Go to the podcast page.

Kourage Kundahl, writing for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum:

Among the artifacts recently accessioned into the Museum’s permanent collection is an authenticated iPhone 17 Pro used during an Apple TV broadcast of Friday Night Baseball. The Sept. 26, 2025 matchup between the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers incorporated live game footage from four devices, marking the first use of an iPhone as a primary camera in a professional sports broadcast.

Apple integrated iPhones into its last couple of baseball broadcasts last year, and it’s only appropriate that it would donate one of them to the Hall of Fame’s collection. (Please note: Lots of things are in the Hall of Fame Museum’s collection, and it does not make them “hall of famers,” though technically you could say that an iPhone 17 Pro is now in the Hall of Fame. Probably more than one right now, given all the people who work there.)

In non-coincidentally related news, Apple announced the first half of its Friday Night Baseball schedule on Wednesday, marking the fifth year that Apple will be streaming two MLB games to 60 different countries and regions, exclusively on Apple TV. Apple says that iPhones “will be further integrated into the broadcast camera lineup for select games” this season.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

While planning for a week on vacation, two things happened that totally derailed me. The Wall Street Journal asked me to review David Pogue’s book “Apple: The First 50 Years,” which pretty much wrapped up most of my beach reading. The book is long!

And then there was the text message I got from John, who claimed to be a contestant producer for Jeopardy!

In early 2023, after many years of curiosity, I took the venerable quiz show’s “anytime test” on the Web. I had no idea how I did, though I was sure I got a few wrong. Anyway, it was fun! My in-laws have been watching Jeopardy! religiously forever, and they turned me into a regular viewer. Despite being a bit game-show obsessive as a kid, being on a game show was never part of my plan. I liked the challenge of the anytime test, though.

A few weeks later, I got an email from Jeopardy! asking me to take the test again—this time with a group on Zoom, cameras on, presumably so they could watch us take the test and make sure we had passed it without any assistance.

And a few weeks after that, in June 2023, I got the call: Appear on Zoom to play a sample game with a bunch of other potential players. At this point, they told us that we had all qualified for Jeopardy!—the Zoom call was really so the producers of the show could see us and hear us playing the game.

It makes sense. Jeopardy! is a TV show, and that Zoom call was essentially a casting session. Maybe 100,000 people apply to be on Jeopardy! and only a tiny group qualify, but there are a minuscule number of slots on the actual show. Jeopardy! producers really do want the show to reflect a cross-section of North America, and the casting process helps ensure they get the right contestant mix, week in, week out.

Two and a half years passed. After a year, I assumed I was not going to make it on Jeopardy! and stopped watching every episode with a clicky pen standing in for the Jeopardy! buzzer. Ah well, it was a fun idea while it lasted.

And that’s when John texted me. His phone number was from the correct area code, and when I did a web search, I found a podcast transcript that also described getting a text from John. (I had expected a phone call, which led to an exciting moment not too long after my audition—I got a 90-second voicemail from the 310 area code. It was, of all things, a fax machine.)

I checked in with Dan Moren, who played Jeopardy last year, and he confirmed that he knew John. So I texted him back, and then we talked on the phone, which is when I got “the call”—I was going to be on Jeopardy! in one month. (And yes, future contestants searching to find out if John Barra is a real person who might text you about being on Jeopardy!—he is.)

My vacation reading suddenly consisted entirely of David Pogue’s book and trivia-themed children’s books. (That’s a pro tip from Ken Jennings himself: Children’s books are very high-density on facts. Good for trivia studying.)

So here we are: Six Colors now has three Jeopardy! players as contributors. I can’t say anything about what went down in early February in Culver City (though I can reveal that Ken had fish tacos after), but I can echo Dan’s comments about the experience: The other contestants were wonderful, and the Jeopardy! staff was supportive above and beyond the call of duty. It was a surreal experience to essentially step inside the television and play the game, for real, in front of a live studio audience. I am adding it to the memory bank of amazing experiences I never really expected I would have in my life.

So please tune into Jeopardy!—either on your local station, or the next day on Hulu or Peacock! (That’s a new development.) My good friends from the Jeopardy! contestant green room will be competing the entire week of March 16, and you can tune in to see me on Thursday, March 19.

When all is said and done, I’ll break down what happened on The Incomparable and Upgrade and, who are we kidding, the Six Colors podcast, too.

I don’t know what else 2026 has in store for me, but it’s already been a very interesting few months.

Go to the podcast page.

With the M5 generation, the MacBook Air finds itself in an unfamiliar, though not unprecedented, position: that of the middle sibling.

Previously Apple’s most affordable laptop, the Air has been undercut in that department by the new MacBook Neo, social media darling and—if you’ll pardon the expression—apple of its parents’ eye. Not since the polycarbonate MacBook’s retirement in 2011 has there been a notebook in Apple’s lineup with a lower price point than the MacBook Air, and it’s gotten used to that status, which led it to its long-running and, for the moment still undisputed, title as Apple’s best-selling Mac.

But with the eye-catching Neo now substantially undercutting the Air’s base price (itself now slightly higher than previously), and the MacBook Pro family bringing unmatched performance, what’s the MacBook Air’s role in the modern Mac lineup? Though it might seem like the Air is on the brink of an identity crisis, the truth is that, in the way of middle children since time immemorial, the MacBook Air is all about getting its job done without fanfare.

Performance, no anxiety

Though it may not boast the sheer power of the MacBook Pro, the Air, like the rest of its M5 siblings, does feature those newly rechristened “super” cores, of which it features four, in addition to six efficiency cores (none of those newfangled “performance” cores like the M5 MacBook Pro). There’s also the 16-core Neural Engine, as well as either 8 or 10 of the improved GPU cores with their Neural Accelerators.

Of course, we’ve had an idea of the ballpark of M5 performance since last fall’s first slew of products using the latest chip generation, and there’s little surprising here: just the usual generation-over-generation bump, in this case of about 11 percent in both single and multicore performance over the M4 Air. GPU saw more measurable improvement in the M5 Air, with about 31 percent better performance on average. In keeping with previous generations, the MacBook Pros, with their active cooling systems, eke a bit more performance out of those individual cores—but just a bit.

As ever, there’s little reason to upgrade from the immediately previous models—the difference between the M4 and M5 is negligible for most users. But those small improvements do add up: go back to the M3, M2, M1, and you’re talking jumps in the 38 percent, 57 percent, and 75 percent range for single-core performance. I only just replaced an M1 Air with an M4 model last year¹, and it’s a testament to Apple’s engineering how good that first generation of Apple silicon still is, almost six years later.

Memory options are constant with the previous generation, starting at 16GB standard, with options for 24GB or 32GB on the 10-core GPU models. However, memory bandwidth is up to 153GB/s, a bump from the 120GB/s on the M4 Air, even if it’s only half the bandwidth of the higher-end MacBook Pro models.

One place you will find a noticeable bump is in storage. The Air now starts at 512GB of SSD storage, double that of its predecessor, and offers up to 4TB, the same maximum as all but the M5 Max-configured MacBook Pros. That capacity increase comes with a speed improvement as well: Apple says the new SSDs are twice as fast as the previous generation and my tests concur. Compared to my personal M4 MacBook Air, the M5 registered read speed improvements of 125 percent, and an extraordinary 219 percent improvement in write speed, according to Blackmagic’s disk tests. So impressive were those numbers, I ran AmorphousDiskMark as a comparison and came away with somewhat lesser, but still outstanding gains up to 139 percent.

I ran an informal test copying a 29GB Final Cut Pro project from an external SSD to both machines, and the M5 was about 30 percent faster. It picked up a more meager 13 percent improvement in compressing that same project, though there are other factors at play there beyond sheer disk speeds. In short, your disk speed is probably not going to be your performance bottleneck here.

Apple’s also updated the wireless in this model via its in-house N1 chip, which first debuted last fall across several product lines. That means support for Wi-Fi 7 (aka 802.11be) and Bluetooth 6, neither of which I have an easy method to test, given my downright decrepit Wi-Fi 6 home network, but it’s perhaps more significant in that we will surely see N2 and N3 chips down the line, ensuring prompt and efficient support for the latest and greatest wireless technologies. And since, as with the M and A series chips, this is Apple’s own effort, the company’s penchant for control comes with a promise to make networking ever more integrated and power efficient.

Still lacking in any of Apple’s laptops, however, are cellular options, all the more apparent as the company touts its C1X modem in recently released iPhones and iPads. Might that finally find its way into a future MacBook? Maybe, but it’s not happening here.

The devil’s in the details

So much is the same with the M5 MacBook Air—the screen, the ports, the webcam, the mic and speakers, the very form factor itself—that it’s all the more significant when this year’s model does deviate from its predecessor. Two small examples caught my attention this time around.

The first, which surprised me, is the keyboard. Gone, in this generation (including the new MacBook Pros), are several keys’ text labels: tab, caps lock, return, shift, and delete. In each case, they’ve been replaced by glyphs, of the same kind long used for keyboard shortcuts in drop-down menus.

If you’re sitting there thinking “Wait, what do you mean—it’s been that way forever?” then congratulations, you’re probably outside the United States. The U.S. has remained an outlier even as the rest of Apple’s international keyboard layouts use this near universally agreed-upon standard.² This standardizes this style across Apple’s laptops (and probably soon its standalone keyboards as well), while also bringing them into line with iOS and iPadOS keyboards, which now use the same symbols (and, in some cases, have for a very long time). Labels are not totally gone, though: the Air’s keyboard still sports text on the function, control, option, and command keyboards, alongside their long-used symbols.

The second thing that I noticed was that Apple is now shipping a new power adapter with the M5 Air. Previously, the company included either a 30W adapter for the base model or a 35W adapter with 2 USB-C ports. With this model, we’re back to a single port “Dynamic Power Adapter” that is rated for 40W with a maximum of 60W. It’s a little smaller than the old dual port design—and, interestingly, lacks the standard holes on the prongs that you find on most plugs, which can add some degree of stability to the connection—but can handle fast charging with the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and Air, as well as the 11-inch and 13-inch M5 iPad Pro models. Honestly, I’ll miss the convenience of the second USB-C port, though that adapter model is still available for purchase separately from Apple.

Air to the empire

Like the M4, the M3, the M2, and even the M1 before it, the MacBook Air remains what it’s long been—even going back to the days before Apple silicon: the best Mac for most people.

Once upon a time, the MacBook Air may have been the newest and flashiest of Apple’s laptops, whether it was being plucked from a manila envelope on stage or compared to the thickness of a pencil. But nothing stays new and flashy forever.³ After 18 years, the Air isn’t a kid anymore, and that’s okay. Squeezing between the Neo and the Pro means there’s room for the Air to chart its own course. The pressure of being the cheapest MacBook is off—all too clearly, given the $1099 base price in this generation. Apple may very well try to get that back under a thousand in the future, but for now it’s okay, because if price is your main factor, you now have a far better option.

The Air remains a truly great Mac. Those who butt up against the limitations of the Neo will be more than comfortable here: after all, it’s unquestionably better than the Neo in pretty much every way—with the exception of its color options. There’s a clear value proposition with the Air: pay more to get more. And that higher cost is reasonable for what you get, especially when you compare the starting prices of the MacBook Pro.

The Neo may vie for the title of Apple’s bestselling Mac, but it’s got its work cut out for it: the crown remains the MacBook Air’s to lose and if you come at the king, you better not miss.

Updated on March 10 at 4:37pm Eastern: An earlier version of this article had incorrect percentages for the performance gains in the SSD tests.

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The two most important things about the MacBook Neo are these: It has a base price of $599 ($499 for education buyers), and it’s a full-fledged Mac.

The price is staggering. The lowest list price for a new Mac, ever, was $499 for the original Mac mini, which famously required you to bring your own display, keyboard, and mouse. While Apple has experimented with lowering laptop prices by selling older models at a discount, and savvy shoppers have been able to find MacBook Airs on sale for $799 or even below, a new Mac laptop with a base price of $599 is a major breakthrough.

For that price, you might be suspicious that the MacBook Neo is not a real Mac. Before the product was announced—and we’ve been anticipating its arrival for more than two years—I saw a lot of speculation that this low-cost laptop would be broken in a bunch of artificial ways in order to separate it from more expensive and full-featured Macs.

So to be clear: Beyond the price, the most impressive thing about the MacBook Neo is that it is just a Mac like any other. It does all the things you’d expect a Mac to do. Yes, it’s got lesser specs than more expensive Macs, just as an M5 MacBook Air is not as powerful than an M5 Max MacBook Pro. Yes, it’s powered by a processor that was previously spotted in 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro, which might make you suspicious that it’s some kind of baby Mac that can barely run Safari.

It’s not like that at all. It runs all the apps. If you’re patient and careful, you could use it in ways that are wildly beyond what Apple recommends. (I’ve been misusing Logic Pro as a podcast editing app for more than a decade, on devices vastly more underpowered than the MacBook Neo, and it hasn’t been a problem.) In many ways, the MacBook Neo is a remix of the M1 MacBook Air, which is a pretty incredible computer even five years after its introduction.

From the ground up

In creating the MacBook Neo, Apple could probably have upgraded the guts in the M1 MacBook Air and called it a day. But that would have sent the message to potential customers that they were buying a rehashed old product, and Apple wisely didn’t want to do that.

Instead, it built the MacBook Neo using the laptop look first introduced with the M1 MacBook Pro in 2021 and exported to the M2 MacBook Air in 2022: It’s got a flat top and bottom and curved corners, and a non-enthusiast would probably assume it was a MacBook Air if they were looking at a silver one. It weighs 2.7 pounds, just like the MacBook Air, and is roughly the same dimensions. (The Air is slightly wider and deeper, and the Neo is slightly thicker.)

Apple has decided to differentiate the Neo by giving it a set of color options that include hues not generally found in other Apple laptops. Yes, there’s a standard silver that will allow the Neo to blend in with almost every other MacBook out there. Indigo is a somewhat lighter cousin to the Midnight MacBook Air, a dark blue that will satisfy those who prefer their devices to be on the darker side. The more interesting choices are blush, which adds a pink pop to the traditional silvery MacBook look, and citrus, a bright yellow gold that’s undoubtedly the most aggressive laptop color Apple has made since the days of the tangerine iBook.

Clearly, Apple expects that MacBook Neo buyers might be a bit younger and more open to their laptops expressing a bit of fun and personality. And as someone who has been advocating for Apple to embrace colors in their designs, I’m happy that this moment has come. That said, Apple remains pretty conservative with its color choices. It probably has data to back those decisions up, and may have even tested brighter colors and decided they were just too much to stare at when you’re trying to use your computer. I admit that as I write this story on a citrus MacBook Neo, I can not for a moment forget that the keyboard plane is bright greeny-yellowy-gold, with a greeny-yellowy-gold frame encircling the display. (It doesn’t bother me, though.)

In a nice touch, the MacBook Neo has white keys that are slightly tinted to fit the theme of the device’s color. So this citrus model’s keys are white, pushing into the yellow. It’s a very subtle and frankly unnecessary choice that shows that Apple really did sweat the details when it came to giving the Neo a proper design that makes it feel unique and part of the MacBook family, rather than some cut-rate monster built out of parts found in a bin. The Apple logo on the top has changed, too: it’s still a separate part, but made of anodized aluminum rather than polished steel, with a slightly different color shade than the rest of the device’s body. It’s a subtle difference that sets the Neo apart.

The tough choices

So how did Apple manage to build a new laptop that’s roughly half the price of the MacBook Air? It made some difficult decisions. When I talked to Apple people about the process, they were quick to emphasize that the MacBook Neo was not created by pulling features out of the MacBook Air, but was built from the ground up. Fair enough, but Apple still had to make choices that resulted in a full-on Mac laptop while reducing costs enough to sell that laptop for $599 instead of $999 or $1099.

It starts with the processor: The MacBook Neo uses an A18 Pro chip with six CPU cores (two performance, four efficiency) and five GPU cores. Yes, this is the iPhone 16 Pro processor, now put into a Mac. That would worry me more if we hadn’t spent six years watching Apple ship generations of new Macs that run on Apple silicon chips based on the very same architecture.

Apple built the M series chips because iPhone chips didn’t quite have enough juice to power a Mac. But that was then. My best guess is that the entire project of making the MacBook Neo began with the realization that Apple’s chips have become so capable, the base performance of even the MacBook Air has become so powerful, that even an A-series chip could run a Mac just fine. And they’re right, as these benchmark tests show:

In terms of single-core performance, the MacBook Neo performs somewhere between an M3 and an M4. For multi-core and GPU, it’s more like an M1. That combination is not going to break any records, but the fact is, the vast majority of computer use by computer users will be covered by that level of power, and easily. I’ve spent days working on the MacBook Neo, writing and using the Web and browsing PDFs and playing music—you know, computer stuff—and the fact that it’s running a chip originally meant for an iPhone has not revealed itself once.

Of course, this laptop is a bad choice for people who need to do more with their computers. (You know who you are.) I do find it funny that at the product’s launch event in New York earlier this month, Apple representatives said several times that people seeking more power should opt for a MacBook Air instead. Remember when the MacBook Air was the compromise and the MacBook Pro was the upgrade option? (Obviously, the MacBook Pro is still there for the most demanding users.)

A lot of the technical limitations of the MacBook Neo do come from the original decision to put an iPhone chip inside. iPhones come with a single port, but Apple tried to make a one-port MacBook and it learned that was not a great idea. So Apple has done the work to put two USB-C ports on the Neo—and those ports reveal a bit more of the struggles Apple had in building this computer. Both of the USB-C ports will let you charge (which is good, because there’s no MagSafe), but only the one that’s furthest back is a fully functional USB 3 port with support for driving an external display at 4K, 60 frames per second. The closer-in USB port only offers USB 2 speeds. (The good news is that Apple has built alerts into macOS that will warn you if the device you’ve plugged into the slow port would be better off plugged into the faster one, so you won’t be transferring files slowly unnecessarily.)

Honestly, I’m more disappointed by the fact that mismatched ports can lead to user frustration—no, not that port, the other one—than I am about the one slow USB port. I’m struggling to imagine likely scenarios where MacBook Neo users will need to use two high-speed ports at once and find themselves frustrated. Yes, only offering two ports—and needing one of them for charging—could potentially be frustrating, but we did survive with that scenario for several years with the retina MacBook Air. And I’m convinced that most users just won’t care, because they’ll just use these ports for charging and the occasional plugging in of a flash drive or projector.

The other limitation baked into the choice of the A18 Pro is that Apple only built 8GB of RAM into that chip. At the time, that was an important step forward because it conferred Apple Intelligence on iPhones, but in late 2024, Apple raised the lowest amount of RAM in a new Mac from 8GB to 16GB, and we all cheered. Welp!

More RAM is always nice, but Apple does a good job of managing memory in macOS and swapping it to disk when necessary. I’m sure there are some specific, RAM-hungry applications that will not do well on a MacBook Neo. But again, I used the Neo for days performing all sorts of normal, computery tasks with many apps open and never felt that I was running into a wall.

Apple prides itself on the quality of its displays, and as a result, the MacBook Neo’s display is good, if a little compromised. At 13.0 inches diagonal, it’s slightly smaller than the MacBook Air’s 13.6, and as a result, it’s got bigger bezels and no menu bar notch—which many users might see as a positive. It only supports the sRGB color space, not P3 wide color, and doesn’t support True Tone color adjustment—but again, these are limitations that seem worth accepting given the price of the device. The screen is good. It’s up to Apple’s standards, even though better screens are available on more expensive laptops.

Speaking of not repeating old errors, the MacBook Neo sports the familiar Magic Keyboard Apple design that’s pretty much in all of Apple’s keyboards these days. There’s no backlighting, which is understandable as a cost-saving measure but also a bit of a bummer. And the $599 model only has a lock key, while Touch ID is reserved for the $699 model with 512GB of storage. It took me no time to get used to opening the Neo and typing my password¹ like I used to do in the olden days, but there’s no denying that this is an area where Apple is straining to find ways to lower the cost of the Neo.

The keyboard is coupled with a bit of a throwback: a trackpad that doesn’t sense force and vibrate with haptics, but physically depresses. It supports the full range of multi-touch gestures, and reminds me a lot of the trackpad on the original Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. Users familiar with other modern MacBook trackpads will notice the difference—a real click makes a real click noise!—but it’s entirely functional and after a few minutes I forgot that it was any different from the other trackpads I use.

Similarly, the MacBook Neo doesn’t have Apple’s latest 12MP forward-facing camera with Center Stage, but an older 1080p camera with no Center Stage support. It looks fine, in the same way that the old MacBook Air and iMac cameras were fine. They do the job, and it’s understandable why Apple saved some money here.

The speakers on the Neo are neither the four-speaker array on the current Air nor the rear-firing stereo speakers from older Airs. Instead, two speakers fire outward from slits in the sides of the laptop just to the left and right of the wrist rests below the keyboard. Once again, Apple has done a good job of making laptop speakers that sound surprisingly decent, even if they’re not up to the standards of Apple’s latest and greatest.

Welcome to the party, pal

If you do the math, the sheer number of iPhones sold every year means that most iPhone users can’t be Mac users. Most quarters, Apple claims that roughly half of the Macs it sells are going to first-time Mac buyers. Even with Mac sales at all-time highs, Apple has an enormous opportunity to sell Macs to more iPhone customers, and the MacBook Neo gives Apple access to a huge slice of the market that simply would never consider buying a laptop for $1000.

This doesn’t make the MacBook Neo a “ChromeBook killer”—the education-market dynamic is much more complicated than that, regardless. But it does put Apple up against a lot of lower-cost PC laptops that previously didn’t have to face this level of competition. And, despite all the compromises, the MacBook Neo is unmistakably an Apple product that upholds the company’s fundamental brand promise. This is not a computer anyone will be embarrassed by, but it may very well embarrass many of the laptops it’s now competing against.

It may come as a shock and disappointment for people who read websites like this one, but a lot of people (even if they have the money, which many of them do not!) just don’t prioritize computers enough to consider that a $1000 MacBook Air would ever be worth the additional cost over a $500 notebook from Hewlett-Packard. Even if the Apple device was clearly nicer, and even if it offered some nice integrations with their iPhone, at the end of the day… why buy a $1000 computer when a $500 one will do the trick?

I know, I know, all of us veteran Mac users shake our heads when we hear talk like that, but it’s true. The MacBook Neo gives Apple a fighting chance to get in front of those people at a price where they might actually consider buying a Mac, perhaps for the first time. An old boss of mine used to say, “You must be considered to be bought.” At $599, the MacBook Neo is going to be considered by a whole selection of people who have never considered a Mac before. Some of them will buy it. And what they’ll get is the full-fledged Mac experience.

I think they’ll like it.

These days, Apple is approaching its Mac releases a little bit like how a car company approaches its model years: Every once in a while, it does a complete redesign, and there’s a whole new generation of devices. In the intervening years, the devices don’t change much, other than some of the internals. In Apple’s case, the regular release of new generations of Apple silicon drives the changes.

So when I say that the M5 Pro MacBook Pro, released this week, is very much the same pro laptop we’ve seen from Apple for the last few years, I’m not trying to be insulting. It’s the familiar, definitive MacBook Pro that was introduced with the M1 Pro and Max in 2021 and updated with new processors for the M2, M3, and M4 generations.

The display still rocks. It’s a 120-hertz ProMotion display with a wide color gamut, backlit by mini-LED display technology that allows it to run bright and peak even brighter, while also maintaining black levels that contribute to a remarkably extended level of dynamic range. The design, with flat sides and top and curved corners, defined what a 2020s Apple laptop looks like.

Some reports suggest that this fifth iteration of this design will be the end of the line, and that a new generation awaits later this year or in early 2027. That may be, but if you need a new Mac laptop now, or prefer to buy your Macs at the end of a design cycle after all the theoretical bugs have been shaken out, you will not find a finer Mac laptop available today than the M5 MacBook Pro with M5 Pro or Max processors.

Apple sent me the M5 Pro model, with 18 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores. It was like welcoming an old friend into my house, especially since I switched to an M4 Max MacBook Pro a year ago. This is a familiar, solid laptop, but the new generation of high-end M5 chips changes the game a bit.

In the end, it’s all about those chips. So here are the numbers in handy chart form:

To summarize, the M5 CPU core is about 15% faster than the M4 generation, and the Pro and Max 15- or 18-core CPU configurations are going to blow my 14-core M4 Max out of the water. My review unit is 23% faster than my M4 Max laptop.

As you might expect, GPU performance on the Pro laptops really depends on which chip class you buy. The Max versions have way more GPU cores and will generate much better performance. That said, my M4 Max’s Metal score was only about 14 percent ahead of the M5 Pro’s, despite my M4 Max having 32 GPU cores instead of the M5 Pro’s 20. It’s pretty impressive, and the M5 Max is there if you really want a ridiculous number of GPU cores to apply to your GPU-intensive workflows.

Of course, I need to mention that Apple has renamed its CPU cores as a part of the upgrade to M5 Pro and M5 Max. The top-speed cores, previously called performance cores, have been redubbed “super cores.” Meanwhile, the new lower-speed/higher-efficiency cores in the M5 Max and M5 Pro have been confusingly rebranded as “performance cores.”

The bottom line is still the same: In normal use, you’ll see the lower-tier cores grinding away on tasks efficiently, while the more power-consuming cores will leap into action when there is CPU heavy lifting to be done. On my 18-core review unit, there are 6 super cores and 12 performance cores, while those who choose the lower-end 15-core configuration will get 5 super cores and 10 performance cores.

The pace of Apple silicon progress is breathtaking, not just at the base level that powers the MacBook Air and iPad Pro, but up here at the level of bespoke chips designed for Apple’s most powerful systems. The M5 Pro and M5 Max both look like major steps above the M4 equivalents, let alone against older chip generations.

In the end, the question for upgraders coming from older Apple silicon MacBook Pros will be: Is it worth it to get a more powerful chip to do whatever it is you’re doing? And, secondarily: Are you willing to wait to see what Apple might have up its sleeve with the first iteration of an entirely new design, if that’s indeed what’s coming?

These are questions I can’t answer for you. But I will say that the M5 Pro chip seems really impressive. Even if the laptops look the same on the outside as they did in 2021, the stuff inside just keeps getting better.

Suddenly, the globe key on the iPad and the hybrid globe/Fn key on the Mac were equipped with a million Windows-like tasks: Globe-C to activate Control Center, Globe-A to show the dock, Globe-N for Notification Center, and so on. There was also Globe-left arrow and Globe-right arrow to jump between apps (even though Command-Tab also did that), Globe-H to go to the home screen (same as Command-H), Globe-F for fullscreen (also available via Command-Control-F), and a bunch of other window management functions. You could even press Globe-D for dictation, even though by now F5 was promoted to serve the same purpose.

The most frustrating thing about the Globe key, as Wichary points out, it that it’s basically a repurposed Fn key that’s been broken so that it’s not compatible with most (but not all!) non-Apple keyboards.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

The Notes app is a handy way to share material with other people. My family—particularly my spouse and I—has about 15 to 20 shared notes that let us collaboratively update various household, financial, college-related, and other details. We even use it with meal planning.

However, once you start adding a shared note, you get alerts about modifications. Notes let you see the editing history and highlight changes. But the stapled-on interface for this makes it harder to figure out what to choose and what you’re seeing than, say, the version history in Google Docs.

All the options to see what’s changed over time can be reached via the Shared Note menu, by clicking or tapping the profile icon with either a generic head and shoulders with a checkmark in it or a tiny profile pic from your contacts for the shared person:

• Show All Activity: This displays a pane revealing the editing history, as well as when people accepted the invitation.
• Show Highlights: You can get a clearer idea of what changes were made when and by whom.

• Show Updates: If you haven’t clicked or tapped the Shared Note menu, you may see a button that reveals changes since your last visit. This status doesn’t appear synced: although I had already viewed a note on my Mac months ago, when I opened it on my iPhone, it still displayed “Show Updates.”

You can use activity and highlights in a couple of different ways.

First, you can use the Activity pane (Profile Pic: Show All Activity) to find previous revisions, listed from the top, oldest to newest, with a profile pic and name next to each. Click or tap the revision, and the note shows additions and changes; deletions don’t appear to be marked, and I don’t see any way to roll back to earlier versions. (If you need version history for shared documents, you can turn to Google Docs or Pages, among many apps.)

Second, when you choose Show Highlights, you see changes in the margin reflecting all edits across the history of the document tagged with the editor’s name and the date. If there are too many edits to fit, you will see +1 next to the name—click or tap it to reveal all names and dates associated with the dit, and that highlight is isolated from the rest of the document.

Third, you can combine Activity and Show Highlights: with a revision selected, choose Show Highlights, and you see just the edits in the margin associated with that set of changes.

For further reading

Take a gander at my revision of Take Control of Notes, which tells everything you need to know about Apple’s Notes app for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and the web, from basic features like formatting text and creating lists to advanced features like scanning documents, protecting notes with passwords, making sketches, and managing attachments.

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

If you’ve ever wished macOS gave you more control over your audio, SoundSource is exactly what you’re looking for. It puts your Mac’s audio settings right in the menu bar, giving you per-app volume control, per-app audio routing, and the ability to apply effects to any app’s audio in real time.

The newly released SoundSource 6 is a major upgrade, with dozens of enhancements. Highlights include:

• Supercharged AirPlay support: Stream audio to HomePods, Apple TVs, and more.

• Output Groups: Send audio to multiple devices at once.

• Quick Configs: Save your entire audio configuration so you can switch setups with a click.

• A powerful new Audio Devices window: Get deep control over settings for all your audio devices.

You can download a fully functional free trial and be up and running in under a minute. When you’re ready to buy, Six Colors readers can save 20% with code 6CSPRING26 in their store. The deal runs through the end of March, so give it a try!

Go to the podcast page.

Like most people who reach midlife, Apple has a complicated history. The path from a bunch of young people assembling computers in a Silicon Valley garage to the international titan it is today was far from linear. Early successes in helping define and popularize the personal computer were followed by a troubled adolescence that almost proved fatal. That crisis moment created the opportunity for a storied rebirth, setting Apple on the trajectory that has made it one of this century’s most profitable and valuable companies, currently valued near $4 trillion.

“Apple: The First 50 Years” tells the stories that lie behind dozens of Apple’s tech creations. David Pogue has seen many of those years up close, having written for Macworld magazine before becoming a columnist for the New York Times and a correspondent for PBS’s “Nova” and “CBS Sunday Morning.” Apple’s successes are famous, but Mr. Pogue doesn’t steer away from discussing the dead-end products and corporate malfunctions. While tech media tends to focus on hot new products and strong personalities, Mr. Pogue’s book is resolutely a biography of Apple Inc. itself—one of the most distinctive characters in American business history.

Continue reading via Apple News…

Continue reading on The Wall Street Journal ↦

Is this disappointing? From one point of view, sure. After all, it’s almost four years since the last model; are we to believe that the state of the art hasn’t changed at all? That point is, of course, somewhat belied by the addition of the Studio Display XDR to the lineup, though it has many of the same specs, such as size and resolution.

The argument to the contrary—and one that shouldn’t shock longtime Apple watchers, since it’s often their modus operandi—is that if it ain’t broke, why fix it? Compare a newly released M5 MacBook Air to the M2 model, also from 2022, and guess what: those displays didn’t change either. Honestly, you’re probably going to find more similarities between those models than differences.

Now, I concede this could all just be cognitive dissonance reduction doing its work. I’ve been using a 2022 Studio Display since around the time of its release, paired first with my MacBook, and later with an M2 Pro Mac mini.

Frankly, it’s great. Perhaps I’m basic, but I didn’t even shop around for displays: I was a longtime 27-inch iMac user before making the switch, and the panel on the Studio Display being essentially the same as in the iMac eased my transition. Granted, I don’t consider myself particularly exacting when it comes to the visual, and I’m certainly not doing any professional graphics or video work that relies on perfect reproduction. To wit, I definitely do not know the difference between sRGB and P3. But for everything I do, the Studio Display is, in the manner of Apple’s best technology, completely transparent.² I was honestly surprised to see Nick Heer’s comment about sketchy firmware issues—I cannot remember the last time I touched anything on my Studio Display. Again, as per Apple’s most famous maxim: it just works.

So, as a happy owner of a Studio Display, I applaud Apple for not changing it³—I consider this a boon to my wallet and my mental health, since there’s no reason for me to crave an update I don’t need. I can remain confident that my Studio Display is just as good as this one, which Apple will probably keep selling for several years—because they are essentially the same. And I can continue to amortize the not inconsiderable cost I paid back in 2022 over the foreseeable future, making it an even better investment. Even if this Mac mini gets shuffled off my desk in the next couple years, the Studio Display will keep on trucking.

So, I’m okay with all of it: after all I’ve saved myself $1599. And, honestly, I’m going to need that—and probably then some—when that folding iPhone comes around this fall.

In late 2008, Steve Jobs hopped on the company’s quarterly phone call with analysts and, besieged by questions about Apple being threatened by low-cost PC laptops called “netbooks,” he explained how Apple approached its product decision.

“We don’t know how to make a $500 computer that’s not a piece of junk,” he said.

It took Apple nearly 18 years to figure it out, but here we are. The announcement of the $599 MacBook neo ($499 for education buyers!) is the low-cost laptop Mac users have been wondering about for years. But there are plenty of reasons it took this long.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

Apple’s history with education is a long and twisty one. Like many folks my age, my earliest school experience with computers were an Apple IIs, carted in to a classroom, on which you could wait your turn to play Number Munchers. Later on, it was labs full of newer models where we cleverly wrote infinite BASIC loops to print “DAN IS AWESOME” all up and down the rows.

By the time I got to college, though, Macs were already in the minority. Even then, the year that the iMac debuted, I was one of just a few folks in my dorm that had an Apple computer at all.¹

In more recent years, Apple’s found itself squeezed out of the K12 education market by the advent of cheap Chromebooks, which often cost just a couple hundred bucks for a unit—a price point that Apple couldn’t (or chose not) to meet with either the Mac or iPad. Couple that with Google’s dominance in courseware, and some big splashy Apple deals ended up evaporating—or worse—and it hasn’t been the best time for the company in education.

A couple recent moves by Apple, however, have me wondering if Cupertino hasn’t decided to take a different tack when approaching education—one that plays more to its strengths.

Neo and improved

Point one is, of course, the new MacBook Neo. At $499 for education customers, it’s the most affordable Mac laptop ever, and tied with the cheapest Mac of all time.

There are tradeoffs, of course: no TouchID on the cheapest model, only a single high-speed USB3 port, a hard limit of 8GB of RAM. But the power of the A18 Pro, the battery life, and the decent storage options are all pretty respectable. Apple’s goal was never to build a cheap computer, after all—if you know anything about the company, it’s not going to sacrifice what it considers quality in exchange for price.

That would have been a fool’s errand anyway, since no matter how cheap Apple made the Neo, Chromebooks could, of course, still be had for cheaper (though if you start configuring the specs to be comparable to the Neo, that price gap does narrow a bit).

That said, I would argue that one aspect the MacBook Neo has going for it is that Apple Silicon has proved to have surprising longevity behind it. I recently handed down my M1 MacBook Air to my dad; that’s an almost six year old computer that I’d probably still be using if it weren’t for me running up against the drive limit, and which will no doubt serve him just fine for years to come.

I’d expect no less from the Neo, and if you amortize the cost of that $500 machine out over the lifetime of the product, you’ve got a better deal yet. (I’d also argue that the aluminum chassis of the MacBook Neo seems more likely to take a beating over the long run than a plastic Chromebook, but of course, your mileage may vary.)

Halo, Neo

But this is all beside the point. Because Apple’s strategy these days is, as I said, is about playing to its strength—and its strength is appealing not at the institutional level, but to the individual consumer. By playing to customers who might want to buy a computer for educational purposes, say for a high school student or a kid heading off to college, Apple capitalizes on the strength of its existing ecosystem and the cachet of its brand.

The MacBook Neo, after all, works seamlessly with your iPhone or your AirPods; it hooks into the Apple account you probably already have. Maybe it even runs the same apps. And it certainly doesn’t hurt that it looks cool, sleek, and colorful—unlike many a Chromebook.

Like Apple’s classic halo effect, which saw Mac sales benefit from the popularity of the iPhone and iPod, the more people using Macs for their own personal uses in education translates, if not into direct institutional sales, then at least into prevalence that can’t be ignored.

This is a considerably better situation than in my school days too: the rise of the internet and its platform agnostic nature has, fortunately, largely done away with the compatibility struggles of the ’90s and 2000s when you had to worry more about whether your organization would even support your device of choice. Not only does your MacBook Neo work at least as well as a Chromebook does with the buzziest technology—such as ChatGPT or Claude—it’s got the potential to leverage the power of Apple Silicon there, which is definitely no slouch.

Get creative

The MacBook Neo isn’t the only move that Apple’s made towards the education market in recent months, either. Take the recently launched Apple Creator Studio bundle, which offers a slew of apps for all sorts of creative applications, and which is extremely aggressively priced for education users: $2.99 per month or $29.99 per year.

Again, those apps aren’t aimed at institutional buyers so much as they are the individual user. And by getting more students to be comfortable with these affordable and accessible tools, Apple helps ensure that the next generation is well versed in its apps—thus, potentially, making them more popular than ever.

Look, I don’t expect to see large swaths of institutions plunking down money for crates of MacBook Neos—and, as someone who used to work in technology higher education, I’m well aware that process is glacial at the best of times. But the point of Apple’s strategy is that it doesn’t need to wait for those big institutional decisions; it can approach the education market bottom up. Once upon a time, people might have been forced to use whatever technology their schools had—these days, we all have technology with us all the time. We love CarPlay, for example, because it lets us bring our phones with us rather than relying on a system force-fed to us by an automaker. It’s no surprise this generation wants to use its own tech in learning too.

And, frankly, a $499 MacBook Neo with $29.99/year subscription to Apple Creator Studio is a pretty compelling offering. I won’t be surprised to see more and more individual students firing up Logic or Final Cut Pro on their citrus MacBooks next fall.

Go to the podcast page.

The rumors are true: Apple has announced a new, low-price MacBook based on an A-series processor. It’s the MacBook Neo and it starts at $599, the lowest price ever for a new Mac laptop.

This product is the result of Apple’s manufacturing ability and the rise of Apple silicon. With Intel processors, the MacBook Air has basically occupied the bottom limit of what Apple would consider acceptable performance for a Mac. But even the original M1 MacBook Air still offers solid performance, and the A series chips primarily used in iPhones have kept getting better alongside them. The MacBook Neo is the outcome: Apple can now sell a capable laptop below the MacBook Air, powered by the same A18 Pro processor found in the iPhone 16 Pro.

For $599—keep in mind, the cheapest standard price for any new Mac was $499 for a Mac mini—you get a complete 13-inch laptop that shares a family resemblance (right down to the rounded corners) with the rest of the MacBook product line. (The education price is $499!) The base model doesn’t offer Touch ID and only has 256GB of storage, but there’s also a $699 model with 512GB storage and Touch ID.

I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention the colors: Apple has dropped its longstanding moratorium on bright colors on Mac laptops. The Neo comes in silver, yes, but also blush, indigo, and citrus. I’ve seen them all in person, so let me translate: Blush is pink enough that even I, a person who has a hard time seeing pinks, can tell that it’s pink. Indigo is sort of like the MacBook Air’s Midnight color lightened up a few notches. And citrus is a bright yellow-gold that nobody is going to mistake for some other Apple laptop.

No $599 Mac laptop is going to exist without compromises, but they’re surprisingly minimal, in my opinion. (And I’ll point out that if they’re too much for a potential buyer, the MacBook Air is right there.) There’s no MagSafe charging or Thunderbolt, but there are two USB-C ports and a headphone jack. One USB-C port is capable of driving 4K external video at 60 frames per second. Both models offer only 8GB of RAM, which is enough to run Apple Intelligence but is shy of the MacBook Air’s 16GB base.

If you’re wondering if an iPhone processor can really drive a Mac, let me reprint this chart that I posted last year:

In short, that A18 CPU core is fast. That will carry the day for the MacBook Neo, and I’d call multi-core and GPU performance “good enough,” certainly for a $599 laptop. (Of course, we’ll see how the MacBook Neo actually performs once we get our hands on one for extended testing and review.)

In introducing the MacBook Neo at an Apple event in New York City, Apple VP of Hardware John Ternus emphasized that nearly half of all Macs Apple sells are to people new to the Mac. If you look at the MacBook Neo product page you’ll see that Apple is well aware that a $599 laptop allows it to address a market that may have never really considered buying a Mac before. In addition to establishing that it’s a bona fide, full-featured Mac, there’s a prominent “Switch from PC to Mac” element.

