HomeView’s simplicity may put off hardcore home automation enthusiasts, but I’d argue it’s perfect for their long-suffering spouses. I’ve tried every version of physical smart home control interface in my home, and you know who hasn’t used any of them? My family.

Because my family all have iPhones, and because the HomeView will always be there and will feel familiar, I can see them actually using it. That means I could set up a full Home Assistant instance and run a detailed dashboard on a tablet in my office, then feed the scenes and devices into Apple Home so my husband and daughter can just tap to control them on a HomeView in the kitchen.

HomeView may not be the smart home computer I want Apple to make, but it is the smart home device Apple needed to make.

My own thermostat, which came with my HVAC system, is a piece of junk, and I can’t replace it because it is incompatible with third-party thermostats. But I can envision putting a HomeView on the wall and making that the primary interface for it and every other smart home device in my house.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple stuffs a lot of different kinds of tasks into Messages. It’s a junk drawer for communications with other people. Send photos? Sure. Set up a safety partner for when you are going somewhere? Why not. Pay somebody? Of course! And, yeah, let’s stick in a poll!

But I think the best use beyond text and media of Messages is sharing your location. It’s a convenient way to share your whereabouts with someone else or a group, either indefinitely or for a fixed time period. Starting in the version 27 operating systems, you don’t have to use Apple’s preset periods, either: you can set a custom duration, which can be up to 30 days.

Sharing your location in Messages is an extension of Apple’s Find My service and native apps. You can also share your location within a native Find My app—that’s on an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch, not iCloud.com’s Find My, which only works with devices.

Like everything with Find My, your current location is locked down except to share with those you explicitly permit, and only for the period you choose, or indefinitely.

Methods of sharing location

Messages offers two different ways to share your location:

• As continuous access: With iMessage, you can let someone see where you are as you move about for one hour, one day, or a custom period (in version 27 releases), or you can add them indefinitely to the list of people who can see your whereabouts in Find My.

• As a pinned location: You can share your current location as a pin on a map, sent as an image preview with a link to Apple Maps. You can send this snapshot using SMS/MMS, RCS, or iMessage.

Starting in the version 27 operating systems, you can also hide your location via Messages (in the Info pane, tap or click Hide My Location) or the Find My app without the other person being notified. They’re also not told when you resume sharing.

Share your location via iMessage

Apple still hasn’t unified how location is shared in Messages across its four platforms, so I have to explain two divergent paths to the same result. (This is a bit overdue for Messages non-text/media features in general!)

Here’s how to share your location on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch in Messages:

1. Select or start a conversation.
2. Tap the plus (+) button and choose Location.
3. A Location view appears at the bottom of the conversation showing a preview of your current location. Tap Share and then tap For One Hour, For Today, Always, or Custom. (These names appear slightly differently in releases before the version 27 operating systems.)
4. If you picked Custom, choose your duration, anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 days, and tap Start Sharing. On an Apple Watch, that starts location sharing; on an iPhone or iPad, proceed to the next step.
5. Tap the Send (up arrow) button to start sharing your location.

A Request button appears if the other person isn’t sharing their location with you. Tap it to request their location.

If you’re already sharing your location with someone, there’s no duration prompt, and the Share button is labeled Send instead. You’re essentially just sending them a reminder with a link they can tap to open Find My.

On a Mac, follow these steps to share your location:

1. Open Messages.
2. Click the profile or profiles at the top of the conversation thread to reveal the Info pane.
3. Click Share My Location.

Where are you?

Apple determines your location from an iPhone, Apple Watch, or iPad, and shows you which device in the Find My app’s Me view under My Location. If you use Messages to offer your location to someone from another device, you’re alerted “Another Device Used for Your Location” and given an option to Cancel or Continue. With iPhone Handoff, which lets two iPhones share one number, your location follows the currently active phone.

After you send your location, the other person or people have access to it. They see a Location card in the conversation that continuously updates to show where you are.

They can tap Open Find My to see you within the Find My app or, if they’re not already sharing their location with you, tap Share My Location to reciprocate.

Likewise, when someone shares their location with you, it appears in the Info pane of any conversation they’re part of. If their current location is known, this tile adds more details; if it can’t be determined, a message says their current location is unknown.

Inset into the location section, you see their current city or landmark, a label showing how recently their location was updated, and a button. The time label appears as minutes or hours, Now (within the last minute or so), or Live (real time). The button shows the walking or driving time; tap or click it to open Maps with directions. Their location updates in real time as they move, which helps if you’re trying to meet up.

You can’t undo sending your current location, but in the Info pane in Messages, in any version of iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, you can tap or click Stop Sharing My Location to cut off the flow of location data.

Apple’s addition of Hide My Location in the version 27 releases lets you silently stop sending your location without alerting the person you’re sharing with. You can also resume from the same spot in the Info pane (or in Find My). The other person only sees your location is unavailable if they check. The reason to add this feature is both to allow privacy or safety, depending on with whom your location is shared. (Abusive partners or controlling family members often force people to enable location sharing.)

Share a pinned location via SMS/MMS or RCS

SMS/MMS and RCS can’t be used to share ongoing location information, but you can send and receive a pinned location with them via Messages, though only on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch:

1. Select or start a conversation.
2. Tap the plus (+) button and choose Location.
3. A Location view appears at the bottom of the conversation showing a preview of your current location. Tap Send Pin.
4. A Location link for Apple Maps appears, labeled Dropped Pin, with your current address below it.
5. Tap the green Send (up arrow) button to send your location.

For further reading

For much more about Find My tracking, location privacy, deflecting stalkers, and AirTags and the Find My network, see my book Take Control of Find My and AirTags. It’s been fully updated for the version 27 releases.

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

Stevie Bonifield at The Verge has the answer:

Now the remote has Find My support, but if you want to see exactly how far away it is on your iPhone with details like “20 feet,” rather than simply “far” or “near,” you will need to have an iPhone Duo, iPhone Air, or any iPhone 17 or later. Those are the only models that include its new N1 networking chip with support for Bluetooth channel sounding, which enables AirTag-like precision tracking, but without requiring a UWB chip.

So before you run out and buy a new $59 remote and then hand it over to your pet to lose, make sure you’ve got a compatible phone I guess.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Two decades after the Walkman had revolutionized personal audio, a new compressed digital audio format emerged that would redefine how we listen to music. We kick off our series about the origin of Apple’s hit MP3 player, the iPod.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple’s new HomeView device doesn’t have an App Store, but it does have an app story, of a sort. There are some selected Apple apps on its (surprisingly) iPad-like home screen, but you can’t add more. What’s a person to do?

If you use apps that play audio or video and support CarPlay, though, you’re in luck: HomeView supports those apps, and just those apps, via projection from your iPhone. So if you’re a fan of Overcast or Spotify, you’re in luck.

And if you’re curious about video CarPlay, well, that’s a feature Apple added this year that lets apps play video using CarPlay when the car is parked. And the HomeView is always parked.

Beyond that, though, it seems like HomeView is at least starting life as a very limited app platform. Apple does say that if you make a Siri AI query for your personal content, it will search everything on your iPhone or iPad—and that includes apps that aren’t on the HomeView. So you should be able to query your iPhone apps, but not actually run them.

In the short term, this means that if you want to (for example) access your calendar right on your device, you will probably have to do so via Apple’s Calendar app, even if you use a different app on your other devices. (If you use an app that has a web app equivalent, you could probably open it up in Safari, which is an app that the HomeView does offer.)