It’s also clear that Apple’s attempts to use the iPad as a way into that part of the market, most notably education, have been limited. The MacBook Neo gives Apple a traditional computer (complete with display, keyboard, and pointing device) to sell into that market. That $499 education price is really aggressive. Apple’s never going to win on price alone in any market—it’s not the game they play—but this puts them in the mix more than an iPad-keyboard combo or an education-priced MacBook Air.

The last few years, Apple has been selling an M1 MacBook Air at Walmart for very low prices. It was a curious choice and Apple hasn’t really talked much about it, but it sure seemed like the company was testing the viability of selling laptops into a never-before-seen price point. Was that all a test of viability for the MacBook Neo? Either way, this new laptop may very well bring the Mac to an entirely new set of users who would have never considered buying a Mac before. That’s very exciting.

One of the most surprising parts of Apple’s announcement on Tuesday of new M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models was its decision to change how it describes the two different types of CPU cores in its processors.

What’s in a name? It’s really a marketing decision, more than anything else. And most people will not care, or even notice. But those of us who pay close attention to this stuff will notice, and you may be hearing about it from us for some time to come.

Here’s what happened:

• Apple renamed its most powerful CPU cores, which had previously been called performance cores. As of the M5 Pro and Max, those cores are now called “super cores.”
• Surprise! Since those cores also shipped in the M5 MacBook Pro, M5 iPad Pro, and M5 Vision Pro, they have all been retroactively renamed as super cores. I am writing this very story on a device that sports four super cores, but I didn’t even know that until I heard the news early Tuesday morning.
• The M5 Pro and M5 Max chips also feature the debut of a brand-new core design derived from the super core design. (I assume the efficiency cores in the base M5 were probably the same cores that Apple used in the M4.) This new core design is still power efficient, but it can offer high performance in multithreaded tasks. In the past, the second-tier core was referred to as an efficiency core, but Apple has decided that these new ones are better described as performance cores. In other words, Batman has become Superman and Robin (or is it Supergirl?) has become Batman.

Here’s the backstory: With every new generation of Apple’s Mac-series processors, I’ve gotten the impression from Apple execs that they’ve been a little frustrated with the perception that their “lesser” efficiency cores were weak sauce. I’ve lost count of the number of briefings and conversations I’ve had where they’ve had to go out of their way to point out that, actually, the lesser cores on an M-series chip are quite fast on their own, in addition to being very good at saving power!

Clearly they’ve had enough of that, so they’re changing how Apple’s second-tier cores are marketed to emphasize their performance, rather than their efficiency. Which is fine on its face, but by re-using an existing term of art, it’s going to be a bit confusing when it comes time to explain what’s going on. I wonder if Apple should’ve come up with two different names for these cores, rather than recycling one of them.

Leaving the naming aside, a new secondary core design is actually great news. Apple doesn’t iterate every aspect of its chips every time, but chooses different bits to upgrade—and the power-efficient cores got the big update with the high-end M5 generation. The “super” cores really are meant to be used for peak workloads, and a huge amount of the everyday life of a Mac doesn’t need to tap that power. Also, presumably these new cores will also crop up on the base M6 chips next year, making them appreciably better than the base M5.

In the end, I suspect this is entirely a marketing issue: Apple didn’t think the lesser of the two core types was getting its due, and I understand why. In a few years maybe none of us will flinch when we read about a chip with so many super cores and so many performance cores. Not today, though.

One last, tangential observation: Apple announced its new Fusion Architecture today as well, which allows the company to mix and match different “chiplets” in a single package. This is another esoteric chip thing (is there any other kind?) but it has real ramifications for the future of Apple’s chip designs. It means that Apple can be a bit more modular with its designs, building a standard CPU set (for the M5 Max and Pro) while offering two different GPU variants with 20 (Pro) and 40 (Max) cores. I’m also curious what this means for a future Ultra chip, assuming there will be one whenever the M5 Mac Studio is announced.

Go to the podcast page.

On Tuesday Apple updated the MacBook Air, its most popular Mac laptop, by adding the M5 chip it introduced last fall.

Beyond the new chip, the M5 MacBook Air is very much the same as last year’s M4 MacBook Air. It does get Apple’s new N1 chip, with Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and improved memory bandwidth of 153GB/s. But the primary changes are in two areas: price and storage.

The base-model M5 Air starts at 512GB of storage, twice what the base-model M4 Air offered. But in true Apple fashion, that generous spec bump comes at a price. Literally. The M5 Air’s starting price is $1099 ($999 for education), $100 more than the M4 Air’s $999 base price.

When Apple raises base prices, this is generally how it does it. Just last year, it raised the base price of the iPhone 17 Pro by $100 but also doubled the onboard storage. So you get more, but you don’t have an option to pay less and get less.

It’s a little disappointing, since Apple had finally gotten back to that magic sub-$1000 non-education price for the MacBook Air. Perhaps, as rumors suggest, Apple has another low-cost laptop on the way that provides it some cover to increase the base price of the MacBook Air. We’ll see.

Pairing with the newly announced MacBook is a new pair of external displays that Apple has also unveiled: the Studio Display and the Studio Display XDR.

The 27-inch Studio Display is largely unchanged from its predecessor, introduced in 2022: it’s a 5K Retina display with a 5120-by-2880 resolution at 218 pixels per inch, 600 nits of brightness, a 60Hz refresh rate, and an optional nano-texture glass coating.

The XDR model, which seems to replace the old Pro Display XDR, is a souped up version of the Studio Display, but it’s also a 27-inch 5K Retina display with the same resolution. However, it offers a Mini-LED backlight with 2304 dimming zones, up to 1000 nits of brightness in SDR and 2000 nits of peak brightness with HDR. It also has a 120Hz refresh rate and Adaptive Sync technology that adjusts frame rates on the fly to suit the content being shown, such as video or games.

Both models offer a 12MP Center Stage camera, which Apple says offers “improved image quality”, a sore spot for some on the previous Studio Display—how true that is remains to be seen. Like the 2022 Studio Display, both models have six speakers with Spatial Audio and a three-microphone array. About the only major difference in the base level Studio Display is the addition of Thunderbolt 5 connectivity, with one upstream port and one downstream port. There remain two USB-C ports.

By default, the Studio Display still comes with a tilt-adjustable stand, though there are options for both a height-adjustable stand or a VESA mount. The Studio Display XDR gets the height-adjustable stand by default, and can also be configured with a VESA mount.

The pricing is, as always, a big question: the Studio Display starts at the same $1599 price point as its predecessor, with the nano-texture option jacking that up to $1899, and the height-adjustable stand adding an additional $400. (The VESA mount version starts at the same base $1599.)

The XDR is a pricey one: it starts at $3299, with the same $300 premium for nano-texture though, hey, at least you get that height-adjustable stand by default. That’s cheaper, at least, than its predecessor, the Pro Display XDR, which started at $4999, with an additional $999 for the stand.

Day two of March’s Apple product extravaganza, uh, marches on with the announcement of MacBook Pro models bearing new M5 Pro and M5 Max chips, updated wireless capabilities, and both more and faster storage.

These models join the base level M5 MacBook Pro, released last fall, but offer more power, starting with a 15-core CPU and 16-core GPU on the M5 Pro model, 24GB of RAM, and 1TB of SSD storage. The M5 Max-equipped MacBook, meanwhile, starts at 18-core CPU, 32-core GPU, and 36GB of RAM, with 2TB of storage. That’s double the storage for both models over their counterparts for last year, and Apple says the SSDs are twice as fast as well.

But the M5 Pro and Max are undoubtedly the stars of the show. Like the M5 chips we’ve seen so far, they feature a next-generation GPU with a Neural Accelerator. But Apple says they also use an all new Fusion Architecture, which connects two three-nanometer dies on a single system on a chip that bundles CPU, GPU, Neural Engine, and more.

In their base configurations, they both feature what Apple is now branding super cores, alongside “all-new” performance cores. This is perhaps a bit of nominative legerdemain—Apple says the super core is the rebranded name for the performance core that already existed on the base M5 chip. The new performance cores aren’t the same as the M5’s efficiency cores—they’re a new design that is intended to balance multithreaded performance and power efficiency.

Wirelessly, the new models are powered by Apple’s N1 chip, bringing support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 across the line, like the new M4 iPad Air and iPhone 17e introduced earlier this week.

There are a handful of other improvements: the microphones add Voice Isolation and Wide Spectrum modes, and the M5 Pro MacBook Pro is now configurable with up to 64GB of memory. The 16-inch M5 Max gets slightly better battery life—up to 16 hours of wireless web browsing, compared to 14 hours on its M4 predecessor, and 22 hours of video streaming, compared to 21 hours. The 14-inch M5 Max ekes out two additional hours of video streaming, up to 20 hours.

The 14-inch M5 Pro starts at $2199, while the 16-inch starts at $2699; the 14-inch M5 Max model starts at $3599, with its 16-inch counterpart at $3899. All models will be available for pre-order on March 4, and will start shipping on March 11.

Go to the podcast page.

A reader of my book Take Control of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26 had a perplexing problem. I had written of the menus available in iPadOS 26’s Windowed Apps and Stage Manager modes in Settings: Multitasking & Gestures:

With a mouse or trackpad, pushing the pointer to the top edge above the status bar reveals the menu bar.

Yet, for this reader, they were unable to use a pointing device to get the menu to appear in that fashion. The cursor sometimes disappeared, and clicking didn’t help. They had to swipe, like some kind of animal, to have the menus appear. This is less than ideal when you’re using an input device and a keyboard on an iPad, as you typically position it differently than when you’re using it with touch input.

We went through some troubleshooting steps, but then it occurred to me that the culprit might be their Mac. That’s right—Universal Control could be the issue! Universal Control is Apple’s name for using a keyboard and mouse or other input devices on a Mac with one or two nearby Macs or iPads. (Follow that link to see the minimum system and hardware requirements.)¹

You configure Universal Control on your Mac in System Settings: Displays. Click Advanced, and three Link to Mac or iPad options appear if the feature is available:

• Allow your pointer and keyboard to move between any nearby Mac or iPad
• Push through the edge of a display to connect a nearby Mac or iPad
• Automatically reconnect to any nearby Mac or iPad

With the first setting enabled, the second is the key issue: Push through. I asked my email correspondent if they had this feature enabled and, more crucially, when they clicked the Arrange button at the bottom of the Displays setting, did they see their iPad below their Mac (see figure).

The answer was yes. Which is why they couldn’t move their pointer to the top of the iPad and have menus appear: when they did this, they slid through to the bottom of their Mac. I was able to reproduce this, and with some fine motor control, could sometimes get the menu to appear before I slid onto my Mac display.

They moved the iPad to one side of their Mac in Arrange, and the problem went away.

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

Continuing its cavalcade of product announcements, Apple also rolled out an updated iPad Air on Monday, upping the tablet’s processor to the M4 and increasing its RAM and memory bandwidth.

Don’t expect the iPad Air to look much different to its predecessor: not only does it feature the same dimensions¹, but it comes in the same Space Gray, Blue, Purple, and Starlight colors as the M3 model and the M2 before it. Battery life is unchanged as well, with up to 10 hours. The new models remain compatible with all the accessories of the previous versions, including the Apple Pencil Pro and Apple Pencil (USB-C), and the 11-inch and 13-inch Magic Keyboards.

All the major improvements are under the hood. In addition to the M4 processor’s 30-percent performance improvement, there’s now 12GB of unified RAM—up from 8GB of memory in the M3 Air—and memory bandwidth of 120GB/s, compared to the 100GB/s offered by the earlier model. The M4 also unlocks hardware acceleration for 8K in more formats, including H.264, ProRes, and ProRes RAW.

There are some improvements on the connectivity side as well. The M4 Air also gets Apple’s own N1 wireless chip, adding support for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 and better performance for 5GHz Wi-Fi networks. And cellular models will use Apple’s C1X, the same chip inside the new 17e, which Apple says offers more energy efficient performance.

As with the iPhone 17e, Apple is continuing to tout its environmental friendly construction. The new iPad Air is made with 30-percent recycled content, including 100 percent recycled aluminum for the exterior, and 100 percent recycled cobalt in the battery.

The new iPad Air will be available for pre-order on Wednesday, March 4, and will arrive on Wednesday, March 11. The 11-inch model starts at the same $599 price point, with the 13-inch beginning at $799.

Apple on Monday kicked off its week of announcements by rolling out the new iPhone 17e, the successor to last year’s lower cost 16e.

The 17e boasts the same A19 chip that powers the iPhone 17, a step up over the A18 in the 16e, including a 4-core GPU enhanced with Neural Accelerators. The 17e also has the same C1X Apple cellular chip as last year’s iPhone Air, the successor to the C1 that debuted in the 16e; Apple says the C1X provides up to 2x better performance and uses 30 percent less energy.

Apple’s also bumped the storage this year, with the 17e now starting at 256GB, twice the 16e’s base level, at the same $599 price point. Upgrading to 512GB will raise the price to $799.

Perhaps the biggest addition to the 17e is the inclusion of MagSafe, a feature that was strangely missing from the 16e. That includes charging up to 15W with a compatible charger, and full compatibility with MagSafe accessories as well as support for Qi2 wireless charging.

In addition, the 17e’s front display has been updated with Ceramic Shield 2 technology to help protect against cracks and breaking as well as reduce glare.

Otherwise, the specs remain largely unchanged, including the same 6.1-inch Super Retina XDR display, up to 26 hours of battery life, and support for both Emergency SOS features and Apple Intelligence.¹

Apple also says that the 17e has a 48MP Fusion camera system, which on the face of it seems identical to last year’s “2-in-1 camera system” although Apple touts the 17e’s “next-generation” portrait mode that adds the ability to recognize people, dogs, and cats as well as to add portrait mode effects after the fact. The 12MP TrueDepth camera in front likewise has the same specs as last year, with the same addition of “next-generation portraits.” Apple attributes this ability to improvements in its image pipeline.

And in case you thought Apple’s environmental promises were out the window in this day and age, the company does say that the 17e is made with 30 percent recycled content. That includes 85 percent of its enclosure, made with recycled aluminum, and 100 percent recycled cobalt in its battery.

The iPhone 17e is available in three colors: black, white, and what Apple is calling “soft pink.” It goes up for pre-order this Wednesday, March 4, and will be available for sale next Wednesday, March 11. There are also six colors of Silicone Case with MagSafe—black, anchor blue, light moss, vanilla, bright guava, and soft pink—as well as a clear case, each retailing for $49.

Go to the podcast page.

This year, Jason’s discussion of the results here at Six Colors and on Upgrade highlighted not just this or that question but a more general feature of the data: the bad vibes. The vibes around Apple seem worse this year. Naturally, we want to know: what can … (here you should imagine me turning my head dramatically while the camera suddenly zooms in) … science … tell us about these vibes?

Well, if we were just relying on the survey, not that much. But when your panel of fifty or more also write tens of thousands of additional words of commentary, your polite attempts to dissuade them from doing so notwithstanding … Well, maybe that can be grist for our mill. Of science. It’s a science mill, OK? One that can be made to do a little sentiment analysis of the 2025 commentary to see how it compares to the vibes from 2024.

The survey data

First, let’s just take a quick look at the survey questions. Non-response patterns are always worth looking at. Here’s a chart showing which questions were most likely not to be answered by panelists.

Everyone on the panel, or almost everyone, has an opinion on the Mac, Hardware reliability, and OS Quality. Last year, everyone had an opinion on the iPhone, too. In 2025, even more people than in 2023 had no opinion on the Vision Pro (over 35 percent of respondents). This is plausible, given that no one who doesn’t have a podcast owns a Vision Pro. Twenty of the 57 respondents have no views on Developer Relations, because they are not developers. This is also a consistent divide in the panel. While its membership shifts a little from year to year, it has a constituency of developers who have somewhat different preoccupations from their non-developer co-panelists. There’s also a steady group of people who have little to no interest in Home-related things.

The fact that the panel is not that big presents some appealing possibilities for visualization. Normally, when it comes to data, more is better. But the Report Card panel is, at its core, fifty or so people answering twenty or so questions. You can very nearly take it all in at once. Just not quite. Visualizations can help here. Here’s one of my favorite ways to try to see everything at the same time. The data is just a spreadsheet where the rows are the respondents and the columns are the questions. Each spreadsheet’s cell contains a particular respondent’s score for a particular question. It may be missing, but otherwise, all of them are on the same scale from 1 to 5. Now imagine you have some method for shuffling around the rows and the columns in a systematic way until both the respondents (in the rows) and the questions (in the columns) are as similar as we can make them in each direction. This is a way to see patterns of correspondence between the rows and the columns, i.e., between your cases and your variables.

One of my favorite ways to do this for data of this size is to make a Bertin Plot. Named for the French geographer Jacques Bertin, who developed it in the 1960s, plots like this involve permuting or “seriating” both the rows and columns of your table. They were originally done by hand using a matrix of Lego-like blocks that could be skewered in the rows and columns. Now we can make the computer do it for us. In this case, the result is easier to see if we flip the spreadsheet on its side and put the respondents in the columns and the questions in the rows.

The nice thing about this representation is that by coloring in only the “good” scores (4s and 5s) but still showing the “bad” ones (3s and lower), and keeping the non-responses, we get a very good sense of how both the questions and groups of respondents hang together. The result is that we get an immediate sense of the entire dataset at a glance, and see both which questions and which panelists tend to hang together.

Long-form topics

So much for the questionnaire. What about the long-form textual responses? Now, perhaps, like Jason, you dutifully read every word of the complete commentary. But maybe your reaction was, as per the meme, “i ain’t reading all that; i’m happy for you tho; or sorry that happened”. For this bit of the analysis, I took everyone’s full-length responses (which Jason very helpfully labels and categorizes) for both this year and last year. The question at hand is: have the vibes shifted? And if so, how?

You already know the answer. The vibes are, in a word, bad. With about sixty thousand words of increasingly bad vibes to play with, we can do a little text-mining to contrast how panelists felt in 2025 and 2024. First, let’s get some overall sense of the keywords. To do that, we’ll construct TF-IDF scores for every word in the data. Some words appear often in the report card commentary just because they appear often everywhere: “a”, “the,” “really,” etc. Those aren’t very informative at all. Net of those, we want to pick out words that are relatively important compared to words in our corpus of text. TF-IDF downweights words that are common across our text groupings (e.g., if we divide it by year, or question, or both at once) and upweights words that are concentrated in particular groups. Here’s a picture of the most common words across all responses in 2024 as compared to 2025:

This gives us a very rough sense of how the focal topics have shifted from 2024 to 2025. We can do this by question, too, because that’s how Jason organizes the responses. Within the categories, many of the distinctive terms are what one would expect, like “MacBook” under Hardware Reliability or “HomeKit” under Home. We also don’t have to restrict ourselves to single words in an analysis like this. For instance, we can count up the most distinctive two-word phrases, or bigrams. Now, for many of the sub-categories, the most common bigrams are just the ones you’d expect, like “Liquid Glass”, “Mac Mini” or “Apple Watch”. So let’s just look at the open-ended “Anything else to say?” question and the “World Impact” question to get a sense of topical shifts from 2024 to 2025.

Tim Cook dominates both these categories in both years, as one might expect. One thing that’s worth noting is that, because of the timing of the Report Card survey, the Trump Administration was already very much on the minds of panelists when they were answering the 2024 version. By the time they were reflecting on Apple in 2024, it was already early 2025 and not only had the U.S. Presidential election already happened, but Tim Cook had attended Trump’s inauguration, and also personally donated a million dollars to the Trump campaign. Still, the additional shift from 2024’s “carbon neutral” and “environmental impact” to “24k gold” and “bottom line” is notable.

Time for a vibe check

Now, what about people’s feelings around these terms? I used two tools from computational text analysis to characterize the tone and emotional content of the long-form responses. Both work on the same principle: they match individual words in each response against a pre-built dictionary (or “lexicon”) of words that have been scored or tagged by human raters. The results are statistical summaries. They capture broad patterns across many responses rather than close-reading any single one. On a corpus this size—-too big for someone to immediately digest, but in the grand scheme of things really rather small—-they’re not going to do a whole lot better than the sense you’d get from using your own ability to read, one of many remarkable capacities that the lump of watery cholesterol sitting between your ears somehow possesses.

First, the AFINN lexicon is a list of about 2,500 English words, each rated on a scale from -5 (very negative) to +5 (very positive). The ratings were originally compiled by Finn Arup Nielsen. Words like “outstanding” or “love” score positively; words like “terrible” or “hate” score negatively. Most everyday words are not in the list at all and just get skipped. To score the 2024 and 2025 full reports, I find every word in them that appears in the AFINN list and take the average of their scores. A response whose matched words average out to, say, +1.2 is mildly positive in tone; one averaging -0.5 is mildly negative. I then aggregate these scores by topic and compare them between years. Here’s what that looks like:

Again, this method works purely at the word-level. It does not understand sarcasm, or even simple negation (“Not great, Bob”), let alone more sophisticated things like context or irony. A sentence like “I can’t believe how great every new Mac is” will score positively because of “great,” even though “can’t believe” might signal surprise more than straightforward praise. Averaging the scores has its costs, too. Scores near zero can mean either genuinely neutral language or a mix of positive and negative words that just cancel out.

Let’s try a different approach. The NRC lexicon, developed by Saif Mohammad and Peter Turney at the National Research Council of Canada, tags about 14,000 English words with the emotions they tend to be associated with. The system uses eight categories of emotion based on Plutchik’s wheel of emotions. This is a model of general emotional responses, not a game show, relationship experience, or torture device. The emotions are anger, anticipation, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise, and trust. A single word in the NRC lexicon can have more than one tag. “Abandoned,” for instance, is tagged with both fear and sadness.

Like with AFINN, we match every word in the panelists’ long-form responses against the NRC list, count how many times each emotion category appears, and convert those counts to proportions. If 20% of all emotion-tagged words in the 2025 responses are tagged “trust” and 8% are tagged “anger,” that tells us something about the overall emotional texture of the commentary that year. Here’s an overall comparison of the differences in the vibe between 2024 and 2025:

The same caveats apply here as with AFINN: the method is wholly context-free and works at the word-level only. It is better at pinning down vibes from a largeish body of text. Its context-free character can also pollute the analysis in unexpected ways. For example, “trust” and “anticipation” tend to appear as “emotions” in English-language writing about technology, but that is because the relevant vocabulary (words like “support,” “reliable,” “expect,” and “update”) is prevalent in this domain for reasons that often have little to do with the emotion of trust as such. Relative differences between years or topics are probably more informative than absolute proportions. We can see that joy and fear were ahead in 2024, relatively speaking, with anger and disgust being more prominent in 2025 than in 2024, relatively speaking. We can also break this out by topic area. Let’s look at four:

We can see distinct shifts in emotional valence in the categories. In the open-ended “Anything else to say?” prompt, there are notably more joy flips in 2024 than in 2025. Sadness, anger, and disgust flip in the opposite direction, with relatively more of them in 2025 than in 2024. Once again, it’s quite tricky to quantify the scope and meaning of these shifts with tools as crude as these. Breaking things out by category makes it clear that the nature or meaning of one’s anger may be quite different across contexts. Panelists in 2025 are comparatively much more angry about Apple Software than they were in 2024, for example. But this anger might not have the same character as that expressed in the “Anything else to say?” category. Still, crude as our vibesometer is, it does seem to register the shifts Jason was feeling in the responses.

Finally, on Upgrade this past week, Jason wondered if being angry about Apple’s World Impact might cause people to downgrade the company on other dimensions. It’s a good question. There are several more and less complicated ways to assess it, but with data like this, none of them is really decisive. Here is a very simple way to just look at the association between the two.

A low impact score is reasonably strongly associated with lower scores on other questions, on average, but we’re not really in a position to say that it caused people to assign those lower scores.

So there you have it. You had a sense that the vibes were bad; now you know that the numbers maybe kinda confirm it. Pinning down exactly how people feel using only descriptive numerical methods is quite tricky. But that, I suppose, is the nature of vibes.

It’s almost time for the green flag.

After lengthy rumors, last October Apple announced it had bought the U.S. rights to the Formula One racing circuit. Next week, the races begin, and Apple has now detailed the viewing experience for the season.

First, the basics: Every Apple TV subscriber has access to all the video feeds from live races, practices, and qualifying. There’s no separate package to buy, and all the video will be available within the TV app on all of Apple’s platforms as well as many other smart TVs and connected devices.

According to Apple SVP of Services Eddy Cue, race video will be in 4K HDR with 5.1 audio. Cue said that like Apple’s other sports broadcasts, the video will be less compressed than content from other services, one reason Apple’s stuff tends to look better than the competition.

The TV app supports Multiview, which allows for the display of up to four video feeds at one time. To make it easier on users who might be uncomfortable building a custom Multiview layout, the app will be able to build different combinations of multiview with just one click—for example, if you click the Red Bull multiview option, you’ll get a large view of the race feed with smaller onboard views from the two Red Bull cars. (You can also set up custom Multiviews and even edit the ones created by the presets.)

Every session will be presented in both English and Spanish audio, and Apple is using the F1 TV feed as its primary feed—but also offering the very popular Sky Sports video feed as an option, and either feed can be used with Multiview. There are 30 extra feeds, including a race tracker; driver data; “podium channels” that show the video of whichever cars are in first, second, and third place; and all 22 driver cameras.

Users of Apple’s Vision Pro won’t get a 3D race map (yet—though that would be amazing, wouldn’t it?), but they can add a fifth camera view to the multiview for an even more immersive experience.

According to Cue, Apple was inspired to become a Formula One broadcaster after working with the circuit on “F1: The Movie.” “What it really did is it let our teams work together for years, and what I discovered is we shared the same vision, in the sense of being innovative and focused on providing the best fan experience,” he said.

Perhaps the most surprising announcement on Thursday was that Apple and Netflix, which have had a rather stand-offish relationship when it comes to video programming, have struck a deal to swap some Formula One-related content. Formula One’s growing popularity in the United States is due, perhaps in large part, to the high-profile success of the Netflix docuseries “Drive to Survive.” The latest season of that series, debuting Friday, will premiere simultaneously on both Netflix and Apple TV. Presumably, in exchange for that non-exclusive, Apple will also non-exclusively allow Netflix to broadcast the Canadian Grand Prix in May. (Insert obligatory wish that Apple and Netflix would bury the hatchet and enable Watch Now support in the TV app for Netflix content.)

Netflix isn’t Apple’s only F1 content partner. The company said it would be providing free streamer Tubi with “exclusive alt-casts for multiple races.” An alt-cast is an alternative version of the main broadcast, like the Manning Brothers doing a sort of live podcast during a Monday Night Football game or Nickelodeon’s animated take on live NFL broadcasts. It’s unclear what the Tubi alt-cast will actually be, but I love the idea of Apple embracing the alt-cast concept—and using it to find a different audience with a partner.

Since Apple’s rights are limited to the U.S., I assume most of these partnerships will involve races that take place during waking hours, since many races do tend to start in the middle of the night over here. On that note, Apple did emphasize that it’s working hard not to spoil the results of races in the TV app, since many American fans will watch on a time-delayed basis.

Other partners Apple announced Thursday were IMAX (select World Championship races will be shown on IMAX screens in the U.S., again presumably ones taking place during waking hours), Comcast, Everpass, Prime Video, and DirecTV. Some of those may just offer resold versions of Apple TV, and others (like Everpass and DirecTV) will make races available to commercial establishments like bars and restaurants.

On Thursday, both parties pitched their relationship as not being between Apple TV and Formula One, but between Apple and Formula One. Following last year’s Monaco maps tied to the Grand Prix, Apple added fancy Melbourne maps in advance of next week’s race, and I’d expect more fancy racing-focused maps in the future. Apple Music, Fitness, Podcasts, Sports, and even its retail stores will be part of a larger Formula One push. It’s clear that the playbook Apple used to push “F1: The Movie” will continue with this wider relationship, at least in the U.S.

Last November, I got to experience watching a Formula One race with my pal Myke Hurley, who is an avid F1 fan. It was a pretty good time, and I’m looking forward to seeing how Apple’s implementation of all these features works out during next week’s race. It won’t be so fun to watch without Myke, though. Maybe I’ll FaceTime him during the race.

Over the past several months, I’ve been on a bit of a quest to refine and enhance the essential automations on my Mac. While I’ve relied on a hodgepodge of tools over the years, the primary impetus for this bout of self-improvement was the introduction of automations for Shortcuts in macOS Tahoe—a long-awaited feature that has been around for many years on iOS and whose lack I’ve repeatedly decried during that time.

Many of the tools I previously used were totally fine—good, even—but I am a big believer in using first-party options where possible, both to figure out the extent of their capabilities, as well as to reduce dependence on other tools that might not offer full cross-platform support or might use non-sanctioned methods that could go away. It’s hard enough to get most people to start trying automations, without having to refer them to third-party apps.

One place that I’ve relied on automation over the past several years is in managing my podcasts. Jason and I have, of course, collaborated on a podcast notes workflow, but most of my needs are more mundane. To wit, recording podcasts requires managing a lot of files, and dealing with all of that manually was something I didn’t really want to have to spend time thinking about.

My previous solution relied on Hazel, an excellent Mac automation tool that can watch folders and carry out actions based on what happens in them. Apple itself has long offered a similar capability called Folder Actions, though it’s somewhat hidden these days and requires using AppleScript to at least bridge over to Shortcuts, something that I didn’t want to have to deal with.

So I set out trying to get two of my major podcast file management workflows into automations.

Recording!

The first task is dealing with the files that I record. I’ve long had a Podcast Sorter shortcut that helps put files into sub-folders, based on the show I’m recording. Initially, this was a shortcut that was triggered by Hazel; later on I adjusted it to be fired off by Audio Hijack’s built-in automation features. The annoyance there was that I maintain different Audio Hijack sessions for each show I regularly record, and that meant having each of them set up to trigger those shortcuts. But Shorcuts’s automation feature allowed me to centralize this functionality. Especially once Apple added the much-needed ignore subfolders criteria.

The shortcut itself is largely the same as the earlier version I linked above, with a few minor refinements from over the years.¹ I did run into one thing that I thought was going to be a challenge, but ended up being fine, if surprising: because this automation watches for changes in the In Progress folder where Audio Hijack keeps the files it’s actively recorded, the shortcut is actually triggered right when the recording files first appear. Thus, those files are instantly moved to the correct sub-folder…while the recording is still happening. To my 1980s/90s-trained brain, I thought for sure this would cause some huge corruption errors with the recordings, but apparently modern file systems can handle it without, if you will, missing a beat. Wild, but true. I’ve been using this for weeks now with nary a problem.

Archival quality

The second podcast file management task I had automated was archiving old recordings to my Network Attached Storage. This was previously another Hazel workflow that would watch my local folder of podcast recordings, take any episode folder that was more than two weeks old, compress it into an archive, and move it to the corresponding folder on my NAS.

I figured replacing that with a Shortcuts automation would be relatively simple and it was…with some caveats. First off, instead of using the Hazel technique of watching the folder, I just have this automation run every day at 3am. That’s plenty efficient for me; there’s no need it needs to be alerted as soon as a folder is two weeks old—and in fact, the old Hazel routine timing meant it often started doing the archiving right as I was recording the current episode of the same show. Schedules!

While the shortcut itself is fairly straightforward, the challenges came—surprisingly enough—in terms of dealing with the file system.

My podcast file organization, which the shortcut needs to traverse, is structured like so:

Podcasts/
├── In Progress
├── Show Folder/
│   ├── Show Name - Date/
│   │   ├── Recording File
│   │   ├── Recording File
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── Show Name - Date/
│   │   ├── Recording File
│   │   ├── Recording File
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── show asset file
│   └── ...
├── Show Folder/
│   ├── Show Name - Date/
│   │   ├── Recording File
│   │   ├── Recording File
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── Show Name - Date
│   ├── show asset file
│   └── ...
├── ...
├── Miscellaneous/
│   ├── Recording - Date/
│   │   ├── Recording File
│   │   ├── Recording File
│   │   └── ...
│   ├── Recording - Date
│   └── ...
├── asset file
└── asset file

First, there is—amazingly to me—no way to identify a given file as a folder. Let’s say you’re using Shortcuts to iterate through the contents of a folder and you just want to identify each sub-folder. The very powerful Filter Files action lets you add a bunch of criteria, pulling out files with a certain extension, path, date, name, etc. In the olden days, you probably could have filtered by kind², but “kind” is not a criteria in Shortcuts’s Filter Files action, only file extension. And folders apparently neither have an extension nor are regarded as having no extension.³ Which I believe is a bug, but doesn’t really help me.

In the end, the most reliable method I found of isolating folders was to Filter Files where file size is less than 1KB. It is, of course, not impossible that I would have another file that small there, but it is enough of an edge case that I’m not worried about it.⁴

My next challenge came from a similar source. Once I identify all the Show Folders, I need to identify the archivable episode folders. Again, I filtered by the 1KB rule to just pull out folders, as well as by the date modified to find the old episodes, buuuuut I ran into another issue. Some of my folders contain Logic or Garage Band projects as show assets (either as templates or for other utility reasons). And guess what? Those are technically packages, which are basically folders…which make them files that are less than 1KB. So I had to specifically filter out files where the file extension was logicx or band. Once again, a problem that could be solved if I was able to just filter out specifically folders.

Now that I’ve identified the files that need to be archived, let’s get to it. First step, compress the folder into an archive. Easy enough, as Shortcuts offers the Make Archive action, but that feature has a quirk. When it creates an archive, it exists…in the ether. Well, not strictly true, but it’s not the same behavior as if you select files or folders in the Finder and choose Compress: there the archive just pops into being, right next to the file you’ve compressed. In Shortcuts, that archive doesn’t stick around unless you subsequently use the Save File action to put it somewhere. Otherwise, it happily makes the archive, and then just tosses it in the dumpster.⁵

Second point, I had to be sure to give the archive an explicit name. When you compress files in the finder, the archive is by default the same name as the item being compressed, just with a ZIP at the end. Not so when you do it in Shortcuts. (I found this out/remembered the hard way, after I started seeing files on my NAS show up with long and random alphanumeric strings.)

The last challenge was to ensure that the archives were moved to the correct corresponding sub-folder on my NAS. In Hazel, I’d accomplished this via a feature that copies the directory structure and by having my NAS’s archive folder essentially mirror the hierarchy of my Podcasts folder. Shortcuts doesn’t really have a corresponding capability, so I had to come up with my own solution. So, I got the name of the parent directory for the folder being archived (which is the name of the show) and then used the Save File feature’s subpath parameter to specify the folder structure within the Podcasts folder on my NAS.

The original is then deleted from my local machine⁶, and a notification sent that says the folder has been archived.

To my delight, this has all generally worked pretty well. Most of the technical issues were limitations with what Shortcuts lets you do, but the automation itself has been solid once those bugs were worked out. While it took way too long for macOS to get Shortcuts automation as a feature, the actual results have been great and, as per my above goals, allowed me to rely more on first party tools for most if not all of the automation workflows I’ve relied on.

I’ve also continued to use automation to push forward another repetitive task: keeping track of my finances. But that’s another post altogether, so stay tuned.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Designing for outer space presents a fundamentally different problem. There is no weather window to wait out, no fog delay, no permit to secure—but there is also limited to no ground truth. The moon environment was built from limited imagery captured during the 1972 landing. And for the Jupiter environment, the team had to construct a plausible world from almost nothing.

I appreciate the idea that these are less photorealistic recreations of the environments than idealized versions. The kind of sheen that your memory puts on something, editing out the things that you weren’t paying attention to. Immersive environments remain one of the best parts of the Vision Pro experience, the only downside being that there aren’t more of them. But from what you can glean from this interview, it’s clear the reason there are so few of them is the amount of attention and detail that they put into making them.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

It’s time for our annual look back on Apple’s performance during the past year, as seen through the eyes of writers, editors, developers, podcasters, and other people who spend an awful lot of time thinking about Apple. The whole idea here is to get a broad sense of sentiment—the “vibe in the room”—regarding the past year. (And by looking at previous survey results, we can even see how that sentiment has drifted over the course of an entire decade.)

This is the eleventh year that I’ve presented this survey to my hand-selected group. They were prompted with 14 different Apple-related subjects, and asked to rate them on a scale from 1 (worst) to 5 (best) and optionally provide text commentary per category.

I received 56 replies, with the average results as shown below:

Since most of the survey categories are the same as in previous years, I was able to track the change in my panel’s consensus opinion. The net changes between 2024 and 2025 are displayed below—you’ll note that scores were down in 11 of the 14 categories:

Read on for category-by-category grades, trends, and select commentary from the panelists. (You can also read the entirety of panelist commentary—all 32,000 words—if you are so inclined. I discuss the results and give some of my own opinions on today’s episode of Upgrade.)

Mac

Grade: B- (average score: 3.5, median score 4, last year: 4.2)

After a few years of relative stability, the Mac has now given back all the goodwill it earned from our panel with the release of Apple silicon Macs. The issue wasn’t on the hardware side: There was wide agreement that Apple is at the top of its Mac hardware game. But macOS 26 Tahoe was condemned as a disastrous OS release, due to its half-baked visual design that hurt the Mac’s usability. The panel lauded Apple silicon’s continued combination of performance and energy efficiency, but cautioned that the chip landscape and product lineup have gotten a bit more messy.

Hardware excellence

• “The biggest compliment I can pay my M4 Pro MacBook Pro is that, apart from the unwieldy name, it’s boring. It’s boring that, unlike my high-powered PC laptop, I don’t need to worry about having a charger on hand. It’s boring that I almost never hear obtrusive fan noise. It’s boring that the screen is beautiful, a perfect size, perfect clarity, perfect contrast, perfect colours, perfect brightness and perfect smoothness.” — Shahid Kamal Ahmad
• “Mac hardware is better than ever, with nearly every current Mac (except the Mac Pro) being a strong performer with no major drawbacks or compromises.” — Marco Arment

• “I feel that [the MacBook Air has] become transparent. They work perfectly, do what I need, don’t complain, I rarely hear the fan on my iMac, and they are both sufficient for all the tasks I do.” — Kirk McElhearn

• “Apple kept the MacBook Air at a pleasing $999, with a base config of 16 GB RAM. All’s right, if not exciting.” — Shelly Brisbin

• “Hardware? Great, steaming ahead. Software? Terrible, steaming pile.” — Charles Arthur

macOS Tahoe controversy

• “Tahoe is the worst user interface update in the history of the Mac. Every change is either wrongheaded, poorly executed, or both. The Mac remains usable only because of Tahoe’s lack of ambition: it mostly alters the appearance and metrics of interface elements rather than making fundamental changes to the structure of the Mac UI. Thank goodness for that. The bad ideas embodied in Tahoe reveal an Apple design team that has abandoned the most basic principles of human-computer interaction.” — John Siracusa

• “Tahoe is the worst regression in the entire history of MacOS. There are many reasons to prefer MacOS to any of its competition, but the one that has been the most consistent since System 1 in 1984 is the superiority of its user interface. There is nothing about Tahoe’s new UI that is better than its predecessor…. Fundamental principles of computer-human interaction — principles that Apple itself forged over decades — have been completely ignored.” — John Gruber

• “Mac hardware: stunning in a good way. macOS Tahoe: stunning in a bad way.” — Craig Hockenberry

• “I am forced to use macOS Tahoe for work, otherwise there is no universe in which I would have it running on even one of my machines.” — Christina Warren

• “The hardware is great. I have a 2025 M4 MacBook Air, and it’s great. But it’s running Sequoia and will be for the foreseeable future. It’s not that Tahoe doesn’t provide some great new features, it’s that as a long-time Mac user, I can’t bear to look at it.” — John Moltz

• “Liquid Glass doesn’t shine on the Mac, but there’s more to macOS Tahoe to make it worth the upgrade. Spotlight is a lot more powerful, Live Activities are useful, and Shortcuts are more capable.” — Chance Miller

Some loose threads in terms of hardware

• “The M3 Ultra is the latest in a long line of failures when it comes to high-end desktop Mac hardware: late, underwhelming, and fully two generations behind the rest of the Mac line. Meanwhile, the Mac Pro, with its M2 Ultra chip that has lower single-core performance than the two-year-old iPhone 15 Pro, seems well and truly dead.” — John Siracusa

• “Mac Pro looks to be abandoned, iMac is getting long in the tooth, and I would love to see a bigger iMac Pro make an appearance.” — Eric Slivka

• “Apple’s external displays continue to age, rather ungracefully. Mac users shopping for a display have more options than ever beyond the Apple Store. The Studio Display is too expensive, and the XDR is just… well, there’s a lot going on there. I hope Apple has some new products ready sooner rather than later.” — Stephen Hackett

iPhone

Grade: B+ (average score: 3.9, median score 4, last year: 3.7)

It was a very good year for iPhone hardware, which helped drive this score up from last year. The iPhone 17 line-up earned a lot of praise, including the base iPhone 17, for adding a bunch of features previously seen only on pro iPhones. The iPhone 17 Pro got a lot of love, too, while the response to the iPhone Air was more polarizing. Of course, the new Liquid Glass design on iOS 26 also came in for a lot of criticism, though many panelists praised it. Generally, iOS is considered the place where Liquid Glass shines best, even if some panelists felt that was damning with the faintest of praise.

The iPhone 17 lineup

• “This is probably the best year for the iPhone that I can recall. The hardware is basically perfect across the lineup. There’s no duds.” — Casey Liss

• “The iPhone 17 line is yet another strong showing from Apple. The vapor chamber in the Pro models addresses one of the few persistent hardware weaknesses of the high-end iPhones. The plain iPhone 17 is one of the best values in years, adopting many formerly Pro-only features.” — John Siracusa

• “2025 brought more iPhones than ever, as Apple leaned into differentiation between models. The iPhone Pro and Pro Max were redesigned to maximize the performance of the camera and the silicon inside. The iPhone 17 gained ProMotion and the always-on display, making it the best base iPhone ever.” — Stephen Hackett

The iPhone Air

• “The iPhone Air, with all its compromises, is the best iPhone I’ve used in a long time. And by ‘best’, I don’t mean technically the best, because it’s not. I mean it in the sense that the iPhone Air is the sort of futuristic, forward-looking, almost impossible product that elicits the same sense of joy and wonder that the iPhone X made me feel in 2017.” — Federico Viticci

• “Apple missed the mark with the iPhone Air — too many compromises at too high a starting price made it easy for people to ignore.” — Peter Cohen

• “The iPhone Air is the most ambitious iPhone redesign since the iPhone X, and it’s what I use every day.” — Chance Miller

Liquid Glass on iOS

• “Liquid Glass works best on the iPhone by a mile. The pearl-clutching about legibility is justified — most of it anyway — but I do love the way things look, and especially, the way they move.” — Casey Liss

• “Liquid Glass is not as bad on the iPhone as on the Mac, but it’s still terrible.” — Brent Simmons

• “iOS 26 feels like a step backward in terms of design and legibility. I’m annoyed daily by it still after several months of use.” — Matthew Haughey

• “I know people are attracted to the ‘fresh’ look, but it’s poorly considered and will age like milk.” — Joe Rosensteel

iPhone 17 value

• “The best iPhone for almost anyone this year is the base iPhone — which is an amazing value…. You’re honestly making very few compromises for the cheaper phone.” — Christina Warren

• “[The iPhone 17] stands out to me as the best overall iPhone in years, finally with ProMotion and Always-On.” — Chance Miller

The iPhone 16e

• “The 16e, I contend, costs too much. If this were $499, I think I would have an easier time defending it.” — Christina Warren

• “The 16e seems very expensive for what you get — not really a budget phone, not a particularly small phone, and far less capable than the still-available 16.” — Nick Heer

• “The 16e is an excellent platform to allow the cutting of the kinds of corners that pro users hate, while the value-conscious get a very recommendable device.” — Shelly Brisbin

iPad

Grade: B (average score: 3.7, median score 4, last year: 3.5)

It’s a new era of good feelings for the iPad, which posted gains on last year’s huge improvement over the no-new-iPads year of 2023. A lot of praise was for iPadOS 26’s new windowing system, in which Apple seems to have figured out how to balance the iPad with a desire among some users for Mac-style window management. Some panelists who said they had drifted away from the iPad reported coming back into its gravitational pull. But as always, some skepticism remains about the iPad’s very reason for being.

iPadOS 26 windowing

• “iPadOS 26 is a leap forward in multitasking, finally delivering what iPad power users have wanted for many years: the radical concept of windows.” — Marco Arment

• “iPadOS 26 has brought me back to the iPad in a big way. I feel like Apple has finally taken off the training wheels from the OS and let it be the best that it can be.” — Myke Hurley

• “They did it! Multitasking the way it should be! iPadOS is as good as it’s ever been, and the hardware continues to be fantastic. But the main question of the iPad remains existential: what and who is it for?” — Dan Moren

• “Windows on iPad still have a lot of rough edges, but it’s a change that I’m so glad Apple made.” — Craig Hockenberry

• “The course reversal Apple has made for advanced users, from eschewing (often to the point of frustration, sometimes to the point of absurdity) the desktop GUI concept of overlapping windows, to embracing regular old-fashioned GUI windows, was the right call, and a welcome sign of humility. It’s a new start for iPadOS, and I look forward to seeing where it goes.” — John Gruber

• “It’s the first time in years where iPadOS doesn’t feel like an afterthought.” — Quinn Nelson

The iPad’s identity crisis

• “More than 99% of what I do is better on my Mac, my iPhone, or my Kindle. But if you like iPad, this was a good year.” — Michael Tsai

• “I still can’t shake the feeling that, in spite of the outstanding improvements to the platform, the iPad’s app ecosystem ship has sailed, and it’s not coming back.” — Federico Viticci

• “Even though multitasking has improved, the app model inherited from iOS is not conducive to power user applications.” — Gui Rambo

• “This is the year that Apple finally called our bluff on making iPadOS more useful. My only concern is whether they waited too long. Are users and developers ready to embrace the iPad for more serious work and software?” — David Sparks

• “The iPad remains incredible hardware that is, still, let down by its software. Now, far less egregiously so, but let down nonetheless.” — Casey Liss

The hardware lineup

• “The iPad mostly took the year off, with only minor spec-bump updates. But the new iPad Pro still has the best screen on any Apple device of any size, and the M5 continues Apple’s history of over-delivery on iPad performance.” — John Siracusa

• “What can you say other than ‘confusing?’ The 2025 iPad Pro is the previous model with an M5 chip and Wi-Fi 7. The iPad uses the A16 chip, but the iPad Mini uses the A17 Pro? iPad Air is on the two-year-old M3 chip.” — Matt Deatherage

• “$600 for a 128GB iPad in 2025 … just feels unreasonably high. Especially when the stuff that most people do with an iPad can be found in a package that is $350.” — Christina Warren

Wearables

Overall: Grade: B- (average score: 3.5, median score 4, last year: 3.6)

Apple Watch: Grade: B- (average score: 3.4, median score 3, last year: 3.7)

Vision Pro: Grade: D- (average score: 2.2, median score 2, last year: 2.4)

Just as Apple’s Wearables, Home, and Accessories category has stalled out financially, it’s also lost its luster in our panel’s eyes. Apple Watch updates were deemed incremental, and what should’ve been a slam dunk—the new AirPods Pro 3—ended up being surprisingly polarizing. And then there’s the Vision Pro, which was acknowledged as a piece of impressive technology… but without much of a purpose, no developer momentum, and no consumer demand.

Apple Watch stagnation

• “Like the iPad, the Apple Watch seemed to mostly take the year off, with limited, mostly internal changes. Unlike the iPad, the Watch could use a good kick in the pants. It’s become stagnant.” — John Siracusa

• “The Apple Watch has become very boring to me as a product line. I am desperately hoping for them to do something new.” — Myke Hurley

• “Innovation in Apple’s wearables has plateaued. There are no must-have upgrades, and the most compelling reason to update Apple wearables is that the battery life on the previous, nearly-identical, Apple wearable has degraded.” — Joe Rosensteel

AirPods Pro 3

• “AirPods Pro 3 are just amazing. I use them every day for several hours. They’re an accessibility aid for me because I’m hypersensitive to noise, so I need noise cancellation to be able to work with full concentration.” — Gui Rambo

• “The AirPods Pro 3 were a bit of a side-step, with nicer sound and noise cancellation, but significantly worse comfort for many people.” — Marco Arment

• “AirPods Pro 3 are the rare misstep. On the one hand, I love the better battery life and the new fit. On the other hand, they do sound demonstrably worse than the AirPods Pro 2s.” — Christina Warren

Vision Pro

• “The Vision Pro remains an expensive tech demo, with promises of future content and apps that still haven’t materialized, minimal investment from Apple, and virtually nonexistent demand from customers or developers.” — Marco Arment

• “I own the Vision Pro and regret the purchase every day. While I’ve had about 45 minutes of breathtaking VR experiences, the overall software availability and media selection are not worth the high price tag.” — Gabe Weatherhead

• “Every time I strap the face computer to my head, I’m absolutely gobsmacked at how cool it is. Still, almost two years on.” — Casey Liss

• “Vision Pro made few visible advancements this year and seems like it needs to be rethought or cancelled.” — Michael Tsai

Home

Grade: D+ (average score: 2.6, median score: 3, last year: 2.7)

Apple’s home strategy appears to be stalled, as has its score in this survey for the last five years. Nothing really changed. The Home app is still not great. And all the rumored new home hardware appears to have been delayed due to Apple’s inability to upgrade Siri.

Stagnation and neglect

• “Does Apple know they make HomeKit?” — Marco Arment

• “Has Apple done anything meaningful here in a long time? It’s preposterous to me how little Apple seems to care about this.” — Casey Liss

• “Why isn’t this platform improving, in drastic, groundbreaking ways, with any urgency? I really thought 2025 might be the year, but nope. I can’t think of any area where Apple’s attitude more clearly seems to be that ‘good enough’ is good enough.” — John Gruber

• “Is Apple still working on HomeKit? The past few years would suggest otherwise.” — Federico Viticci

• “They basically did nothing at all across the entire year for their Home line.” — Benjamin Mayo

The Home app

• “I can’t give Apple high marks for Home until they rewrite the Home app entirely. I’m pretty clever, and I’m continually baffled by it.” — Allison Sheridan

• “The Home app is still frustrating. You have to go to Shortcuts to make things that will properly control it, and the lack of if statements and proper logic within the app makes it frustrating if you have bigger visions than turning lights on and off.” — Charles Arthur

Siri troubles

• “When I say ‘Turn off the lights’, and the Watch shows what I said, then spins, then says ‘Sorry, could you say that again?’ I want to scream. But it’s just good enough to keep using it, and keep hoping it will get better.” — Paul Kafasis

• “Siri continues to decline, and has become the albatross around the neck of a largely stagnant Home system.” — Adam Engst

Matter might matter?

• “Matter continues to grow in both capability and availability. Having moved in 2025, I’ve been slowly building a new HomeKit setup, and it’s been very, very smooth. Things aren’t perfect, but putting something together with products from various vendors is way easier than it used to be.” — Stephen Hackett

• “My old 2012-era Nest 2nd Gen got deprecated, and despite being annoyed with Google, I went with Nest 4th gens. They’re Matter-compatible, which means I no longer need a HomeControl server to make them work with the Apple Home app. Hooray! The future of cross-compatibility is finally here, a little bit.” — Paul Kafasis

Apple TV

Grade: C- (average score: 2.8, median score 3, last year: 3.2)

Panelists wonder why the Apple TV is the best there is at what it does, yet still feels stagnant. There’s still no new hardware, tvOS got minimal updates, and Apple’s TV app overpromotes Apple’s own content over the needs of its users. Even its most ardent fans feel like the platform is overdue for a rethink, but it’s unclear if Apple wants to bother.

Stagnation

• “The Apple TV trudges along like an old, reliable, yet strangely expensive, horse.” — James Thomson

• “The only way I watch media is through an Apple TV. … Apple pays nowhere near enough attention to this. The last new hardware was October 2022 for Chrissakes!” — Casey Liss

• “Did anything happen? It did not… It’s been a big nothing of a year for Apple TV.” — Dan Moren

• “Apple TV continues to be a product in Apple’s ecosystem.” — Christina Warren

Best by default

• “The Apple TV continues to be the best product in its category, but mostly because everything else is so awful. It could be so much more with even a modicum of effort.” — Marco Arment

• “Meh, but arguably the best in the category? The hardware is long in the tooth, tvOS seems to be in compatibility mode with new OSes, and no streamers use the tvOS profiles.” — Andrew Laurence

• “The Apple TV does exactly what I want it to do. tvOS and the TV app could use a rethink, but it’s still the best set-top box experience out there. Perhaps that’s more of an indictment of the competition than praise for Apple.” — Chance Miller

Discovery in the apps

• “TV apps everywhere continue to prioritize the needs of the streaming service over my needs as a viewer. I want to continue watching my show. They want to shove a bunch of new content in my face while making the show I was just watching as difficult as possible to find.” — John Siracusa

• “The TV app won’t let you see what you might like until Apple has shoved what it wants you to see down your eyeballs first, a dark pattern of the first order.” — Matt Deatherage

Services

Grade: B (average score: 3.6, median score: 4, last year: 3.5)

Like its financial counterpart, the Services score in our survey just keeps going up (or at least, has done so for two years straight). Our panelists appreciated the Apple TV streaming service (formerly Apple TV+), calling out hit shows and movies. Other services like Apple Music, iCloud, and Apple Pay were generally described as solid. But there were also complaints about Apple over-marketing its own products, that pesky free iCloud tier remains unchanged, and ads in Apple News are lousy. Most damning, perhaps, is the sentiment that Apple’s services are good, but none of them are the best in their class.

Apple TV programming

• “Apple TV has really grown since its pretty low-key launch years ago. I think 2025 was the year it finally had not just one mainstream hit, but a few. Severance season 2, The Studio, and Pluribus were all genuine cultural events this year.” — Matt Birchler

• “For me, Apple TV+ props up this entire category. … The majority of my favorite TV shows in 2025 came from Apple, and they had a veritable hit with F1.” — Myke Hurley

• “I’d really like whoever’s picking the shows for Apple TV to keep doing what they’re doing: it’s a great collection, and keeps getting better.” — Craig Hockenberry

Upselling fatigue

• “I’d really like Apple Fitness+ to stop constantly trying to upsell me in the Workouts app. I’d really like Apple News+ to stop constantly trying to upsell me in the Stocks app. I’d really like iCloud and AppleCare to stop constantly trying to upsell me in the Settings app.” — Craig Hockenberry

• “The nags for upsells… feel so personally disrespectful and infuriating to someone who so passionately evangelized the little fruit company from its pre-iPod days.” — Joe Macirowski

• “Holy fucking shit, enough with the upsells. My God.” — Casey Liss

• “Apple’s focus on subscription revenue has led to many nagging pleas to subscribe and spend money with Apple.” — Joe Rosensteel

iCloud and the 5GB Tier

• “Once again, the free tier of iCloud storage remains at 5GB. It has been so since 2011, when announced by Steve Jobs. It’s been 14 years. The Apollo moon program, the Beatles, and the entire run of ‘Friends’ were all shorter than the amount of time Apple has kept the free iCloud tier at 5GB.” — David Sparks

• “I see iCloud syncing for apps to be an unsung hero. We complained about it for so long, we’ve forgotten to herald the fact that it works superbly now.” — Allison Sheridan

Apple News pros and cons

• “In Apple News, the ads I see should make Apple embarrassed. Choosing Taboola to serve ads was a mistake.” — Kirk McElhearn

• “Apple News+ is still filled with low-quality ads.” — Stephen Hackett

• “The puzzles in Apple News+ have become part of my morning routine.” — Chance Miller

• “I only have a couple of friends who play [Apple News puzzles], but they’re really fun. I particularly like Emoji Game, in part because it’s unlike anything else I’ve seen.” — Casey Liss

Hardware reliability

Grade: A (average score: 4.5, median score 5, last year: 4.6)

If there’s an area where Apple’s firing on all cylinders, it’s hardware. Panelists reported no significant hardware failures, with many noting they couldn’t remember the last time an Apple product failed them. (Several panelists joked that the person in charge of hardware would make a great CEO. If you know, you know.)

Solid reliability

• “Apple is on an epic run of great hardware.” — Brent Simmons

• “I can’t remember the last time one of my Apple products broke that wasn’t my fault.” — Casey Liss

• “Tim Cook’s legacy will be unbeatable hardware anchored by mediocre software and design. Every piece of Apple hardware feels like it’s from the future.” — Gabe Weatherhead

• “17 years into writing for MacStories, and I still haven’t had any major issue with Apple hardware in my life. They should promote the guy in charge.” — Federico Viticci

• “I bet the guy in charge of hardware would be a great CEO in the future.” — Stephen Hackett

• “Apple’s hardware is rock-solid. Maybe their hardware chief deserves a promotion.” — Marco Arment

Longevity

• “All of my Apple devices are solid. They perform well, and I have confidence they will for several years to come. I don’t have to buy new hardware nearly as often as I might have, several years ago.” — Shelly Brisbin

• “I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a hardware issue with an Apple device.” — Kirk McElhearn

Apple software

Apple OS quality

Grade: D+ (average score: 2.7, median score: 3, last year: 3.4)

Apple app quality

Grade: C (average score: 3.1, median score 3, last year: 3.5)

So, yeah, about that… Suffice it to say that after several years of increasing discomfort about Apple’s approach to software design and usability, the introduction of Liquid Glass caused our panel to boil over. Liquid Glass was criticized on all platforms, though the macOS Tahoe implementation was probably judged the harshest. Beyond the aesthetics, there were complaints about bugginess, glitchiness, and usability regressions. Several panelists suggested that next year’s OS cycle should focus on refinement, usability, and stability rather than new features. However, several panelists acknowledged that some new features in macOS Tahoe were actually useful—but were largely overshadowed by the new design.

Liquid Glass criticism

• “Yearslong growing concerns over the direction of Apple’s software design reached a breaking point with MacOS 26 Tahoe. It’s so bad — or at least, so much worse than MacOS 15 Sequoia — that I’m refusing to install it.” — John Gruber

• “Liquid Glass is so bad that it makes everything else look bad.” — Brent Simmons

• “I’ve gotten more unsolicited negative comments and queries about the 26 releases from friends and family than any other OS release in recent memory, and that’s almost all Liquid Glass complaints.” — Jeff Carlson

• “Usually, big design trends last for five to 10 years. But after just a couple months of using Liquid Glass, I’m already craving the next trend.” — Matt Birchler

• “Did I mention that I do not care for Liquid Glass?” — James Thomson

• “I don’t hate Liquid Glass as much as others in our community do, but let’s face it: it hasn’t been a smooth rollout, especially on macOS.” — Federico Viticci

A new focus on quality is needed

• “I’d love to see Apple take a release cycle to focus on quality, but with the catch-up they’re currently doing for Apple Intelligence, that seems unlikely.” — Craig Hockenberry

• “Liquid Glass really drags down the average this year. It also completely wiped out Apple’s ability to make improvements to existing features, which is at the core of Apple’s longstanding software quality crisis. Apple really needs to shift the balance between new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. The process of polishing existing features is vastly undervalued by today’s Apple.” — John Siracusa

• “I’d love to see a Snow Leopard-style shift focusing on ironing out what went wrong with this 26 strategy.” — Peter Cohen

• “Sometimes you need to take a moment to reset and to clean up around the house. Apple needs that.” — Casey Liss

• “It has been a supreme disappointment to watch Apple bumble the Shortcuts app. This is an app that felt like it was designed by true Apple fans, back when Apple acquired it. But in the years since then, Apple has abdicated its responsibility to us, and Shortcuts is now too unreliable to invest our attention and time any further.” — Gabe Weatherhead

• “Certain features like Screen Time, touted as a very important feature when it debuted, just withers on the vine without any updates or bug fixes.” — Todd Vaziri

Developer relations

Grade: D- (average score: 2.3, median score 2, last year: 2.4)

When this survey began, Apple’s relationship with third-party developers was so rocky that I made sure the topic was covered in the Report Card—and, as expected, it received a terrible score. Soon after, Apple made some major changes to its App Store policies, and the scores in this category shot up. However, for the last eight years, it’s been mostly on a downward slide, and this year it’s almost returned to the low point of 2015.

It’s because of what you probably expect: Apple’s aggressive defense of App Store revenue and control, the global regulatory patchwork that creates confusion for developers, the burden of adapting to the Liquid Glass redesign, and a general sense that Apple treats developers as means to an end rather than partners. Swift and SwiftUI continued to draw mixed reactions, with concerns about maturity and complexity. A few panelists noted that Apple’s developer tools and APIs remain strong even as the relationship sours.

App Store

• “The quote ‘it’s our FUCKING STORE‘, from Apple’s Marni Goldberg that came out during the Epic vs Apple trial, is permanently burned into my mind as the perfect encapsulation of Apple’s attitude towards developers.” — James Thomson

• “Business as usual. But business is not good. The company keeps fighting to control the App Store as it has, without ever stopping to ask whether or not it actually needs to.” — Dan Moren

• “Apple touts it, but the App Store continues to be awful for developers. Apple refuses to stop trying to squeeze every unearned cent out of developers. The greed is astounding, and compromise is absent.” — Paul Kafasis

• “I publish two apps. The process of getting new releases approved is still too painful. The tools Apple offers developers are great. The lawsuits Apple fights to avoid giving developers (and their users) what they should… are not great.” — Lex Friedman

Making life hard for developers

• “Apple gave developers great new APIs to use in the 26 OSes, but burdened them with half-baked redesigns that make it extremely challenging to create good UIs and reliable apps.” — Marco Arment

• “I feel like I could copy and paste my comments from several past years on the topic of developer relations. We are not making progress. It seems like new leadership at Apple is our only hope.” — John Siracusa

• “Apple consistently and regularly shows developers that it does not care about them… Without developers, Apple wouldn’t have an ecosystem. They’d have an iPhone. One that nobody would buy, because it’d be damned near useless.” — Casey Liss

Regulatory challenges

• “The hodgepodge of regulations around the world is only getting more complicated for both Apple and developers. Apple might have been able to head this off by making some voluntary changes sooner.” — Eric Slivka

• “Everything we’ve said before about fighting a war on all fronts with every single regulatory body around the world is still true from last year.” — James Thomson

Apple’s Impact on the World

Grade: F (average score: 2.1, median score: 2, last year: 3.1)

This category (formerly Environmental/Social Impact) was designed so panelists could judge Apple’s frequent claims that it’s trying to leave the world better than it found it, most notably with its championing of various social and environmental policies and causes. This year, the bottom fell out. Tim Cook’s relationship with the Trump administration dominated the discussion. Panelists overwhelmingly condemned what they described as obsequious behavior — the gold-plated plaque, the Mar-a-Lago dinners, the inaugural donation — as a betrayal of Apple’s stated values on human rights, the environment, and social responsibility. Several panelists noted that Apple had quietly deprioritized environmental commitments and removed the ICEBlock app from the App Store. A few acknowledged the difficulty of Apple’s position as a multi-trillion-dollar company navigating an unpredictable administration, but most argued that Apple was obliged to take a stronger stand.

Tim Cook and the Trump administration

• “As has often been said this year, what good is having fuck-you money if you never say fuck you?” — John Siracusa

• “‘Awarding’ Donald Trump a 24-karat gold trophy emblazoned with the Apple logo in August 2025, after seeing eight months of Trump 2.0 in action, wasn’t ‘engagement’ or ‘getting off the sideline.’ It was obsequious complicity with a regime that is clearly destined for historical infamy. Cook’s continued strategy of ‘engagement’ risks not only his personal legacy, but the reputation of the company itself.” — John Gruber

• “Tim Cook presenting an award to Donald Trump is one of the single most awful things Apple has ever done.” — Paul Kafasis

• “Tim Cook’s actions supporting Trump and China betray Apple, democracy, and human rights to ensure favorable treatment, reduced competition, and minimal judicial and regulatory interference.” — Marco Arment

• “Watching Tim Cook bend a knee to Trump for the past year has been downright embarrassing.” — Matthew Haughey

• “Can we give Apple a gold-plated award for obsequiousness?” — Adam Engst

Loss of moral authority

• “Apple once had a reputation as an ethical and humane big tech company — and that reputation helped the world by showing that it was possible to be that and to be successful. That reputation is gone, and that example is now gone too.” — Brent Simmons

• “I don’t have a lot of patience for the ‘What are they going to do, stand up to the bad guys?’ arguments defending the company’s fawning over everything the new U.S. President says and does.” — Matt Birchler

• “How can a company tout its own diversity, while at the same time handing out golden awards to a person that’s trying to destroy our country’s diversity? You either believe in it, or you don’t: there’s no gray area here.” — Craig Hockenberry

• “I’ve been buying Apple products since my first Apple II in 1979. This is the year they lost me. Giving into Trump’s demand for a monetary tribute has left me unwilling to buy any new Apple products until I’m assured that they will not be donating to the executive branch.” — Ben Long

• “I don’t care what Tim’s personal feelings on the matter are, and I don’t care what his fiduciary responsibility is, Apple simply can not claim they are serving the greater good in any way, shape, or form.” — Joe Rosensteel

• “They stopped Product (RED) products … They don’t even pretend any more to be environmentally positive, other than when they present new products.” — Kirk McElhearn

• “I’m no longer surprised by Apple’s political decision-making and maneuvering. A multi-trillion-dollar company is going to prioritize capitalism every time, even if it means cozying up to the worst people. Apple did, however, resist outside pressure to abandon its DEI policies. It continues to put an admirable focus on Accessibility. Apple 2030 is still a goal on Apple’s roadmap.” — Chance Miller

Notes

Every year, I tell people they don’t need to write a lot, but many just can’t help themselves. Their complete 32,000 words of commentary are also available, and I’ve encouraged them to also post them elsewhere if they desire. I didn’t vote in the survey, though you can hear me provide my own thoughts on Upgrade 604, released today.

Thanks to all of those who participated: Shahid Kamal Ahmad, Steven Aquino, Marco Arment, Charles Arthur, Matt Birchler, Shelly Brisbin, Jeff Carlson, Robert Carter, Peter Cohen, Matt Deatherage, Jessica Dennis, David Dozoretz, Adam Engst, Lex Friedman, Rob Griffiths, John Gruber, Stephen Hackett, Zac Hall, Matthew Haughey, Nick Heer, Craig Hockenberry, Myke Hurley, Paul Kafasis, Joe Kissell, Andrew Laurence, Casey Liss, Ben Long, Joe Macirowski, Brian Mattucci, Benjamin Mayo, Kirk McElhearn, Philip Michaels, Carolina Milanesi, Chance Miller, John Moltz, Dan Moren, Quinn Nelson, Howard Oakley, Rosemary Orchard, Gui Rambo, Stephen Robles, Joe Rosensteel, Allison Sheridan, Rich Siegel, Brent Simmons, Aleen Simms, John Siracusa, Eric Slivka, David Sparks, Brett Terpstra, James Thomson, Michael Tsai, Todd Vaziri, Federico Viticci, Christina Warren, and Gabe Weatherhead. And thanks to Khoi Vinh for suggesting this concept way back in October of 2015.

All our previous surveys are available via our Apple Report Card archive page.

Here we go.

Mac

James Thomson: Solid hardware updates, though the full range now has a mix of M3 through M5 chips, which makes decision-making slightly harder. Tahoe is a mess, though, at least visually, with the worst implementation of Liquid Glass.

Andrew Laurence: The Mac is clearly the worst off with Liquid Glass—so much UX chaos with so little benefit.

Shahid Kamal Ahmad: The biggest compliment I can pay my M4 Pro MacBook Pro is that, apart from the unwieldy name, it’s boring. It’s boring that, unlike my high-powered PC laptop, I don’t need to worry about having a charger on hand. It’s boring that I almost never hear obtrusive fan noise. It’s boring that the screen is beautiful, a perfect size, perfect clarity, perfect contrast, perfect colors, perfect brightness and perfect smoothness. It’s boring that the keyboard has no faults. It’s boring that it’s more than powerful enough to handle just about any task I throw at it without fuss or drama. It wasn’t always like this, and for that I’m grateful. I never thought the day would come, but the latest MacBook Pro is a near-perfect laptop, and the only thing that would make it perfect is if Apple’s RAM prices weren’t so exorbitant.

Todd Vaziri: As a nearly four-decade-long Mac user, I love my Mac. The little things still frustrate me, like the bizarro UI decisions made over the last few years. System Settings is still an utter UI mess, with core functionality hidden behind inconsistent buttons. And with multiple Mac computers in the house, simple File Sharing is still buggy and weird.

Joe Macirowski: I’m tired of waiting for OLED MacBooks. I’ve been using USB-C portable 4K OLED monitors for years now as my only Mac displays, despite also having a Studio Display. It’s not like I have to sacrifice Face ID to do so, and with full P3 coverage and trivial calibration, they simply look better than any of Apple’s Mac displays 100% of the time. They even have touch input that macOS kinda knows what to do with sometimes. This is starting to feel as frustrating as waiting for Retina to move beyond just the 15″ MacBook Pro, except perhaps it’s worse because 3rd party retina displays barely existed.

Nick Heer: MacOS Tahoe has some great new features, but it is overall a regression. I am writing this in Notes. The toolbar right above this sentence is so hazy that it makes me think my vision is degenerating, and it is giving me a headache. The metaphor “tip of an iceberg” barely works because icebergs are well-defined objects. A better metaphor is “when there is smoke, there is fire”, and this amorphous interface is evidence of deeper problems. The hardware updates were modest this year, but the MacBook Air is a standout, especially since its price is back down to the magic thousand-dollar-in-the-U.S. mark.

Gabe Weatherhead: Unfortunately, the Mac platform has declined, yet again in 2025, as a result of poor software design. Liquid Glass is bad enough to tank my opinion of the entire platform. It’s quite an achievement for a company that imagines it is a leader in design. Great hardware with bad software still makes for a bad customer experience. I often avoid native macOS apps now because of Liquid Glass, so I can’t think of many reasons to recommend a Mac for most people.

Kirk McElhearn: This should really be separated into hardware and software. Regarding hardware, I updated both my Macs (iMac and MacBook Air) to M4 models this year. I feel that they have become transparent. They work perfectly, do what I need, don’t complain, I rarely hear the fan on my iMac, and they are both sufficient for all the tasks I do. On the software side, macOS 26 is an insult to the history of design and human interface guidelines. From the silly “Liquid Glass” which makes things harder to see (I’ve enabled the incorrectly named Reduce Transparency setting), to the dumb icons in menus, to the placement of things like the play bar in the Music app, this looks like it was designed by the marketing team. It’s obvious that Apple thought they had something brilliant when they first presented this at WWDC, and had to tone it down a lot because of complaints, but this is a stain on the history of Apple’s human-centric operating systems.

Federico Viticci: Fun fact: I now own and regularly use two Macs (a MacBook Pro and M4 Mac mini) as opposed to the one iPad Pro I also use on a daily basis. Beyond hardware (which is excellent), the third-party Mac software ecosystem is living its own renaissance at the moment, thanks to AI. Thanks to the major AI companies continuing to ship Mac-only features for their LLM clients (case in point: the new Claude Cowork for Mac) as well as third-party developers now being able to iterate faster than ever on their Mac apps thanks to AI-assisted coding, the result is a breadth of Mac apps and exclusive Mac app features that are nowhere to be seen on other platforms. One way or another, the Mac keeps going – despite the questionable “improvements” to macOS Tahoe.

Adam Engst: The hardware is great, but macOS 26 Tahoe is dragged down by Liquid Glass. It adds nothing and causes all sorts of visual glitches and slowdowns.

Marco Arment: Mac hardware is better than ever, with nearly every current Mac (except the Mac Pro) being a strong performer with no major drawbacks or compromises. There’s not a single Mac for sale today (except the Mac Pro) that a friend or family member could purchase without asking nerds like us, and we’d think, “Oh no, they bought the wrong one!” But macOS Tahoe’s redesign tore through the Mac’s beloved, considered, evolved UI, hastily slapping flawed concepts from iOS onto a radically different platform without any of the care and craftsmanship that we love about the Mac, to achieve self-imposed unification goals that seem to matter only to Apple.

John Gruber: If there were separate categories for Mac hardware and MacOS, I’d give the hardware a 5 and MacOS 26 Tahoe a 2. The hardware continues to be great — fast, solid, reliable, and Apple Silicon continues to improve year-over-year with such predictability that Apple is making something very difficult look like it must be easy. Tahoe, though, is the worst regression in the entire history of MacOS. There are many reasons to prefer MacOS to any of its competition — Windows or Linux — but the one that has been the most consistent since System 1 in 1984 is the superiority of its user interface. There is nothing about Tahoe’s new UI — the Mac’s implementation of the Liquid Glass concept Apple has applied across all its OSes — that is better than its predecessor, MacOS 15 Sequoia. Nothing. And there is much that is worse. Some of it much worse. Fundamental principles of computer-human interaction — principles that Apple itself forged over decades — have been completely ignored. And a lot of it just looks sloppy and amateur. Simple things like resizing windows, and having application icons that look like they were designed by talented artists.

Charles Arthur: Hardware? Great, steaming ahead. Software? Terrible, steaming pile.

Stephen Robles: Mac hardware by itself would be a 5. I use an M4 Max Mac Studio and an M4 MacBook Air, both of which I love. The Air is especially impressive when I’m on the road. Software is a little more divisive. macOS 26 design leaves a little to be desired, but Shortcuts on Mac have been huge for me. And the ability to customize Control Center with multiple “panes” of Shortcuts is a big improvement. Aside from the Studio Display flickering, which does drive me nuts, it’s also been reliable for me. Live Activities from iPhone continuity is also a big quality-of-life improvement. I don’t use iPhone mirroring often, but the live activities for sure.

David Sparks: This one is difficult to rate. The hardware is superb. Each subsequent “M” makes me love Apple Silicon even more. But the well-documented backslide on macOS is frustrating. I hope next year I can bump this number up if Apple starts taking the wiz-bang out of macOS.

Jeff Carlson: To be honest, I had to go look up what was new in the Mac world last year. Apple seems to be continuing to increment, though the processor numbering is still confusing for people who don’t know the differences (M5 laptops but M3 Max Studio?). At the same time, it’s a testament that there isn’t a “bad” Mac in the lineup… no model that a knowledgeable friend would say, “oh no, don’t get that one”. Hardware design is largely unchanged but still solid.

Christina Warren: It’s truly stunning: For the last five years, Apple has sold some of the most incredible hardware available by any manufacturer. Even this year’s relatively modest list of updates (the glorious M4 MacBook Air, the standard M5 MacBook Pro, the torturously expensive M4 Max Mac Studio or outrageously expensive M3 Ultra Mac Studio) are still either best-in-class machines, almost worth the price (I say almost on the Studio because I do think that for $10,000, recent RAM crisis notwithstanding, there are probably better ways to spend your money for local models or to rent compute space), or only now after half a decade finally getting x86 and ARM competitors that have started to catch-up. Last year’s M4 Mac mini became a phenom at the beginning of 2026, a full 14 months after its release, as a way for people to run OpenClaw — a viral (and frankly expensive) way to abuse a Claude Pro Max or burn hundreds of dollars in AI tokens — to the point people were joking about there being a shortage of minis, only because the $500 price nearly everyone can buy it for is such an amazing deal in computing. Putting the RAM crisis stuff that makes Apple’s upgrades almost look reasonable (but look, Apple gets zero credit on this and a massive supply chain crisis doesn’t make the years and years that Apple has charged outrageous fees for upgrading RAM or storage in any way defensible — also, I fully expect Apple to raise prices this spring to “align” with the supply chain and lock in some extra profits, even though industry experts say Apple already locked in a year of NAND and RAM pricing in advance), the fact that you have been able to get incredibly good deals on Macs (especially base models) for the majority of the year at outlets like Amazon, Best Buy, etc., is yet another thing to celebrate. I got my sister a 16GB/256 M2 Air (thank you, Apple Intelligence, for requiring the base RAM be 16GB) for $599 on a Cyber Monday special — and the M4 Air was available under $800 several times this holiday season. Sure, sub-$500 Chromebooks and Windows laptops are still more plentiful, but the fact that you can get a brand-new MBA for well under $1000 and the $500 Mac mini (no one is paying $600 for that thing) remain some of the best deals in computing. And yet I can’t give any higher than a 3, and honestly, was hesitant on the 3, because macOS has become an abomination of software. I am forced to use macOS Tahoe for work—otherwise, there is no universe in which I would have it running on even one of my machines. I will not install it on any personal devices, and am sadly dreading what this means for the longevity of my long-in-the-tooth but still cooking 2020 iMac, which, thanks to this abortion of software engineering, is the most ignominious way for the Intel Macs to go out. At least the PowerPC Macs got Mac OS X Leopard. Apple has so utterly lost the plot on macOS software — not just from the much-discussed (and rightfully maligned) design (Liquid Ass is the lead of my problems, but let’s start with that), the multiple windows corner radii that are different even amongst Apple-made programs, the fact that there is so much white space that anyone using a 13″ MacBook Air (which is most of Apple’s userbase at this point) has less screen real estate than they did before, to the horrific icon design, and the inconsistent and unfinished styling across the OS. But that’s only part of the horrors. For the same period of time as Apple has been cranking out incredible hardware, the software has become more buggy, less consistent, less thoughtful in its design, and has taken a turn that wasn’t great a decade ago, and only become even worse. The only saving grace Apple has on the software front is that Windows 11 is actually worse to the point that the kids are unironically installing Linux on their machines. And lots of people give Linux a lot of shit (and I’m proudly one of them — as much as I also have probably used Linux more than most of the Linux haters and Linux fanboys). Still, I’m going to be stuck running some half-supported version of Linux on my 2020 iMac pretty soon (half-supported because the driver situation around T2 Macs is complicated and Apple has never so much as pretended to care about things like longevity of hardware or letting people have control of their own hardware). There are days I wish I could run it natively on my Mac (and no, Asahi Linux, as impressive a party trick as it was, doesn’t even come close to counting). But no, Tim Cook’s Apple hates user choice and loves locked-down bootloaders and will never let you run any alternative OS on your Mac. Man, we had it great in the early 2010s. Anyway, the Mac is great hardware plagued by truly deplorable and indefensibly bad software. And Apple gets away with it because we have no alternative. But here is the rub: that will not always be the case. Windows is probably never going to have a comeback moment (as much of a comeback as any dominant OS can have), and ChromeOS will forever be in that spot of OSes your kid is forced to use or your corporation of who hates you has you use — but now that we are in the age of AI, these multi-billion dollar startups are sweeping up the best and brightest talent (both existing talent and also the new grads coming out of school) and if you don’t think Claude and OpenAI aren’t working on their own operating systems, well, I have some land in Florida to sell you. And their OSes don’t have to be perfect, and the hardware doesn’t have to be as polished as Apple’s— it just has to do a few things better. And as the Steam Deck has proven, if things look good enough, people will give it a shot.

Casey Liss: I think I may be the only talking head in our community that isn’t actively repulsed by Liquid Glass on the Mac. I absolutely believe there are missteps, but on the whole, I like that my Mac looks different. It looks new, which is fun! Hardware-wise, the Mac continues to do incredibly well. I have a M3 Max MacBook Pro, and I rarely feel like I’m wanting for more of… well… anything, really. I may upgrade this year, but I surely won’t need to.

John Moltz: The hardware is great. I have a 2025 M4 MacBook Air, and it’s great. But it’s running Sequoia and will be for the foreseeable future. It’s not that Tahoe doesn’t provide some great new features; it’s that, as a long-time Mac user, I can’t bear to look at it.

Gui Rambo: I would’ve given it a lower grade due to the numerous issues with macOS Tahoe, but that wouldn’t be fair to the hardware, which continues to be excellent.

Craig Hockenberry: Mac hardware: stunning in a good way. macOS Tahoe: stunning in a bad way.

Ben Long: Great hardware, hampered by an OS that continues to decline.

Benjamin Mayo: macOS Tahoe is the worst implementation of the Liquid Glass design language, and it makes using a Mac less enjoyable. It’s not unusable, it’s not even bad per se, it’s just not as nice as it used to be. The 2025 Mac hardware was fine, although it is a little sad that Mac Studio fans now have to wait every other year for a new architecture of the ‘Ultra’ chip. And the Mac Pro is still a dead man walking.

Joe Rosensteel: The line-up is messy, storage and RAM prices are painful, and the OS has been visually marred with the kind of care only a black-market plastic surgeon could provide.

Michael Tsai: The M4 MacBook Pro with nanotexture display is one of my favorite Macs ever. The M4 MacBook Air was a great update, with more RAM and a lower price. The Mac Studio finally got an update, though the M3 Ultra chip is now two generations behind the M5 in the baby MacBook Pro released the same year. Nothing seems to be happening with iMac or Mac Pro. Overall, I’m down on macOS Tahoe due to the Liquid Glass design and the large number of bugs. I do like that AutoFill can now work in third-party browsers. The new Spotlight seems like a big improvement, though I continue to prefer LaunchBar.

Brian Mattucci: I’m very happy with the Mac Studio with M4 Max, and I’ve largely enjoyed macOS 26. I’m unbothered by Liquid Glass, though it feels overhyped. It’s fine. The new Spotlight is an improvement, and the iPhone app is neat, though I don’t have a lot of use for it.