In the long term, I still think it’s quite likely that Apple will eventually expand what can be run on HomeView. I haven’t used one yet, but based on what I’ve seen on Apple’s website, it feels very much like a 1.0 product with plenty of room for expansion. Whether that comes in the form of apps, widgets, or access for CarPlay apps that aren’t audio or video apps, remains to be seen.

Go to the podcast page.

The company sent out a brief email to customers today that contained the same text as a blog entry titled, “An apology”:

We launched an AirTag silencing tool recently. We’ve always made products we want for ourselves, and this was no different – we wanted it for AirTags on our bikes. (Some of us have bikes more valuable than our cars.)

In retrospect though, this also has the side effect of aiding someone with bad intentions to track someone that wouldn’t get phone notifications.

We have removed the product and will use our patent on it to prevent anyone else from making one in the future.

At the time, the company defended the product. I don’t know if my words had any effect.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

On Tuesday as a part of its deluge of smart home announcements, Apple has launched something a bit different: a series of products called Apple Home Collection that are… not quite Apple products, but not not Apple products. Instead, they’re “designed in collaboration” with partners, in this case LG Electronics and Schneider Electric.

It’s hard to tell where one company ends and the other begins, but if you carry the weight of a brand like Apple, having Apple stand over the shoulder of some other company and sprinkle in some secret ingredients isn’t the worst approach if you don’t want to actually build and support those products yourself.

According to Apple, each accessory can be set up with one tap from an iPhone, and only requires the Apple Home app. (That describes a lot of products today, too—it’ll be interesting to see if Apple’s added some new tech just for these products or if they’re largely using standard techniques that other products in the market can offer.)

Now to the products, which will be available starting in December, and all of which share a “clean, minimal aesthetic and premium materials,” which would probably be your first clue that Apple was involved in their design.

LG is offering four cameras, all of which capture 2.5K video and connect directly with iCloud for video via the HomeKit Secure Video specification.¹ There’s a video doorbell (with chime integrated with HomeView, HomePod, and HomePod mini), a combination camera and floodlight, a standard outdoor camera, and an indoor camera that can tilt down automatically to physically stop monitoring when a family member enters the home.

Apple gets in the smart lock game with LG’s Smart Deadbolt Lock, which uses UWB for automatic unlocking when you approach the door, like the locks released earlier this year by Aqara and Schlage. It’s also got NFC support for non-UWB devices, a numeric keypad, and a hidden physical key slot.

And then there are the smart thermostats. There are two of these, from LG and Schneider Electric. The two thermostats support external temperature and humidity sensors as well as those built in to HomeView, HomePod, and HomePod mini. It’s unclear what differences the two products have, but Apple’s press release hints that there might be some different kinds of system compatibility, perhaps for the home heating and cooling systems themselves, though both are described as working “with a broad range of HVAC systems.”

Every one of the accessories supports Thread, which Apple has been building into its devices for a while now. While it doesn’t seem like there’s much here that hasn’t been done in other smart home products, Apple’s stamp of approval is important. If you don’t do a lot of research, even today you can end up buying a smart home product that has hidden gotchas. These devices will presumably be as standard and Apple-friendly as they come.

That said, other smart home products also seem to live up to everything Apple is describing with the Home Collection. Until these products ship, it will be hard to determine if there’s some special stuff Apple is doing with these products that’s unavailable to other products, but at a glance it doesn’t seem so.

In an announcement sure to shock the very foundations of the world, Apple rolled out a new Apple Siri Remote with support for Find My with Precision Finding and a speaker that can play a noise, ensuring you’ll never again lose it in your couch cushions for months on end. And also a new Apple TV 4K with Siri AI.

The new Apple TV 4K uses an A19 chip that gives it access to the revamped Siri. For the first-time, the Apple TV also features built-in microphones that let you use Siri without depending on the remote.

The A19 chip features an AV1 decoder, which Apple says will offer high-quality streaming with less bandwidth. And you can now pair up to four second-generation HomePods or four HomePod mini 2 to create a full surround-sound experience—but bear in mind, each pair of speakers, front and back, must be of the same type.

In other big news, the Apple TV is now of the higher 128GB storage tier and comes with a commensurately expensive price: $299. That’s more expensive than the previous model, which Apple raised to $199/$249 just a few months ago, and considerably more expensive than the $129 entry-level cost it offered for the previous model when it was introduced.

The new model is available for pre-order today and will ship on November 13. The new Siri Remote is available separately and is compatible with both previous Apple TV HD and Apple TV 4K models; Find My Support will work with the second-generation Siri Remote or later, but for the Precision Finding (via a new Bluetooth Channel Sounding protocol), you’ll need that new fourth-generation model.

Among its smart home product announcements on Tuesday, Apple announced the new HomePod mini 2, priced at $149 and powered by an S10 chip (introduced in the Apple Watch Series 10). Curiously, its banner feature—support for Siri AI—will not be available when the product ships on October 30.

According to Apple, Siri AI will come to the HomePod mini 2 “in a future software update.” When it does, Apple’s press release hints that it will be able to tap into personal context when paired with an Apple Intelligence-capable iPhone or iPad. When there’s no such device available, it’ll still have access to broader Siri AI functionality, but won’t have access to the treasure trove of data that rides with your device.

Of course, since home accessories are the order of the day, Apple has touted the HomePod mini 2’s integration with the broader home experience. Like its predecessor, you can use it to control home devices via voice commands. Apple’s also supporting a new four-speaker surround sound setup, when four HomePod minis are connected to the new Apple TV 4K.

Apple also continues to tinker with that little glowing circle at the top of the HomePod, that’s not quite a display but is… something. The new Sound Glow feature turns it into a visualizer that is based on the sound of the currently playing song, and its color scheme will match the song’s associated album art.

As was widely expected, Apple today took the wraps off its “HomePod with a screen”, dubbed the HomeView.

The device features a seven-inch Liquid Retina display with multitouch, at 1088-by-1088 resolution and is powered by an A18 chip. It comes in two different styles: a model intended to sit on a tabletop with a half-dome and small tilt-adjustable arm holding up the display, and one that’s meant to be wall-mounted. The former comes in silver, starlight, rose pink, and space gray options, while the latter has only silver and space gray.

The other main distinction between the two is the addition of more speakers on the tabletop version: a custom down-firing woofer and dual force-cancelling passive radiators. Both, however, nominally support spatial audio with Dolby Atmos. If you opt for the wall-mounted version, you can pick up a wall mount sold separately.

That A18 chip gives the HomeView enough juice to run Siri AI, which is at the heart of the new experience. The HomeView comes with a subset of built-in apps familiar from Apple’s devices, including Calendar, Home, Safari, Music, Messages, Podcasts, Weather, FaceTime, and more. Additional apps can be powered by a connected iPhone, including Apple News and Apple TV, as well as “supported third-party audio and video apps.” Apple says the device will recognize up to six people and gives them each their own home screen, while still allowing some shared features amongst all members of a household, such as music or shared photo albums. A 12MP Center Stage camera allows for FaceTime calls.

In terms of interface, the HomeView is reminiscent of the Apple Watch, with a customizable clock screen and various “faces”, including a Home Modular face that provides access to your commonly used smart home devices.

Apple also showed off a recipe specific mode that can detect recipes in Safari and format them appropriately for the device.

Both versions of the HomeView cost $299 and will be available on November 13. Pre-orders are open today for customers in Australia, Canada, India, New Zealand, the UK, and the U.S. The device is not available in the European Union, due to the lack of Siri AI in that region.

So why not reach in and see if any of the apps below grab you? And if there’s something we haven’t covered, drop us a line with the details at apps@sixcolors.com. We can’t respond individually, but rest assured that we take a look at every suggestion we get.

Freshly Squeezed

Each week I produce a weekly newsletter where I write about whatever’s on my mind — you should subscribe! — and one of the big production tasks is to take the images I’ve shot and convert them into 16:9 JPEGs cropped down to 2000 x 1125. It’s a job that would definitely benefit from batch processing, which is where an app like Freshly Squeezed comes into play.

Freshly Squeezed handles the jobs you’d expect from a batch image processor: It can resize, crop, compress and convert images to different files, all while retaining your originals. I’ve set up the app so that I can drop photos into it and get the right cropping and conversion, with Freshly Squeezed giving me the option to individually tweak crops if I want.

The app’s showcase feature is called Drop Folder, which you set up when you need to perform the same image processing over and over again. Once you’ve set up the parameters, just drop images into the folder, and Freshly Squeezed handles the rest.

You can download Freshly Squeezed onto your Mac for $7. A 7-day trial lets you try things out for free.

NepTunes

For another way to control music playback on your Mac, turn to NepTunes 4, which works with both Apple Music and Spotify. In fact, the Pro version of the app even lets you toggle between the two music services.

At its most basic, NepTunes lives in your menu bar, where it shows you whatever song is currently playing along with playback controls. You can also customize NepTunes to display additional info — I’ve got the app showing recently played songs, and if you link it to your Last.fm profile, you can see stats affiliated with that account. From the NepTunes interface, you can look up similar artists, while Pro users can find similar tracks to what’s playing. And all NepTunes users can set up hotkeys to control different playback features.

I keep mentioning the Pro version, which is a $10/year subscription. Besides the aforementioned features, Pro users can display their top albums in a grid. They can also download desktop widgets in various styles, such as one that displays the album you’re listening to like it’s a CD in a jewel case. You can peruse the 15 available widgets to get a flavor for NepTunes’ visual flair.

The Pro version comes with a 14-day free trial. Otherwise, NepTunes is a free download.

Tidy

It’s an occupational hazard that I have a lot of screenshots piled up around my Mac with names like Screenshot 2024-07-09 at 10.05.32 AM that tell me nothing about what’s actually contained in the screenshot. I imagine you might have the same problem with IMG files or PDFs or any file with an inscrutable collection of letters and numbers as its only means of identification.

Tidy is the answer to our organizational prayers. This $9 macOS download takes the screenshots, scans and other oddly named files from your Downloads folder, takes a look at them using its own built-in OCR feature and proposes readable names to help you better identify what the file actually contains. You approve the names, so nothing’s forced upon you, and Tidy only generates names using what it sees, so there are no hallucinations.

Even so, Tidy occasionally misses the mark. For example, a screenshot of the NepTunes app from up above got renamed “dutton-toster” because the font for singer Sutton Foster’s name proved too tricky to decipher. I was able to reject that suggestion, though, so no harm, no foul.

More often, Tidy proved to be on the money, as a photo of the ferris wheel looming over Disney’s California Adventure was retitled “blue-sky-land-amusement-park” — a much more decipherable moniker than IMG_435.HEIC.

Appricio

Appricio looks to be an indispensable travel companion by taking advantage of your iPhone’s location awareness. Fire up Appricio in a city included in one of the iOS app’s guides, and it can tell you what to do based on where you are, what the weather is and preferences shared in the settings.

You won’t just get a list of places to visit with Appricio, though. It’s a curated guide that makes specific suggestions, with a bias toward taking you off the beaten path (at least when you’re amenable to that). For example, Appricio detected that I’m near San Francisco and that the weather’s nice right now, so it steered me away from Pier 39 — which it dismissed as a tourist trap — and guided me to a day in Golden Gate Park instead.

Appricio would be a fine app if it just helped you in the moment, but it helps you plan trips, too. That feature is somewhat limited by the fact that the app only covers 50 cities at the moment, though I was able to do web searches for an upcoming visit to San Diego (currently not among the included cities) without the benefit of Appricio’s curation.

The app is free, though a $30/year subscription gives you a dozen more cities, a multi-day planning feature in which Appricio helps build your trip and an events calendar, among other bonuses.

Droppy

If you’ve looked at the notched display on your MacBook and thought, “I wish this worked more like the Dynamic Island on my iPhone,” Droppy is here to answer the call. At its most basic, this app lets you drag documents and files up toward the notch, where they can be stored for easy access until you find a more permanent home for them. But Droppy’s feature set doesn’t end there.

Droppy provides access to other features, like music playback controls, a clipboard that keeps the history of things you copy and paste and a five-hour weather forecast. Additional widgets — or Droplets, as the app dubs them — can be added to handle things like editing screenshots, file conversion, transcription and more.

While the app complements notch-equipped machines, it brings those Dynamic Island capabilities to other Macs as well. Droppy is free to try for three days; afterwards, a $10 payment unlocks the app for up to two Macs.

The centerpiece is a new smart home hub called the HomeView. Equipped with a display and an A18 chip, the product essentially serves as the Siri command center for an Apple-powered household…

The HomeView comes in two versions: a countertop model with a metal speaker base and a wall-mounted version with a flat, square base that sits against the wall beneath the display. The countertop offering will come in four colors: space gray, silver, starlight and pink, while the wall-mounted version will be limited to space gray and silver.

The name dovetails with a MacRumors report that Apple used a shell company to trademark “HomeView” last year. So much for my prediction of a re-use of the base HomePod name.

Gurman also says the new Apple TV remote will have a speaker, and the new Apple TV itself will have a microphone to enable it to receive Siri requests directly.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

The announcement that Apple’s making a home-related announcement on Tuesday was hardly unexpected. Most things Apple does these days are reported in advance, usually by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

But this event has been years in the making. Gurman first reported in detail on the centerpiece product two years ago:

Apple… is nearing the launch of a new product category: a wall-mounted display that can control appliances, handle videoconferencing and use AI to navigate apps…. The company is gearing up to announce the device as early as March and will position it as a command center for the home, according to people with knowledge of the effort. The product, code-named J490, also will spotlight the new Apple Intelligence AI platform, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the work is confidential.

J490 did not, in fact, ship in March of 2025. The failed Apple Intelligence roll-out meant that the company had to push back the release of its AI-powered home products until after it could fix its AI issues and launch Siri AI last month.

It’s been a long time coming. Apple has made some runs at addressing the smart-home market in the past, but it’s never seemed to be part of a coherent, consistent strategy. (Many of us still can’t forgive it for abandoning the AirPort product line just as the advent of mesh networking would have provided the company opportunities that ended up accruing to companies like Eero, now a part of Amazon.)

Perhaps in new CEO John Ternus, Apple really does have a powerful internal advocate for the smart home. In a funny twist of fate, Apple’s intransigence in this category hasn’t really harmed its chances. Amazon and Google have been selling products similar to J490—touchscreen voice assistant home hubs—for years now, but they have failed to catch fire. I’ve used multiple Echo Shows and Google Nest Hubs in my kitchen over the years, and they have all been various degrees of terrible.

More broadly, the entire smart home market has suffered from fragmentation and mediocrity. Early devices were expensive, unreliable, and impractical. Things have gradually improved, and the tech giants have reached a detente that has made everything more interoperable. But even so, it’s really only this year that (for example) I feel like the smart lock has reached a level of tech capability that allows it to fulfill its promise, thanks to UWB support.