Peter Cohen: M5 MacBook Pro performance is impressive. Tahoe, Liquid Glass and Apple Intelligence, less so.

Matt Birchler: There’s a lot to like with the Mac this year. The MacBook Air has finally gotten back to having the latest processor in the $999 model, and for the second year in a row, there isn’t a Mac in the lineup I’d say is a bad machine (besides the Mac Pro, which I don’t even think of as part of the Mac family at this point). On the other hand, we didn’t really get an exciting Mac hardware update this year, and Tahoe was greeted by a mixed reception at best. Some of the features they added were useful, but it seems pretty clear that the always divisive liquid class is least suited to Apple’s oldest platform.

Stephen Hackett: Five years into the Apple silicon era, Apple seems to be firing on all cylinders, with regular releases for most of their products (cough, cough, Mac Pro.) The laptops run cool with amazing battery life, and there’s a desktop Mac for just about everyone. Apple’s external displays continue to age, rather ungracefully. Mac users shopping for a display have more options than ever beyond the Apple Store. The Studio Display is too expensive, and the XDR is just … well, there’s a lot going on there. I hope Apple has some new products ready sooner rather than later. macOS Tahoe is Apple’s weakest implementation of Liquid Glass. Buttons don’t look like buttons, window corners cut off content, and the locking of icons into Squircle Jail is a crime. I like a lot about Liquid Glass on the iPhone, but I fear that Tahoe was either an afterthought or redesigned by folks who don’t know what makes macOS special. I’m running Tahoe, and while it doesn’t get in my way very often, there are little bits of friction everywhere, like grains of sand scratching and pitting the windshield of a passing car.

Howard Oakley: Excellent hardware releases, but Tahoe is a disaster that mars the whole year.

Myke Hurley: I wouldn’t say that 2025 was a particularly exciting year for the Mac, but the product line is on such a great trajectory right now that I have a hard time knocking it.

Chance Miller: Liquid Glass doesn’t shine on the Mac, but there’s more to macOS Tahoe to make it worth the upgrade. Spotlight is a lot more powerful, Live Activities are useful, and Shortcuts are more capable. On the hardware side, Apple continues to release new Apple Silicon-powered Macs whenever they are ready, even if the timing is a bit awkward (M3 Ultra Mac Studio, for example).

Allison Sheridan: The staggered, sort of behind, sort of in front position for the Studio is, at the same time, confusing and disappointing. (M3 Ultra and M4 Max, not M5)

John Siracusa: Mac hardware continues to excel in the realm of battery-constrained performance, which is incredibly important to the Macs that most people buy. But the traditional weaknesses of modern Mac hardware became a bit more glaring in 2025. While the iPhone and iPad have had OLED screens for years, the Mac will have to wait until 2026. Apple’s desktop displays are so outdated that they’re still waiting for features from the laptop line, like higher refresh rates and dynamic backlight improvements, with OLED even farther off in the future. The M3 Ultra is the latest in a long line of failures when it comes to high-end desktop Mac hardware: late, underwhelming, and fully two generations behind the rest of the Mac line. Meanwhile, the Mac Pro, with its M2 Ultra chip that has lower single-core performance than the two-year-old iPhone 15 Pro, seems well and truly dead. On to software. Tahoe is the worst user interface update in the history of the Mac. Every change is either wrongheaded, poorly executed, or both. The Mac remains usable only because of Tahoe’s lack of ambition: it mostly alters the appearance and metrics of interface elements rather than making fundamental changes to the structure of the Mac UI. Thank goodness for that. But Tahoe is a concerning bellwether. The bad ideas embodied in Tahoe reveal an Apple design team that has abandoned the most basic principles of human-computer interaction. Tahoe is not an ambitious update that flew too close to the sun and was burned. It’s a clumsy debasement of surface elements, making basic mistakes that are obvious to anyone skilled in the art of interface design. It breaks things that were not broken while ignoring or exacerbating existing problems. Oh, and I also personally think it’s not very attractive. What a sad year for macOS.

Brent Simmons: Hardware is utterly amazing — but the macOS 26 Liquid Glass UI is shockingly bad.

Jessica Dennis: I was pretty bummed to retire my iMac Pro this year — I replaced it with an enormous Dell monitor that I hook up to my 2023 15″ MacBook Air, which I guess is a testament to how decent the MacBook Air is nowadays.

Shelly Brisbin: 2025 was the year of the solid update. The M-chip stairs the laptops and the Mac Studio have been climbing are sturdy and reliable – no chance you’ll be discomfited by a squeaky step, or slip and fall on a broken one. And Apple kept the MacBook Air at a pleasing $999, with a base config of 16 Gb RAM. All’s right, if not exciting. I’m not a particular fan of the liquid glass changes in Tahoe, but the ones I like least are easy to tame by turning off a few settings.

Lex Friedman: Mac hardware is the best it’s ever been. Liquid Glass really is bad, but less bad on the Mac than on iOS.

Matthew Haughey: The new M chips are always welcome, and the latest MacOS isn’t too terrible compared to mobile.

Dan Moren: My enthusiasm for new models and chips is tainted by macOS 26, which has had some significant and well-documented issues on the platform. The design feels clunky and weird still. Some apps need more love and reliability (Shortcuts!).

Eric Slivka: On the hardware side, things seem to be in a bit of a holding pattern, with minor spec-bump updates for some models and others not receiving updates at all. M5 MacBook Pro without M5 Pro/Max at the same time is understandable, but makes things a bit awkward, as do the M4 Max and M3 Ultra offerings for Mac Studio. Mac Pro looks to be abandoned, iMac is getting long in the tooth, and I would love to see a bigger iMac Pro make an appearance. As far as macOS Tahoe, I don’t hate the Liquid Glass redesign as much as some, but there are definitely some odd design choices that need revisiting.

Quinn Nelson: This was one of the least impressive years for the Mac in the Apple Silicon era. While none of the releases were bad, none of them particularly wowed, and any/all excitement was mired by macOS 26 Tahoe.

David Dozoretz: As is common knowledge, Apple is far behind in A.I. implementation. Hopefully, they can continue their history of doing it best instead of first. Oh, and Tim Cook sucking up to the White House is despicable – regardless of any perceived business issues. I say that as an Apple shareholder since the early ’80’s.

Paul Kafasis: Hardware: Apple’s back to regularly releasing Mac updates, and that’s a very good thing. What’s up with the Mac Pro, though? Approximately no one should buy it. Software: Tahoe is not great. In particular, Liquid Glass on Mac is pretty bad.

iPhone

Carolina Milanesi: It feels like the Pro Max has been such a winner for Apple, and the Air is a key stepping stone to the Fold.

Marco Arment: The iPhone 17 Pro is a radically better phone than its predecessors. iOS 26 has some flawed designs and remains buggy months after its public release.

John Gruber: iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max are, technically, the best iPhones Apple has ever made. They’re very well designed, too. The change to make the camera plateau span the entire width of the phone is a good one. It looks better, allows a naked iPhone 17 Pro to sit more steadily on a flat surface, and lets one in a case sit on a surface without any wobble at all. Apple even finally added a really fun, bold color — orange — that, surprising no one seems to be incredibly popular with customers. The iPhone Air is, from a design perspective, the best-designed iPhone Apple has ever made. It’s a marvel to hold and carry. One rear-facing camera lens is limiting, but it’s an excellent camera. Not 17 Pro-quality, no, but excellent quality, yes. Battery life is amazing given the physical constraints of the iPhone Air’s thin and lightweight design. The two main dings against the iPhone Air are that (a) Apple didn’t offer it in a fun bold color like the 17 Pro’s orange, and (b) Apple, bafflingly, hasn’t advertised the Air. I’ve seen so little promotion of the Air that I’d wager most iPhone users in the market for a new phone don’t even know it exists until they walk into a store and see it there. iOS 26 is Apple’s best implementation of the Liquid Glass concept, by far. I prefer it, in just about every way, to iOS 18. There are some individual apps from Apple in iOS 26 that have poor implementations of Liquid Glass (Music, I’m looking in your direction), but most of them are decided improvements, with more consistency system-wide improvements (like the placement of search fields).

Steven Aquino: Perfection is seemingly unattainable, but I feel as though the iPhone line is most proximal. I chose an iPhone Air as my new phone for its thinness and lightness, and despite some lingering feelings of missing another camera lens or two, I have no complaints whatsoever.

Jessica Dennis: I’m one of the people who kinda digs liquid glass, so I’m not mad at iOS. I do kinda wish that instead of a phone that’s big but thin (the iPhone Air) we got another small phone — I know my iPhone 13 Mini would be unusable by now, but I still kinda regret trading it in (it was pink! I continue to be annoyed that Pro models don’t come in pink or purple or other “girly” colors). I was also pretty irritated that it seemed like I could only get a launch day iPhone 17 by physically going to the Apple Store to pick it up (which I did), and would have to wait a week or whatever if I opted to have it shipped to me — like Apple RTO’d us! Rude!

John Siracusa: The iPhone 17 line is yet another strong showing from Apple. The vapor chamber in the Pro models addresses one of the few persistent hardware weaknesses of the high-end iPhones. The plain iPhone 17 is one of the best values in years, adopting many formerly Pro-only features. The new front-facing camera is a welcome improvement after many years of stagnation, and it’s shared by both the Pro and non-Pro phones. The iPhone Air is an impressive and interesting new diversification of the iPhone line. Apple is prone to losing faith in iPhone variants that don’t set the world on fire, but I hope it sticks with the idea of a thinner, lighter iPhone for more than a couple of years. iOS 26 manages to dodge some of the worst aspects of the Tahoe redesign, and it includes a few actual improvements as well. But the core values of the 26 OS family are still present, and still damaging: allowing background content to reduce the legibility of foreground elements; using more screen space to show less content; generally making things uglier (in my opinion).

Craig Hockenberry: 2025 was the first year I haven’t didn’t upgrade my phone in September: the year-over-year improvements weren’t important to me. I would like to see Apple lean more into the iPhone Air direction: I don’t need more features, but I would certainly enjoy a device that was easier to carry around.

Stephen Hackett: 2025 brought more iPhones than ever, as Apple leaned into differentiation between models. The iPhone Pro and Pro Max were redesigned to maximize the performance of the camera and the silicon inside. The iPhone 17 gained ProMotion and the always-on display, making it the best base iPhone ever. Then there’s the iPhone Air. Its compromises aren’t for everyone, but if it fits into your life, it’ll slide into your pocket better than any other iPhone. Liquid Glass feels the most complete on iOS 26, but it is far from perfect. The price paid for content reflecting and refracting under UI elements includes legibility issues and performance concerns. I don’t have the hatred for Liquid Glass that some do, but it’s clear that Apple has more work to do to make this interface serve all of its users well.

Shelly Brisbin: By all accounts, iPhone’s generation 17 was a terrific set of upgrades on the hardware front. And the 16e is an excellent platform to allow cutting the kinds of corners that pro users hate, while the value-conscious get a very recommendable device. But the phone’s great hardware year does not overshadow liquid glass – an update that wasn’t as abominable as iOS 7.0, but seems to have been based on similarly clueless assumptions about how users would either “love” or “adjust to” high-flown design ideas. I’ve made peace with it at this point, but changes like floating button bars, the moving ofsearch to the bottom of the screen, and adding low-contrast buttons to many interfaces still rankle. More than that, the summer’s triumphal announcement, followed by a series of user-inspired fixes, did nothing to enhance Apple’s goodwill with those of us who prize usability over design flourishes.

Rosemary Orchard: 8x optical zoom has made a huge difference for me, and I really appreciate it.

Casey Liss: I cannot recall a better time for the iPhone. More exciting, perhaps — 2025 was [mostly] a year of further evolution. Better, though? I don’t think so. This is probably the best year for the iPhone that I can recall. The hardware is basically perfect across the lineup. There are no duds. There are places where there are tradeoffs — I’m particularly looking at you, iPhone Air — but I wouldn’t say there are any bad phones. Perhaps the biggest complaint I have about the hardware lineup is the lack of MagSafe in the 16e? I’d say that’s a pretty good sign things are going well. Software-wise, things are mostly great. I am becoming more and more embittered at the incessant upsells that I’m getting, but the services monster must be fed. Liquid Glass works best on the iPhone by a mile. The pearl-clutching about legibility is justified — most of it anyway — but I do love the way things look, and especially, the way they move.

John Moltz: The iPhone hardware continues to be great, if it has reached a point of stable progression. Maybe next year will be a little more exciting.

Joe Macirowski: The lineup is impossible to explain to anyone, and the constant entry-exit of models like the mini, plus, and presumably air aren’t making it any easier. I will always think back to the iBook G4 era when a simple grid expressed “do you need X PowerBook exclusive feature” and “big one or small one.” The white back to the “Clear” case because the MagSafe replication ring crosses the Apple logo is stupid, and I hate it. I buy the Apple clear cases for two reasons: 1, the lack of a bottom lip, whose presence is a tactile nightmare for me and 2, obviously, they’re supposed to be clear.

Peter Cohen: Apple missed the mark with the iPhone Air – too many compromises at too high a starting price made it easy for people to ignore.

Myke Hurley: I think that the fall 2025 iPhone lineup is the best range of phones the company has to offer. Every product they released was excellent, with very little trade offs among them. Essentially, all you had to do was decide which best fit your life. Overall, I am happy with iOS 26 also. I recognize the rough edges of Liquid Glass, but I am actually a fan overall of the ideas represented in the redesign and have been really pleased to see how some apps have reworked their interfaces to match Apple.

Joe Rosensteel: The part of the year where everyone was still using iOS 18 was pretty because it never lived up to what had been promised, meanwhile iOS 26 provided many obstacles and fresh opportunities for bugs and usability issues that we still haven’t seen resolved, and probably won’t see resolved for years. I know people are attracted to the “fresh” look, but it’s poorly considered and will age like milk.

Christina Warren: So a lot of the same complaints I had about macOS could be applied to iOS for the iPhone — but for me, I hate iOS 26 a lot less than I hate macOS 26. Was I perfectly satisfied with the looks of iOS 18? Yes. Did I get anything of value out of Liquid Ass? Absolutely not? Is the fact that they keep trimming back Liquid Ass an indictment of how much people hate it? Also yes. But there are some things in iOS 26 that are really good. The new call screening feature is excellent, and there are some nice improvements and enhancements with messages that really sing. This was also a really solid year for hardware. The iPhone 17 Pro/Pro Max (orange, natch) is maybe not the most handsome phone Apple has ever released, but it is definitely the way you can show you got the new one. And the new cameras and vapor chamber, coupled with a thicker body, really make this a great phone for the enthusiast or the person who wants the best phone and replaces it every 3 – 4 years. Bummer about the move from titanium and what that means for scratching of the paint, but that’s why we have Apple Care+! That said, the best iPhone for almost anyone this year is the base iPhone — which at $799 (or $829 if you get it carrier unlocked), is an amazing value. I had to buy a new phone just for work and gladly got the iPhone 17. The new selfie-camera — available across the line of phones — is one of the best hardware updates Apple has put out across the board. The dual cameras on the back are great, the colors are fun, and MagSafe can now be faster if you have the right types of chargers. You’re honestly making very few compromises for the cheaper phone — and for a $300 – $400 savings, this is an area where I could see plenty of iPhone 12 or 13 Pro customers saying, “You know what, the base iPhone 17 is good enough for me.” The one bummer is that they didn’t make an iPhone 17 Plus. I fear that the larger screen requiring the 17 Pro Max or the Air was a weird “we will force you to spend more money” thing — and that’s too bad. My dad has an iPhone 14 Plus, and he has no desire to upgrade, but I’d love to get him a new phone. I think he would struggle with the smaller phone. The only two weird phones in the lineup are the iPhone 16e and the iPhone Air. The 16e, I contend, costs too much. If it were $499, I think I would have an easier time defending it. The old SE cost $429 (and it was $399 for the previous two versions — and miss me with the “but inflation” defense bullshit — Apple has margins you know are above 50% on the SE style phones, so stop it.) but at $599, you’re not getting MagSafe, you’re getting a single camera, you’re getting a weaker cellular modem, you’re getting only 128GB of storage — you’re getting a lot of compromises. Especially when cheap iPhone 13 and iPhone 14s can be found in the sub $200 range with prepaid wireless carriers (you’re locked to the carrier and a $60 a month phone plan for 3 months, but if you do the math, you can still come out with phone service and a phone for less than the price of an iPhone 16e). For a 256GB iPhone, you save $100 to get the iPhone 16e vs the iPhone 17. Why would anyone buy this phone? The iPhone Air is also a strange one for me. I did get one for my mom — as she’s close to the target market — price indiscriminate, prioritizes thin/light over features — didn’t use the camera on her iPhone 15 Pro Max much. But we still had to get her the Apple Battery pack, and she kept her old phone around as a sort of iPod and potentially for the camera. But the iPhone Air, for all of its defenders, hasn’t seemed to find a lot of success. Because the trade-offs on battery life and cameras are just too much. To me, it was a phone designed for rich male tech executives (and I say male because no female executive would be OK with the camera trade-off or to be worried about the battery situation — the ladies are getting the iPhone 17 Pro/Pro Max) or rich male YouTubers who want a “weekend phone” (or a “night” phone as Dave Morin once bragged about having in a simpler web 2.0 time). If you are spending $1000 on a phone and you aren’t my 78-year old mother who wants a light and thin phone for her purse and doesn’t care about the rear cameras as much, you’re honestly better off getting the iPhone 17 and saving some money — no matter how beautiful the design is (and it is beautiful).

Gui Rambo: Even though Liquid Glass is controversial and has its issues, iOS is the platform where it works best, and this year’s iPhone lineup is really good, especially the entry-level iPhone 17.

Quinn Nelson: How could we have had a better year? The 16e was solid, the Air was a breath of fresh… air, and the “base” 17 is one of the best mid-ranges phones in the whole market—not typical of Apple.

Nick Heer: For a mature product line in essentially a single form factor for eighteen years, 2025’s iPhone lineup is fairly surprising. The no-suffix 17 seems to be the standout despite its tepid colours, and the Air is an intriguing compromise. The 16E seems very expensive for what you get — not really a budget phone, not a particularly small phone, and far less capable than the still-available 16. Probably great for bulk corporate buyers, though.

Kirk McElhearn: As for the Mac, hardware is fine, software is poor.

Michael Tsai: Processor, battery, camera improvements, and Ceramic Shield 2 in iPhone 17 (and 17 Pro) are nice, but I just find it hard to get excited about iPhone these days. The camera improvement I want to see, reverting to a deeper depth of field, will probably never happen. As with the Mac, the iPhone is let down by the new software. I guess I like the new Camera app, and I like CarPlay widgets (though they need more font controls), but most of the other changes that I notice day-to-day are either neutral or regressions. Liquid Glass is maddening. Apple also set a bad precedent in preventing newer iPhones from updating to iOS 18.7.3, thus forcing them to update to iOS 26 to get security updates.

Benjamin Mayo: I think it was a fantastic year for the iPhone overall. It is rare for Apple to redesign the flagship iPhone, and this year, they essentially did it twice. I don’t love all the choices they made in the new Pro lineup, but I highly appreciate that Apple was confident enough to be opinionated and do something bolder than they have done in a while. The same can be said for the iPhone Air, which I love and is my new daily driver. I consider iOS 26 and Liquid Glass a success. Apple rolled out a dramatic change to the visual appearance of the system, including some navigational changes like new tab bars and moving search bars to the bottom of the screen, and most users seem to have accepted it without issue. Personally, I think they’ve gone too far in places, but I mostly like it. I expect the usage of Liquid Glass material effects will be curtailed over time; they probably went slightly overboard with this first iteration.

Howard Oakley: I have to admit it, although there’s still room for improvement, I like iOS 26.

Brent Simmons: Liquid Glass is not as bad on the iPhone as on the Mac, but it’s still terrible.

Federico Viticci: The iPhone Air, with all its compromises, is the best iPhone I’ve used in a long time. And by “best”, I don’t mean technically the best, because it’s not. I mean it in the sense that the iPhone Air is the sort of futuristic, forward-looking, almost impossible product that elicits the same sense of joy and wonder that the iPhone X made me feel in 2017. Only Apple could put a whole pocket computer in a camera plateau. I’m going to miss the iPhone Air when I eventually upgrade to an iPhone Fold (iPhone Duo?) later this year, but this device showed us that Apple is still capable of pushing the boundaries of what iPhone hardware can be, and I can’t wait to see where they take the lineup next.

Stephen Robles: Again, combining the hardware and software makes the rating a challenge. iOS 26 has been buggy, with my iPhone 17 Pro Max brightness getting stuck at times, keyboard and autocorrect are rough, and random springboard crashes. But iOS 26 also has a lot of great features for Messages, Shortcuts with Apple Intelligence, etc. Hardware-wise, I’ve gotten used to the utilitarian design of the 17 Pro lineup, but still wish I had another color option (I went with silver). Camera-wise, the 17 has been incredible, and it’s what I used almost exclusively at CES.

Lex Friedman: iPhone improvements are small but appreciated. Liquid Glass really is bad.

James Thomson: An additional point for bright and colourful Pro phones, and doing something different with the iPhone Air. Minus a point for Liquid Glass, a design language made by people under thirty (derogatory).

Matt Birchler: Call me boring, but I think 2025 was a great year for the iPhone. No, we didn’t get a folding phone, but we did get the iPhone Air, which, despite my being annoyed with several aspects of it, I’m continually drawn to use it as my daily driver. Meanwhile, the Pros got an opinionated new design that leans into their Pro moniker, the normal iPhone finally got ProMotion, and I’d argue the iPhone 16e is underappreciated.

Brian Mattucci: I think iOS 26 is a really good update in general, and I especially appreciate spam filtering on messages and calls. Liquid Glass is fine for me, though I wish for additional options, such as being able to have clear widgets and colorful dark mode icons at the same time. There has been a major widespread bug with wired CarPlay on the new iPhone, and Apple has stayed disappointingly quiet about it. iPhone Air was an interesting experiment, but I didn’t opt for it because the trade-offs didn’t seem worth it.

Philip Michaels: Apple clearly has a hit with the iPhone 17 Pro models, particularly with the new design that allowed space for improvements like a vapor cooling chamber and a bigger battery. But even the standard iPhone took a big step forward with features that made it feel more premium and the best value in Apple’s lineup. If there was a misstep, it’s that Apple failed to really define a reason for the iPhone Air to exist, though given the similar muted reception for the Galaxy S25 Edge, it’s not like Apple is alone in that regard. Thin phones just need to offer more than thinness. iOS 26 felt like a holding update to me — some good improvements, but until we find out what Siri can do, there are missing details.

Eric Slivka: I’m using an iPhone Air as my main phone, and while I miss having a telephoto camera, it otherwise suits my needs just fine and is a marvelous bit of technology. The Pro models continue to set the standard in performance and features, though the new design is a bit controversial. The sleeper hit is the base iPhone 17, which got some nice feature upgrades to make it a very compelling choice for many users. I’ve gotten Liquid Glass looking reasonably well on my devices and am happy enough with it, and I appreciate some of the minor improvements across the built-in apps.

Chance Miller: The iPhone Air is the most ambitious iPhone redesign since the iPhone X, and it’s what I use every day. But it’s the strength of the base iPhone 17 that allowed Apple to push the iPhone 17 Pro to new heights and to release the iPhone Air. It stands out to me as the best overall iPhone in years, finally with ProMotion and Always-On. I wish the iPhone 16e were $100 cheaper, though. iOS 26 was a big swing, and despite what you might hear inside our tech bubble, I think it’s largely been a success with the broader public. Outside of Liquid Glass, iOS 26 has some really solid quality-of-life improvements to things like Messages, CarPlay, and Maps.

Matt Deatherage: Quiet upgrades like Memory Integrity Enforcement deserve more attention but are hard to sell. The iPhone 17 Pro is solid, but the iPhone Air seems to have blown away, like that grocery bag in “American Beauty.” Apple’s A‑series chips deliver impressive power in a thin package, but when you explicitly position one device as “thin” and another as “powerful,” a screen‑addicted world won’t choose to be left behind. And speaking of past design aesthetics, we have to talk about Liquid Glass. UI designers have coveted transparency since the moment that hardware became fast enough to drag full window content around the screen without lagging. Opacity seems sinful because it blocks the view of what users chose to see. Making the “chrome” more transparent “bring[s] more focus to your content,” says Apple. They seem to forget that users also choose what to look at now by selecting the apps and views to use. It’s more important to see those clearly than to satisfy FOMO by showing what’s underneath. The hard part of something like Liquid Glass is coding it—making all those transformations to each pixel and shape as filtered up through calculated levels of transparency and edge distortions like lenses, all without burning up the processor or draining the battery in 12 minutes. Twenty years ago, it would have been wildly impractical. It’s an impressive feat. But the “can we do it” may have edged out the “should we do it” questions. Far too many individual cases of the hundreds (or thousands) of UI element combinations on a screen lean towards showing off rather than towards the clearest presentation. The fit and finish are not what they should be when replacing something as mature as the iOS 18 UI. As the animated Peter Griffin once said about a movie, “It insists upon itself.” (https://english.stackexchange.com/a/627015) Ambition isn’t enough (ask Tesla’s self-driving engineers). It has to be right, or it fails.

Matthew Haughey: iOS26 feels like a step backward in terms of design and legibility, etc I’m annoyed daily by it still after several months of use

David Sparks: Even though the iPhone Air is not for me. I love that Apple made it. And it looks like they are not done experimenting with the platform. And the iPhone Pro finally got fun colors. Keep it up, Apple.

Jeff Carlson: iPhone 17 Pro really does take better pictures, has a larger battery, and comes in orange. What’s not to like? I’m surprised that the iPhone Air hasn’t been more successful… I’ve yet to see one in the wild, so I think most people understand the limitations of battery life and camera and are getting the 17 or 17 Pro instead. Still, it’s a statement.

Dan Moren: Great year for the iPhone. The 17 Pro and iPhone Air are amazing pieces of hardware. iOS 26 is the best expression of Liquid Glass, even if that is damning with faint praise.

Adam Engst: It’s the same story as with the Mac. The iPhone hardware is top-notch, and it’s particularly impressive that the iPhone 17 has closed the gap on the iPhone 17 Pro for most people. But Liquid Glass in iOS 26 causes nothing but headaches for many people.

Allison Sheridan: I think Apple hit a sweet spot of wonderful this year. Pro phones with spectacular cameras, non-Pro with the camera most people probably want, and then the Air with its elegance and delight. The lineup also feels simpler to me.

Gabe Weatherhead: I have to hard reboot my iPhone at least once a week. My iPhone 16 Pro Max is unreliable, and when it does work, it’s tainted by the Liquid Glass UI. A typical week with an iPhone is a story of stumbling through bad executive endorsements. On a Monday, I will reboot my iPhone so that it will reconnect to my home wifi. On a tuesday I will reboot my iPhone so that the buttons become responsive again. On a Wednesday, I will reboot my iPhone so that the Mail app can find emails again. On a Thursday, I will reboot my iPhone so that my contacts reappear in Apple’s Contacts app. On a Friday, I will reboot my iPhone so that iCloud resumes syncing files. On a Saturday, I will reboot my iPhone so that Apple Photos can find my family memories again. On a Sunday, I will give up and leave my iPhone on my desk and just hope that Wi-Fi works the next day. Personally, I am offended by the high price Apple sets for its iPhone and how little care its executives take in approving their iOS releases. The hardware is only worth as much as the software it will run.

Charles Arthur: Hardware is doing well again, but the software is not.

Ben Long: Apple’s phones are too big, so I’m still on the 13 Mini.

iPad

James Thomson: The chips keep getting faster, and we finally got full windows and menus! Hopefully, we actually do something with it all next year.

Matt Birchler: I’m going right down the middle with this one. The iPad remains unquestionably the best tablet on the market, and the new windowing features introduced in iPadOS 26 have made a lot of people happy. But it must be said that all three new models we got this year were some of the simplest spec bumps we’ve ever gotten in iPad history, and that new windowing system wasn’t exactly universally adored. Personally, I think more than ever the iPad is in an awkward middle ground between the iPhone and Mac experiences. As a pretty simple iPad user myself, I am slightly annoyed by the added complexity in my day-to-day use of the product to enable a windowing system I personally do not use. Meanwhile, as primarily a Mac user, it still lacks countless features and usability niceties that would ever pull me away from doing my work on the Mac.

Stephen Robles: I’ll likely be alone here, but I think the M5 iPad Pro with iPadOS 26 is the top platform/device this year. iPad Pro hardware is incredible and leaves almost nothing to be desired. Software-wise, I actually think iPadOS 26 is great on iPad, and Apple added enough features to please power users while not making it a Mac (which I don’t think is a good idea). After switching to a 13″ iPad, the windowing and stage manager mechanism has become invaluable to me, and it’s now where I build 90% of my Shortcuts. Little things like Mic input choice in Control Center, Apple Intelligence Shortcuts, and bringing back Slide Over and Split View, it’s perfect for my use, which includes editing podcasts daily, researching and writing, building Shortcuts, and entertainment.

Brent Simmons: Hardware’s great, and some nice changes have come to the iPad — it’s more Mac-like in some good ways, ways that benefit the iPad. But the Liquid Glass UI is such an appalling change that it overshadows everything.

Dan Moren: They did it! Multitasking the way it should be! iPadOS is as good as it’s ever been, and the hardware continues to be fantastic. But the main question of the iPad remains existential: what and who is it for? Apple still doesn’t have a great answer to this.

Myke Hurley: iPadOS 26 has brought me back to the iPad in a big way. I feel like Apple has finally taken off the training wheels from the OS and let it be the best that it can be. While I recognise the inherent rigidity of it compared to macOS, I feel like they have now allowed me to do exactly what I would want from this platform. It’s so good that I bought a Magic Keyboard again – something I have not used on my own iPad for many years.

Craig Hockenberry: Windows on iPad still have a lot of rough edges, but it’s a change that I’m so glad Apple made.

Allison Sheridan: While the hardware announcements marched along, the big gain was with iPadOS 26. Windowing on the iPad, but only for those who want it, is a game-changer.

Peter Cohen: From top to bottom, solid improvements across the board and better value throughout the stack. Now if Apple could just get its software act together…

Charles Arthur: Same story as the Mac and iPhone: the hardware is doing great! The software is letting it down.

Brian Mattucci: iPadOS multi-tasking system overhauls have been common over the years, but it finally seems like Apple has landed on something that works. Arranging multiple app windows on an iPad used to be laborious. I won’t say it’s perfect now, but it’s so much better that I’m no longer doubting sticking with iPads going forward. I think Home Screen customization needs some tweaks, though, as the OS tends to want to rearrange your icons or reset the layout when you’re just trying to drag an icon or widget around. There’s a similar issue with Control Center. Also, I’m not a fan of how the app icon spacing changes if you have a widget on the Home Screen – it feels like too large a gap on a 13-inch iPad.

Marco Arment: iPadOS 26 is a leap forward in multitasking, finally delivering what iPad power users have wanted for many years: the radical concept of windows.

Casey Liss: We finally got the multitasking we’ve always wanted. However, it still just doesn’t click with me. It’s like Slack’s basically-but-not-quite Markdown — this is basically-but-not-quite macOS windowing. I’ll take it over any of the godawful attempts they’ve made in the past, but I don’t think it’s quite nailed down. The iPad remains incredible hardware that is still let down by its software. Now, far less egregiously so, but let down nonetheless. Further, despite an M2 iPad Pro being my “downstairs computer”, I just can’t find myself getting excited about iPad hardware anymore. Maybe that says more about me than it does the iPad.

Benjamin Mayo: I’m not a frequent iPad user, but I think Apple has landed in a good spot with the new iPadOS 26 multitasking system. The new system unifies various metaphors of earlier attempts into a single system that is pretty easy to mentally grok; full-screen apps flow naturally into floating windowing and Split View arrangements and vice versa. We also saw the company respond to feedback in a matter of months, quickly addressing user complaints about Split View gestures and missing Slide Over behaviours, all before the end of the calendar year.

John Gruber: iPad hardware continues to be fine, and “fine”, but iPad standards mean “the best tablets in the industry by far.” The lineup is well-differentiated and spans a larger-than-ever gamut from “totally casual user” to “actual pro usage”. iPadOS 26 is the most exciting release of iPadOS ever. I don’t love all of it. I think the biggest problem is that too much complexity is exposed to very casual users, for whom the main appeal of using an iPad as their main “computer” is its rigorous simplicity. But the course reversal Apple has made for advanced users, from eschewing (often to the point of frustration, sometimes to the point of absurdity) the desktop GUI concept of overlapping windows, to embracing regular old-fashioned GUI windows, was the right call, and a welcome sign of humility. It’s a new start for iPadOS, and I look forward to seeing where it goes. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought that about iPadOS.

Steven Aquino: I have a dichotomous relationship with the iPad. On one hand, I applaud Apple for finally making iPadOS more “Mac-like” with the new-is-old windowing paradigm and everything else. From a disability standpoint, there’s a cogent argument for a 13-inch iPad and iPadOS 26 being a more accessible “laptop replacement” for a certain class of people with disabilities. In my case, though, as much as I appreciate my 13″ M4 iPad Pro, my gut keeps saying I’ve left the iPadOS-for-productivity train forever. Give me an OLED iPad mini, and I’ll be ecstatic.

Jessica Dennis: I’m a weirdo who only cares about the iPad Mini — it was updated last year, and I bought one, and it still serves its purpose for me. Next year or the year after, I’m sure I’ll be complaining that a new iPad Mini has not yet been released, though!

John Siracusa: The iPad mostly took the year off, with only minor spec-bump updates. But the new iPad Pro still has the best screen on any Apple device of any size, and the M5 continues Apple’s history of over-delivery on iPad performance.

Matt Deatherage: I’m rarely without my iPad Pro at hand, and while Liquid Glass has more opportunity to work well here (and on Mac) than on smaller screens, it somehow doesn’t. That’s mostly the fault of a woefully unpolished windowing system. Yes, everyone’s wanted windows for years, and some have wanted menu bars also. They can be handy—but we’re used to tapping the top of the screen for a lot of reasons. You have to tap near the top to get Safari’s UI to show, but if you touch too close to the top, you activate the menu bar or take an app out of full-screen view. (Using the old “windowshade” metaphor of double-tapping what’s essentially a window title bar to minimize it is clever, but there are too many actions happening in a small area of the screen.) If I hold down on the “back” button in Safari’s UI but don’t keep my finger (or pointer) perfectly still, I don’t get the list of previous pages; I get a moving window. If I try to pull down from the top to see notifications, I get a menu bar (or control center). Windows shouldn’t be so fragile as to quiver and quake along any edge! Slide over vanished before coming back too strong, where Apple demands that you see part of a slide-over app in Springboard unless you hid it while in another app. And for all the talk of transparency, slide-over apps never fade even slightly above other content, and act weirdly when not sharing another app’s space. It’s just…frustrating. You can’t use iPadOS 26 for more than three minutes without realizing how much better it should have been. As for the hardware, what can you say other than “confusing?” The 2025 iPad Pro is the previous model with an M5 chip and Wi-Fi 7. The iPad uses the A16 chip, but the iPad Mini uses the A17 Pro? iPad Air is on the two-year-old M3 chip, once again seeming to argue that “thinner” means “less powerful.” It’s probably great for Apple’s margins, though.

Eric Slivka: I am not an iPad power user by any means, but the recent multitasking improvements are definitely helpful. iPad hardware didn’t get much of an upgrade this year, though I’m hopeful for some big improvements to the iPad mini that might make me revisit it after many years away.

Philip Michaels: I actually paid for a new iPad with my own money this year, and I’m notoriously tight-fisted. Apple must be doing something right.

Shelly Brisbin: Not exciting, but not bad. The iPad lineup was beefed up most at the Pro level, with the extremely awesome Air getting a little chip bump. And iPadOS 26 brought a long-awaited windowing system, along with the death and rebirth of previous multitasking features. There’s more creative software for the platform, which is also a pretty good calling card.

Carolina Milanesi: The new silicon has helped the Pro a lot, but sadly, I do not think it is moving the needle enough to convert people from the Mac, especially as the MacBook Air got much better this year.

Gui Rambo: iPad hardware is really good, but the software is so bad that I can’t give it a higher grade. Even though multitasking has improved, the app model inherited from iOS is not conducive to power user applications.

Kirk McElhearn: Same comments as for the Mac and iPhone. Regarding hardware, I bought an M4 iPad Pro when it was released in May 2024, and I can’t see that I’ll need to replace it for several years. This is the first time that I feel that an iPad has longevity beyond just a few years. Perhaps because it was the first M4 device, and was, in some ways, ahead of itself, but it feels like the OS won’t hinder it for quite some time.

Chance Miller: iPadOS 26 nails much of what we’ve wanted Apple to do for years, and it did it by embracing the Mac’s proven multitasking model instead of overthinking it again.

Joe Macirowski: SideCar has gained the ability to work while my Mac is connected to a VPN, as long as I reboot the iPad every single time. I tried to use my iPad in clamshell mode to convince various streaming apps to actually fill my connected 16:9 display (a separate issue), but was thwarted by it forgetting my Magic Trackpad existed – an issue that was not afflicting the Magic Keyboard I was also using. All these still not fully baked “pro” features keep the iPad in a weird spot where it’s most useful to me as a 12″ (Concert) sized page of sheet music. iPad Safari and desktop Safari are practically a singular app in this release which is more of a loss to the Mac than gain for the iPad but the reason it’s an iPad criticism is because if you shrink an iPad Safari window enough it will change to the iPhone Safari layout using the choice labeled “Top” in Settings > Safari > Tabs – a setting that is only on iPhones and being the third choice of three implies it might be akin to a “Classic Appearance” option begrudgingly added as a common solution to criticism of a new design and unspecified compatibility issues (hence its use as the only layout for iPad windows that become small enough). Despite this strongly implying that there is more common code than ever before across all three major flavors of Safari the fact that “Top” is not the choice I have for tabs on my iPhone and cannot choose “Compact” or “Bottom” for my iPad makes them feel further apart and in indeed they are because it’s possible whatever code or resources power “Bottom” aren’t even in the iPad build and either way they’re at least never touched. Similarly, as I don’t have “Top” chosen on my iPhone, I would not notice if its code or resources were stripped from the build. It feels sloppy. It feels like iPadOS and iPhoneOS only ever offer anything in lockstep with each other because someone has manually implemented a static copy. There’s no telling when something missing from iPadOS is a pointless but deliberate market segmentation decision, a genuine capability detection system making what is hopefully an accurate call, or a simple oversight because 15 years in Apple’s own code is still riddled with “Is this a hardware iPhone or hardware iPad” that gatekeep not just when someone deliberately chooses but also simply forgets, the QA cycle moves on, and if there were maybe if a post calling out this difference becomes viral it will be addressed, whether or not anything was ever submitted via feedback assistant. Still,e, they’ll only be robots closed on their individual birthdays.

Quinn Nelson: The already remarkable M4 iPad Pro gets even better, the iPad Air inherits the M3, and the entry iPad finds frequent, deep discounts below $275. It’s also the first time in years that iPadOS doesn’t feel like an afterthought.

Matthew Haughey: I got a new M4 iPad Pro this year (on discount after the M5 came out) to replace an iPad Pro from 2018, and with iOS 26, there are so many UI bugs that didn’t happen on the old iPad that it’s shocking to me. There are close buttons on video players that can’t be tapped because they overlap the time and wifi top area of the screen.

Christina Warren: “iPad OS continues to be a thing that exists and a thing that Apple pretends to care about. It’s no macOS, although given the state of macOS, maybe that isn’t as bad as it once was. The more confusing aspect is the hardware. And by that I mean the confusing state of the lineup. I’m probably going to trade my iPad Pro M2 in for the M5 iPad Pro this year — but I won’t get the 5G version, mostly to save money. I’ve put off the change for the last few years, as I haven’t wanted to buy a brand new Apple Pencil and a brand new Magic Keyboard. But this is the last year I’ll be able to get any sort of reasonable trade-in on my M2, so I should bite the bullet. Like the iPhone, I think the base iPad is now the most impressive unit. This is the one I got my mom for Christmas (replacing an iPad from 2017) — there was a special on the 256GB model, and I just couldn’t justify the $300 price difference for a 256GB iPad Air. Now, I can sort of defend the iPad Pro — different class of device, comes 256GB of standard, blah blah blah — but $600 for a 128GB iPad in 2025 (or now 2026), just feels unreasonably high. Especially when the stuff that most people do with an iPad can be found in a package that is $350. If they bothered to do Pro Motion displays in the Air, I could see it. See it as selling the years-old Pro — but we know why Apple doesn’t do this. They don’t do it because then not enough people would contort themselves into thinking they need an iPad Pro. The 13” iPad Air is actually the one I really don’t understand existing as a product. You are much, much, much better off buying a used iPad Pro 13″ and some sort of third-party warranty if you’re that concerned about that sort of thing (Apple Care won’t replace your battery — even if you volunteer to pay — until it shows less than 80% battery capacity anyway, unless you get snippy with them as you explain that 81% is low enough and just please replace my iPad’s battery) than spending $800 on an iPad Air that doesn’t even have a 120hz screen. You can get an M4 MacBook Air for less than a 13″ iPad Air. Let that sink in.