So is there a universe in which Apple rolls into this category at this late date and actually finds success where others have struggled to get traction? I’m not saying it’s a likely scenario, but it’s certainly possible. Apple’s track record with prioritizing user security and privacy is certainly an asset for anyone considering adding tech devices (especially ones with sensors) to their personal spaces. Apple’s tight device integration could also be a strong selling point for the many users who are fully bought in to the ecosystem.

So I’m saying there’s a chance.

The future of home is widgets?

The more I think about J490 or the HomePad or whatever it will ultimately be called—my money’s still on something with the HomePod name, possibly even just HomePod—the more I feel like it will expose Apple’s current thinking about the role of apps on its platforms. (Kind of an important topic.)

The wild success of the iOS App Store starting in 2009 transformed how Apple viewed the role of software in its operating system. Handed a big hammer, Apple saw nails everywhere. The Mac got an App Store, which exists, but I think nobody would consider a hit. The Apple Watch got an App Store, which also exists but seems kind of pointless. Messages got an App Store, which also exists, much to my surprise. And of course, tvOS was revamped under the premise that “the future of TV is apps,” but that future never really arrived.

Perhaps Apple has taken notice that the everything-has-an-App-Store strategy is really showing diminishing returns. The problem is, what do you do with a device like this forthcoming touchscreen? It doesn’t run iOS or tvOS, but apparently yet another variant of Apple’s omni-OS foundation. If it supports playing video from Apple TV but not Netflix, or podcasts from Apple Podcasts but not Overcast, or music from Apple Music but not Spotify, that’ll be frustrating. And the strength of the iPhone app ecosystem is one of Apple’s greatest assets.

So what’s Apple to do? My best guess is that it’s going to use some technology we’ve already seen to let your apps peek through on this new device from your iPhone. macOS Sequoia introduced the ability to display widgets and receive notifications directly from your iPhone—a feature that, given the timing, might actually have been invented for this as-yet-unreleased device!

In the long run, I wonder if the answer on devices that are ancillary to the iPhone—and I’ll throw the Apple Watch in here, too, since it already does this—is to allow app developers to include apps for alternate Apple platforms along with their existing App Store apps. You don’t actually need to use the watchOS App Store to download Apple Watch apps—you just get the iPhone app and your iPhone installs the app on your watch. If Apple wants real apps running on its smart home devices, perhaps they just transfer over from your iPhone.

In the meantime, projecting widgets doesn’t seem like a bad compromise to make the home hub more personal without requiring yet another App Store and all that complexity.

Of course, the next problem this product will face is that, as a device that sits in a home, it is probably going to need to interact with more than a single user. Beyond the Mac, Apple has struggled with the concept of multiple people using a single device. You can do it on Apple TV, but it’s not a great experience. You can do it, sort of, on HomePods. But if Apple is going to tie in the contents of a user’s iPhone with this home hub, it needs the device to be able to shift context on the fly and display content from a particular person’s iPhone, or (in the case of children or guests) someone without a paired iPhone at all.

Tricky stuff, and not a place where Apple has a great track record. Gurman’s reports suggest Apple is going to try a form of face recognition (that’s sub-Face ID level, but that’s probably okay for something found inside a home) in order to determine the context of which person is interacting with the device. We’ll see how it goes, and how responsive it can be if it’s got to connect to an iPhone and display widgets or load other personal data.

The Siri AI question

Then there’s the feature that has made these products all wait for their moment in the sun: Apple Intelligence. Apple has been slow to roll out iOS 27, probably to limit a surge of use of Siri AI on Apple’s servers. Numerous people have reported that Siri AI feels a little slower now than it did this summer, when the user base was smaller.

These products—not just the home hub, but next-generation HomePod mini speakers—will live or die with the functionality of Apple’s voice assistant. I’ve found Siri AI to be a pleasant surprise, an entirely functional voice assistant that replaced an entirely dysfunctional one. But if it fails me on my iPhone or iPad, I can just do things myself. That’s a lot less true on a device that’s meant to use voice as its primary interaction mode. Apple needs to get this right.

The rest of the story

Finally, there’s the question of how Apple will approach the entire smart home ecosystem. What product categories are worthy of Apple’s own brand name, and what ones can be served by preferred partners?

Gurman’s report this week that Apple is working with LG to build a smart lock and a series of security cameras, starts to answer that question. At least for now, it seems that Apple is going to approach this with three tiers: a few Apple-built products (home hub, speakers, TV box), some “second-party” products built in collaboration with Apple but released by LG and possibly others (cameras, lock), and presumably other Matter and Apple Home certified products that will receive Apple’s attention, promotion, and Apple Store placement.

I do wonder how Apple will make its decisions about what products it will decide to build itself. Will it go this far, but no further? Or do its LG collaborations give it time to figure out what categories could use a little bit of Apple magic? (Once again, I am imploring Apple to consider bringing back AirPort.)

That said, I’ve got a couple of Aqara 4K security cameras that work great, and the Aqara and Schlage UWB locks are pretty great. Apple doesn’t need to build products in new categories if other companies are making products that meet Apple’s standards. And maybe it’s hoping that its own moves here will set a direction and encourage further investment, so Apple doesn’t have to do everything itself.

After years of Apple never engaging with the smart home category for very long, this is an opportunity for a reset. What Apple announces on Tuesday will be a good start, but we’ve seen good starts from Apple before. It needs to keep its eye on the category, keep shipping new products, and continually improve its home software. If this is just a short-term lease, it’ll be pointless. Apple needs to get a mortgage and settle into its new home.

Go to the podcast page.

I got a weird email the other day from OpenAI that ended up causing a great deal of work for me:

As part of our continuous upgrade process, we are deprecating the following legacy audio models: tts-1, tts-hd, gpt-4o-mini-tts. Access to these models will be shut off on January 6, 2027.

I use OpenAI’s text-to-speech voice for the Six Colors Audio Newsletter. Ironically, I chose one of OpenAI’s least advanced voices for this brand-new feature of this website because it was one of the only modern text-to-speech models that didn’t occasionally omit, rewrite, or hallucinate text. I need the computer voice to speak all of our words, and our words only.

This is a bummer, and not just because I have only had six months with this feature before having to rebuild it! I was inspired to build it in the first place by the app (and, full disclosure, former sponsor) Listen Later, which is a read-it-later service that turns your saved articles into a podcast read by… you guessed it… a now-deprecated OpenAI TTS voice.

Not too long after I got the email from OpenAI, I heard from Yalım of Listen Later about this. Unsurprisingly, as someone who has built his entire business on this particular set of voices, he was a bit upset! And not just for the technical challenge he now faces.

It’s the human cost on his customers. Because, funny thing, our human brains are great at finding patterns in static and personifying things that aren’t people. Yalım’s customers have spent years listening to their chosen voice. Their brains have made connections to the sound, rhythm, and delivery pattern of those particular voices. Now those voices are being silenced.

(There’s also an accessibility angle here: As you might expect, Listen Later has a lot of visually impaired users. I’m not sure OpenAI has thought through the ramifications of what this change will mean for those users’ lives, but then again, OpenAI strikes me as a company that doesn’t think a lot of things through.)

I can’t speak to Yalım’s users, but obviously I’m also concerned about this for the Six Colors members who subscribe to the Audio Newsletter. (If you’re someone who likes this site and prefers to listen rather than read, I highly recommend becoming a member and subscribing—you’ll get the stories of the day in a podcast, chaptered and fancy like.) Unfortunately, I don’t expect OpenAI to budge on this, so I’ve spent the last week investigating other options, both local and API-based, to replace my six-month-old version.

Much to my surprise, the winner of my bake-off was the brand-new ElevenLabs v4 engine, which is remarkably good. Yes, I’m going to be spending dollars a month instead of pennies, but the results are very good. Even if the voices are not, alas, our old friends. What I have had to do is create a workflow that tests every audio file that comes out of the API to make sure it’s saying the words it’s supposed to be saying, and not hallucinating. Yes, that means articles take a ridiculous round trip from text-to-speech-back-to-text. But it means that I can use more sophisticated models while guarding against AI omissions or hallucinations. So far, so good.

If you’d like to sample the newsletter or just compare the two sets of voices, good news! I’m currently running both models simultaneously as a test. Here’s a recent example of the current OpenAI voice style, and here’s the beta version of the new ElevenLabs alternative.

I hope people like the new voices, and that Listen Later users don’t suffer too much from the discomfort that change can bring.

Apple has announced that it’s planning something for October 13. The assumption—amplified by the “Welcome Home” slogan—is that Apple is going to roll out a bunch of new home-oriented products, most notably a touchscreen home hub that’s been rumored for a couple of years now.

The word broke via an X post by Greg Joswiak. Video creator Marques Brownlee posted his invitation to an “Apple Experience” in Tribeca on October 13 at 9am Eastern.

My understanding is that the “experience” at Apple’s cozy building in Tribeca will focus on creators, while some other traditional press will just receive remote briefings. So I think it’s wrong to say there will be an Apple Event next Tuesday. More likely, there will be a 9am Eastern drop of a video and a bunch of press releases. Followed shortly by a bunch of influencer videos shot in Apple’s building, of course.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Before we get to that offering, though, there’s a pair of Mac productivity boosters that caught my eye, particularly for research projects. And just so iPhone users don’t feel left out, we’ve got a couple of iOS entries, too, aimed at helping improve your sleep and your brain power, respectively.

Do you know of an app that makes your heart sing? Let us know by emailing apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description. Due to the large volume of tips we get, we’re not able to respond to each email, but rest assured if you send us a note about an app, we’re going to read it.

And now on to our first number…

Eno PDF

I’m of the mind that AI is best suited to perform repetitive tasks that might otherwise derail me from getting my main work done, and Eno PDF seems to be of the same mind. Billed by its developer as “AI for people who hate AI,” the app taps into artificial intelligence to dive into documents to find the information you might otherwise invest a lot of time to track down on your own.

Eno PDF doesn’t just expect you to take its word for it, though, as it summons up the exact part of the text that shows what you’re looking for, so that you can verify the result.

When testing Eno PDF, I loaded up four years of Apple SEC filings into the app and asked it to track down exactly how much revenue Apple made from iPhone sales last year. Eno PDF produced the right answer and even highlighted the part of the fiscal 2024 report that showed the number. (And yes, the 2024 fiscal year was the last full year of data I had Eno PDF search through.) More impressively, as it was searching, Eno PDF listed what documents it was poring over, further reinforcing the idea that its results aren’t being pulled out of thin air.

The searches take place natively on your Mac, so they’re relatively speedy depending on the size of the documents you’re having Eno PDF sort through. Nothing’s stored on external servers, though snippets of documents are sent out for AI analysis.

You can download Eno PDF for free, with 1,000 free credits available for you to test out the app. After that, it will cost you $15 to add 5,000 credits for future searches.

Not everyone’s going to need a tool like Eno PDF on their Mac, with the developers touting the app for professionals like lawyers and academics. But if you work on any project that requires research, Eno PDF can take a lot of the grunt work out of your hands while giving you the confidence that the results coming back to you aren’t some AI hallucination.

Caddy

Speaking of research projects, I’m a sucker for any app that can keep all my related ideas in one place. And Caddy, which adds a project tab to the side of your Mac’s screen, fits that description to perfection.

Caddy can hold whatever you need to have on hand for a particular assignment — notes, files, documents, images or what have you. I’ve set up a Caddy tab to contain research for a story I’m working on so that I can slide out the tab when I need to reference my notes without distracting from the app I have open. You can set up multiple Caddy tabs, using different colors to distinguish them.

The app is a free macOS download with a subscription-based Caddy Club ($3.99/month or $29.99/year) adding the ability to further customize tabs, collaborate with other people or send a copy of your Caddy to someone else so they can see what you’re working on.

Sessionography

I don’t think I’m saying anything controversial when I contend that the more specific your music tastes, the less you might feel well-served by streaming music apps built with general audiences in mind. Sessionography looks to bridge that gap, at least when it comes to appreciating jazz music.

Type an artist, album or song into the Sessionography app, and you can easily fall down a jazz wormhole. (Jazz Wormhole, incidentally, is the name of my poorly received second album.) Typing “Bill Evans,” for example, brings up a list of all the pianist’s albums, which you can then sort through by whether the artist was the leader or sideman. Speaking of sidemen, you can get a list of everyone who played on a particular album, delving into their catalog, too. Create a smart playlist with the tap of a button — assuming you’ve got an Apple Music subscription to also enjoy playing back your selections, that is.

The free version of Sessionography limits you to 10 taps per day for exploring artists and music along with three smart playlists, but a subscription (99 cents/week or $19.99/year) unlocks unlimited activity. It’s an ideal app for jazz enthusiasts to find new combinations and for the jazz-curious to find out what kind of tunes they like.

Wavelength

Like a lot of people reading this, I struggle to get a good night’s sleep, and while there are probably many factors at play, perhaps one I can take more control of is the quality and duration of the ambient light around me. That’s the notion behind Wavelength, an iOS app that taps into your iPhone’s camera to measure the light around you to see if it might be throwing off your body clock.

The first time you fire up Wavelength, you’ll enter in the time you woke up that morning along with your preferred wake-up time. Wavelength then charts out the times of day you should be out in daylight or at least bright light to boost your body clock and when you might want to steer clear of brighter lights, lest you throw off your body clock. Not only does this help with sleep, but it can help you stave off jet lag, too, the app’s developers claim.

If this sounds like hooey to you, Wavelength’s release notes point to the research all this is based on. So there’s some circadian science behind all the app’s recommendations on heading to the light.

Normally a $29.99 download for the full app, all of Wavelength’s features are currently free to all users through September 2027, according to the Wavelength App Store listing.

Geo Text

Part of my daily puzzle habit is to play the latest edition of MapTap online, where I have to drop a pin on a globe as accurately as possible to whatever city is part of that day’s game. Geo Text takes a similarly geographical approach to gaming, bringing a guessing game to the Messages app on your iPhone.

After downloading Geo Text to your iPhone, you access it in Messages, where you’re given a 360-degree photo of a place to scroll around looking for clues. You then tap the part of the globe where you think that photo was taken — the closer your pin to the right result, the more points you accrue.

Here’s where the Messages component comes in. Sharing your Geo Text result to a chat or group message lets everyone you’re chatting with play along — provided that they download Geo Text, too, of course. It’s a way to add a little friendly competition to your chats, as you battle friends for geographic supremacy.

There’s just one Geo Text game per day in the free version of the app, but $1.99 in-app purchases unlock separate games for the 50 U.S. states as well as soccer stadiums around the world.