Paul Kafasis: I got a new iPad Mini 7 in 2025. The update to this device was minimal, but my old one (a 2021 iPad Mini 6) was 64 GB, a problem. I wish the update had more advancements.

David Sparks: This is the year that Apple finally called our bluff on making iPadOS more useful. My only concern is whether they waited too long. Are users and developers ready to embrace the iPad for more serious work and software?

Adam Engst: The multitasking changes in iPadOS 26 are undoubtedly welcome by the people who find the iPad makes them more productive. For many others, though, it still doesn’t outcompete a MacBook Air in any way. And, Liquid Glass.

Stephen Hackett: After years of dragging its feet, Apple finally did the thing and gave iPadOS a full-blown windowing system. Split View, Slide Over, and Stage Manager were all attempts that still (mostly) exist, but iPadOS 26 is the real deal. Paired with a keyboard and trackpad, an iPad feels more desktop-like than ever, yet the classic one-app-at-a-time interface is still alive and well for folks who prefer a simpler experience. Hardware-wise, Apple continues to offer a wide range of devices at a wide range of price points. There’s an iPad for everyone, and that’s a good thing.

Gabe Weatherhead: I can wholeheartedly recommend the iPad for anyone who loves Procreate. The Procreate Pad is a joy to use. The Apple Pencil for Procreate is an incredible experience and delivers professional-level capabilities. I’ve been repeatedly impressed with what the Procreate team has done with Apple’s hardware. I’m not even sure what to say about Apple’s contributions in this arrangement. The iPad is a device hampered by a lack of vision and strategy. It’s an expensive device, and I have no real idea why it exists, except, of course, for the Procreate app.

Ben Long: Again, great hardware, but they’re really making a go at ruining the OS.

John Moltz: iPadOS experienced the most substantial improvement in years. Windowing on iPadOS isn’t perfect, but it is a big jump in making the platform more productive for people who want to do more than watch shows, surf the internet and do email.

Federico Viticci: If you told me at the beginning of 2025 that I’d end the year feeling enthusiastic about the future of the iPad’s platform and its operating system…I wouldn’t have believed you, to say the least. It was a relatively quiet year for iPad hardware (unless you really care about running local AI models on an iPad), but, for the first time in a while, it was the iPad’s software team that delivered a stellar year for iPad users. And it’s not just that: after doing so in September, they didn’t stop. After years of minor updates following the confusing and bug-ridden rollout of Stage Manager in iPadOS 16, iPadOS 26 arrived as a massive update featuring Mac-like windowing, support for local audio and video capture, Files enhancements, and lots more. See, Apple could have stopped there, and we – where by “we”, I mean all of us who love the iPad, have been let down by it many times, and yet never fully stopped believing in it – would have praised the company for its return to form. Instead, they persisted: first, they made local capture even better; then, they listened to user feedback and restored Split View and Slide Over functionalities that had been removed from the first version of iPadOS 26. The result of all this is that, now a few months into iPadOS 26, I feel the pull of the iPad platform again, and I want to work from it more and more. It’s good to be home. But: I still can’t shake the feeling that, in spite of the outstanding improvements to the platform, the iPad’s app ecosystem ship has sailed, and it’s not coming back. I want to work from my iPad Pro more and more again, but every day, I have to face a new reality: its multitasking flow is similar to my Mac now, but my Mac has so many more apps available for me to use and tinker with. This is especially true in the age of AI, assistive tools, and work agents: the frontier of productivity and artificial intelligence is very much exclusive to the Mac these days. Brand new iPad-specific app experiences are too few and far between at this point; unless you’re okay with using web apps with a subpar browser (no matter what Apple says, Safari for iPad still isn’t as good as Safari for Mac, let alone Chrome), if you want to work exclusively from an iPad these days, you’ll be looking at your Mac friends with a little bit of envy every single day. Perhaps the solution, then, is not to try to be monogamously computing on an iPad, despite the great steps taken by Apple with iPadOS 26. Maybe Apple executives are right when they say that the best course of action is to have both a Mac and iPad, and take advantage of the strengths of each. And for the past year, I’ve been doing exactly that. But I’m not going to stop wishing for a future where a single, modular computer with a blend of macOS and iPadOS is all I need—some habits never die.

Michael Tsai: Putting Liquid Glass aside—which is admittedly hard to do—iPadOS 26 is the biggest improvement in a long time. Multitasking works much better now. I still do not find it a very compelling platform, though. More than 99% of what I do is better on my Mac, my iPhone, or my Kindle. But if you like the iPad, this was a good year.

Shahid Kamal Ahmad: I love my M4 iPad Pro, but I don’t use it much. I’d likely use it more if the Magic Keyboard didn’t add so much weight to the impossibly thin and light, near-as-damnit magical tablet itself.

Wearables

David Sparks: I like the new Apple Watch Ultra and AirPod Pro updates. I understand that Vision Pro is in the doldrums hardware-wise, and I don’t fault that. I do, however, fault the slow rollout of content for Vision Pro. The pace of content is increasing, but I feel they should have been where they are now on day one.

Dan Moren: Wearables is a category that continues to exist in Apple’s lineup. I like the visionOS 2 improvements, like widgets, and it’s still amazing technology, it’s just not a great product. watchOS didn’t get much love this year—some people don’t like the Workout app redesign; I think it’s fine. But Workout Buddy, watchOS’s marquee feature, is terrible. The category, overall, feels like it is sleepwalking.

Craig Hockenberry: Who doesn’t love their AirPods (except when the case falls on the ground and the buds are inevitably ejected into some impossible-to-reach location)? And it’s a product that Apple continues to improve in meaningful ways. I’ve recently had some major health issues, and the Apple Watch’s sensors have been an essential part of my healing process. There is no Apple product more important to me right now. I’m still wondering what the Vision Pro is for, other than a really great tech demo.

Matt Birchler: I think it’s hard to imagine what a worse year two could have looked like for the Vision Pro. Consumer interest seems as though it’s effectively dropped to zero. Developers are simply not making apps for the device anywhere close to the level that we’ve seen from other Apple platform launches. To Apple’s credit, they have been releasing spatial videos here and there over the course of the year. But this is not how you would want the energy level around your big new platform to be going in its second full year on the market.

Allison Sheridan: I probably shouldn’t upgrade my watch every year, and this is the first year I didn’t (with no regrets).

Charles Arthur: AirPods and Watch: fine, keep going. Vision Pro: Even though it’s obvious to absolutely everyone that live sports are the way to pull in buyers, in 2025, Apple did nothing, said nothing. Anyone would think it had lost interest in the Vision Pro, or pulled everyone off it to work on something else.

Carolina Milanesi: I thought adding a heart rate monitor to AirPods this year was amazing – opening up an opportunity for people to track their fitness without a watch. Vision Pro has seen some improvements that drive engagement for current owners, but not enough to grow the platform.

Matt Deatherage: Apple hasn’t given up on Vision Pro and visionOS. Still, I don’t know how many people know that enterprise developers can get around normal privacy limitations like “no eye tracking” and “see main camera feeds live,” which privacy-invading developers (cough Meta cough) would horribly abuse, but are necessary for lots of industrial work or training. But for almost everyone else, Vision Pro is still an expensive boondoggle with more promise than payoff. Apple Watch seems to be evolving at about the same pace for the past few years; I love my Ultra 3, and almost everyone I know with an older Apple Watch (7 or earlier) wants a new one.

Gabe Weatherhead: I own the Vision Pro and regret the purchase every day. While I’ve had about 45 minutes of breathtaking VR experiences, the overall software availability and media selection are not worth the high price tag. Hell, they can’t even keep the virtual environments refreshed. There is just a leadership vacuum for this device. I imagine a team of engineers grinding their days away while Mike Rockwell doodles on the whiteboard some incoherent product strategy. I’m sure his new efforts in Siri will be much more impressive. The AirPods Pro 3 were fine. They were about as good as version 2. The AirPods continue to dominate the market without innovating in any meaningful way this year. This fits with Apple’s other product strategies, and I expect the future to hold similar disappointments. The Apple Watch is fine. It’s a fine sleep tracker. It tells the time. It usually provides notifications when I want them. It sometimes integrates with Apple’s other services. It wasn’t ruined by Liquid Glass, like the iPhone. But, I use a fairly simple heuristic when rating a device: How likely am I to go buy a replacement if it dies? I would probably wait up to a year to replace my Apple Watch Ultra. I probably wouldn’t miss it much.

Benjamin Mayo: AirPods Pro 3 make the AirPods lineup better than ever, but perhaps slightly more divisive than Apple intended. They feel like a less universal recommendation compared to AirPods Pro 2, whether that be due to weird quality control bugs (like the sporadic-but-ongoing complaints about hissing or strained sound profile) or incompatibilities with the new, more aggressively sealed fit. I appreciated that Apple revved the headband as well as bumping the chip for the Vision Pro, although obviously it doesn’t change much about the appeal of the product line in general. They need a cheaper one. Meanwhile, the Apple Watch product lineup plods along aplomb — nothing revolutionary in terms of the new releases, but it’s difficult to recommend any other smartwatch but Apple’s.

Marco Arment: The Apple Watch had a disappointing year, with almost no hardware changes and significant usability regressions with watchOS 26. The AirPods Pro 3 were a bit of a side-step, with nicer sound and noise cancellation, but significantly worse comfort for many people. The Vision Pro remains an expensive tech demo, with promises of future content and apps that still haven’t materialized, minimal investment from Apple, and virtually nonexistent demand from customers or developers. Imagine if the vast resources Apple spent on the car project and the Vision Pro had instead been spent on Siri and AI.

Gui Rambo: I’m giving a 5 to wearables because AirPods Pro 3 are just amazing. I use them every day for several hours. They’re an accessibility aid for me because I’m hypersensitive to noise, so I need noise cancellation to be able to work with full concentration. AirPods Pro 3 deliver great ANC, comfort, and battery life.

Steven Aquino: I love my Apple Watch and AirPods. They do what I want them to do, reliably and with aplomb. I discovered in the past year that I gravitate towards the AirPods 4 with ANC more than my “old” AirPods Pro 2. I find the fit and audio fidelity of the AirPods 4 to be just as good, and I get wireless charging and a smaller case to boot. As to Vision Pro, my usage ebbed and flowed in 2025. I continue to enjoy it and admire its capabilities, but the app story remains the biggest pain point as players like Netflix, YouTube TV, and Channels (for OTA TV via HDHomeRun) remain absent from visionOS and thus limit the Vision Pro’s appeal as a more accessible entertainment vehicle.

Philip Michaels: I upgraded to the latest AirPods this year, and I think Apple’s taking steps back in terms of design. The earbuds regularly fall out of my ears. Performance-wise, they’re fine, but it’s just not the level of fit or finish I expect from Apple. Maybe we’ll look back on the Vision Pro as the necessary first step for Apple Glasses or whatever other product Apple comes up with in this space (though I have my doubts about the prospects for that device). But I continue to think the Vision Pro is a device in search of a purpose, and Apple seems to be coming to that conclusion, too.

Paul Kafasis: AirPods: Just moved from AirPods Pro 1 to AirPods Pro 3 – it’s a great upgrade (USB-C, wireless charging case, ANC updates). Apple Watch: Incremental improvements are just fine by me. I update my Apple Watch every 2-3 years now. AVP: Every so often, I remember the Apple Vision Pro exists, and still sells for $3500+. Then I forget about it for weeks on end. Apple having only one gear when it comes to marketing (“X is the most amazing thing ever!”) really hurt the AVP, which could have been pitched as an experimental device not expected to sell huge.

John Gruber: AirPods Pro 3 are frigging amazing. AirPods, overall, continue to exemplify Apple at its best. Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3 are great year-over-year improvements from the Department of If the Design Ain’t Broke, Don’t Fix It. Battery life improvements, in particular, are impressive. No one comes close to Apple at making very small, powerful computers that don’t really seem like computers at all. And the best Apple Watch news of the year, by far in my opinion, is the SE 3. The SE 3 is simply an outstanding Apple Watch at very low prices ($249 for 40mm, $279 for 44mm). That’s the price range a lot of people are looking at if they’re thinking about getting themselves a good watch, smart or not. An M5 speed-bump update to the Vision Pro was nice to see, but only as a sign that Apple is still committed to this new platform. And they’re actually starting to build a nice little library of immersive content that is extremely compelling — including baby steps toward immersive live sports with a limited slate of games, albeit just from one single NBA team (the Lakers). The new version of Personas in VisionOS 26 is amazing and strikingly improved from the first implementation. That’s another sign that Apple is doing amazing things with this new platform and the concept of spatial computing. But in terms of VisionOS being a productivity platform on its own right (not counting the excellent Mac Virtual Display app), I didn’t see any progress at all. Nor any outreach at all to third-party developers to make VisionOS into a serious productivity platform. Frankly, it’s weird — perhaps even alarming — that some of Apple’s own core apps like Calendar and Reminders are still iPad apps running in compatibility mode, not native VisionOS apps.

Eric Slivka: Shockingly few improvements in Apple Watch and Apple Watch Ultra this year, and in fact losing the original blood oxygen capabilities from my Ultra 2 made the 3 a bit of a downgrade. (It’s unbelievable to me that Apple hasn’t been able to resolve that patent dispute, given the significant impact it’s had on functionality.) Apple Watch SE did get some nice improvements, like always-on display, so it’s probably now the one most buyers should look at first. I haven’t tried the M5 Vision Pro, but while it sounds like it offers some minor performance improvements, the platform continues to be a flop. My M2 model mostly gathers dust, although I do really like the new headband, and it’s the design that should have shipped with the first model.

Casey Liss: The AirPods Pro 3 are phenomenal, however, that’s an opinion that I know is not shared. If you can fit them in your ears, they’re great. If not, well, tough noogies. How have we not had a meaningful update of the AirPods Max yet?? The Apple Watch is still great, but it’s getting very long in the tooth now. Additionally, the changes made to the Workout app are an abomination. Which isn’t a big deal, since that’s ONE OF THE ONLY WAYS I DIRECTLY TRY TO GET THINGS DONE ON MY WATCH. Sigh. I am, perhaps more than most of my peers, a Vision Pro apologist. Every time I strap the face computer to my head, I’m absolutely gobsmacked at how cool it is. Still, almost two years on. While Apple has started to advance the rate at which they release content for the platform, it’s still nowhere near fast enough. Hopefully, with Blackmagic’s camera becoming more available and toolchains getting better, we’ll see some more from third parties. But we’ll see. I’m pleased with the M5 Vision Pro, but it’s not a particularly compelling release. Not even for M2 owners — it’s not compelling in general. I actually gave a bonus star for the Dual Knit Strap, however. It’s that good, and priced very reasonably, compared to everything else on the platform. It’s not surprising it’s backwards-compatible — since the M5 AVP basically is the OG AVP — but I’m still glad that it is.

Rosemary Orchard: The Vision Pro is still far too expensive for the vast majority of people, which is a shame. It has the chicken and the egg problem of fewer use cases because there are so few users.

John Moltz: AirPods remain great. Apple might want to spend more time making sure it has the rights to sell the features it advertises and intends to include.

Brian Mattucci: The Apple Watch was barely updated this year. Their headlining claims – hypertension monitoring and battery life – were not what they seemed, as older watches also got hypertension monitoring, and the increase in battery life was largely due to a change in how they calculated it. Vision Pro continues to exist, and for that I’m happy. I assume the chip upgrade just makes things easier for them more than anything, as I have never felt like my first-generation Vision Pro needed to be faster. What it needs is more software and games. It’s interesting that Apple would work to get PSVR2 controller support for Vision Pro, but that they wouldn’t also try to get any big games that might showcase it. Games with VR versions like Resident Evil 4, 7 and 8 and also Hitman are available on Apple devices, but without VR mode. It would also be good to see support for running these sorts of games on a powerful Mac and streaming VR mode to the Vision Pro. It’s also frustrating as a PSVR2 owner that I have to re-pair the controllers when I want to use them (Sony offers a nice multi-system pairing feature for their normal PS5 controllers, but not these).

John Siracusa: The Vision Pro remains a product in Apple’s lineup. Unlike the Mac Pro, it even got a new chip this year. But Apple’s apparent indecision about how to advance this new platform is allowing the rest of the industry to race ahead with new products and new ideas. Any time Apple changes the size and shape of an AirPods product, it’s bound to reshuffle the deck when it comes to customer comfort. Congratulations to all the people who find the AirPods Pro 3 more comfortable than earlier models, and commiserations to those who don’t. Like the iPad, the Apple Watch seemed to mostly take the year off, with limited, mostly internal changes. Unlike the iPad, the Watch could use a good kick in the pants. It’s become stagnant.

Quinn Nelson: Apple’s burgeoning category feels a bit stalled this year with only the AirPods Pro 3 grabbing headlines (while failing to capture universal praise).

Stephen Robles: Ultra 3 and Series 11 are great, but I was not compelled to upgrade. I had an Ultra 3 review unit and literally saw zero difference from my Ultra 2. Back on my 2, it’s still great. I also have an M5 Vision Pro review unit, and while it’s certainly faster on startup and connecting to Wi-Fi, after that, it’s in no way a big enough improvement to upgrade from my personal M2. Good for those buying their first Vision Pro, though. AirPods Pro 3 I actually prefer to 2, and think the noise cancellation and tips are significantly improved. If AirPods were their own category, I’d give it a 5.

Michael Tsai: Live Translation seems magical, though I’ve not used it myself yet. I’m concerned that AirPods Pro 3 seems to have issues with fit and static. I really like the Apple Watch SE 3. Vision Pro made few visible advancements this year and seems like it needs to be rethought or cancelled.

Matthew Haughey: The Apple Watch is getting less exciting each year, but it kind of mirrors how the iPhone got a big stagnant period after 7 or 8 years of massive strides to incremental updates

Adam Engst: The AirPods remain top-notch, the Apple Watch is still very good (if largely mature—most users I know upgrade only when battery life becomes problematic), and the Vision Pro is still exorbitant and irrelevant.

Christina Warren: The Apple Watch continues to be great, but Apple continues to offer very few reasons for anyone to upgrade any more frequently than they have to. I was worried that my Hermes Apple Watch Series 10 would be usurped this year (especially after I spent over $1000 on the Grand H band last December), but I was pleased that, aside from a bigger battery (which, sure, would be nice) and a 5G connection (who cares on the watch), nothing changed. And that’s sort of the problem with getting to the “finished” state of a product. It’s all up to software, which, like the rest of the ecosystem, is lacking. Now for visionOS. The Apple Vision Pro will go down in history as one of Apple’s biggest misses and most expensive flops. And Apple deserves every drop of criticism for this thing. As I said last year — the Vision Pro is an incredible tech demo — there is zero reason to buy one unless you are doing it for the tax write-off or you’re so wealthy that dropping $5000 for something that will sit on your shelf won’t bother you. And if that is you, I congratulate you. I can piss away money with the best of them. I would feel physically sick to see my unused and unloved, and uncomfortable AVP sitting collecting dust. AirPods Pro 3 are the rare misstep. On the one hand, I love the better battery life and the new fit. On the other hand, they do sound demonstrably worse than the AirPods Pro 2s. And that sucks.

Stephen Hackett: “WATCH: After skipping the Apple Watch Ultra 2, I upgraded my original Ultra to the 3 this time around … but I’m not sure I could tell you the differences between this Watch and my old one, other than battery life. This has been the story of Apple Watch hardware basically forever. Every few years, a new feature or design comes along, but otherwise, things are pretty sleepy. I’m actually okay with that strategy, as no one other than the people reading this article upgrades their Apple Watch each year. However, this slow pace has kept the product line fairly narrow. The SE and Series Watches are indistinguishable from each other by the consumer, and even the Ultra isn’t a massive departure from the original recipe. Like the iPhone before it, it’s time for Apple to branch out. After years of upheaval, watchOS has settled into a good place, but some of its old woes are still around. Apps will fail to update. Complications will become stale. Media handoff can be slow. And that’s all with an iPhone present. Flipping on the cellular radio and taking the Watch out alone can still be a frustratingly limited experience. VISION PRO: I honestly think my headset is still running an early beta of visionOS 26, but I’d have to charge it up to know for sure.

Myke Hurley: I enjoy the noise-cancelling capabilities of the new AirPods Pro, but this was the first model that felt physically uncomfortable to me for the first week or two of using. I feel like Apple has taken a step back here. The Apple Watch has become very boring to me as a product line. I am desperately hoping for them to do something new. I was very surprised that they revised the Vision Pro hardware this year, and I am a fan of the new strap option. While this platform really had not gotten to where I was hoping it would, I respect Apple keeping on with content and updates to the OS.

Kirk McElhearn: I bought an Apple Watch Ultra this year, after ten years of the same boring squircle design. I like the bigger display, but I would love to see Apple actually innovate in this space with, perhaps, a round watch. It seems like they consider the watch to be like a laptop or iPad, with one shape that never changes.

Peter Cohen: Vision Pro continues to be a solution in search of a problem. As a Series 10 user, I’m jealous of the 11’s battery life. The SE (3rd Gen) is the value winner for older model upgraders.

Joe Rosensteel: Innovation in Apple’s wearables has plateaued. There are no must-have upgrades, and the most compelling reason to update Apple wearables is that the battery life on the previous, nearly identical, Apple wearable has degraded. WatchOS 26 received a glossy coat of Liquid Glass, but fundamental design issues with Apple Watch faces, and the rigidity of the form factor mean nothing has really changed in many years.

Jeff Carlson: It’s nice to see the Ultra 3 now with technologies that really should have arrived the year before, and the SE 3 was a nice surprise. WatchOS 26 seems to be pretty solid with an assortment of quirks — in other words, a typical watchOS release — and the Liquid Glass annoys me only sometimes.

Federico Viticci: Apple seems pretty content with the state of their Apple Watch and AirPods lines of wearables, and that’s fine – but I wonder if the company could innovate more in this field at this point. The Apple Watch is more than a decade old, and save for the new design of the Ultra and a few new sensors over the years, it still pretty much does the same things that it did at launch. Which is, again, fine – but I’d love to see the company take more risks with design, customization, watch band design, and AI features. The new AirPods Pro 3 are great, but in the age of wearables that can proactively assist you with cameras, microphones, and AI, I wonder if there would be room for Apple to flex some new muscles in this area, too. And the Vision Pro? I basically never use it, and that’s a shame, because visionOS rocks. But until that operating system gets somehow miniaturized into glasses that I can wear without feeling neck pain, I don’t feel the urge to use it on a daily basis.

Lex Friedman: I can’t imagine spending more than $500 for a Vision Pro.

Joe Macirowski: Each subsequent edition of AirPods Pro is even more “I literally forget these are even in my ears” while in transparency than the last – at least they are when they’re new. I have taken every pair I’ve ever owned in for full replacement because cleaning and tip replacement are insufficient to restore active noise modes. I still don’t appreciate the red “Night Mode” being exclusive not only to the Ultra but also to only a handful of faces. Further, it could be offered as an accessibility color filter, but “red” simply isn’t among the choices.

Nick Heer: Here is a little observation about the lineups of Apple Watch models and Mac models: the Watch is updated annually regardless of substance or impact, while the Mac has no discernible pattern despite significant architecture changes generation-to-generation. The Mac line is a bit messy, with products on sale today from — if you include the Walmart-exclusive MacBook Air — every generation of M-chip. This year’s Apple Watch models, meanwhile, are barely upgraded with slightly better displays and, if you opt for the cellular version, better connectivity. The best update is to the SE, which is almost a great fitness-only companion. The Vision Pro remains a tech demo in the company’s lineup, now with newer tech.

Jessica Dennis: Did I need a new Apple Watch this year to get all the cool new features? No, I did not. Did I buy one anyway, to get the cool titanium case after 10 years of only getting aluminum watches? Yes, I did (though I was very fond of my jet black aluminum Series 10). I’ve actually switched to using only a single Apple Watch, instead of using my newer model during the day and an older one at night, and it’s been working out better than I expected. The battery life and fast charging really are plenty good enough. I did buy the AirPods Pro 3, even though I had relatively recently replaced my AirPods Pro 2 (for battery life reasons); the only actual hardware feature specific to the newer model that I’ve used is the XXS tips (which I definitely do appreciate). I’m sure the noise cancellation really is appreciably better, because that would surely be a very silly reason to have spent a couple of hundred bucks on new AirPods when my previous AirPods were still fine…

Chance Miller: Apple Watch hardware is rather stagnant right now, but the Apple Watch SE 3 is a solid upgrade. The redesigned Workout app is a lot better. I still want Apple to do more and be more proactive with all of the health data it has on me, though. Apple showed it’s listening to at least some of the Vision Pro feedback with the Dual Knit Band and support for PlayStation VR 2 controllers. The pace of Immersive Video seems to be gaining momentum. I’m glad they stuck the M5 chip inside instead of letting the M2 model linger for years. AirPods Pro 3 are fantastic. I think they are the best value product Apple sells right now, given how much I use and rely on them.

Home

Stephen Hackett: If you had told me five years ago that HomeKit would serve as the spiritual father of a smart home platform that tears down the old walls built around Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant, I would not have believed you. Yet here we are, with Matter continuing to grow in both capability and availability. Having moved in 2025, I’ve been slowly building a new HomeKit setup, and it’s been very, very smooth. Things aren’t perfect, but putting something together with products from various vendors is way easier than it used to be.

James Thomson: I’m sure the massive end-scene-of-Raiders warehouse filled with all the new Home products that didn’t actually ship is really impressive.

Rosemary Orchard: We finally got robot vacuum support!

John Siracusa: Apple Intelligence famously failed to fulfill its promise in 2024, and it turns out that 2025 wasn’t its year either. Rumor has it that there are several new Apple home products that are blocked by this long software delay, and every existing Apple home product seems to be in a holding pattern.

Stephen Robles: Really disappointed in Apple Home, which basically did nothing in 2025. No new Apple TV or HomePod, or the rumored HomePod with a screen. HomeKit features are still years behind, like HSV only being 1080p, no pan-and-tilt to other controls available for cameras, no improvement to automations (you need workarounds or third-party apps to get a notification if a door is left opened), it’s all way behind. Thankfully, they’re supporting Matter, so third-party device makers are still making products, but Apple needs to focus on Home in 2026. The smart home ecosystem is going to get more proprietary, with brands like Aqara building features exclusive to their app and not for universal access across ecosystems.

Joe Rosensteel: I have serious doubts that the protracted delays of the Apple Home update tied to Siri and app intents are going to actually be any good at the kind of pain points people have been asking Apple to address for years. It seems absolutely implausible that we’ll have a thoughtful UI, a competent and complete voice assistant, and simpler support for device automation and individualized preferences in multi-user households. None of the groundwork is there now, so dropping Gemini on top of a tablet on a speaker is unlikely to yield anything of consequence.

John Gruber: Why isn’t this platform improving, in drastic, groundbreaking ways, with any urgency? I really thought 2025 might be the year, but nope. I can’t think of any area where Apple’s attitude more clearly seems to be that “good enough” is good enough.

Paul Kafasis: Home/HomeKit is nowhere near as reliable as it should be. Things fail randomly, or require multiple identical requests. When I say “Turn off the lights”, and the Watch shows what I said, then spins, then says “Sorry, could you say that again?” (presumably because the request timed out on the server side), I want to scream. But it’s just good enough to keep using it, and keep hoping it will get better. On Matter: My old 2012-era Nest 2nd Gen got deprecated, and despite being annoyed with Google, I went with Nest 4th gens. They’re Matter-compatible, which means I no longer need a HomeControl server to make them work with the Apple Home app. Hooray! The future of cross-compatibility is finally here, a little bit.

Quinn Nelson: Somebody should inform Apple that Home devices and software “remain a product in their lineup.”

Steven Aquino: I’m completing my part of the survey while listening to music on my OG HomePod, which still works perfectly. I use it every day in my office for podcasts and music. The HomePod minis strewn about the house are great for timers and controlling lamps. I’m not really longing for more from them, however old they may be. HomeKit makes my house more accessible, with my only want being the mythical smart display that’s purported to come.

Casey Liss: Has Apple done anything meaningful here in a long time? It’s preposterous to me how little Apple seems to care about this. Or, if they have done things, how uninteresting they are, since I can’t think of them. It’s awful how little one can do with automations in HomeKit; Home Assistant has shown me how powerful automations could be. Not only is it a nightmare to use Shortcuts for this, but it’s nowhere near robust enough.

Federico Viticci: Is Apple still working on HomeKit? The past few years would suggest otherwise. I like my HomeKit setup…which I configured years ago, and it’s mostly stayed the same since. I’d like to see Apple make some new home-related hardware, but I’m not holding my breath.

Chance Miller: HomeKit is the best smart home ecosystem, but that’s not saying much. Apple’s hardware plans in the smart home, like the rumored smart display, continue to be held back by Apple Intelligence delays.

Jeff Carlson: Is this thing still on? Doesn’t seem like anything has changed.

David Dozoretz: Obviously, lack of updates and AI implementation are a problem. Siri is just terrible.

Adam Engst: Siri continues to decline and has become the albatross around the neck of a largely stagnant Home system. And I say that as someone who uses Siri to control HomeKit light switches, outlets, and shades multiple times every day.

Benjamin Mayo: They basically did nothing at all across the entire year for their Home line. Both sizes of HomePods are getting long in the tooth and would highly benefit from new hardware and more software attention. Hopefully, the upcoming smart display is the start of a renewed smart home initiative.

Matt Birchler: This is the category that often makes me wonder if I’m living in a different universe than everybody else. I have a smart lock on my front door, about a dozen smart lights, and automation set up for a lot of these, and they all just work. And the move to Matter has been pretty seamless for me. It hasn’t introduced any new issues in my setup that I can notice, and I’m able to control my Nest thermostat from the Home app, and it works great. I honestly have no complaints.

Marco Arment: Does Apple know they make HomeKit?

Allison Sheridan: I can’t give Apple high marks for Home until they rewrite the Home app entirely. I’m pretty clever, and I’m continually baffled by it. And I’m talking about automations I’ve created that actually function. It’s needlessly complex, impossible to search for a specific device, and the weird half implementation of Shortcuts is just plain mean.

Michael Tsai: My HomePod continues to not work well for Siri or music. The smart outlet that I installed last year no longer works reliably. The Home app is still frustrating.

Charles Arthur: The Home app is still frustrating. You have to go to Shortcuts to make things that will properly control it, and the lack of IF statements and proper logic within the app makes it frustrating if you have bigger visions than turning lights on and off. It has been this way for years. Has Apple decided that the Home app is perfect as it is? Because it isn’t.

Matthew Haughey: My complex HomeKit setup is still working ok, but I have to use HomeAssistant as a backend to bridge over to HomeKit via plugin since still not everything supports Apple Home. So far, I have only two Matter devices, and they work ok.

Gabe Weatherhead: HomeKit is similar to what it was in 2024, and 2023, and 2022, and… well, you get the idea. It never changes because Apple executives lack vision. I doubt they even use HomeKit, but maybe that saved it from the Liquid Glass treatment. Pray that they don’t alter the deal further.

Matt Deatherage: Can you name anything new in Home for [device]OS 26? I can’t. At least nothing got worse. And from Glenn’s article, I dug around and learned that there’s no API to turn off a scene, something the UI has allowed since the start! Geez Louise.

Eric Slivka: Everything seems to be a waiting game until the new Siri is ready and Apple can launch its full smart home experience. Looking forward to seeing how that goes, but in the meantime, 2025 was a giant snooze.

Shelly Brisbin: The Home experience feels just a bit more stable than in the past, though the Home app is still a source of aggravation.

Christina Warren: Home Assistant FTW. There is nothing Apple offers in Apple Home that is compelling to me. I do have a funny story: In August, I was staying with a girlfriend in New York City and trying to turn on the lights in her Apple Home setup apartment. Siri and Apple Home, predictably, could not turn on the lights, turn off the lights, or control anything I needed them to. So it was 3 a.m., and three people (and a dog) were all yelling at the Apple TV and Siri to try to get things to settle themselves. That sums up the Apple Home experience. And also reinforces why I use Home Assistant and a Raspberry Pi.

Todd Vaziri: I have a few smart home products that interact with Apple Home, but I’ve not hooked them entirely into Apple Home for fear of screwing up the current functionality. It all currently works, so I hesitate to integrate it into Home for fear of breaking it. Which is a big problem, it would seem! If a long-time Apple customer like me is hesitant to use a core Apple feature, that’s bad for the company and illustrates a deep lack of trust in the feature.

Carolina Milanesi: I am honestly not sure what they have even done here, and I fear part of it is that they need Siri to be much better to drive more ambient computing

Myke Hurley: This should have been the year for the HomePod with a display. Holding patterns continue.

Dan Moren: The Home app is still unreliable at times (looking at you, “Not Responding”). The design is cluttered and confusing. We still can’t temporarily disable devices in the year 2025. Home badly feels like it needs an injection of attention and interest.

Joe Macirowski: Maybe it’s just hardware catching up with heavy-weight software design, creating this illusion for me, but Home.app feels more reasonable in terms of behavior when it comes to things like my air conditioner being unplugged during winter or still letting me control the remaining lamps in a group when I’ve accidentally unplugged one member while vacuuming. Trying to add my Eero to HomeKit (as suggested by the Eero app) timed out and errored, and it feels like that’s an omen not to try again.

Apple TV

Marco Arment: The Apple TV continues to be the best product in its category, but mostly because everything else is so awful. It could be so much more with even a modicum of effort.

Steven Aquino: I always say, with some jest, the Apple TV 4K is laughably over-engineered for its primary purpose: streaming video. I appreciate the horsepower for its performance, but the box’s problem isn’t hardware (twinsies, iPad!)—tvOS could be so much more robust than a static grid of icons. I keep waiting, with unbated breath, for the platform to receive its iOS 7-like glow-up. Amazon and Google have implemented good ideas that Apple should steal for itself.

Stephen Hackett: “For the 2023 Report Card, I wrote, “The Apple TV hardware has been so overpriced and overpowered for so long, it feels like I’m wasting everyone’s time by mentioning it again.” I also said, “tvOS continues to feel trapped between Apple’s vision for the platform and what it can work out with streaming giants like Netflix.” That’s still all true, and I bet I can copy and paste it again in a year.

Adam Engst: Did anything change?

Todd Vaziri: I use my Apple TV to consume 100% of my TV content. I love it, but I still think it could be much better, starting with the Remote, which is begging for variation in button size, shape and placement, rather than a grid of buttons all the same size and shape. One large Play/Pause button, please!

Myke Hurley: Another product that feels a little stagnant. But to be honest, from a hardware perceptive I am not sure there’s much more I would realistically want them to do.

Craig Hockenberry: We were one of the lucky ones that didn’t get the Liquid Glass update in tvOS 26: another reason to hang onto our first-generation Apple TV 4K.

David Dozoretz: Obviously, lack of updates and AI implementation are a problem.

Jessica Dennis: I continue to sell my privacy to Roku for the sake of a user interface that makes more sense to me and a $30-50 price difference. Plus, I really enjoy the Roku fish screensaver. Maybe if Apple TV had a fish screensaver, I’d consider switching.

Matt Birchler: I feel that for a few years in a row, Apple has made the Apple TV interface more heavily promote Apple TV content, which has annoyed me. While they haven’t undone any of those changes, they also haven’t made it worse this year. I also think tvOS gets the award for Least Impacted by Liquid Glass. After I installed the update, I had to double-check to make sure it actually installed because the differences were so subtle.

Paul Kafasis: I greatly appreciate the Apple TV box. I updated my TV last year and just kept it completely offline, letting the Apple TV be the brains. But the hardware should have received an update or a price cut by now – they’re still selling 2022 HW for the same price.

Christina Warren: Apple TV continues to be a product in Apple’s ecosystem.

Gabe Weatherhead: It’s hard to complement a device that consistently delivers the same mediocre experience and bad UI but still beats most competing devices. The Apple TV works, but it does not bring me any joy to use. The UI is inconsistent (still), and the services do not integrate in a meaningful way. I still have no idea how to find content on the AppleTV. Every bit of content I want to use on the AppleTV requires additional purchases. And yet, the AppleTV still costs up to $150 (which does include the $60 remote control).

Federico Viticci: I don’t particularly care about my Apple TV. I don’t think about my Apple TV and tvOS much. If you ask me about it, though, I’ll say that I really like my Apple TV when I use it: tvOS is the most pleasant and nicest TV software platform I’ve tested in recent years, and that’s because Apple is the only company with a modicum of taste making software for TV-connected devices these days. Nothing else comes close to just how “nice” tvOS feels, even if Apple doesn’t seem to put much effort into it.

John Moltz: The Apple TV remains a product in Apple’s lineup? I think?

Andrew Laurence: “Meh”, but arguably the best in the category? The hardware is long in the tooth, tvOS seems to be in compatibility mode with new OSes, and no streamers use the tvOS profiles.

Benjamin Mayo: No new Apple TV hardware debut in 2025, but it still stands strong as capable hardware. tvOS got some niceties this year, like the refreshed design for the TV app and new tricks for Apple Music Sing, but core software features remain unattended for: multi-user support needs to be overhauled, and the unified Up Next queue of content should be exposed on the home screen itself (how rivals like Google TV already do) rather than just a grid of app icons.

John Siracusa: It’s getting to be about time for another Apple TV hardware update, but we didn’t get one in 2025. Maybe next year. tvOS 26 is perhaps the least damaged by Liquid Glass, but it also didn’t get many improvements this year. All my comments from last year still apply, so I am including them here as well: I continue to be frustrated with the poor quality of many of the streaming video apps I use on Apple TV, both in terms of bugs and interface design. Is that Apple’s fault? Maybe only to the extent that these apps are using standard Apple frameworks for things like video playback. But Apple also isn’t exactly leading by example when it comes to user-centric design. TV apps everywhere continue to prioritize the needs of the streaming service over my needs as a viewer. I want to continue watching my show. They want to shove a bunch of new content in my face while making the show I was just watching as difficult as possible to find. And they don’t seem to care if they lose my place or fail to track my progress. And heaven forbid I go back to refresh my memory by watching a scene from an earlier episode. Now my current place in the series is apparently impossible for modern technology to discern. Also, I still think the Apple TV remote could use further improvements.

Allison Sheridan: Hardware still works great, but nothing new in so very long…

Chance Miller: The Apple TV does exactly what I want it to do. tvOS and the TV app could use a rethink, but it’s still the best set-top box experience out there. Perhaps that’s more of an indictment of the competition than praise for Apple.

John Gruber: Apple TV is so much better than the competition that I fear complacency has set in. It really is so much better than any competing set-top box (or built-in smart TV system), but it also still falls so far short of “insanely great”.

Eric Slivka: I don’t really have complaints about tvOS, as it does what it needs to do with a simple interface. Similarly, the hardware continues to perform well despite getting up there in age. Feels like it’s time for at least a spec bump there, though, and hopefully the upcoming smart home push yields some good improvements and integrations for Apple TV.

Charles Arthur: It’s fine. The tvOS update was the least offensive of those across all the platforms.

Joe Rosensteel: Apple TV development continues to concentrate on areas of development that are pragmatic, like live/linear video streams, universal content guides, etc. The focus on user switching has been comical because it isn’t implemented by service providers. The TV app is a mess, and the home screen is still just a bunch of app tiles.

Peter Cohen: I’m still waiting for Apple TV to become a viable gaming console option, but Apple is Lucy holding the football, and I’m Charlie Brown, every year.

James Thomson: The Apple TV trudges along like an old, reliable, yet strangely expensive, horse.

Stephen Robles: tvOS 26 was a solid upgrade, but, unfortunately, we didn’t get new hardware. Still wouldn’t use anything else.

Carolina Milanesi: Not much happened on the software side.

Casey Liss: The only way I watch media is through an Apple TV. Either using Plex, Channels, Disney+, F1TV, or something else. I love my Apple TV. Apple pays nowhere near enough attention to this. The last new hardware was October 2022 for Chrissakes! My older hardware is getting very long in the tooth, and I’d love to replace my main Apple TV and then start a trickle down, replacing the one I use for tailgates and when traveling. But I can’t do that if Apple won’t 🤬 release a new one!