Yesterday, Bloomberg reported that Apple is working with LG Electronics on accessories for its upcoming home hub and other home products, citing regulatory documents without sharing the filings. FCC records MacRumors found contain label-placement drawings, three-dimensional renderings, and technical reports, providing a first look at the products’ housings and additional details about their capabilities.

I get real Motorola ROKR vibes from all of this. I have a hard time believing that Apple will slap its own branding on these devices. Given the recent conversation about Apple needing to become more nimble in its development, it feels a bit like these devices are a case of being able to get something to market sooner than Apple might if it did them alone. Or it may be a case of Apple simply not wanting to—or feeling that it needs to—make these devices itself.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Gil Amelio and Steve Jobs make a deal that will change the future trajectory of Mac OS, Apple, and the tech industry. But is Steve happy to be the CEO at Pixar, or is he secretly plotting to take over Apple?

Go to the podcast page.

Late last month I got several emails from Spotify, all pretty much the same:

Hello,

Our automatic review tools determined that this podcast may contain content that infringes the rights of a third party. Due to this, we’ve removed:

Title: 14: Ribsy

Detected Content: “Ribsy” by Beverly Cleary

Why did this happen?
Spotify for Creators supports the distribution of audio and video podcasts. Our automated review process may remove any content that appears to be distributing third-party literary material.

What’s next?
If you think your episode does not infringe the intellectual property rights of a third party, or is subject to a copyright exception (such as fair use), you may submit an appeal. We’ll review your appeal and notify you of our decision.

Please note: Abusing the appeals process may result in restrictions on submitting future appeals. Under our repeat infringer policy, shows or users with multiple strikes will be removed from Spotify, and their accounts terminated. However, if your content is reinstated—either through a successful appeal or because the claim is withdrawn—we’ll update your records and remove the strike.

Klickitcast was a podcast by John McCoy and Phil Gonzales that covered every book by Beverly Cleary. Episodes were usually an hour long, and generally started with the hosts reading the first paragraph about the book to kick off their discussion.

I measured a few of them. An hour or more of critical content, and maybe 30 or 45 seconds of quoting from the work being discussed. This is the very definition of “fair use,” in which excerpts from works may be used specifically for the purpose of making editorial points about those works.

It’s very obvious what happened. Not being satisfied by its endless patrolling of podcast episodes for music that appears in Spotify’s own music libraries, the company had moved on to either:

• Lazily scanning the titles of podcasts to see if they matched books.

or

• Lazily transcribing podcasts and matching them to some book text, possibly even only the first portion of the book.

Either way, if a match was found, Spotify would immediately remove the podcast episode from its service and send one of those emails that I received.

On the one hand, I was offended because anyone could see that these were not pirate podcast episodes that were illegally creating audiobooks out of copyrighted works. When I use the word “lazily,” what I’m saying is that there is clearly a way to build a tool that analyzed the transcripts of podcast episodes and compared it to book text and intelligently determined whether the episode was pirating books. But Spotify didn’t bother with that. It just hoovered up anything and everything, including an episode where book text took up a grand total of 0.008% of its runtime.

On the other hand, I was also offended because this is just another example of the ruination of the legal concept of fair use. Fair use is not a copout or a loophole, it’s a fundamental understanding that copyright law has limits, and quoting a work to criticize it can’t be stifled by authors demanding that their copyright entitles them to prevent critics from quoting their work.

The problem is that fair use on the internet has been stifled by content-detection algorithms that don’t care about your fair use. It just notices that you used something that belongs to someone else. On YouTube, this can lead to account deactivation, loss of ad revenue, and even the hijacking of your ad revenue and the diversion of it to someone else who claims they own the rights to the thing you are using legally.

Let me give you an example of how this chilling effect works. Next week we’re posting the first episode of the new series of Designed in California, which is about the creation of the iPod. To set the scene, there’s an episode about the origins of the MP3 audio format, which includes an amazing story about a particular pop song that was used by one of the creators of the MP3 to fine-tune the format.

I thought it would be great to play a few seconds of the song in the podcast, when illustrating just how difficult it was to encode an a capella voice performance and explaining that the father of the MP3 estimates that he had to listen to the song a thousand times before he felt he had gotten it right.

We aren’t playing the song, though, because I’m sure it would run afoul of YouTube and Spotify’s content algorithms, and we’d need to risk the argument that it’s fair use—and potentially threaten the distribution and revenue generation of our brand-new podcast. Nothing like having episode one of a five-part series disappear from the internet because we ran afoul of content scanning.

(Yes, you can appeal these sorts of rulings. In fact, Spotify did reply the next day to my response to its rejection notices and agreed that it was in the wrong and restored the episodes. But as a content creator, you are throwing yourself on the mercy of the organization, and if they decide you’re in violation, you are out of luck.)

After all this, I decided to delete my Spotify account and sever The Incomparable’s relationship with that company. To be honest, I had only put my network’s podcasts up on Spotify because I had heard from a few Spotify users who were interested in listening to them there. But for shows like mine, the truth is that we rarely had double-digit listeners of any given episode.

And more broadly, I believe Spotify is bad for podcasting. It’s not really podcasting, of course, because it ingests the files and re-serves them. It’s not interested in the broader podcast ecosystem (hence its original plan to buy a bunch of popular shows and limit their distribution to Spotify). It’s a massive company that has decided to feed the growth beast by consuming as many adjacent pieces of content as it possibly can.

And that includes podcasts and audiobooks. (Yes! Is it a coincidence that just as Spotify began its lazy inspection of podcasts for violations of literary content, it’s also ramped up its own audiobook offerings, including AI-generated audiobooks? I assume not, while also assuming that there probably is a plague of AI-generated audiobooks out there that really do violate copyright. It’s not wrong—but it’s conveniently self-serving.)

If you listen to podcasts on Spotify, I encourage you to stop. Your iPhone comes with a free podcast app that’s pretty good, and many others are available. We all have better options.

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.

My friend Lex Friedman, who is staggeringly productive at releasing apps, decided to address a social-media comment about how that productivity was “suspicious” on his tech blog, and in doing so, detailed how much of his app building was Claude and how much was his own background as a developer and user of computer software:

The question, to me, isn’t how much code was written by a human. It’s how much the app was authored by a human, which I think is a more nuanced question. How much care, thought, and humanity went into the app matters far more than tabs vs. spaces or a manually-vs.-machine-built HStack.

This is the truth of it. Slapping a quick prompt into Claude is not going to get you good software. Envisioning how a product should work, in detail, is hard work—and not everyone is going to be good at it, or want to do it. If pure coding skill is no longer the differentiator it was, taste and organization and attention to detail and many other intangible features that great developers have always had will still matter.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Apple introduced iMessage within Messages in 2011 as its house-brand, end-to-end encrypted messaging product. The promise of iMessage is that posts are always encrypted, using servers and technology developed by Apple and controlled by it. The encryption keys reside on your device, stored so Apple can’t access them, and no third party should ever have the leverage to retrieve them. (There’s a big proviso there, which I’ll explain at the end of this article.)

Despite exploits uncovered over the many years since iMessage first appeared, the core protocol has never been breached, only device exploits or iCloud-backup extractions that allowed access to stored messages. That’s a strong track record. Apple has continued to tinker with improving iMessage encryption, while also adding an optional method of ensuring conversation integrity, Contact Key Verification.¹

But in researching the update for Take Control of FaceTime and Messages, a lengthy ebook that covers those two apps plus the Phone app ², I discovered you could be lulled into a false sense of security based on what you assumed iMessage was and was not.

The odds of this change in standards causing a security breach and your messages being exposed seem unlikely, at least right now. But after scrolling through conversations and seeing what’s going on, I feel Apple has omitted important signals for users when iMessage suddenly stops being used during a conversation.

When is an iMessage not an iMessage?

Messages supports four kinds of communications, each with its own encryption standards and limitations, except for iMessage:

• iMessage: iMessage is always encrypted, but you may not always be using iMessage in an iMessage conversation, which is a confusing thing to say—bear with me.
• RCS: The Android-standard RCS is encrypted only if every non-Apple device in the conversation has a recent-enough version of RCS that supports encryption and its carrier also allows it.³
• SMS/MMS: SMS and MMS are never encrypted. (SMS allows text only; MMS supports rich media and group messaging. RCS is intended as the ultimate replacement for MMS.)

Apple sensibly organizes messages into conversations: a series of messages with another person or in the same group of people. However, that presentation method intentionally hides most of the details about how different communications protocols may be used within a single conversation. Apple likes to keep things simple.

As you start a conversation, Messages offers all sorts of visual signals that let you know when you’re using iMessage, as reassurance and branding:

• The person’s email address or phone number appears in blue.
• At the very start of the conversation, iMessage appears on a line by itself and a lock icon plus Encrypted appears on the next line. (You can always scroll way back to the start of a conversation and find this.)
• In the conversation, your messages are shown in blue.
• Click or tap the conversation profile image or images, and in the Info pane, at the very bottom, a message in gray in small type notes “All iMessage conversations are securely encrypted end-to-end, so they can’t be read while they’re sent between devices.”

That feels like a lot of reinforcement of the point! And, when you’re using iMessage, you probably expect you’re always using it throughout a conversation. But within an iMessage conversation, things can go wrong, and the system downgrades to the next commonly available option.

The hierarchy of Messages standards ranks, from most to least desirable:

• iMessage
• RCS with encryption
• RCS
• MMS
• SMS

The impact of that hit me while revising my book: when iMessage isn’t available, Apple tells you only inline. Despite all the information Messages displays about iMessage being encrypted, the inverse state is faint. This kind of negative knowledge, or information about something not happening, can often be as important as something that does happen. A warning about a fuel tank approaching empty is the kind of information every driver (or pilot) needs, for instance. If you think end-to-end encryption—or Apple-based encryption—is critical for you, then a pop-up message or other warning is what you would expect.

Look through the images in this story to see real-world examples I encountered this summer. In one, my wife and I are texting in a conversation that goes back almost two decades. For unknown reasons, Messages couldn’t perform a secure interchange—no security warning appeared, but something prevented iMessage from doing its usual handshake dance. So it defaulted without an alert to RCS, and noted that inline (see the figure’s top).

Because Messages supports RCS encryption, it can use it with other iCloud users, too, allowing encryption to continue even though it’s not iMessage encryption. Then, equally oddly, it went right back to iMessage (see near bottom).

If a conversation switches to an unencrypted communications method, there’s no warning; only, as you can see in another example, the gray inline message in a group chat of iMessage users (encrypted) shifted to unencrypted RCS when I added someone whose device didn’t support iMessage or encrypted RCS.

So how can you be sure what’s in use without scrolling around for sure? At any given time, the Info pane always shows the current state of encryption. This figure below shows two RCS conversations: on the left, an unencrypted one; on the right, an end-to-end encrypted session.

Because it’s RCS, Apple won’t vouch for the integrity of the session on the right! The Messages label reads “Apple can’t verify the software used on receiving devices,” and provides a link with more technical information and disclaimers. This is fair: Apple is relying on an infrastructure it doesn’t control.

With the above scenarios, I don’t believe Apple is putting us in jeopardy, nor do I think you should be particularly worried about it, unless you’re someone already in a high-risk category, like a political figure, human-rights advocate, or journalist. However, I keep thinking about how what we don’t know can still hurt us.

If you’d like to prevent Messages from downgrading security, you have options, although they may not be fully desirable. All of these are managed on an iPhone at Settings: Apps: Messages. You can’t control these message settings from an iPad or Mac.

• Disable downgrading to SMS: Turn off Retry as Text Message. This may mean some messages you send won’t get through. Also, this doesn’t prevent other people in an iMessage (or encrypted RCS conversation) from sending you SMS or MMS messages if they can’t transmit via iMessage.
• Disable RCS Messaging: In RCS Messaging, disable RCS Messaging. You can’t disable only non-encrypted RCS, which is a shame, as that would be my suggestion as the next best thing. Instead, you have to disable it entirely to prevent iMessage from downgrading to either unencrypted or encrypted RCS.
• Disable MMS Messaging: Messages may try to send MMS even when it doesn’t try to use SMS, so disabling MMS Messaging will prevent that as well.

This set of options and Messages’ presentation of encryption feels overdue for an overhaul.

Protecting Messages in iCloud

I mentioned at the outset there was a proviso about accessing stored messages. The one exception to the end-to-end encryption rule is if you have iCloud for Messages enabled. In certain configurations, someone who manages to gain access to your Apple Account could retrieve an iPhone or iPad backup, retrieve that backup, and use an encryption key stored in it to decrypt messages and extract your data. That someone could be a law-enforcement agency, not just a hacker.

Because the Messages in iCloud encryption key is stored in the clear in the backup, this is the one scenario in which Apple can be compelled to provide information under the right legal framework that would allow a government-connected agent to examine your iCloud-synced messages. This is also an exploit that a criminal or other party could take advantage of.

You can avoid this end-to-end encryption loophole in one of two ways:

• Enable Advanced Data Protection for iCloud. This option adds end-to-end encryption on top of nearly all your data (excluding email, calendar entries, and contacts) stored in iCloud. This is a good move generally, though there are drawbacks: you may lose full data recovery if all your devices are stolen, lost, or destroyed. See the complete list. (ADP is not available in the United Kingdom.)
• Disable iCloud Backups. Without backups, the Messages data isn’t archived via a restorable backup to iCloud, and thus the Messages in iCloud encryption key isn’t uploaded into that backup. Backing up to your Mac (or a Windows machine) requires more effort, though most of what you want to retain is likely synced via iCloud! Read this support document for the difference between iCloud Backup and backing up to a computer.

I suggest picking one. While, again, it’s unlikely your privacy would be breached, most of modern life feels like it’s about finding out how your privacy was, in fact, breached. Why not take action before that happens, however much we trust Apple’s infrastructure and integrity?

I’m not even trying to use Screen Time on my son’s devices. He’s 18, away at college, and well beyond my parental controls. The problem is I apparently need him to update his MacBook Neo before I can use Apple’s new Screen Time features on my 15-year-old daughter’s iPhone. His college is four hours away, and like many college kids, he’s an expert at ignoring text messages from his mom asking him to do a boring chore.

The underlying issue here is a technical one: there’s a new architecture on which the entire system is based, not unlike when Apple updated its home architecture a couple of years ago. So you end up with kind of an all-or-nothing approach here.

My hurdle with the new parental controls is that the iPad my kid uses is an old one—a hand-me-down 2017 iPad Pro that can’t even be updated to iOS 27. That, unsurprisingly, makes the new parental controls a non-starter. The likely answer? Buy a new iPad. But the kid is four and currently only uses the iPad for watching videos on long trips, so that seems like overkill. It also means there isn’t really a deep need for parental controls, since we’re still in a world where the iPad is never used on the internet and without some degree of supervision—it can still just be removed.