Michael Tsai: It continues to work OK, but I don’t think any of the changes this year really improved my experience. I’m still not very happy with the software or the remote.

Dan Moren: Did anything happen? It did not. tvOS’s big feature was tied to profiles, which still feel half-baked and badly executed. Otherwise, it’s been a big nothing of a year for Apple TV.

Matthew Haughey: The new TV OS updates were fine and mostly cosmetic, but it would be nice to get updated AppleTV hardware someday

Matt Deatherage: Do we need new Apple TV hardware? I can’t point out why we would, so it’s hard to ding Apple for not providing any. Siri on tvOS could use some Apple Intelligence, in terms of processing what you say and finding the media you want. It’s not good enough for 2026 at the moment. Liquid Glass is…OK on tvOS. The UI in general continues to suffer as TV, the main app, continues to be more of a promotion vehicle for Apple TV (the subscription) and less the central hub for all your content. The TV app won’t let you see what you might like until Apple has shoved what it wants you to see down your eyeballs first, a dark pattern of the first order,

Services

Matt Deatherage: The same things we used to get cost more; we get no new benefits for the higher prices.

John Siracusa: I wish Apple would refocus its services strategy on serving customer needs rather than increasing revenue and profit margins.

Federico Viticci: I love Apple TV the service, I think Apple Music is fine, iCloud Drive is passable these days, and I don’t use Apple Fitness, Apple News, Apple Arcade, or Apple Podcasts. I honestly think that Apple’s services are okay for most people (and the numbers seem to prove it). However, I think that they could be so much more with a healthy dose of AI integrations, especially when it comes to news summarization, music discovery and playlist creation, or an AI-based health coach. It sounds like the company is indeed exploring these areas, and I’m looking forward to that.

Quinn Nelson: The rollout of AppleCare One was one heck of a mess.

Christina Warren: So I have finally found a use case for the Apple Arcade+: people with small children. My older sister has a son (he’s 4), and although she limits screen time, when Auntie Nina is spending 12+ hours a day with him while also battling a herniated disc in her cervical spine (just got surgery for it, thank you), sometimes the stand-in parent needs to allow the child to play on the iPad. And man, the state of children’s iPad content is fucking bleak. Tim Cook, Eddy Cue and every other Apple executive who talks about why the App Store can’t be opened up to protect the sanctity of the experience should be kicked firmly in the teeth, with how predatory and terrible the games situation is for children’s content. I know others have lamented this for years and years, but having seen it first hand in some Paw Patrol games (don’t start, I don’t like cop propaganda either, but it makes the child happy) and some other properties, good God! But you know what a nice surprise was? Apple Arcade. First, there was a more educational Paw Patrol game that, while poorly coded, at least was IAP-free. But the real surprise was this very fun and very educational Play-Doh game. It was cute and kept little C-Mac entertained and excited while Auntie Nina helped mommy with some things and packed her bags. So I finally found a use case for Arcade+ — protecting children from predatory games. Unsurprisingly, you have to pay for this privilege. As for the other services, as I’ve always argued, none of Apple’s services are best in class. There are better cloud storages services, better music subscription services, better video subscription services (though this was a decent year for ATV originals, but not an HBO Max year), better photo services, better game subscriptions (albeit not for iOS, but if you’re serious about games you aren’t playing on iOS or a Mac), ways to spend $120 on news. But the sum of the parts, if you pay Apple $38 or whatever they charge now for Apple One Premier, is worthwhile, and the seamlessness of the ecosystem makes it worth it even if this is very much a scenario where nothing is best-in-class.

Peter Cohen: Record performance quarter to quarter, and I’m roped in with monthly payments for AppleCare +, the full suite of Apple One services, and recurring payments to App Store vendors – but the only Apple hardware I bought last year was a Watch.

Brent Simmons: I’ve really liked some of the TV shows! I’d like to see Apple Music get a lot better.

Andrew Laurence: Apple’s services earn the highest compliment: they execute their remit so well I don’t notice them.

Kirk McElhearn: It’s disturbing that Apple is increasing its ads in the App Store and in Apple News. Regarding Apple News in particular, the ads I see should make Apple embarrassed. Choosing Taboola to serve ads was a mistake, but I think that Apple just doesn’t give a damn. It’s not just that the ads are bad, but that they show up, in some stories, every couple of paragraphs. I would consider Apple News+ to access some of the publications, but would not pay what they want, and since there are still ads, I would feel insulted to be paying to see this dross.

Stephen Hackett: “I use a bunch of Apple Services on a regular basis, and they’re all solid. My photos and other data sync quickly and smoothly. Apple Music is great, and Apple TV (no +) continues to pump out bangers. Some issues persist, however. Apple News+ is still filled with low-quality ads. The App Store continues to become splintered as Apple tangles with various governments around the world. Apple’s retail and support infrastructure can still feel creaky, providing uneven experiences at times.

Charles Arthur: Services was actually fine. Fitness+ is being expanded – great! Apple TV had some absolutely brilliant hits – Pluribus deserves all the awards it is winning. Who would have thought we’d reach a time when we were happy with Apple services?

Joe Rosensteel: Apple’s focus on subscription revenue has led to many nagging pleas to subscribe and spend money with Apple. The “One” bundle isn’t one bundle for all their services, but merely one of many. Acquired companies with subscriptions have unclear development roadmaps, so you’re not even sure what the money you’re paying for does. It isn’t connected to doing any work.

Craig Hockenberry: “I’d really like someone who loves music to design the Apple Music apps (especially on the Mac). I’d really like Apple Fitness+ to stop constantly trying to upsell me in the Workouts app. I’d really like Apple New+ to stop constantly trying to upsell me in the Stocks app. I’d really like iCloud and AppleCare to stop constantly trying to upsell me in the Settings app. I’d really like whoever’s picking the shows for Apple TV to keep doing what they’re doing: it’s a great collection, and keeps getting better.

Shelly Brisbin: The Apple services I use continue to be reliable and actually worth the money I pay for them. Apple Music “gets” me. iCloud has kept my files safe, and I still find new places that let me use Apple Pay (Apple may not get direct credit for that, but it helps with my personal consumer satisfaction.

Ben Long: I’m generally pleased with the reliability and pricing of the services I use. Where I get frustrated is the lousy UI in News+, and the always-trying-to-sell-you-on-a-service layer in so many apps and parts of the OS.

Steven Aquino: iCloud, Apple TV, Apple Pay, and Apple Music all work great for me. Apple TV’s new intro logo is delightful. I love it so much that I’ll occasionally rewind a show just to see it again.

Matt Birchler: Apple TV has really grown since its pretty low-key launch years ago. I think 2025 was the year it finally had not just one mainstream hit, but a few. Severance season 2, The Studio, and Pluribus were all genuine cultural events this year.

Paul Kafasis: iCloud syncing is good. Apple Pay is nice. Apple has far too many services for my taste. I don’t need them doing TV, or News, or Fitness. But I ignore the things I don’t use.

Dan Moren: Very much “fine.” I’d love to see more attention paid to Apple Fitness+. Apple TV has put out a lot of bangers. Apple Pay continues to be the default way I pay for most things. So many services I simply use only rarely or don’t care about (News/Arcade/AppleCare).

Myke Hurley: For me, Apple TV+ props up this entire category. Everything else I use and am happy enough with, but the level of content that they are producing is frankly astounding. The majority of my favourite TV shows in 2025 came from Apple, and they had a veritable hit with F1.

Nick Heer: The services I use continue to be fine — nothing less, nothing more, and not spectacular enough to justify this category being a quarter of Apple’s overall revenue. Serious business people who talk about stocks and stuff are probably thrilled Google is allowed to keep giving Apple tens of billions of dollars annually for being the default search engine in Safari. I was glad to see cycling routes expand nationwide in Canada this year. The biggest news was when Paris Buttfield-Addison was locked out of his entire Apple account toward the end of the year. Without insinuating blame on Buttfield-Addison, who did nothing wrong, it was a sobering reminder about the risks of entrusting our valuable data to a single company. Apple launched a browsing-only App Store on the web. Google and Sony have figured out how to send a digital download from one device to another, but not Apple.

Gabe Weatherhead: It’s difficult to separate Apple Services from Apple’s poor software. I guess the fact that I still use iCloud, Apple Card, Apple Pay, and Apple TV means that it’s all fine. It’s not a reason to buy Apple hardware, but if you do, the other services integrate like nothing else.

” Howard Oakley: Apple is still failing to curate its App Stores.

Eric Slivka: Most of these services are fairly mature and stable at this point, and the user experience

Carolina Milanesi: Services growth was great, and from Apple TV content to Apple subscriptions shows Apple growing engagement. I look forward to seeing the impact AI will have on more personalized recommendations in the future.

Chance Miller: I don’t think renaming Apple TV+ to just Apple TV has done anything to clean up confusion. As a service, though, Apple TV is on a roll. Excellent TV shows, a theatrical win with F1, and huge value-adds with F1 and MLS Season Pass. Apple Arcade is a surprising hit inside my house. I enjoy Apple Music’s AutoMix feature. The puzzles in Apple News+ have become part of my morning routine.

Joe Macirowski: I haven’t had any weirdness with a 2TB iCloud plan and gigabit fibre for a couple of years now, and iCloud as my means of setting up a new iPhone was boring and stable. I’d love to give this category a 5 but the nags for upsells and the stack of “do you want to turn on this service you’re paying for and had enabled on the device you’re replacing?” screens feels so personally disrespectful and infuriating to someone who so passionately evangelized (including with my wallet) the little fruit company from its pre-iPod days because they unapologetically different.

John Moltz: Most of Apple’s services continued apace this year, which is a bit of a blessing and a curse because the company makes it so easy and compelling to enter into a tithing relationship. The company continues to hit it out of the park with shows on the artist formerly known as TV+, with “Pluribus” being a standout hit.

Jessica Dennis: Apple TV+ has really put out some bangers this year — Pluribus was just phenomenal, Slow Horses continues to be great, Severance pretty much lived up to its first season, and The Studio was really enjoyable. I really wonder if Apple is losing money hand-over-fist on this content, because I really hope they continue to do so. As for Apple Music, I’m trying to switch back after using Spotify for a few years — the process to transfer my playlists was pretty seamless, and I was able to set up TikTok (shut up) to send songs to it pretty easily (shut up! that’s where I discover a lot of new music!). Apple Fitness+ has a lot of neat things that, uh, I really should take advantage of… And when I remember to look at Apple News+, I appreciate that it’s there.

Benjamin Mayo: I love that Apple Music Replay finally got an (overdue) update, now featuring a truly integrated native experience inside the Music app. The rebrand from Apple TV+ to Apple TV was a good decision. 2025 saw a strong slate of new originals, and the F1 deal is an exciting prospect for Apple’s commitment to streaming sports. AppleCare One is a nice bundle offer and represents good value for people who previously paid separately for AppleCare for a Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Allison Sheridan: Apple TV is killing it with new shows. Pluribus … amiright? I also see iCloud syncing for apps to be an unsung hero. We complained about it for so long, we’ve forgotten to herald the fact that it works superbly now. Apple Card makes me happy – the interface on iPhone, the feeling of security, and the simplicity of the card itself. I had THREE AppleCare stories that had happy endings — I think that’s a world record.

” David Sparks: Once again, the free tier of iCloud storage remains at 5GB. It has been so since 2011, when announced by Steve Jobs. It’s been 14 years. The Apollo moon program, the Beatles, and the entire run of Friends were all shorter than the amount of time Apple has kept the free iCloud tier at 5GB. Ridiculous.

Casey Liss: Apple One is nearly forty dollars a month. That’s A LOT of money. I do not feel like it’s a good value, despite getting basically all Apple has to offer. Apple TV continues to be — as many have said — the new HBO. Basically, everything I’ve watched on it — film or TV — has been at least enjoyable. Many things are legitimately good or even great. I loved the F1 movie. More discerning fans of the sport than I will pick it apart, but I thought it was fun, while also accurate enough to prevent me from scoffing repeatedly. The shows we’ve watched are good, with Severance and Shrinking both being particularly great this year. I’d also like to call out the Apple News puzzles. I only have a couple of friends who play them, but they’re really fun. I particularly like Emoji Game, in part because it’s unlike anything else I’ve seen. Two terabytes of iCloud storage is not enough for those with a family and a penchant for taking photos or — God help them — videos. Five gigabytes of storage for free is — to use a dysphemism — criminal. Also, holy fucking shit, enough with the upsells. My God.

James Thomson: Apple TV continues to be a source of top tier tv shows, but everything else feels quite stagnant.

John Gruber: Quality is high, value is fair (except, still, for iCloud storage), and it’s getting to the point where it’s hard to keep up with all the great series on Apple TV.

Brett Terpstra: I think Apple TV+ is pumping out some good content, but I’m not certain it’s enough that I would pay for it outside of a One subscription.

Michael Tsai: iMessage and Siri still work poorly for me. Apple Pay and the rest of iCloud are OK, with most apps that sync having occasional hiccups. The other services don’t interest me except in that their existence seems to be warping Apple’s product design decisions.

Hardware reliability

Chance Miller: Apple made the thinnest iPhone ever and dared us to bend it. We couldn’t.

Ben Long: I hear about troubles with high-end displays, but all my Apple hardware stays bulletproof.

David Dozoretz: Phones and Macs are good, home and TV are not.

Steven Aquino: Put it this way: I just decommissioned my 7-year-old Retina 4K iMac because I wanted to go Apple silicon on macOS full-time, and Tahoe isn’t supported. But the hardware—especially the panel—remains exquisite for its age. I expect my new Pro Display XDR to age just as well, if not even better. The thing is built almost like a literal tank.

Paul Kafasis: No complaints here.

Kirk McElhearn: I can’t remember the last time I’ve had a hardware issue with an Apple device. A few years ago, I had to switch the external power supply on my M1 iMac, but that’s the last time. It is making me rethink whether I should continue to pay for AppleCare.

Federico Viticci: 17 years into writing for MacStories, and I still haven’t had any major issues with Apple hardware in my life. They should promote the guy in charge. Oh.

Shelly Brisbin: All of my Apple devices are solid. They perform well, and I have confidence they will for several years to come. I don’t *have to buy new hardware nearly as often as I might have, several years ago. But if I do buy something, I’m confident it will be a joyful experience.

Stephen Robles: The reliability of hardware has been top-notch for me.

John Gruber: No news remains great news in this category.

Michael Tsai: My family’s hardware has been solid this year (not counting the ever-present USB problems), and I don’t recall any major issues reported elsewhere. I remain a bit on edge because if a Mac’s SSD fails, the Mac can no longer even be used with external storage, and my experience with AppleCare has not been great.

Allison Sheridan: While I did suffer one hardware problem (misbehaving Touch ID on a MacBook Air), overall, everything else was quite stable.

Benjamin Mayo: Hard to think of anything bad to say, which is a good thing.

Stephen Hackett: “I bet the guy in charge of hardware would be a great CEO in the future.

Andrew Laurence: Apple’s hardware is the best it’s ever been.

Matt Birchler: I continue to be amazed at the reliability of these products that are sold to hundreds of millions of people every year.

Marco Arment: Apple’s hardware is rock-solid. Maybe their hardware chief deserves a promotion.

Jessica Dennis: I can’t remember the last time I had a problem with my Apple hardware — well, aside from my 2017 MacBook Pro that refused to die (it had The Bad Keyboard, but it was exactly as bad when I finally retired it in 2023 as it was on day 1). I even, er, spilled a bunch of Liquid IV into a backpack, soaking my work MacBook Pro, and it was totally fine, once the Thunderbolt ports were de-gunked. I thought for sure it was toast when the ports failed one after another, but apparently AppleCare just cleaned it out and sent it back.

Nick Heer: If 5 is a perfect score, I guess I have to give a 4 because Apple launched a service program in June for Mac Minis made last year.

Brent Simmons: Apple is on an epic run of great hardware.

Dan Moren: One of Apple’s biggest bright spots right now. Apple’s hardware has avoided any major issues in the past year, with no really major controversies. My new iPhone 17 Pro and M4 MacBook Air are rock solid, while my M1 iPad Pro and M2 Pro Mac mini keep cooking along, perfectly fine.

Adam Engst: Apple hardware remains impressive on all metrics, reliability included.

Quinn Nelson: Unless we consider the cosmetic scratches of the again-aluminum Pro phones a reliability issue—rather than added character—hardware dependability is better than ever.

Charles Arthur: This stuff is nailed on now that the keyboard and TouchBar nonsense is gone. One could argue that the phone is getting overcomplicated – more buttons? – but at least one gets to choose functionality.

Eric Slivka: No recent issues for me (knock on wood), and overall things seem to be in pretty solid shape.

Casey Liss: I can’t remember the last time one of my Apple products broke that wasn’t my fault.

Gabe Weatherhead: Tim Cook’s legacy will be unbeatable hardware anchored by mediocre software and design. Every piece of Apple hardware feels like it’s from the future. Just hold an iPad, and you can imagine you are on the Enterprise. Look at a MacBook Pro screen, and it feels otherworldly.

Christina Warren: I had to fight to get my iPad Pro replaced with a bum battery, and then the one I got still has lousy battery capacity. But that aside, Apple continues to really do great stuff with hardware.

Apple software

Nick Heer: The most charitable thing I can say about Apple’s software quality after a full cross-platform redesign is that it has fewer bugs than I had expected. But I do not grade on a curve. Even leaving aside the visual assault that is Liquid Glass, the current state of Apple’s operating systems remains disappointingly buggy and unreliable.

John Moltz: There’s not a lot left to say about Liquid Glass and the degradation of the usability of Apple’s operating systems that hasn’t already been said. Sure, they’re still usable and sure Apple shipped some great new features with all of them (particularly iPadOS), but the fit and finish of the company’s operating systems have long been one of its crowning achievements, and they really clowned them up.

Benjamin Mayo: The OS 26 releases are controversial due to the design changes, but I don’t think they represent a step back in terms of reliability. Reliability feels about the same as their 2024 counterparts.

Philip Michaels: New interfaces are always hard, but Liquid Glass’ debut went about as well as can be expected. At the very least, I’m used to it by now.

Eric Slivka: The Liquid Glass transition has caused some issues with features and apps, but hopefully Apple will continue to refine things.

Jeff Carlson: I’ve gotten more unsolicited negative comments and queries about the *26 releases from friends and family than any other OS release in recent memory, and that’s almost all Liquid Glass complaints.

Federico Viticci: I don’t hate Liquid Glass as much as others in our community do, but let’s face it: it hasn’t been a smooth rollout, especially on macOS. The thing that concerns me about Apple software and quality, though, is that I fear the company is falling behind other Silicon Valley giants in terms of reimagining the role of an operating system and apps in the age of AI. I also take another stance from most of my peers here: like it or not, generative AI and LLMs aren’t going away. Even if the “AI bubble” bursts, the technology will remain, and – guess what – people truly like that technology. So far, Apple has been incapable of delivering on its promise of a new kind of operating system, one where AI is woven through every interaction with apps and which can proactively assist us in our work, communications, and information recall. Will Google help? Let’s check back in a year.

Brent Simmons: Liquid Glass is so bad that it makes everything else look bad.

Dan Moren: Despite not being as down on Liquid Glass as many of my colleagues, it is still hard to argue that it doesn’t feel like a step backward in many places. Chronicles of usability issues persist, and there are plenty of places (especially on the Mac) where the design feels ill-considered. Meanwhile, many apps feel broken or incomplete (Shortcuts, looking at you), and others still haven’t been updated with compatibility for the latest OS releases. That includes all of iWork, which lacks the new look and feel (perhaps not a huge disaster in terms of usability, but an editorial on just how essential Apple views them), Final Cut on iPad still doesn’t support the background process feature that was designed for it, and the company continues to spend its time rolling out unnecessary ventures like Invite.

Shelly Brisbin: I’ll take one more swipe at liquid glass, especially on iOS. It has brought no productivity boost to my life, nor is it “delightful.” iOS and macOS themselves are, well, fine. Long before Apple released new versions of pro creative apps, I would have complained about the quality of many basic apps and suggested that Apple devote more resources to modernizing them. “Plumbing” apps like Contacts, Calendar and Music have serious performance issues on macOS, and have for years.

Steven Aquino: Apple’s platforms and apps have always been perfectly fine for me. I know there was a lot of consternation for Liquid Glass, but I like it and haven’t encountered any egregious usability problems. I think the fact that Apple added some customization options for appearance was tacit recognition that the Liquid Glass demoed at WWDC went too far in places, so the options are a sign of correction. From an accessibility point of view, Apple’s stated goal of Liquid Glass bringing “coherence” and “consistency” to its panoply of platforms is a worthy, righteous goal. The community has, and does, bemoan certain elements of the design—but just because Apple failed in certain respects doesn’t mean the overarching idea is bad.

Howard Oakley: Apple has turned a deaf ear to the obvious problems with Tahoe’s macOS interface for 13 months now. While it has never found it easy to admit it has been wrong, this is one time when it needs to do that to restore confidence. The strange thing is that I actually like iOS 26, and quite like iPadOS 26, but macOS 26 is catastrophically bad to use. Given that this is the last version for Intel Mac users, that’s a tragedy for those who will now be stuck on Sequoia for the next few years before they replace their Intel Macs. There have been other less visible bad decisions, particularly with respect to XProtect updates in Sequoia and Tahoe. Instead of making them more reliable, there are now many who are one or two versions behind because Apple’s new iCloud-based update mechanism has let their Macs down. That’s another case of not listening to users.

Myke Hurley: While I am a fan of the redesign that Liquid Glass has brought, it is not perfect. I hope for a year of ironing out some of the irregularities. Otherwise, though, I do not have any glaring issues with how the systems are operating right now. I feel like I should mention here that they have absolutely dropped the ball on Apple Intelligence in 2025 – but I am not sure yet if the features they say the devices can do will realistically help my computing life, so it feels hard to ding them in the report card.

Joe Macirowski: Aqua looked a little too weird and too strong and committed to visual ideas at the expense of being good at being a GUI in OS X 10.0 but by the 10.4 Tiger days I intentionally would use Safari to screenshot webforms when writing tutorials simply because it used the aqua native form elements instead of sterile boxes you couldn’t even always tell were interactable elements. Liquid Glass feels like timeline wise it’s still more like the Mac OS X betas, but underneath it all, I still have faith it can indeed follow the same history of too-literal concept to the eventual de facto singular “correct” way to handle GUI. But this isn’t rating my hopes, dreams, and/or faith. It’s not broken, it’s not unusable, and at least in my experience never compromised stability even in beta, but it’s still in its weird and awkward era and most noticeably so on macOS where it causes usability reductions and whether or not Liquid Glass is the cause this release also decreased the common ground (visually) between “big” (macOS, iPadOS) and “little” (iPhone) Safari.

Christina Warren: I already answered this ad nauseam in the macOS section.

Stephen Robles: Creator Studio announced today would raise this score, but if we’re only looking at 2025, most of the Pro apps, and iWork, etc., have been pretty static.

Charles Arthur: We are all deeply grateful to Mark Zuckerberg for his charitable work in hiring away Alan Dye and his closest allies. We eagerly look forward to a time when all the mistakes that he inflicted on a generation of phone and computer users can be undone and made better. Because seriously, the class of 26 was not classy. Specialists could poke many, many holes in the UI and UX of the ’26 OSs. People who found their phones updated were not always pleased. iOS 7 at least had some reasoning behind it and left the Mac alone. Thinking that desktop computers and handheld smartphones should have the same essential interface is the mistake that Microsoft made, years ago, with its very earliest Windows designs for the phone. Those were terrible in the opposite direction from Liquid Glass on the Mac.

Quinn Nelson: I truly don’t know if anybody within Apple has used macOS 26 Tahoe. It’s the worst Mac release we’ve had in well over a decade. Any neat new features (Spotlight, Universal Clipboard, Live Activities) have been completely overshadowed by poorly applied Liquid Glass and more bugs than I can recall since OS X Leopard.

Adam Engst: iOS 26 and macOS 26 have been funkier and glitchier than any Apple operating systems in years. I suspect it’s almost entirely due to Liquid Glass. There aren’t any deal-breakers—the basics still work fine—but there are too many lags and oddities.

James Thomson: Did I mention that I do not care for Liquid Glass?

Todd Vaziri: Certain features like Screen Time, touted as a very important feature when it debuted, just withers on the vine without any updates or bug fixes. And it’s now 2026, and there’s still no iCloud full-disk Mac backup.

Stephen Hackett: “It’s been years since I’ve had to reinstall an OS to fix an issue or spend time digging around in some Library folder, which is great. However, because Apple keeps quoting Steve Jobs’ axiom of “Design is how it works, the issues created by Liquid Glass cannot be ignored. There are good ideas in there, and I like a lot of the visuals, but the new UI introduced bugs and challenges for developers and users alike. I spend a lot of time in Apple’s first-party apps, including Safari, Notes, Reminders, Calendar, Photos, Music, Logic, Terminal, and more. Some of them are great, while others need work, but my primary reflection on them is that these apps can be incredibly inconsistent. Lists in Reminders and folders in Notes should have the same options when being named and labeled. Keyboard shortcuts should be more predictable. Safari should be far less ugly. My personal pet peeve fits in here as well: apps should have access to the entire SF Symbols library. Why am I forced to choose from a subset of them for an icon for a Reminders list or when naming a Shortcut? Emoji can partially solve these issues, but the SF Symbols library is great. It’s time Apple unlocks them.

Matt Birchler: Usually, big design trends last for five to 10 years. But after just a couple of months of using liquid glass, I’m already craving the next trend. It undoubtedly has moments where it looks really cool, but in general, I think it’s relatively garish.

Andrew Laurence: Liquid Glass makes this a rough year. I know many who now use accessibility affordances just to make it more tolerable. Whatever benefit it wanted to achieve, it missed the mark.

John Siracusa: Liquid Glass really drags down the average this year. It also completely wiped out Apple’s ability to make improvements to existing features, which is at the core of Apple’s longstanding software quality crisis. Apple really needs to shift the balance between new features, bug fixes, and performance improvements. The process of polishing existing features is vastly undervalued by today’s Apple.

Gabe Weatherhead: Today, I opened the Apple Phone app, and all of my favorites were gone. Last week, I opened the Apple Contacts app, and all of my contacts were missing. In both cases, I was not surprised, and in both cases, I had no options other than to restart the device. This is my lived experience with iOS and macOS. It has been a supreme disappointment to watch Apple bumble the Shortcuts app. This is an app that felt like it was designed by true Apple fans, back when Apple acquired it. But in the years since then, Apple has abdicated its responsibility to us, and Shortcuts is now too unreliable to invest our attention and time any further. I complain that there are many sharp edges to Apple’s OS, but Shortcuts is just a sack of broken glass.

Michael Tsai: Most of the old bugs are still there, and the new OS releases brought new ones. Will this ever get better? Apple just seems lost. This year, I want to highlight how unreliable Screen Time is. I also experienced new issues where the “d” key sometimes doesn’t work on my Mac (with any keyboard), and my Apple Watch wouldn’t charge with third-party chargers. Nearly all of Apple’s Mac apps feel like they need attention, but I don’t really wish for that because recent revisions—like the Contacts app in Tahoe—tend to be regressions. I keep being tempted to switch away from Safari—the reliability, performance, and compatibility are subpar—but am sticking with it for now because I prefer its user interface.

Peter Cohen: I’d love to see a Snow Leopard-style shift focusing on ironing out what went wrong with this 26 strategy.

Paul Kafasis: Liquid Glass is bad. Apple’s design chops are way down. Quality overall is lacking.

Craig Hockenberry: Whether or not you think Liquid Glass is a good change for the user experience, it has had a disruptive effect on the quality of the OS and apps that Apple provides. Things are janky and glitchy all over, and the root cause always seems to be a failure to get the glassy effects. I’d love to see Apple take a release cycle to focus on quality, but with the catch-up they’re currently doing for Apple Intelligence, that seems unlikely.

Carolina Milanesi: The OS releases have been very stable in 2025. Some improvements on Apps with Apple Intelligence, but expect much more to come this year.

Ben Long: Not sure where to start. I find some of their apps, such as Music, to be almost unusable, while software features like AirDrop are spectacular. So, very uneven except for UI, which is universally approaching bad.

Casey Liss: Sometimes you need to take a moment to reset and to clean up around the house. Apple needs that.

Joe Rosensteel: The OS updates have had many issues with quality, not just with taste. None of Apple’s apps have had satisfying or noteworthy updates, with many not receiving updates to even match the new look and style of the OS and those that have suffered for it. Impossible to see this as a successful year for Apple software.

Allison Sheridan: I know it will be obvious why I gave it a lower rating than previous years, but I’ll go ahead and say it, Liquid Glass! I don’t hate it, but I sure don’t favor it. I’ll say one nice thing — I like the bigger, rounded corners on windows. The apps are fine, except for their drippy liquid elements.

Lex Friedman: Everyone talking about your crappy design is a bad thing. I don’t use many of Apple’s pre-installed apps. But the pro apps — particularly Logic — keep getting better. And wow, Notes is really a little engine that could that powers big parts of my business.

John Gruber: For two straight years, I’ve written the same comment for this category: “I have concerns and complaints about aspects of the direction Apple’s software design is headed (or in some ways, has been now for years), but their software reliability has been very good for me. The reliability and technical quality remain excellent. While writing this report card, I checked, and my uptime on MacOS 15.7.2 got to 91 days before I got around to restarting, which I only did to upgrade to 15.7.3. At one point, I literally had over 1,000 tabs open in Safari, spread across over 50 windows. (I have a problem with tab hoarding.) That is technical excellence. But yearslong growing concerns over the direction of Apple’s software design reached a breaking point with MacOS 26 Tahoe. It’s so bad — or at least, so much worse than MacOS 15 Sequoia — that I’m refusing to install it. That makes it hard to assign a single grade for “OS Quality”.

Matt Deatherage: If you want to move the liquid glass stuff here, I’ll understand.

Aleen Simms: Liquid Glass, especially on iPhone, is a frustrating-to-use hot mess.

Jessica Dennis: Apple’s apps and operating systems seem fine; they generally mostly work, but I don’t think there’s really anything super exciting about Apple-developed software these days.

Developer relations

Nick Heer: Between strategies for bare-minimum regulatory compliance that vary around the world, and implying a necessary ground-up redesign on all platforms, third-party developers are not Apple’s priority.

Marco Arment: Apple gave developers great new APIs to use in the 26 OSes, but burdened them with half-baked redesigns that make it extremely challenging to create good UIs and reliable apps.

Craig Hockenberry: If Apple were looking for ways to make developers even less enthusiastic about their platforms, they found several: doubling down on the App Store monopoly, shipping an unfinished user interface design on all platforms, and tacit support of fascists who are in the process of destroying American democracy.

James Thomson: Everything we’ve said before about fighting a war on all fronts with every single regulatory body around the world is still true from last year. The quote “it’s our FUCKING STORE”, from Marni Goldberg that came out during the Epic vs Apple trial, is permanently burned into my mind as the perfect encapsulation of Apple’s attitude towards developers.

John Gruber: Fifth year in a row with basically the same comment: Resentment over App Store policies continues to build. Frustrations with the App Store review process seem unresolved. Apple’s goal should be for developer relations to be so good that developers look for excuses to create software exclusively for Apple’s platforms. The opposite is happening.

Dan Moren: Business as usual. But business is not good. The company keeps fighting to control the App Store as it has, without ever stopping to ask whether or not it actually needs to. Some of its arguments against legislation like the DMA might be well-founded, but much of it just seems spiteful and petty. While it has adhered to laws in other parts of the world, it does so mostly when it can continue charging the fees to which it has become accustomed. The App Store might still be the place you need to be to sell your app, but it has never felt less vital—these days it seems like little more than a digital version of Walmart.

Stephen Robles: Not involved personally enough to say.

Andrew Laurence: The US injunction against payment systems and commissions was well-earned. Apple needs to remove its head from its posterior.

Brent Simmons: Apple is burning developer goodwill by shipping this terrible UI update, by continuing their astonishingly greedy defense of the monopolistic App Store, and, worst of all, by supplying gold statues and flattery to the fascists in the White House.

Charles Arthur: Apple’s relations with developers continue to be that of an abusive spouse who knows there’s no chance of their partner divorcing them. Might a chance of leadership at the top shift this?

Michael Tsai: The same old issues with the App Store, documentation, the schedule, and bug reporting. Apple needs a turnaround. Swift has not taken over the world. It continues to get new features without really feeling mature. Swift Concurrency is now officially approachable, but the complexity remains, and Apple has not convinced the community that this approach is actually an improvement. Flagship frameworks like SwiftUI and SwiftData continue to disappoint. On the plus side, there is finally a roadmap for improving the type checker.

Christina Warren: Standard disclosure: For most of 2025, I worked in developer relations at Google DeepMind, and then for the last 6 weeks of the year, I was at GitHub, which Microsoft owns. Apple really loves to shoot itself in the foot with developers, and the continued fight over App Store DCA rules shows this. The fact that Patreon can’t drop the IAP option from its app at all, and instead its users have to choose to either raise prices in-app or take a loss so that the greedy fucks at Apple can claim 30% on content they aren’t responsible for and sign-ups they didn’t facilitate is but just one example of how out of touch Apple continues to be with developers. The utter failure of Apple Intelligence and the fact that Apple has had to partner with Google of all people because Siri is such a shit show, I think, should be a pogrom against those at Apple. Because mark my words: alternative OSes are going to come. And they won’t be from the big players, but from the upstarts. And those are the ones you need to worry about. And when everyone can vibe code, your lock-in isn’t as deep or as strong as you think it is. Also, the ICE Block stuff was cowardice, pure and simple. Apple allowed (and continues to allow) apps from the Saudi government that allow men to track the location of their wives (their property in that country), on the basis that it’s legal in those jurisdictions. But somehow, the legal tracking of thugs with badges is a human rights risk. OK.

John Siracusa: I feel like I could copy and paste my comments from several past years on the topic of developer relations. We are not making progress. It seems like new leadership at Apple is our only hope.

Howard Oakley: Apple remains far too detached, rather than a partner. There are some salient exceptions in some teams, though.

Eric Slivka: The hodgepodge of regulations around the world is only getting more complicated for both Apple and developers. Apple might have been able to head this off by making some voluntary changes sooner, which could have been on a worldwide basis, but ultimately opted not to.

Lex Friedman: I publish two apps. The process of getting new releases approved is still too painful. The tools Apple offers developers are great. The lawsuits Apple fights to avoid giving developers (and their users) what they should… are not great.

Casey Liss: Apple consistently and regularly shows developers that it does not care about them. It does not care about playing fair. We are but cogs in the machine that prints Apple money, and the squeaky cogs do not, in this case, get the oil. Apple’s consistent and petulant insistence that we exist by their grace is obnoxious and simply untrue. Without developers, Apple wouldn’t have an ecosystem. They’d have an iPhone. One that nobody would buy, because it’d be damned near useless. Apple’s consistent and petulant insistence that all regulation is bad, and that the only way to have a safe device is if Apple builds a wall around it, is patently untrue. As I write this, Grok is enabling the creation of CSAM and other deeply objectionable media, and Apple does not care. It’s all bullshit, and we can see it for what it is now better than ever.

Myke Hurley: The longer we continue to see arguments in courts, and with governments around the world over Alternative App Marketplaces, the clearer and clearer Apple’s stance becomes.

Paul Kafasis: Apple touts it, but the App Store continues to be awful for developers. Apple refuses to stop trying to squeeze every unearned cent out of developers. The greed is astounding, and compromise is absent. To top it off, we all have to tread water to figure out how to handle their poor design changes.

Matt Birchler: I started doing real developer work in the App Store this year, and it’s made me appreciate some of the things that are nice about that system. On the other hand, it’s frustrating to wait days to weeks for app review to let your updates be released to users, as is the company’s inflexibility in giving up an ounce of control of the store.

Joe Macirowski: Reddit is the only place Google can find actual Safari documentation for developers (like how to tint the window because the meta tag theme color is just ignored in this release) because the link someone might have included “for more information see: ” points to a page that now says “yes, the URL used to contain an article. I don’t know what it said, but this isn’t a 404 page. Nor do I know where it went, so this isn’t a 301 either. Here’s a link to a different permutation of the documentation landing page that will also not help, as it’s still not the current one, though you won’t find much help there, because Google would’ve found what you’re looking for there instead of Reddit if that were the case.

World impact

Casey Liss: They’re consistently bending the knee and kissing Trump’s ring. They’re all but eliminating Lisa Jackson’s role. Just gross.

Lex Friedman: Tim Cook makes a choice every day to suck up to Donald Trump and fascism. I will never forgive him.

Steven Aquino: As a lifelong disabled person who copes with multiple conditions, I will stump up and down for Apple’s staunch commitment to serving my community vis-a-vis accessibility. The company isn’t perfect here either, but it makes the most effort of anyone in the industry to make people like me feel seen and valued. That isn’t trivial, and it’s something Apple should be lauded for more often. The iPadOS power users would do well to remember that the pointer feature has origins in the AssistiveTouch suite. Apple has innovated to empower people, then went on to take those ideas and build on them for the mainstream.

Ben Long: I’ve been buying Apple products since my first Apple II in 1979. This is the year they lost me. Giving in to Trump’s demand for a monetary tribute has left me unwilling to buy any new Apple products until I’m assured that they will not be donating to the executive branch, regardless of who’s sitting in the Oval Office. And I don’t buy that they had to do this to protect the company. Helping to normalize this kind of corruption is not good for Apple, the industry, or the world. For this reason alone, I’m thrilled that Tim Cook is leaving. Hopefully, they’ll find an actual vertebrate to replace him. And I’m fed up with their disposable watches and AirPods that make any claims of environmental stewardship completely laughable.

Matthew Haughey: Watching Tim Cook bend a knee to Trump for the past year has been downright embarrassing

John Moltz: Apple’s cozying up to the Trump administration and its cronies is widely excused as regrettable, but what’s right to do for business. The problem with this argument is that you could say policies protecting the environment and promoting accessibility are not “good for business”, many companies do, and yet Apple has long prioritized both despite not being able to directly tie them to the bottom line. Cooperating isn’t the only way to look at what’s good for the business. Other companies like Costco have taken a different approach by suing the administration in order to protect their bottom line. Apple has chosen collaboration despite having massive consumer goodwill and one of the strongest corporate positions imaginable. They are choosing to protect themselves at our expense.

Federico Viticci: How’s a gold statue for impact?

Shelly Brisbin: Apple has been in the news because of Tim Cook’s relationship with Donald Trump. Given the potential for arbitrary regulations coming from the administration, this has been a basically sound strategy. Don’t antagonize an unpredictable actor. But even if maintaining good relationships with the government is critical to Apple’s business, the public, and the obsequious nature of some of those contacts has severely impacted Apple’s ability to occupy space on a socially-conscious high road of its own making. If one lesson of 2025 is not to expect a profit-making company or its charismatic CEO to embody the same values you do, another – this one for Apple itself – would be not to count on the staying power of a cult of corporate personality.

Marco Arment: Tim Cook’s actions supporting Trump and China betray Apple, democracy, and human rights to ensure favorable treatment, reduced competition, and minimal judicial and regulatory interference. He has shown us exactly who he is and what’s important to him, and it’s time for us to start believing it.

Charles Arthur: It seems pretty clear that Apple is going to abandon its environmental goals in favour of Chatbots Everywhere (which, to be fair, means a long-overdue overhaul of Siri). In 2025, Tim Cook’s obeisance to the Trump regime in the US was at odds with Apple’s usual stances. Having seen how often Trump chickens out of initially robust stances, you’d think he might learn to ignore him. The fact that he doesn’t reflects badly on him and on the company.

Jeff Carlson: Oh Tim.

Paul Kafasis: Apple isn’t as bad as some other companies, but nowadays, that’s about the highest praise they can receive. They no longer set a positive example. At best, they’re slightly less bad than a company like Meta. What an accomplishment.

Carolina Milanesi: Sustainability remained a core focus for Apple, and inclusive hardware and software were strong, as was community impact.

David Dozoretz: Come on Tim. You know better.

Brent Simmons: Apple once had a reputation as an ethical and humane big tech company — and that reputation helped the world by showing that it was possible to be that and to be successful. That reputation is gone, and that example is now gone too. See the malicious defense of the App Store. See how it puts its arms around Trump. And see how Lisa Jackson, head of Apple’s environment efforts (among other things), is leaving, while Jennifer Newstead, formerly of Meta, formerly a Trump appointment to the State Department, and a co-author of the Patriot Act, is coming to presumably double down on Apple’s legal defense of its monopoly.

Todd Vaziri: As someone smart once said, “If you have FU money, you gotta use it when it matters.” Apple has previously been a champion of human rights and environmental policy, so it’s deeply concerning to see the CEO giving the President of the United States an Apple trophy. I completely understand the “gotta protect the shareholders/politics” of the situation, but it’s so gross and betrays some of the company’s corporate values.