Unfortunately, this isn’t the only issue Pattison Tuohy ran into; other devices didn’t register as updated, ghost devices lingered, and the new controls took time to roll out even after the updates. While these issues will likely get ironed out in time, it does seem like a bumpy launch for a much-touted new feature.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Please drop in if you can.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Silent tracking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A misfired pin

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

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

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

(Update: They did.)

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

Continue reading on Apple News ↦

Continue reading on The Wall Street Journal ↦]]> 41695 https://sixcolors.com/podcast/2026/09/clockwise-676-mad-at-a-supermarket/ Wed, 30 Sep 2026 17:51:00 +0000 https://sixcolors.com/post/2026/09/clockwise-676-mad-at-a-supermarket/ Minor bugs that drive us mad, app blasts from the past, smart home infrastructure, and our non-car navigation systems.…

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

The risks of cracking our eggs at once

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We don’t yet have face-stealing technology

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

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

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

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

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

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

For further reading

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

Mainspring

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

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

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

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

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

Docktor

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

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

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

Pop Out Timer

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

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

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

TrillMark

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

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

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

Echo

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

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

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

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

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[via The Verge]

Go to the linked site.

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

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

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

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

Previously, on Mac mini…

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

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

And now, the star of the show

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Small is beautiful

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

Let me be clear: I love it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

Voice Keyboard Pro

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

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

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

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

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

Play

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

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

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

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

Skyscraper

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

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

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

Einfall

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

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

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

Eyes Forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

But then something delightful happened, as Lex recounts:

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

The result is an OS that feels like a marked improvement over its predecessor, in everything from design to performance to capabilities. That’s not to say there isn’t still room for improvement—software is a living thing, and those of us who have been using it throughout the beta period this summer can attest to the fact that Apple is constantly at work trying to refine its experiences.

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

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

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

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

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

New Siri is integrated throughout iOS, whether you access it via the traditional press-and-hold of the side button or by saying the wake word, or in its new home integrated with the Spotlight search when you swipe down on the home screen. That last interface is available systemwide, in any app, by swiping down from the center of the top of the screen. The search interface has a new look too: a black liquid glass bubble with silver overtones. You can ask Siri questions by voice, or by simply typing to it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Unfortunately, not every moment is like that. Like any LLM-based chatbot, Siri AI sometimes misunderstands or gives confidently wrong answers. For example, when I asked it about when my neighbor said they’d be back from vacation, it found the relevant text message but said that no return date had been mentioned, despite the fact that it was right there in the message. I took a screenshot and asked it to add a bunch of listed panels that I was speaking on to my calendar, and it added only one of them, at the wrong time and in the wrong timezone.² Sometimes it mishears things, as the time I was using my AirPods to tell my wife I was walking past Dunkin’, and it asked me if I meant Duncan.

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

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

In general, I’m bullish on the future of this new enhanced Siri, and fascinated to see what happens as it rolls out to more and more users. Will it be able to sway the habits of those who’ve been using Claude and ChatGPT? Perhaps not for advanced uses like coding—though Siri AI will whip up a Python script for you if you ask it—but for your run of the mill world knowledge queries? That seems eminently plausible. And, more to the point, for questions about your life, contacts, and data? As newly minted CEO John Ternus pointed out as this year’s iPhone event, to get the same results from one of those competing AI chatbots, you’d need to hand it access to all your data. Is that really a better alternative?

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

All roads lead to Siri

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

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

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

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

Liquid Glass half full

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

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

In case you still aren’t happy with the default look, Apple also offers an option for adjusting the glass effect without resorting to the classic accessibility tweaks that can often have unintended design consequences. Settings: Appearance: Liquid Glass offers a slider that goes from More Clear to More Tinted, with a stop at the Default or anywhere in between. You can see right in the scrollable pane above the slider how your choice will look in a live interface, which is a nice touch.³

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

Performance, no anxiety

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photo fit and finish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But of course, Photos isn’t immune to the expansion of AI, either. Previously we got Clean Up, the tool that lets you remove unwanted elements from your photos. Apple says it’s improved that in iOS 27: you can now choose between Fast and High Quality modes, the latter slower but more powerful. The default Auto mode chooses the best option for you based on what edits you’re making.

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

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

Just browsing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Other features

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

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

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

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

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

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

In a “better late than never” improvement, Calendar now has natural language input when creating new events. Third party apps like Fantastical and Google Calendar have done this for years. I would appreciate if it were a little smarter about some things, such as picking up timezone from a specified location. If you see the event I’m scheduling is in San Francisco and I’m in Boston, maybe at least prompt for which timezone I’d like to use. But I get it: timezones are hard.

For those who love endlessly looking at 3D imagery of cities, Maps gets an improved flyover view with better 3D modeling of buildings and landmarks. Buildings do admittedly look less warped when you get in close, with sharper detail. For some reason, though, the new maps in Boston appear much, much darker than the iOS 26 counterparts; I didn’t see the same results in New York City, for example. Not sure what’s going on there.

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

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Design takes a step forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Siri AI takes the Spotlight

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a new Ask Siri entry that’s been added to the top of every contextual menu, and while I don’t mind the idea that Siri can act on just about any context you can think of on the Mac, I don’t love how it’s implemented. It’s at the top of every single context menu (regardless of applicability) and darker than the rest of the menu. If you click on it, it floats forward, the rest of the menu disappears, and you can type in the resulting box. I don’t mind the impulse, but it feels like Apple is trying too hard to push Ask Siri into places it doesn’t belong.

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

Touchscreen Macs, at last?

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

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

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

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

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

Shortcuts, reduced and enhanced

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

It is, in some ways, a longstanding dream of the computer industry finally realized. You can literally describe what you want your device to do—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it.

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

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

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

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

The arrival of Describe a Shortcut has changed the Shortcuts interface a bit. On the Mac, there’s a new three-paned interface, where the third pane is a giant preview of a shortcut’s color, icon, and (this is fun) an AI-generated summary of what the shortcut does. The pane exists because of the text box at the bottom, which lets you type input to Describe a Shortcut to make changes to whatever shortcut you’ve got selected. Fortunately, it’s easy to resize or hide that pane and go back to the more standard Shortcuts look.

New horizons for Photos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There are a handful of other nice, new Photos features, including new Captured By Me and Identity Documents sections (quick, find that photo of my passport!), and a triumphant return of star ratings for individual photos if you are the sort of person who wants to assign star ratings to things.

Safari gets organized

Across the 27 OS releases, Safari now sports an AI-driven tab organizer, so if you’re someone who keeps a zillion tabs open, you can have Safari group them into smaller, more navigable clusters. I’m not a zillion-tabs person, so I basically haven’t used this feature. I’m glad it’s there for those who are desperately in need of an injection of tab organization, though.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This section is running in the background

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

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

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

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

Wait, there’s more…

There are so many small enhancements in Golden Gate that it’s hard to mention them all, and every time I turn around, I keep bumping into more of them.

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

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

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

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

Sail through the Golden Gate

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

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

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

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

Rogue Amoeba, leading the way in Mac audio software.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

Hush, now

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The right to be unheard

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

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

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

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

So let’s do the vibe check.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s a jungle, Jim

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

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

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

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

Go to the podcast page.

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

None of the above.

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

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

No padding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some room of one’s own

Why am I harping on this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Verging on converging

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

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

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