James Thomson: Given what they had to work with in terms of the current political landscape of the US, maybe Apple did the best they could over the last year (at least, the best they could for shareholders). But they sure lost a lot of my respect along the way, with that gold and glass trophy just perfectly setting the tone for the year.

Peter Cohen: That the company and its CEO are actively supporting a criminal fascist regime is repugnant. That it’s par for the course throughout much of the tech industry is a disgrace.

Chance Miller: I’m no longer surprised by Apple’s political decision-making and maneuvering. A multi-trillion-dollar company is going to prioritize capitalism every time, even if it means cozying up to the worst people. Apple did, however, resist outside pressure to abandon its DEI policies. It continues to put an admirable focus on Accessibility. Apple 2030 is still a goal on Apple’s roadmap.

Craig Hockenberry: We used to believe “Think different.” Now, it’s more like “Think whatever is needed to maintain our profit margins”. How can a company tout its own diversity while at the same time handing out golden awards to a person who is trying to destroy our country’s diversity? You either believe in it, or you don’t: there’s no gray area here.

Dan Moren: I’m not sure I’ve ever given this such a low score. But it is what it is. We often talk about Apple’s social impact being a litmus test, and while I’m sure the company is still doing some good, it has increasingly been offset by its ills. Supporting the current administration not just willingly but seemingly enthusiastically, burying its social/environmental impact so as to not attract scrutiny, removing apps like ICEBlock, even (as of this writing) not suspending X/Grok from the App Store all make Apple seem less like a company composed of people you can root for and more like another giant monolithic entity concerned with its own profit above all else. In a word: disappointing.

Matt Birchler: I don’t have a lot of patience for the “what are they going to do, stand up to the bad guys?” arguments defending the company’s fawning over everything the new US President says and does.

John Siracusa: Apple has abdicated much of its power to improve the world in exchange for improving its short-term financial results. As has often been said this year, what good is having fuck-you money if you never say fuck you?

Joe Rosensteel: Apple’s commitment to environmental and social issues is at an all-time low. Tim Cook, specifically, has debased and collaborated with an administration that has harmed and continues to harm the American people and the world. Even issues like the App Store are just about securing rent and nothing else. I don’t care what Tim’s personal feelings on the matter are, and I don’t care what his fiduciary responsibility is; Apple simply can not claim they are serving the greater good in any way, shape, or form.

Jessica Dennis: So, it would be pretty cool if the CEO weren’t kowtowing to the current administration in that frankly embarrassing fashion, you know? In years past, I’ve complained that Apple seems to be engaging in a good deal of greenwashing and only playing lip service to diversity, but 2025 was just so much worse. I guess on the plus side, there are a bunch of features built into iOS that make it a little safer to resist fascism, but it would also be really nice if Tim Cook seemed even remotely interested in resisting fascism.

Kirk McElhearn: They stopped Product (RED) products, though there was a promotion for Apple Card users, I think, this year. They don’t even pretend anymore to be environmentally positive, other than when they present new products. It seems like either they think they don’t need to communicate about it, or they don’t care. And Tim Cook fluffing Trump was a very, very bad look.

Stephen Robles: Haven’t thought about this a lot.

John Gruber: Tim Cook is in an excruciatingly difficult position regarding the Trump 2.0 administration. But that’s his job. He’s clearly attempting to take the same tack he took with the Trump 1.0 administration from 2017–2020, which, in hindsight, he navigated with aplomb. To wit: staying above the fray, keeping Apple true to its institutional values while keeping it out of President Trump’s wrath. But the Trump 2.0 administration isn’t anything like the 1.0 administration. Cook, addressing employee concerns back in 2016 regarding his participation in then-President-elect Trump’s “tech summit”, said, “There’s a large number of those issues, and the way that you advance them is to engage. Personally, I’ve never found being on the sideline a successful place to be.” “Awarding” Donald Trump a 24-karat gold trophy emblazoned with the Apple logo in August 2025 — after seeing eight months of Trump 2.0 in action — wasn’t “engagement” or “getting off the sideline.” It was obsequious complicity with a regime that is clearly destined for historical infamy. Cook’s continued strategy of “engagement” risks not only his personal legacy, but the reputation of the company itself.

Quinn Nelson: Tim Cook is effectively handling the current administration, which has managed to displease everyone but shareholders.

Nick Heer: Tim, I am willing to reconsider my low score. I hear you give bribes in gold bars. I am only human.

Howard Oakley: A nightmare year in the US. Whatever Apple chose, it wasn’t going to come out as well as it deserved. On balance, I think it steered clear of becoming a target of wrath without becoming too sycophantic, but we’re going to need hindsight to be the judge of that.

Joe Macirowski: The University is currently in talks with the state government and local power utilities to figure out how to power university-controlled instances of the major models so that, quite frankly, suicides can be prevented (and everything else on the spectrum of AI harm). These talks have to occur because the power required just to run the models exceeds the university’s total – not just IT – TOTAL power consumption by an order of magnitude. This is not speculative demand but a need to insource what is already filled via api calls to data centers that are stressing their own grids to the extreme. That much green energy simply isn’t available. Nuclear timelines aren’t feasible either. This will likely end up being natural gas, as it is among the types of power generation that can most easily respond to random demand, as combustion powers turbines directly. However, during startup, they emit multiple times more pollutants – especially those causing smog, a summer-wide problem for much of the state – than they do in their steady state, and that amount will likely also have immediate and noticeable effects. This is the impact just running LLMs has on power. Someone’s air quality is going to be decimated, and even if somehow everyone’s backyard could be isolated from local effects, the contribution to global emissions remains a concern. When Apple needs to increase on-device RAM so a large language model can sort your email worse than a surprisingly few very well-written regular expressions, it’s not because this is an extremely efficient use of computing resources and therefore power. When you distribute that power utilization to local devices instead of data centers, you’re still adding that much power usage SOMEWHERE – and in the US, there’s a good chance it’s coal. And the more widely you distribute this the more power stations are reaching tipping points where units that used to spend time completely off and cold are graduating to full time service where the new cycle is running at reduced efficiency during the day because demand is too high and everything is running hot and running at reduced efficiency during the night because demand is below the minimum to keep a unit idling but not low enough that the cost of turning back on doesn’t outspend the savings from turning it off. This is why rates can be lower overnight and why your phone begs you to let it wait until these periods to delay charging. Either every iPhone waiting to do heavy (>5Watt) charging until their local utility’s daily demand minimum is a completely pointless self-congratulatory feature, or iPhones charging at 25-95W is already enough of a problem for the daytime grid that shifting it to when local grid demand is lowest would have an appreciable effect. I want to believe it’s the former, just another greenwashing gesture two orders of magnitude too small to matter, but considering AI data centers are already looking into methods such as charging batteries overnight to supplement peak daytime hours just to have enough power at all makes me believe it’s not as far from the latter as I would’ve assumed even 5 years ago.

Christina Warren: Look, no tech leader or major tech company looked particularly good this year, with all of them lining up to kiss the ring of the King in exchange for insulating themselves from his whims. And it’s shameful for every single one of those companies. But most of the other companies didn’t sell themselves as making the world a better place or put themselves on a moral high ground. And you know what, I don’t expect Apple to act any better than any other soulless, feckless corporation. Sure, good people work there (good people work at all of these places), but that doesn’t change the fact that it is abundantly clear that all of this talk about “making the world a better place” was marketing spin. And I personally never want to hear another word from Apple or their defenders about how they are better than any other soulless, feckless company out there. It’s fine that Apple is just the same as every other company. But Apple nor its leaders ever get to pretend they are better.

Philip Michaels: It’s tough to be a CEO right now, and you could make the case that Apple is doing what it has to do to preserve its interests as a company. But people are going to remember who did what during these times, and I think that’s going to have a lasting impact on Apple’s public standing, long after the current occupant of the White House is just a horrible memory.

Allison Sheridan: I’m incredibly disappointed by the kowtowing to the administration. I used to be proud of Apple and its stance on most societal issues, but that was erased this year entirely for me.

Gabe Weatherhead: This is the year that Apple decided how much CSAM is the right amount of CSAM on the AppStore. The decision turned out to be a lot harder than any decent person would think it should be. Every single executive on the Apple team should be disgusted and embarrassed by the knots they had to twist to allow the Twitter app to continue to generate child pornography on iPhones. But Phil Schiller, to name one, demonstrated his personal value system by his silence. CSAM is now just a part of his bottom line. What a legacy.

Matt Deatherage: Apple’s CEO took a lot of the company’s “improve the world” credibility and set it on fire in 2025. Everyone knows how.

Michael Tsai: We tend to focus on hardware and software, and sometimes Apple’s interactions with various governments, but its customer account policies are an increasingly important area. These days, much of our devices’ functionality relies on services tied to your Apple Account. The account holds your purchases, your data (cloud storage and backups), and it’s the key to even being able to use certain features. It’s incredibly important, yet as we saw this year with the story of Paris Buttfield-Addison, your account can be taken away through no fault of your own and with no recourse save from running to the press. This is completely unacceptable. Apple should revise its procedures so that this sort of thing can never happen again, and it should audit its software to make sure that as much of it as possible does not require an account. One particular area of concern is passkeys. Years after their introduction, Apple finally shipped credential exchange, but it turns out that users still don’t have control over their data. You can’t export your passkeys for offline storage and later reimport into the Passwords app. Even if you have a full backup of your Mac, you can’t restore it and access your passkeys unless you have access to your Apple Account. If your Apple Account is working, your data is stored in iCloud, but it’s not really backed up because you can’t access historical versions. A sync bug will just wipe it out everywhere. If, as Apple says, passkeys are the future, they need to be implemented in a way that serves and protects users, rather than locking their data into a cloud of questionable reliability, which they could lose access to at any moment simply for trying to redeem a gift card.

Aleen Simms: I don’t pretend to be an enthusiastic historian, but it is not hard to see the signs pointing to the United States’s fall into authoritarianism. Tim Cook has been bending over backwards to try to please a man aspiring to autocracy. By donating a million dollars to Trump’s inaugural committee, presenting Trump with a plaque with a gold base, attending movie premieres at the White House, and even dining with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, Cook has been communicating his, and therefore Apple’s, support of the current presidency. I can come up with a great number of reasons why Cook may have taken these actions. Maybe it’s at the behest of the board of directors. Maybe he’s trying to protect as many of his employees as he can. Maybe he’s just trying to protect Apple’s bottom line. Perhaps he grits his teeth every time Trump’s name appears on his Caller ID. Perhaps he agrees with everything Trump is attempting to do and is glad to offer his support. I don’t know where the truth lies, but ultimately, it doesn’t matter. They say that actions speak louder than words, and Cook’s actions are in support of a corrupt administration that is running roughshod over the U.S. Constitution. I also don’t know what the solution is here. Tim Cook is the face of Apple; however, he’s presumably been doing this with the approval of the majority of Apple’s board of directors and other members of the leadership team. Does Cook need to go? I think so, but so does everyone there in a position of authority who is more concerned with appeasing Trump than doing the right thing.

Adam Engst: Can we give Apple a gold-plated award for obsequiousness?

Anything else to say?

Gabe Weatherhead: This has been a pretty bleak year for Apple as a company and for Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, and Craig Federighi personally. In my opinion, their legacy fell off a cliff in 2025, and not just because they no longer use their own products. They bent their knees and broke their backbones, and it only took 12 months to convert some of us from being fans to being former Apple customers. Ostensibly, this is a technical review of one of the world’s biggest corporations, but I live in a world of multitudes. Corporations don’t exist; people do, and their personal decisions are not hidden by shiny branding. The current state of Apple represents a series of human decisions and opinions that feel too expensive for me to continue to support.

Charles Arthur: A year ago in this space, I asked: how would we know if Apple has become sclerotic? A year on, the departures (Dye et al) and rumours of changes to come at the top (Cook to be replaced by Ternus) offer some hope that an organisation which has absolutely become too slow to react (see: chatbots) and neglected products (see: content for Vision Pro) and too rigid in response to governments (see: fights with Europe over DMA) is seeing a shift in tectonic plates. This is long overdue. Apple used to be a nimble company: the iPod went from concept to launch in a single year, back in 2001. That was 25 years ago, and the company’s scale is bigger, but being nimble for an organisation is about reducing the weight on teams – fewer upward management checks and meetings, fewer people with the power to say no (just the right ones). I’m optimistic about the replacement of Tim Cook. It’s time. Apple needs to move into the next generation of its existence. But a necessary part of that is for old parts to die off. I’m agog for 2026.

Joe Macirowski: As discussions of Tim Cook’s stepping down become serious I’m left with the opposing images of a gay man in the early 2010s telling shareholders he doesn’t care about the bloody ROI of environmental issues to handing Trump a 24k gold “commemorative” plaque while his legacy of ‘textbook’ union busting transitions from a turn-of-phrase to literally becoming curricula in labor relations textbooks

Casey Liss: This year, perhaps more than any other in the nearly 20 years I’ve been following Apple, I’ve had to reckon with the fact that Apple is a money-making machine. They’re a money-making machine that is incredibly efficient, but often at the cost of the things I consider important or valuable. That’s fine, but it’s too bad. I miss being able to root for Apple, without disclaimers.

Lex Friedman: I love Jason Snell.

Nick Heer: At best — and I really hope this is the case — 2025 looks like an off year. If my scores seem low, it is because Apple can and should be doing better. But it seems like the most important thing remains adhering to an annual schedule.

Jessica Dennis: 2025 was Not Great, Bob [insert Mad Men gif here]! It’s kind of nice to spend a little time reflecting on technology instead of the advance of fascism.

Andrew Laurence: From the perspective of an enterprise IT admin, the 26 cycle has been — compared to recent prior years — relatively uneventful. Pity it was paired with the UX chaos of Liquid Glass.

Paul Kafasis: Tim Cook presenting an award to Donald Trump is one of the single most awful things Apple has ever done.

Ben Long: There’s still so much great design and engineering left in Apple’s products. This is why it’s frustrating to see that great stuff getting chipped away at and hollowed out. There are always ups and downs, but it feels like they’ve been on a downward trajectory for quite a while.

After my article on 2nd-generation AirTag compatibility issues a few weeks ago, in which I explained that the 26.2.1 or later release of each of Apple’s operating systems was required to pair and view the revised tracker, my friend Adam Engst posted a question about compatibility, and Six Colors member Scott wrote in with a related query.

If you can’t use a 2nd-generation AirTag with an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch—because you can’t upgrade the device to its respective 26.2.1, or have chosen not to—does that mean that this newer AirTag model is invisible to those devices when reporting its location? And—me partly extrapolating a related question—does this prevent anti-stalking features, created by Apple and by an Apple/Google industry initiative, from “seeing” an unwanted AirTag 2?

Fortunately, the ability to pair and track a 2nd-generation AirTag is distinct from participating in Apple’s crowdsourced Find My network, allowing its encrypted, privacy-protecting broadcasts to be recognized by all generations of Apple hardware. And the new AirTag doesn’t create an accidental loophole in deterring and detecting unwanted tracking—in fact, it might even be a better “citizen” due to its ability to emit a louder noise and its longer Bluetooth range.

Find My network counts on you

When you’re within Bluetooth range of an AirTag (either generation), a third-party Find My tracker, or a device with one embedded, Bluetooth lets you find your devices. This includes most Apple and Beats audio hardware and Apple’s Internet-connectable hardware.

But outside that range, the Find My network kicks in. It relies on crowdsourcing. When your “device” (iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch) lacks an Internet connection, it begins broadcasting over Bluetooth using a network name that contains encrypted information. Audio hardware not near a paired device does the same, and AirTag and Find My items broadcast all the time.

This signal is picked up by any nearby iPhone, iPad, or Mac with an Internet connection. It takes the encrypted Bluetooth identifier, which reveals nothing to the device’s owner, packages it with the currently derived location (using a combination of GPS, cell tower finding, and Wi-Fi positioning), and uploads it to Apple. Because the data is encrypted, only a device registered to the same Apple Account can download and decrypt it, which is why native Find My apps are required on each major device platform.

The 2nd-generation AirTag broadcasts the same kind of information as the 1st-generation model. In fact, due to a newer Bluetooth chip, it will likely be picked up at a greater range than its predecessor, making tracking more likely.

Unwanted tracking

Technology is always turned to dark ends, and it’s our job, as people who buy, make, or critique devices, to appreciate the good uses and to mitigate or eliminate the poorly developed ones. So far this century: Bad work, everyone!

The AirTag is a great case in point. Before it existed, Tile offered trackers that worked within Bluetooth range and had developed a crowdsourced passalong technology, but needed a vastly larger installed base to make it valuable—and dangerous. Besides Tile, if you wanted to track something (or someone), you had to get a GPS tracker with cellular connectivity, which could be expensive and have relatively short battery life.

This was useful for expensive hardware, families of people with dementia or cognitive decline, and for stalkers, whether domestic (or former) domestic partners or others. But the cost, size, complexity, battery life, and other details put them out of reach of most people.

Apple shipped the AirTag, and it immediately changed the equation. Because an AirTag can rely on a billion pieces of Apple hardware already in the field, and because it has a lithium-ion cell that can last about six to 12 months, it’s a boon for making keeping tabs on our bags, cars, and bikes. But also a boon for the creeps and abusers of the world.

I won’t relitigate the critique Apple received for its initial settings, but the company made changes over time to make it more likely that we would become aware that someone was trying to track us without our knowledge. Here’s a rundown of the two main features and how the new AirTag improves discoverability:

• Planted on you or your stuff: When an AirTag is separated from its paired device, it makes a sound when moved. Initially, the delay was three days; Apple reduced it to a random duration of 8 to 24 hours. Thus, if someone stuck a tracker in your bag while you were out and about, when you picked it up within a day, you’d get an audible alert. The 2nd-generation AirTag is 50% louder (according to Apple’s measurements) than the 1st-generation model.
• Moving with you: In whatever fashion a tracker comes to be near you for a persistent period of time—Apple doesn’t disclose, but it’s likely 15 minutes or longer—you will receive an alert on your iPhone or iPad about it, and be able to play a sound on the tracker. It should appear when you arrive home or at a significant location, defined and securely stored locally on your devices, or by the end of the day if the previous trigger didn’t occur. The 2nd-generation AirTag’s 50% louder volume helps here, too. Apple and Google co-wrote a standard for anti-tracking that led both companies’ mobile operating systems to recognize each other’s devices as moving with you.

Google has adopted additional countermeasures that I wish Apple would consider:

• Trackers’ locations are relayed only when they’re in “high-traffic” areas, like an airport, a path, or a street people commonly walk on. This prevents tracking in homes or when someone is out for a drive or bike ride. It makes it less likely to be useful for finding someone on their own, for sure.
• If you mark your home address in your Google Account, this prevents any Android device from relaying trackers in or near that location. That can keep a stalker from knowing when you leave or return home.
• A tracker’s owner is limited in how frequently they receive updates. Google doesn’t provide details says they “rate limit” and “throttle” requests, as most lost items remain in stationary locations.

Apple may have implemented some aspects of the above, but the company doesn’t disclose or document them.

For further reading

Since my last column, I’ve updated my book Take Control of Find My and AirTags to incorporate all the details related to the 2nd-generation AirTag and the new availability of Precision Finding for certain Apple Watch models.

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

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

While this could be seen as being another sign of trouble at Apple, as the company is currently mired in an ongoing narrative about its inability to ship AI features it promised nearly two years ago, I choose to see this as the opposite: A promising early sign that Apple’s executives are recognizing that its headlong charge into chasing services revenue might be coming at too high a cost.

The unlikely hero in all this? Apple’s services chief himself, Eddy Cue.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

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In the Apple Podcasts app, users will be able to switch seamlessly between watching and listening to shows, making the experience of discovering and viewing video podcasts as simple and enjoyable as listening to audio podcasts has always been. Users can watch video from within the app and move to horizontal full display, as well as download videos to watch offline. And automatic quality adjustment powered by HLS technology ensures smooth playback across network conditions, delivering the best possible experience whether listeners are on Wi-Fi or a cellular connection.

YouTube has become the most popular platform for podcasts period, and Spotify has been aggressive in integrating video content, so it’s hard not to see this as an attempt to make Apple’s platform more attractive for shows that broadcast in video. At the same time, the audio experience on the go for YouTube often leaves something to be desired, so this feels like Apple trying to thread that needle.

As with audio podcasts, Apple won’t charge creators for distributing video podcasts; however, the company is also enabling dynamically inserted video ads, and ad networks that participate in that will be charged a fee.

Interesting, you know what Apple doesn’t have? A podcast creation app in its brand new creative suite. Hmmm.

(Update: Apple Podcasts has supported video podcasts distributed the traditional way — a downloadable file — since pretty much the beginning. This change offers streaming video via HLS and lets users toggle between audio and video. Apple is relying on podcasters to pay for a video hosting service compatible with Apple’s platform. -J.S.)

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

I’ve written before about the concept of presence. This is the notion that in your digital life, you have many devices—sometimes several near you¹—and when you get an alert, a phone call, or other call to action, you do not want every single piece of hardware to chime, shake, or grab you by the scruff of your neck.²

And yet. And yet. When you desperately want the digital jingle bell to sound off on a particular device, my goodness, what a fuss that might be.

Quick: Without picking up your iPhone, tell me how you configure an alarm in the Clock app to trigger on your Apple Watch when you’re wearing it? I can’t remember, and I just looked it up.

While Settings: Notifications controls many ways in which your iPhone lets you know something is up that you wanted to be reminded about—or a company wanted to tell you about—you will scroll through your app list in vain: there’s no Clock app listed or alarm settings.

Instead, naturally (?), go to Settings: Apps: Clock: Notifications. After my recent brain failure related to the Video menu in the macOS Phone app, I looked through the entire Settings: Notifications list. Nope, no Clock. Yet, Settings: Apps: Clock: Notifications.

And even when you arrive there, there’s no Apple Watch! So let’s visit the Watch app. One assumes there’s an easy way to figure out how to turn iPhone-set alarms on or off on your Apple Watch. In fact, there is, but the language is rather obscure. At Notifications: Clock, use the Push Alerts from iPhone control to turn this feature on or off:

When this is on, Apple Watch will alert you of Timers and Alarms you’ve set on your iPhone, so you can snooze or dismiss them remotely.

“Push Alerts” isn’t my first thought for syncing alarms and timers, but at least it’s there.

Just remember to keep your Apple Watch charged and unlocked on your body.

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

Through no fault of Apple, Face ID is having a moment — and not in a good way.

Sure, the biometric security feature works as well as it ever does, using a face scan to unlock your iPhone, confirm mobile payments and generally an extra layer of protection between your digital data and the prying eyes of the outside world.

But we live in a time of increasing unrest, and with it comes a concern about biometric security features in general. Run afoul of what purports to be law-and-order these days, and your own face can be used against you by police who can compel you to use Face ID unlocking against your will. A security writer at PC Mag goes so far as to suggest you should stop using Face ID entirely.

I’m not sure I want to take that drastic a step with my own iPhone. While concerns about biometric locks are certainly valid, I find Face ID pretty convenient to use when I’m out and about and my phone remains firmly in my possession. Glancing at my iPhone to unlock is certainly quicker than tapping out a passcode every time, and I like using Face ID to lock down everything from health data in my health care provider’s app to images I’ve got stashed in separate Photos folders.

That said, when I attend a protest (and it seems like I’m showing up at a lot of those lately), I do disable Face ID before heading out. The protests I’m attending haven’t ever gotten out of hand, but better safe than sorry, I reckon. While there’s not much stopping law enforcement from making you use your face or thumbprint to unlock a device, you aren’t compelled to share your passcode if you’re detained.

Turning off Face ID requires you to dive into the Settings app, tapping the Face ID & Passcode menu and then entering in that passcode when prompted. Only then can you toggle off the feature. And while that’s simple enough to do, it’s not a feature you can turn off discreetly or quickly should you remember that Face ID is enabled as someone’s approaching you with ill intent.

There’s a shortcut of sorts: Just press and hold the side button on the right side of your iPhone at the same time you press and hold the volume-up button. iPhone veterans will recognize this as the button combo that brings up the Slide to Power Off command, which is exactly what will happen. As a neat bonus feature, you’ll even get some haptic feedback to let you know that the Slide to Power Off screen has appeared, allowing you to discreetly pull off this manuever without even looking at your phone. (You can also tap the sleep/wake button five times.)

“But I just want to shut down Face ID, not power off my iPhone,” you may be saying. And my friend, shutting down Face ID is exactly what you’ve just done.

Tap the Cancel button on the Slide to Power Off Screen, and you’ll bring up your phone’s lock screen. Only now, the only way to unlock your iPhone is to enter a passcode. Face ID remains disabled until the next time you unlock your phone, giving you some measure of protection from having the Face ID feature used against you.

Apple should do more

As a workaround, the Slide to Power Off move will do in a pinch. But I’d like there to be an even easier way to turn off Face ID, whether that’s through a Shortcut or with the help of Siri.

Poking around the built-in Shortcuts app on the iPhone, you can find pre-populated controls for silencing your phone, adjusting connectivity or the iPhone’s display, and more. But if there’s a way to quickly access the Face ID & Passcode menu in the Settings app, I couldn’t find it. (You can use Shortcuts’s Open URL action and the URL pattern prefs:root=PASSCODE to create an action that opens it, but you’ll still need to enter your password and flip the switch manually.) Likewise, there’s no tappable shortcut in the Control Center, which would seem like a natural place for a quick on-screen way to turn off Face ID. (You could even put the shortcut right there on the lock screen now that we’re firmly living in the brave new world of iOS customization.)

Likewise, Siri is no help when it comes to handling Face ID management. In the current version of iOS 26, a simple “Turn off Face ID command” will have Siri apologetically telling you that it doesn’t understand what you’re talking about. Perhaps that could be some of the smarts Siri is supposed to pick up in a coming update to iOS 26.

And really, this is the sort of thing Apple should add. The company makes the privacy features of its products a central part of the case for why you should buy Apple, with most of the recent TV spots focusing on keeping your browsing data private. But I would contend an even bigger privacy concern would be having everything that’s stored on your iPhone—text messages, emails, photos—made available on command to a some mask-wearing federal agent just because you’re using a biometric feature as intended.

The central role that phones play in our lives coupled with uncertain times at home and abroad have people rethinking how they should approach Face ID. Apple needs to be doing the same.

Go to the podcast page.

Sometimes I can’t help myself.

The other day, while watching an episode of “Animal Control”¹, I realized that I have been writing about technology so long that I can’t even turn off my brain to stop from shouting troubleshooting advice at the made-up people on my TV during a half-hour of light comedy.

Here’s the scenario: Our hero, Seattle Animal Control Office Frank Shaw (expertly played by Joel McHale), has been roped into ferrying around his arch-nemesis, a Cesar Millan-esque dog whisperer played by guest star Ken Jeong. (Kudos to you if you immediately picked up on this mini-“Community” reunion.) Joel McHale’s character has recorded a video on his phone of Ken Jeong having an encounter with an aggressive dog that will cause the latter no small amount of professional and personal embarrassment.

Ken Jeong manages to guilt Joel McHale into deleting the video from his phone by spinning a sob story that (if you know the kinds of characters Ken Jeong plays) is completely made up. But Joel McHale falls for it and deletes the video, only to have Ken Jeong turn the tables and cause McHale no small amount of professional and personal embarrassment. Joel McHale is left to fume about his missed opportunity.

“There’s gotta be a way to recover lost footage,” he says, while impotently turning his phone’s flashlight on.

And where other people might chuckle at this little interlude, a person in my position finds himself shouting at the screen, “There is! There is, you big galoot!” as if Joel McHale is going to answer back.

We do not have to guess as to what phone Joel McHale’s character is using — it is very clearly an iPhone. Given the camera array that I spotted when reviewing the footage with the same frame-by-frame intensity that JFK conspiracy theorists study the Zapruder film, I’d suggest that it’s an iPhone 16 Pro, but that’s neither here nor there. The point is, Frank is using a recent iPhone, so we’ll assume the on-board software is relatively up-to-date.

Everybody who’s used any piece of tech for any length of time knows that nothing’s truly deleted — at least not right away. In the case of photos and videos that you remove from your iPhone, by default they sit in a folder for 30 days before they disappear completely.

In the case of this particular “Animal Control” episode, all Frank would have to do to get that damning video back would be to fire up the Photos app on his iPhone, tap on the Collections tab and find the Recently Deleted folder tucked away in the Utilities section. Frank would tap on the deleted video, select Recover, and sit back and smile while that nasty Ken Jeong finally gets what’s coming to him.

Near as I can tell, there’s no way to disable the Recently Deleted folder feature so that deleted photos and videos go directly to that big trash can in the sky, nor is there a way to extend the stay of execution beyond those 30 days.

Frank could also avoid these kind of situations altogether by backing up his photos and videos to a third-party cloud service. (iCloud wouldn’t work in this case, as deleting things off your phone removes them from Apple’s syncing service.) But considering his tendency to repeatedly turn on his iPhone’s flashlight, that might be a backup best practice beyond his skill set.

Go to the podcast page.

This tickled something in my brain and sure enough, I wrote about this very topic more than a decade ago—but I only covered how to do it on the Mac. Which got me wondering if it was possible to do on iOS.

Sure enough, it is, but you’d be excused for not finding it, since it’s a bit buried.

First, start typing the address in Mail’s To field until you see it show up in the dropdown menu. If it’s not in your contacts¹ you’ll see it has a little “i” icon next to it. Tap that to bring up a screen where you can add it to your contacts or, more relevantly, scroll to the bottom and you’ll find “Remove From Recents.” Tap that and it should banish it…well, at least until you send them another email.

So there we are, only eleven years later. And, if you’re wondering, the macOS instructions above still work, even if the UI looks a little different these days.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple’s newly updated AirTag model, informally called an AirTag 2 but just an “AirTag” to Apple, has a greater Bluetooth range, offers greater Precision Finding with newer iPhones, works with newer Apple Watch models, and produces sound Apple states is 50% louder than the original.

But if your iPhone or iPad isn’t running version 26.2.1, released a few days ago, you can’t add one of these new AirTags to it. And your iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch¹ won’t be able to locate it.

The original AirTag from 2021 works with the iPhone 6s and later and all iPhone SE models. iPad compatibility varies by model, starting with the iPad Air 2 in 2014. You need iOS 14.5/iPadOS 14.5 or later. The iPhone 11 and later added Precision Finding via an ultra-wideband (UWB) radio; it’s not available for any iPad. An Apple Watch requires watchOS 8 or later, on an Apple Watch Series 3 or later (2017). Macs gained Find My item access with macOS 12 Monterey in 2021, which sweeps in Macs mostly released in 2015, though a few older models qualify, too.²

This revised AirTag 2 thus breaks backwards compatibility in three ways, with one twist.

First, some older devices can’t see newer AirTags. The new tracker works with:

• iPhone 11 and later, and 2nd and 3rd generation iPhone SE, as they’re the oldest that can install iOS 26.
• The iPad comes in so many models, there’s a different minimum requirement for each for iPadOS 26; see the iPadOS 26 page. These models were released between 2018 and 2020.
• An Apple Watch has to be a Series 6 or later (2020), Ultra or later (2022), or SE 2 or later (2022) to install watchOS 26.
• Tahoe requires that a Mac has an M-series chip or is one of a handful of late Intel models from 2019 and 2020.

Second, people who have chosen not to update older devices compatible with the “26” releases can’t use the new AirTag.

Third, the twist: Because there’s no explicit labeling, it will be very difficult to tell the original and revised AirTag apart. 9to5Mac published an article on this very topic, noting:

If it’s an AirTag 1, the back will say: AirTag / Designed by Apple in California / Assembled in China / Bluetooth LE / Ultra Wideband.
If it’s an AirTag 2, the back will say: AirTag / FIND MY / NFC / BLUETOOTH LE / ULTRA WIDEBAND / IP67 / APPLE INC.

If there was ever a time for product naming and physical feature distinguishing, maybe this was it? Perhaps the AirTag 2 should have been matte black or space gray.

For further reading

Why do I know so much (apparently) about AirTags? I wrote an entire book on the topic: Take Control of Find My and AirTags. I’ll be updating it in the next week or two to incorporate the new AirTag model and the provisos listed above.

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

But it’s true: Apple and the Super Bowl have been making milestones for decades. It’s a nerds-and-jocks love story for the ages, except these days it’s more about musicians than jocks. Let’s look at Apple’s long history with the Super Bowl!

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

Point your camera at a page, and the Spotify app uses computer vision to match text with audio. If you have to jump behind the wheel for a long drive, but didn’t want to put down The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, you can just snap a pic to jump to the spot in the audiobook where you left off in the physical book.

It works in reverse too, apparently. Point your camera at your physical book and it’ll tell you whether to flip back or forth to reach the spot you left off in your audiobook. (Spotify also today announced that it will partner with Bookshop.org to sell physical copies of its audiobooks.)

It’s a clever workaround, and has me wondering if a similar system could provide a workaround for the lack of sync on other hardware, like the Xteink X4.

That said, it does not escape me that this particular workaround is something that we end up with largely because of the imposition of Digital Rights Management on ebooks. In an ideal world, you’d simply be able to pick up any device—audio, ebook, etc.—and just keep reading where you left off.

While I don’t expect the current situation to change anytime soon, there are occasional glimmers of hope. Amazon, for example, now lets customers download DRM-free ebooks (when publishers have made them available).

I’ve argued before that Apple pushing for a world of DRM-free ebooks—the same way it once did for music—could make the company more relevant in the market once again. But it’s done vanishingly little with its ebook marketplace in recent years, and nothing on the horizon suggests anything different to come.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

I cut the cable TV cord just about seven years ago, and I don’t regret the move at all. Through a judicious selection of streaming services—some free, some bundled—I’m able to see most of what I care to. And for the most part, it’s all on my own schedule.

The one pain point has been sports, which remains one of the few things keeping cable TV afloat. Even that’s changing a little bit, as streaming services are picking up coverage of more events. But to have access to everything, I’d have to subscribe to a whole host of packages, and that balloons the cost up to what I was paying for cable way back when. No thank you.

But there’s a solution of sorts when I need a sports fix, especially if there’s a can’t-miss event that I want to watch from the comfort of my own couch instead of at a sports bar or a friend’s house. It’s day passes via Sling’s streaming service.

If you’re not aware, Sling bundles up a bunch of different channels into one of two collections—Orange or Blue—that you can either buy separately or as one. It costs $45/month to buy one or the other or $69 for the whole megillah. That’s a bit steep for my tastes, but last August, Sling introduced a day pass option, where you can pay just $5 for 24-hour’s worth of access to the bundle of your choice.

So in this scenario, if there’s some event I want to watch on ESPN, I fire up the Sling app on my Apple TV, select the event from the schedule and follow the prompts to hand over my $5. (There’s a little extra tacked on for taxes, but the total bill is less than $6.) And that day pass means I don’t just get to watch one event on ESPN—for the next 24 hours I can watch anything on Sling’s Orange tier, which includes channels like the Food Network, TNT, TBS, and more.

I can tell you that Sling day passes work great in practice. I have a New Year’s Day tradition of watching the Rose Bowl game, a by-product of spending some formative years in Southern California. Or at least I had that tradition: the Rose Bowl has moved from free-to-air TV over to cable in recent years, blocking the game from my cord-cutting view.

On this New Year’s Day, though, I bought a Sling day pass, specifically to watch the Rose Bowl game. And because I made my purchase early enough in the day, I also got to watch two additional football games that were airing on ESPN. It was a nice throwback to my cable TV days, only without the big monthly bill.

There are, however, a couple pitfalls to the day pass approach. First, once you make a purchase from Sling, you’ll never be lonely again, as the streaming service will send many entreaties to your mailbox urging you to maybe consider a full monthly subscription. A quick tap of the Unsubscribe button takes care of that problem, though.

A more pertinent issue would be the fact that those day passes can add up pretty quickly if you don’t exercise some restraint. Fortunately, that’s not a problem for me, as my New Year’s Day splurge happened when there was an event I wanted to see at a time when I planned to be home. Maybe there will be similar circumstances later in the year—a World Cup match, maybe, or an NCAA tournament game. But I’m not too worried about racking up day pass charges.

And even there, you’ve got options. In addition to its day passes, Sling also has 3-day ($10) and weekly ($15) options, which can come in handy if there’s a multi-day sporting event on the calendar. I imagine those will get a workout in some corners when March Madness rolls around.

Cord cutting remains tough if you’re a sports fan, particularly if you blanch at the idea of committing to multiple streaming services just to watch your favorite teams. But at least Sling’s day passes give you a little more flexibility when it comes to unwinding with a good game.

Go to the podcast page.

Or was it?¹

The Phone app introduced in Tahoe for the Mac (and on iPadOS 26) made it much easier to deal with telephony across your devices. Instead of cramming phone features relayed through your iPhone into FaceTime, you can use a full-fledged Phone app. I have been a big fan of it, since I spend most of my working hours standing in front of a desktop Mac. I far prefer using my hard-wired USB headset for calls than AirPods or, gasp, holding my iPhone to my ear!²

After months of using the Phone app successfuly, I suddenly couldn’t get audio input to work. The Phone app has minimal controls and—I thought—no option to select audio input or output, which, in other apps, means the system selection rules apply.

I use several Rogue Amoeba apps and installed the latest version of SoundSource to see if that helped. Maybe there was an audio routing problem? But no: no settings were active and quitting the app didn’t change the input problem.

Checking the Sound pane in System Settings, I could see that the correct microphone was selected for input and, crucially, showed that it registered me speaking in the “Input level” section as I tested it. I could also be heard on Zoom and Google Meet, and could record audio locally.

Clearly, something else was at work! I called up my old pal Jeff to do some testing. (He’s also a technology writer, so we trade off troubleshooting.) After trying several things, I launched FaceTime by clicking the camera icon on the Phone lozenge that appears by default in the upper-right corner of your display during a call.

Jeff still couldn’t hear me! Interesting. FaceTime’s input and output controls are ancient and mysterious. Audio and video are both controlled from the (inappropriately named) Video menu, and it turned out that my audio input was set to a screen-sharing program I no longer use. I changed it to the microphone that was set as my system default, and suddenly my voice rang out.

“Ah ha!” I thought to myself—and said to Jeff and to editor Jason Snell—”I am a very clever chap and should document this as an article for Six Colors,” which Jason agreed to. In editing the article, Jason said, “Isn’t there a Video menu in the Phone app?” Despite my recollection that there was none, and my recent checking for such a menu, there it was on my Mac. It must have been there all along, and, Westworld-like, it didn’t look like anything to me.

In my defense: Why, why, is there a Video menu in an app called Phone that doesn’t use video?³ Apple doesn’t document this in the Phone part of its Tahoe manual And I wasn’t the only one unaware of it: Jason and Jeff didn’t know it existed either, until Jason was pushed past the Somebody Else’s Problem Field level of awareness.

I guess this is how I keep humble. Despite decades of using a Mac, I can still miss a Video menu in an audio app.

I’ve been a fan of the Transit app for a long time. Apple and Google Maps can provide similar information about how and when to catch a bus or a train, but Transit has always focused more tightly on those modes, with lots of real-time data, and a social component, if you’re into that sort of thing.

It had been a long time since I’ve used Transit, so updates haven’t been on my radar until I found myself in Northern California recently. I needed to use BART, the AC Transit bus system, and San Francisco’s MUNI, all in the course of a weeklong trip. And when I opened Transit, I discovered that a lot of things about using the app have gotten better with the release of version 6.0 last year.

Transit has always been best as a “live” app, the kind you want by your side when you need to know if you’ve missed the bus, or how long it will be before the next one comes. It works great for route-planning, too, but so do the “big two” mapping apps. Transit also excels when you’re on a train or bus, watching for a stop.

What’s new are the big, bright boxes that tell you how long you need to wait for your transit vehicle, offered with real-time data, when available. It’s also easier to scroll a list of stops your vehicle will make, because the list is bigger and bolder onscreen. As before, you can use the Go feature to plot your route, live, and have Transit tell you where and when to get off, with any combination of phone and Apple Watch notifications.

If you’re planning a trip, Transit offers a lot of preferences you can adjust, whether it’s limiting the amount of walking you need to do, or getting there quickly, whatever the mix of modes. These have been beefed up, but they’re a little hard to find for the beginner.

There’s always been a social component to Transit, from usage badges to aggregated data that gives the app more information about the routes its users frequent. In the most recent version, there are also poll questions, meant to gather information about vehicles, stops and safety. Multiple choice questions pop up when you’re on a bus or train, and it’s easy to either ignore them or participate. If you answer two or three multiple-choice questions, Transit will ask if it can send you more, or if you’d rather not. It might be annoying to some riders, but it’s a way to pass the time while you ride, and the questions are all on the app’s screen, not pushed to your phone as notifications… Which feels like a nice balance.

Apple lets you store payment cards in two places on your devices. Apple Pay is for point-of-sale (POS) transactions at a payment terminal or the like, as well as for payments in apps or in Safari. AutoFill Cards, the name of the menu items, lets you, er, automatically fill cards within Safari, and in any browser that supports Apple’s autofill framework.

Why does Apple have two places to store credit and debit cards? Why is the way you set them up similar, but not identical? When can you use one and not the other?

I thought I knew the full answer prior to researching my new book, Take Control of Wallet, but it took a lot of careful reading and testing to understand what I had been missing.

(Yes, I wrote an entire book about Wallet. You may laugh! But Take Control Books publisher Joe Kissell and I agreed on it after I realized how many pain points I kept finding as an ostensibly experienced user. Wallet has a lot of unexplored territory for many people—including me!)

Pick a card, any card, to enter

As far as I can tell, you could start entering and syncing payment cards within Safari as of 2013, with the release of Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks and iOS 7 (which encompassed iPad at that point). Apple added secure password synchronization via iCloud Keychain in those releases, including support for debit and credit card numbers.

An autofill card entry requires you to enter a card number and all associated details.¹ You can start on a Mac at Safari: Settings: AutoFill, and click the Edit button next to “Credit cards” (it also includes debit cards). On an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, you can also go to Settings/System Settings: Wallet & Apple Pay: AutoFill Cards. The iPhone and iPad let you bypass manual entry by pointing your camera at a card, and visible details are extracted and dropped into the form for you.

You will note that when you go to that particular location on any device, Apple prompts you for some kind of authentication. That’s because you’ve stored card information that could be extracted and used by someone else simply by looking at it—the details are exactly what would be entered in a Web form.

Visiting a payment site in Safari on any Apple platform, you can tap or click in most payment card form fields, and Safari provides a list of cards that you can drop in. Autofilling requires authentication. On other browsers that support autofill in macOS, you typically have to Control-click/right-click in a field, then choose AutoFill: Credit Card, authenticate, and then use a long scrolling pop-up menu to fill in or copy information.

But note that at the bottom of AutoFill Cards, there’s an option labeled Apple Pay Compatibility: if enabled, either before or after you have entered cards, your device checks whether a given card or cards support Apple Pay’s contactless method. If so, you’re prompted to add the card or cards to Apple Pay. (One advantage of AutoFill Cards is that you can include payment cards here that aren’t supported by Apple Pay, which can include some store-brand cards and stored-value cards.)

Now, we know Apple Pay uses a different process, one that doesn’t send the actual card number, and which involves some encrypted handshaking with merchants, banks, or card-processing networks. So why are we storing cards for autofill, too? And what exactly is the difference?

Let me introduce you to the Secure Element.

Keeping card numbers in a special lockbox

I confess I had never heard of the Secure Element before. Or, perhaps having seen the name, I confused it with the Secure Enclave, Apple’s proprietary security component that handles private information and security keys.

The Secure Enclave is built largely around material entering and not leaving, or generating cryptographic elements internally. For instance, when you enroll in Face ID or Touch ID, the data collected is passed to the Secure Enclave and not stored in regular memory or on a drive. When you later authenticate, biometric details are sent to the Secure Enclave for verification, and it responds. The Secure Enclave is built into the T2 Security Chip for later Intel Macs and is part of the system-on-a-chip (SoC) of M-series Macs.

In contrast, the Secure Element allows two-way communication, though not with Apple or your device! When you add a card to Apple Pay by entering the details or using a card’s RFID chip, the card number is passed to the Secure Element and never stored by Apple. The Secure Element negotiates a secure connection with the card issuer or its payment network, and you’re asked to validate possession in one of several ways, like entering the security code or a texted confirmation number.

Once validated, the card network passes back a cryptographic element used as part of future transactions and a device-specific card number (called a Device Account Number or DAN).² This number does not correspond to your physical card’s number. It’s stored within the Secure Element. Card networks also mark the number so it can’t be used for in-person swipe transactions, on websites when entered manually, or when read to a merchant over the phone. This number can only be deployed via the Secure Element with a secret that only it possesses, unique to the DAN and device.

Apple has no access to this number; only the “applets” that run on the Secure Element do. The last four digits of the number are passed back to the operating system so they can be displayed in Wallet, but the rest of the number remains secret.³

(With Apple Card and Apple Cash, Apple creates this number with the Secure Element during card setup. Apple provides access to a virtual card number via Wallet for iPhone or Apple Watch for manual or autofill transactions, which is a substitute for a physical card number, and you can see it in full.)

When you use Apple Pay at a payment terminal over NFC (near field communication) via an iPhone or Apple Watch, the Secure Element creates a cryptographically secured transaction with the DAN and a unique security code, which passes directly over NFC between the terminal and the chip. Only the card issuer or network can decrypt that transaction.

When you use Apple Pay via Safari, a third-party browser (by scanning a 2D code), or within an app, Apple requires all the parties involved—like the website and charging merchant—to have completed steps with Apple or payment networks. The transactions are wrapped in more complicated layers with verification codes and encryption that are as secure as an in-person NFC payment.

All right! Now you know about the Secure Element and this unique handoff that Apple engages in. But why don’t Apple Pay and AutoFill Cards share information?

Pay as you go

Here’s the crux, as you will have seen:

• Apple Pay cards don’t sync across devices.
• AutoFill Cards do, so long as you have Settings/Systems Settings: account name: iCloud: See All: Wallet enabled.

Now you know the reason: Apple Pay cards must be enrolled on each device, because there’s a process of creating a device-specific number for the card that can only be accomplished with biometric or other authentication on the device. AutoFill Cards are identical across all devices, so protected by iCloud security and device-based authentication when you want to view them or fill them into a browser form.

However, there is a time-saver for adding Apple Pay cards that I’m not sure everyone is aware of. In Wallet for iPhone or Apple Watch, you can tap the Add button (iPhone) or More…: Add Card (Apple Watch), and choose Cards Found For You. You can also tap Add Card in Settings/System in Settings on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. (The Mac shows these cards initially, as “Select cards to use with Apple Pay.”)

If Apple Pay can’t sync, why do these entries appear? Apple Pay can’t sync payment cards for use, but it can sync just enough information about a card that you can select it on another device and use the bank, issuer, or network’s verification process to complete adding it to Apple Pay, since—I would guess—you’ve previously proved your ownership on another device. It’s not perfect, but it still achieves the necessary goal of creating a Secure Element entry.

For further reading

If you found this useful or enlightening, please take a look at my new book, Take Control of Wallet. Wallet isn’t just about payment cards: you can add digital IDs, track orders, manage transit passes, and handle tickets, rewards cards, and boarding passes. I cover more ins and outs than you might believe possible in an app as simple as Wallet.

Go to the podcast page.

For the past decade and change, I’ve tested and reviewed a large number of Android phones, augmenting the iPhone expertise I’ve built up since seeing the very first iPhone live and in person at Macworld Expo 2007. And while that parade of phones has included some winning devices, my overall impression of the Android experience falls somewhere along the lines of “How do people live like this?”

That’s largely a reflection of the haphazard way Android phones receive their software updates. Some, like Google’s own Pixel devices, get new features right away, while others see updates once phone makers and wireless carriers are good and ready to release them. As someone used to downloading iOS updates the moment they’re available, that throws me. Android partisans tell me I’m being silly — sometimes politely, sometimes less so — and they may well have a point.

But even if some elements of the Android experience don’t land with me, I’d have to be a pretty narrow-minded person not to appreciate the features that do deliver. Android phones get a lot of things right — and some of those are missing in action when it comes to the iPhone.

Look, Apple didn’t sell more than $201 billion in iPhones during its 2024 fiscal year by listening to my advice, and I certainly don’t expect the company to start casting sideways glances toward Android phone makers to surreptitiously gather ideas on how to spruce up the next iPhones. But I do think there’s some merit in looking at areas where Android phones excel and how adopting something similar might give the iPhone a boost.

After all, we have some evidence that this already happens to some degree. Google added a rather distinctive horizontal camera bar to the Pixel 6 back in 2021. And while I don’t think the iPhone 17 Pro’s extended camera array is a direct copy, it certainly seems to draw some inspiration from what the Pixel has offered for years. Bringing the new look to the iPhone also allowed Apple to shift around internal components so that the current iPhone can benefit from a bigger battery and a vapor chamber, so there are benefits to adopting, adapting and improving.

So here’s what I’d flag up from my time looking at Android phones for features I’d like to see on the iPhone.

More photo and video capture tools

One of the best rivalries going right now involves Apple and Google battling it out to see whose phones can produce the best photos. It’s a pretty even match-up that seems to shift every time one of the companies rolls out a new flagship device, but I do think Google’s use of computational photography to produce high-quality images gives it an edge over Apple.

Some of this involves long-standing capabilities like the Super Res Zoom feature that’s been a part of Pixel phones for years. It cleans up digital zooms so that they don’t have the noise and fuzziness that can creep into a shot the closer you zoom in. I’ve also been impressed by features like Best Take, where the Pixel uses multiple exposures in group shots to make sure everyone’s looking their best.

I’d especially like to see Apple try its hand at a version of Pixel camera features, such as Add Me or Camera Coach. Add Me, debuting with 2024’s Pixel 9 release, lets you insert yourself into group photos you take, using AR overlays to show you where to stand and then stitching together the photos by tapping into AI. My results with Add Me on Pixel phones tended to be hit-or-miss — often, the final output depends heavily on who you hand the camera phone off to — but I bet Apple could make the process a little bit more foolproof.

Similarly, the Pixel 10’s Camera Coach feature isn’t flawless. But I like the concept behind it, as Camera Coach uses the phone’s Gemini assistant to make real-time suggestions on how to take a better shot. Once Apple gets its act together with Siri — and more on that in a bit — this is something the iPhone could easily offer.

A Pixel Screenshots-style app for the iPhone

I take a lot of screenshots on my phone — sometimes to preserve information I want to remember, sometimes to chronicle how-to steps for an article. And when I use a Pixel phone, I like that there’s an app that lets me stay on top of those screenshots, rather than letting them live unsorted on my camera roll.

I’m speaking of the Pixel Screenshots app, introduced with the Pixel 9, that collects all the screenshots you’ve captured. But it also lets you do more than that, like set reminders if there’s a specific action you want to take that’s related to that screenshot (even if it’s something as basic as “remind me to enter this recipe I’ve found into my database of recipes when I have more time.”) You can group screenshots into collections, too — handy for keeping those how-to screenshots in one place.

My favorite part of the Screenshots app is that those screenshots are now searchable — as in, the Pixel’s on-board smarts allow you to search for screenshots based on the information they contain. It saves me the trouble of having to remember when I captured a particular screenshot by just bringing up what I’m looking for, when I want it.

I feel like Apple is taking steps in this direction by expanding Visual Intelligence in iOS 26 to work with screenshots — adding calendar entries based on times and dates in a screenshot, translating words in a screenshot and running web searches on objects included in a screenshot. Cataloging the contents of those screenshots in a single app feels like the next natural step in Visual Intelligence’s evolution.

A smarter Siri that works across apps

I don’t have to tell you that Siri needs to get a lot smarter, a lot faster. But if you’ve had a chance to use the Gemini Assistant on any recent Android flagship, you know how far behind Apple is when it comes to a truly intelligent assistant.

Hopefully, the iOS 26.4 update and its rumored updates to Siri will get Apple back in the game, though I don’t think it would be reasonable to expect Apple to catch up with Android with just one software update. If Apple is truly serious about making a go of Apple Intelligence and its suite of AI tools, it would be wise to work toward what Samsung currently offers with its cross-app actions through Galaxy AI.

Samsung introduced cross-app actions just about a year ago, and they really show off what on-device AI can offer, even to an AI skeptic like myself. With this feature, you can issue one command to your on-device assistant — “find me a nearby BBQ joint and text the address to my good pal Jason,” for example — and your assistant carries out that task across multiple apps. There’s no need for repeated commands or clarifications — just tell the assistant what you want done, and it goes and carries out the multi-step task.

Outside of some of the camera features mentioned above, this is probably the Android capability I miss the most when I’m back in my familiar iPhone terrain. And it’s something Apple needs to adapt on its own sooner rather than later.

Despite some bumps in the road for its AI-driven features on the consumer side, Apple’s not slowing down on integrating the technology into its products. Today the company announced the latest update to its Xcode developer tool, which brings support for agentic AI coding.

Adding the agentic model opens up features like the ability for these AI models to get even deeper access to and more power with your projects. For example, the agents can look at and parse your project’s file structure to get more information, or even test and build the project all by itself. They’ll also have access to the latest documentation, allowing them to take advantage of the most recent APIs. Perhaps most impressively, these tools continue to iterate, repeatedly testing, verifying, and fixing errors until the project builds successfully.

This feature builds on top of the existing intelligence-powered tools and integrations that Apple introduced in Xcode 26 last year. Out of the box, Xcode 26.3 has built-in support for Claude Agent and ChatGPT’s Codex, allowing users to log in with their accounts or API tokens. But because this system is underpinned by Model Context Protocol (MCP), any other agent that supports the open standard can be integrated as well.

Xcode 26.3’s release candidate is available for download today.

Go to the podcast page.

Six Colors subscriber Mihir writes in with a Photos question:

How do I delete just the RAW file in a RAW+JPEG pair from my photos library on my iPad or my iPhone?

The short answer: you can’t. Not directly, anyway. And it’s not just an iOS or iPadOS limitation—macOS won’t let you do it either.

I can understand why Mihir asks. An image in RAW format can occupy several times the amount of storage as a JPEG equivalent. This has to do with the nature of the image being stored, as I explain below.

There are good reasons to capture as RAW and good reasons to discard those formats later. I’ll go through the background of RAW, and then provide a workaround to Apple’s missing piece.

Pre-post-processed camera sensor data

The RAW format used by digital cameras is often capitalized as RAW, but it’s not an acronym, nor is it a format in the traditional sense.

RAW means the file contains “raw,” or unprocessed, sensor data from your camera. To produce a JPEG, TIFF, or other format, a digital camera—including your iPhone—performs post-processing to produce an image that’s immediately usable. This can involve making significant changes to dynamic range and white balance, or even combining multiple images as a form of computational photography, as Apple does with iPhone photos.

This makes RAW the digital equivalent of a film negative: it’s typically larger than a post-processed file, and contains information that hasn’t yet been shaved down or squeezed into a presentable output. This gives you more flexibility when editing, but it requires processing to be usable for design, printing, or sharing.

Many cameras let you set a RAW export that includes a JPEG preview usable on its own. The JPEG is the best post-processed output from the RAW, and was originally provided because desktop (and later mobile) software didn’t support RAW or didn’t always keep up to date. Without the JPEG, importing the RAW file by itself would have been much less useful.

There’s no single RAW standard—Canon, Nikon, Sony, and others each have their own proprietary versions. It has become common to write “raw” in all caps, probably to distinguish it from the adjective form.

Because the information comes more or less directly from sensors without intermediate steps, it contains much more data that appears like noise, as the variation between adjacent sensors is retained rather than smoothed away. So even for RAW formats that compress data—not all do—the files will be larger than final images intended for viewing or printing. RAW will always be much larger than a corresponding JPEG file, as JPEG is lossy by nature, and discards some information even when you’re using the maximum quality setting.

After camera makers began supplying RAW output, often requiring apps they released to support it, photo-management and image-editing tools added RAW processing filters to meet the needs of digital photographers. Every professional app supports importing RAW, including Photoshop, Lightroom, Pixelmator Pro, Capture One, and DxO PhotoLab. And Photos!

Image-editing apps generally treat RAW as an import format: you view a preview, then apply changes before it is imported into an editing environment where you can work on the resulting image. Photo-management apps with built-in editing tools, like Photos and Lightroom, typically retain the original RAW image, and allow you to apply modifications on top. This provides much more flexibility in achieving your desired outcome.

One image unit, indivisible

When you import RAW+JPEG pairs into Photos, Apple treats them as a single, indivisible unit. You can choose which version to use as the basis for editing (Image: Use RAW as Original or Use JPEG as Original), but you cannot discard one half of the pair while keeping the other. Delete the image, and both files are thrown away.

Apple built Photos around a lossless workflow. This means that the original file that’s imported isn’t modified—changes are layered on top and previewed, and can be reverted back to the source image. You’d think it might engineer an override in a case like this, but apparently not.

If you need to reclaim the storage space those RAW files occupy, it’s only possible on a Mac, and it requires exporting, deleting, and re-importing.

Follow these steps if you haven’t made any modifications that you want to keep for any or all of your RAW+JPEG pairs:

1. Select the images you want to retain in JPEG format.
2. Choose File: Export: Export Unmodified Originals. In the export dialog, enable IPTC as XMP—this creates a sidecar file containing your metadata (titles, keywords, locations, descriptions, etc.). Without that, you’ll lose any metadata you added.
3. Choose a destination and click Export.
4. In the resulting folder, each RAW+JPEG file is represented by three files: the RAW file, the JPEG image, and an XMP sidecar.
5. Delete the RAW file or files from that folder.¹ (If you don’t, Photos treats the two as a pair and merges them when re-importing.)
6. Back in Photos, delete the original RAW+JPEG pairs. These are moved to the Recently Deleted album (see below).
7. Reimport the folder containing just the JPEG and XMP sidecar. Photos will apply metadata from the sidecar file automatically.
8. Delete the folder to free up space.

Of course, you can use the same process to jettison the JPEG and retain the RAW-formatted file.

When you delete files, if you’re sure that you have all the backups you need, you can click the Recently Deleted album in the Photos sidebar, authenticate if prompted, and click Delete All. (Or select images and click Delete X Items.) This removes the images from your Mac, iCloud Photos, and all linked devices immediately and forever. Use wisely!

Now, I noted above that this works for images that you haven’t modified in Photos. As part of its lossless workflow, exporting unmodified originals means you lose any changes unless you follow these steps:

1. Before step 5 above, return to each modified image in Photos.
2. The re-imported JPEG image should appear next to the RAW+JPEG file, because of the timestamp, which is preserved from the XMP data. Select the RAW+JPEG file, and press Command-Shift-C (Image: Copy Edits). This copies any modifications.
3. Now select the re-imported JPEG, and press Command-Shift-V (Image: Paste Edits).² This applies those changes.
4. Proceed to delete the original RAW+JPEG file.

Because of how iCloud Photos syncs images, you may want to delete all the images you intended to first, and make sure those images have moved to the Recently Deleted folder on your devices before you re-import them.

While Mihir specifically asked about iOS and iPadOS, the export-delete-reimport workflow requires the Finder and file management capabilities that only macOS provides.

For more expert advice on Photos, you should obtain a copy of Jason Snell’s Take Control of Photos, which addresses all of the app’s features and vagaries.

A feature request, not a bug

People have been asking Apple to add a “split RAW+JPEG pair” or “delete RAW only” feature for many years, and the company hasn’t budged, likely because of its focus on lossless workflows.

In the meantime, if you find storing RAW+JPEG is taking you too close to a full volume, you could shoot RAW only on your camera, and let Photos generate a JPEG preview. If you want to convert to JPEG, you can export it from the RAW file and re-import it. Or you might switch between RAW+JPEG, RAW, and JPEG shooting profiles on your camera, as many support user-defined modes that include output formats.

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

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As was foretold (in last quarter’s corporate guidance), on Thursday Apple reported its biggest quarter ever. The holiday quarters are always Apple’s biggest, and this was no exception. It offered the most revenue ($143.8B) and most iPhone revenue ($85.3B) of any financial quarter in Apple’s history.

Suffice it to say that the iPhone 17 family is a hit.

“This is the strongest iPhone lineup we’ve ever had, and by far the most popular,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said during his conference call with analysts. As for the quarter itself? “It exceeded our expectations, to say the least.” Spoken like a man whose most popular product, the one vital to his company’s existence, grew 23% from the year-ago quarter.

Even more interesting, though, is Apple’s suggestion that it’s still selling the iPhone 17 about as fast as it can make them—or to be more specific, about as fast as TSMC can make cutting-edge 3nm chips to power them, per Cook:

We exited the December quarter with very lean channel inventory due to that staggering level of demand, and based on that, we’re in a supply chase mode to meet the very high levels of customer demand. We are currently constrained, and at this point, it’s difficult to predict when supply and demand will balance. The constraints that we have are driven by the availability of the advanced nodes that our SOCs are produced on, and at this time, we’re seeing less flexibility in the supply chain than normal, partly because of our increased demand that I just spoke about.

Those details are really interesting. Back during the height of the pandemic, sales were constrained because Apple lacked access to “legacy nodes”—chips made on older processes for stuff like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. That is definitely not the case now, when it’s the “advanced nodes” of 3nm chips at TSMC that are just not being built fast enough because demand was much higher than Apple expected.

This also extends a long-standing story that the Chinese market really likes a new-looking iPhone. Overall, Apple’s revenue was up 38% in China. Cook said that traffic in Chinese Apple Stores grew by “strong double digits,” and cited surveys that said the iPad was the top-selling tablet in urban China and the MacBook Air and Mac mini were the top-selling laptop and desktop in the last quarter in urban China. Cook, a longtime proponent of Apple’s business in China, seems thrilled.

Department of the Tough Compare

Mac revenue was down 7% in the quarter, the poorest performance of all Apple’s categories. But it’s hard to be that down about the results, because not only did the Mac still generate $8.4B in revenue and reach an all-time high in its overall installed base, but this was all happening in a quarter that is the proverbial “tough compare”—since Apple released the M4 MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac in the year-ago quarter, and only the low-end M5 MacBook Pro in this quarter.

Full credit to analyst Michael Ng of Goldman Sachs for the most creative way possible of trying to get Apple to reveal its future product strategies: Ng asked Apple CFO Kevan Parekh if there would be any tough comparisons due in the upcoming quarter, to which Parekh replied, “There’s nothing that rises to that kind of color that we’d outline in the outlook.”

Let me translate this for you: Ng is wondering if, perhaps, Apple is going to release some nice new Macs this quarter that will mean that it’s not a “tough compare” versus Q2 of 2025. Parekh replied by essentially pointing at his previous statement and saying that the dog did not, in fact, bark.

Look, we know there will be new MacBook Pros eventually, and probably pretty soon. Maybe they’ll help with Q2 Mac sales, though at this point they’d only be able to contribute for about half of the quarter. Still, a gold star to Ng for trying to logic his way into getting Parekh to reveal things about future product releases.

The storm clouds of financial headwinds… are called off

Apple posted a company gross margin of 48.2%, based on a 40.7% products margin and an astounding 76.5% margin on services. This was actually above the high end of Apple’s previous guidance on margin. This fact left several analysts on the call flabbergasted, none more so than Ben Reitzes of Mellius:

You know, I’m pretty shocked. I got to hand it to you, Tim, that you’re able to do 48% to 49%. What’s really going on there? How are you doing that with… the [memory] prices?

Parekh’s answer was basically that Apple tended to sell more of its high-margin products than its lower-margin ones during the quarter, which pushed margin up. What really impressed the analysts was his insistence that even this upcoming quarter, where memory price issues are expected to become even more serious, Apple says it feels “pretty good” about its guidance to another 48% to 49% margin quarter.

Looking more broadly at Apple’s forecast, the company says the second quarter should offer 13% to 16% growth versus the year-ago quarter. Considering that the Q2 2025 revenue number was $95.4B, this means Apple expects to generate somewhere between $108B and $111B in revenue next quarter. That’s just a staggering number, because it suggests that even Apple’s boring quarters are going to routinely generate more than $100B in revenue. (For the record, last year’s fourth quarter was the first non-holiday quarter with more than $100B in Apple revenue. This would be the second. There may be no going back.)

Odds and ends

A few other notes about the numbers and call before I wrap it up:

• The iPad, bolstered by the A16 base iPad and the M5 iPad Pro, was up 6%.

• Wearables was down 2%, marking 10 straight quarters of year-over-year decline. (I suspect the softness in this category is why Apple is reportedly planning on launching several new home-based products, including a screen-based controller and a security camera.) However, here’s an interesting tidbit: Apple said it couldn’t make AirPods Pro 3 fast enough to meet demand, and that it believes the category would have grown had it not been for that supply constraint.

• Forget profits and revenues. “This quarter set an all-time record for operating cash flow, coming in at $53.9 billion,” Parekh reported. Accounting nerds, this is your stand up and cheer moment. The cash must flow!

• Everyone wants to know more about Apple’s AI deal with Google, but Apple’s not talking. “We aren’t going to provide any details on our arrangement and collaboration with Google,” Parekh said. Cook emphasized that it should be thought of “as a collaboration,” rather than Google just riding in and saving Apple’s bacon. When Ben Reitzes of Mellius tried to get more out of Cook, only to be stonewalled, he replied: “Bummer. Okay, I tried,” he said. “You did,” the CEO replied through a squall of laughter.

I got a chance to watch Apple’s new “Top Dogs” immersive documentary this week before its release Friday. It’s about 30 minutes total split into two 15-minute episodes, and takes you behind the scenes (and out on the main floor) at the world-famous Crufts dog show.

It’s a pretty good example of all the issue that creators of immersive video are still working out. There are some amazing moments in “Top Dogs,” mostly when you’re watching a dog and their handler close up, or when you’re in the arena in Birmingham, England, watching the dog show. Unfortunately, there are also a bunch of pretty shaky moments: distracting quick cuts, some vertigo-generating dramatic camera moves, and a reliance (albeit understandable) on non-immersive footage in order to make the narrative make sense despite the lack of the right immersive camera angle.

The more I watch immersive content, the more I realize that it requires patience to help immerse you in the scene. “Top Dogs” lacks patience, even when it pads the main dog-show narrative with side quests to Flyball and agility competitions. I found myself wanting to watch Flyball or agility for a while, just to understand how it worked, but the documentary isn’t really interested in lingering on anything.

So, does “Top Dogs” have some fun fluffy dog action? Yes! I enjoyed watching some remarkable speciments of various dog breeds, even if there was not a single Boxer in sight. But as an immersive project, I found it more representative of a style that’s probably not the right way forward for this style of video.

Go to the linked site.

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Every quarter after releasing financial results, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh hop on a conference call with analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and maybe brag a little about setting an all-time record or two. This is Six Colors’s transcript of the call for January 29, 2026.

Tim Cook’s opening statement

Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. I am proud to say that we just had a quarter for the record books. We are reporting our best ever quarter, with $143.8 billion in revenue, up 16% from a year ago and exceeding our expectations. The demand for iPhone was simply staggering, with revenue growing 23% year-over-year and all-time records across every geographic segment.

Services set an all-time revenue record as well, up 14% from a year ago, and EPS reached an all-time record of $2.84, growing a robust 19% year-over-year. We set all-time revenue records in the Americas, Europe, Japan, and rest of Asia Pacific, and grew in the vast majority of markets we track. We continued to gain momentum in emerging markets, which includes India, where we saw strong double-digit revenue growth. Greater China also grew 38% year-over-year, driven by iPhone, which had record upgraders and double-digit growth on switchers.

Apple’s December quarter results underscore our relentless commitment to innovation, to our customers, and to our mission to build the best products and services in the world. Now I’d like to take a closer look at results from across our lineup, beginning with iPhone.

As I mentioned earlier, it was a fantastic quarter for iPhone, with an all-time revenue record of $85.3 billion, up 23% year-over-year. This is the strongest iPhone lineup we’ve ever had, and by far the most popular. Throughout the quarter, customer enthusiasm for iPhone was simply extraordinary. Users were incredibly excited about everything [it] enables them to do. iPhone 17 Pro and 17 Pro Max deliver the ultimate iPhone experience. They feature the best-ever performance and battery life on an iPhone, the most advanced camera system, and a striking design. iPhone Air, our slimmest and lightest smartphone yet, packs powerful capabilities into an ultra-slim and sleek design. An iPhone 17 is a truly fantastic upgrade at an incredible value.

Turning to Mac, revenue was $8.4 billion for the December quarter. We were pleased to see the Mac install base reach another all-time high, with nearly half of customers who purchased a Mac being new to the product. The M5-powered 14-inch MacBook Pro takes a huge leap in AI performance thanks to the next-generation GPU architecture and a faster Neural Engine. From the world’s most popular laptop for consumers and businesses in MacBook Air to the small and spectacular Mac Mini, every Mac in our lineup has something special to offer users and with the recently released Apple Creator Studio—available across Mac, iPad and iPhone—creators have more tools at their fingertips to make incredible music or turn their devices into a video production studio.

Meanwhile, iPad saw December quarter revenue of $8.6 billion, up 6% from a year ago, with an all-time record for upgraders. We are proud to have our strongest lineup ever, from iPad powered by A16, which is proving to be incredibly popular; to iPad Air, with its amazing versatility; to the unbelievably powerful M5 iPad Pro, with its remarkably thin and light design. It’s no wonder that iPad continued to be the most popular tablet in the world.

Across Wearables, Home and Accessories, revenue was $11.5 billion. With Apple Watch Ultra 3 and Apple Watch Series 11, users are tapping into a comprehensive set of health and wellness features to help them meet their health goals. In a recent survey, we see an increasing number of users telling us they’re wearing their watch to sleep, which allows them to check their sleep scores each morning and find ways to improve their sleep quality. And Apple Watch alerts are enabling important conversations between users and their doctors regarding potential signs of hypertension. These are just some of the many ways that Watch is helping people live healthier lives.

The response to AirPods Pro 3 has been amazing. Customers are raving about the rich, immersive sound quality, the unmatched level of active noise cancellation, and the noticeably improved comfort that makes them effortless to wear. Features like live translation are also changing the way people can communicate by helping users connect across languages in real time and making everyday conversations feel more natural and accessible. Together these innovations create an experience that feels both powerful and personal, and the enthusiasm we are seeing reflects just how strongly AirPods Pro 3 are resonating with customers.

Across our product categories, we are seeing very high levels of customer satisfaction, and we are proud to report that we have a new record for our installed base, with more than 2.5 billion active devices. During the quarter, we were excited to see that the majority of users on enabled iPhones are actively leveraging the power of Apple Intelligence. Since the launch of Apple Intelligence, we’ve introduced dozens of features, including Writing Tools and Clean Up, and made it available in 15 languages. These AI experiences are personal, private, integrated across our platforms, and relevant to what our users do every day. We are bringing intelligence to more of what people already love about our products, so we can make every experience even more capable and effortless.

One of our most popular features is Visual Intelligence, which helps users learn and do more than ever with the content on their iPhone screen, making it faster to search, take action, and answer questions across their apps. And as I touched on earlier, we are hearing powerful stories of people using live translation to communicate seamlessly across languages.

And these are just some of the many powerful AI features that are enabling our users to do remarkable things with our products, which are far and away the best platforms in the world for AI. That’s in no small part because of the extraordinary power and performance of Apple silicon. Building on our efforts in the AI space, we are also collaborating with Google to develop the next generation of Apple Foundation Models. This will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year. We’re incredibly excited for what’s to come with so many new experiences to unlock.

Turning to Services, we achieved an all-time revenue record of $30 billion, 14% higher from a year ago. Services also set all-time revenue records in both developed and emerging markets. Apple TV has seen fantastic momentum, with December seeing a 36% increase in viewership over the previous year. It’s no wonder, with shows like “Pluribus,” which are creating landmark cultural moments that audiences are loving. Anticipation is building for upcoming new productions like “Cape Fear” from Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese, and we are thrilled to announce that “Ted Lasso” will be returning for a fourth season this summer.

Six years since launch, we’re excited by the growing enthusiasm viewers have for Apple TV, and we are grateful for the accolades that have followed, most recently at the Critics’ Choice and Golden Globe Awards. To date, Apple TV productions have earned more than 650 wins and more than 3,200 nominations, including a recently announced Oscar nomination for Best Picture for F1: The Movie.

And speaking of F1, we’re also approaching the start of a new Formula 1 season, and for F1 fans in the U.S., Apple TV will be the place to watch every practice, qualifying, sprint, and Grand Prix. MLS fans will also be able to watch every regular and postseason game with their Apple TV subscription this year, and we’re looking forward to kick off in the coming weeks.

Looking back, 2025 was a fantastic year for services as we rolled out amazing new features and broke records. Apple Music climbed to all-time highs in both listenership and new subscriber growth. Apple Pay eliminated more than $1 billion in fraud for our partners last year, and we’ve made it available in more markets than ever before. And last year, we welcomed more than 850 million users every week on average to the App Store, the world’s safest and most innovative app marketplace. Developers have now earned more than $550 billion on our platform since 2008.

In retail, we continue to bring a magical experience to our customers all around the world, and we were thrilled to have our best-ever results in retail during the quarter. We were excited to open our fifth store in India in December and have plans to open another store in Mumbai soon.

Wherever we are, we see ourselves as part of a larger whole. That’s why we show up with our values in everything we do. That means working with partners in places like Vietnam to bring more clean water to rural areas. It means celebrating graduations of new classes of innovators from our developer academies in places such as Brazil, Indonesia, and South Korea. It means 3D printing titanium cases for Apple Watch using recycled materials so that they’re better for the planet without compromising quality. And so much more.

We’re especially proud of the work we’re doing to support American innovation. Last year, we committed to invest $600 billion over four years in vital industries like advanced manufacturing, silicon engineering, and artificial intelligence. As we’re building on our long-standing investments in America, we’re supporting nearly half a million jobs with thousands of suppliers across all 50 states. In the years since we made our initial commitment, we’re making great progress. Today we’re shipping servers to power Apple Intelligence from our new manufacturing facility in Houston. Through our Advanced Manufacturing Program, we’re working with Corning in Kentucky to make 100% of cover glass for iPhone and Apple Watch. We’re working with Micron, which broke ground on a new advanced chip packaging and test facility, and we continue to advance the development of an end-to-end silicon supply chain across the country, sourcing 20 billion U.S. chips in 2025.

Through our Apple Manufacturing Academy in Detroit, we’re already training American businesses and innovators on the latest smart manufacturing and artificial intelligence techniques. Six months since opening, the Academy is already making an enormously positive impact for businesses working alongside Apple engineers to drive productivity, efficiency, and quality in their supply chains.

As I said at the beginning of my remarks, this was, in so many ways, a remarkable quarter for Apple, and we’re excited for all the opportunities we’ll have in the year ahead to deliver innovations that have never been seen before and enrich the lives of users every step of the way. With so much to look forward to in the weeks and months ahead, I have every confidence that our best work is yet to come. With that, I’ll turn it over to Kevan.

Kevan Parekh’s opening remarks

Thanks Tim, and good afternoon everyone. Our revenue of $143.8 billion was up 16% year-over-year, our best quarter ever. Across the world, we set all-time revenue records in both developed and emerging markets, and we saw double-digit growth year-over-year across a majority of the markets we track, including the U.S., Latin America, Western Europe, Greater China, India, and Japan. in South Asia. Products revenue was $113.7 billion, up 16% year-over-year, driven by double-digit growth in iPhone, setting a new all-time record. And as Tim mentioned, thanks to our strong levels of customer loyalty and satisfaction, our install base of active devices has now surpassed 2.5 billion, reaching another all-time high across all product categories and geographic segments.

Services revenue was 30 billion dollars, up 14% year-over-year. This performance continues to be broad-based, with double-digit growth in almost every market we track. We also reached all-time revenue records for advertising, cloud services, music, and payment services, with December supporter records on the App Store and video.

Company gross margin was at 48.2%, above the high end of our guidance range and up 100 basis points sequentially, driven by favorable mix and leverage. Products gross margin was 40.7%, up 450 basis points sequentially, driven by favorable mix and leverage. Services gross margin was 76.5%, up 120 basis points sequentially, driven by mix.

Operating expenses landed at $18.4 billion, up 19% year-over-year. This was within the range we provided, and driven by increased investment in R&D. Net income was $42.1 billion and diluted earnings per share was $2.84, up 19% year-over-year. Both net income and diluted EPS were all-time records, and these incredibly strong business results drove an all-time record for operating cash flow, coming in at $53.9 billion.

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

iPhone revenue was $85.3 billion, up 23% year-over-year, driven by the iPhone 17 family. iPhone saw strength around the world, reaching all-time revenue records in many of the markets we track, including the U.S., Greater China, Latin America, Western Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and South Asia, as well as a December quarter record in India. The iPhone Active installed base grew to an all-time high and set a new all-time record for upgraders in aggregate and across many countries, including the U.S., China mainland, Japan, and India. According to a recent survey from World Panel, iPhone was a top-selling model in the U.S., urban China, the U.K., Australia, and Japan. Customers are loving the latest iPhone lineup. The latest customer satisfaction for the iPhone 17 family in the U.S. was measured at 99 percent by 451 Research.

Mac revenue was $8.4 billion, down 7 percent year over year. As we described in the last call, we faced a very difficult compare against the M4 MacBook Pro, Mac Mini, and iMac launches in the year-ago quarter. Despite this difficult compare, we continued to see growth in several emerging markets, including Brazil, India, Malaysia, Vietnam, and more. And, as Tim mentioned earlier, the Mac installed base reached another all-time high, with nearly half of the customers who purchased a Mac being new to the product. And in the U.S., customer satisfaction for Mac was measured at 97%.

iPad revenue was $8.6 billion, up up 6% year over year, driven by the M5-powered iPad Pro and the A16-powered iPad. We continued to add new users to the iPad. In fact, over half the customers who purchased an iPad during the quarter were new to the product. This helped the iPad installed base to reach an all-time high, and we also reached an all-time high for upgraders. Based on the latest reports from 451 Research, customer satisfaction was 98% in the U.S.

Wearables, Home, and Accessories revenue was $11.5 billion, down 2% year-over-year. During the quarter, we experienced constraints on the AirPods Pro 3, and we believe the overall category would have grown had it not been for these constraints. The wearables installed base reached a new all-time high, with over half of customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter being new to the product. And in the U.S., customer satisfaction was recently reported at 96%. Our services revenue reached an all-time high of $30 billion, up 14% year over year. As we said earlier, we had all-time revenue records on advertising, music, payment services, and cloud services, where we saw a double-digit growth on paid subscribers. We continue to be optimistic about the future of our services business. With our installed base of over 2-1/2 billion active devices, we have an incredibly strong foundation for new growth opportunities. We saw increased customer engagement across our service offerings, with both transacting and paid accounts reaching all-time highs in the quarter. And we continue to improve the quality and expand the breadth of our services offerings, from new wallet features like Digital ID, which provides a way for users to create an ID in wallet using information from their U.S. passport, to additional ads coming to search in the App Store, which provides advertisers more ways to drive downloads from search.

Turning now to Enterprise, organizations are continuing to expand their fleet of Apple devices to drive productivity while remaining secure. Snowflake has deployed over 9,000 Mac devices company-wide, establishing Mac as a primary laptop across all business units, resulting in increased performance and a reduction in support tickets. AstraZeneca is rolling out over 5,000 M5-powered iPad Pros to its pharmaceutical sales team to take advantage of AI capabilities, including Apple Intelligence, while meeting with clinicians daily. And in Mexico, Coppell, the country’s largest domestic retailer, recently added MacBook Air in addition to a growing fleet of over 10,000 iPad devices.

Let’s turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $145 billion in cash and marketable securities. We had $2.2 billion of debt maturities, and decreased commercial paper by $6 billion, resulting in $91 billion in total debt. Therefore, at the end of the quarter, net cash was $54 billion. During the quarter, we returned nearly $32 billion to shareholders. This included $3.9 billion in dividends and equivalents, and $25 billion through open-market repurchases of 93 million Apple shares.

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

We expect our March quarter total company revenue to grow by 13% to 16% year-over-year. which comprehends our best estimates of constrained iPhone supply during the quarter. We expect Services revenue to grow at a year-over-year rate similar to what we’ve reported in the December quarter. We expect gross margin to be between 48% and 49%. We expect operating expenses to be between $18.4 billion and $18.7 billion, which is at a similar level to what we reported in the December quarter, and driven by higher R&D on a year-over-year basis. We expect OI&E to be around $100 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 17.5%.

Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of 26 cents per share of common stock payable on February 12, 2026 to shareholders of record as of February 9, 2026. With that, let’s open to call the questions.

Analyst Q&A

Amit Daryanani, Evercore: You know, there’s a lot of focus on the impact of memory to a host of companies, and I’d love to kind of get your perspective. When you folks are guiding gross margins up into the March quarter, just talk about, you know, A, your comfort in securing the bids that you need for shipment, and B, how do we think about memory inflation flowing through Apple’s model over time?

Tim Cook: Yeah, Amit, hi, it’s Tim. Let me back up a bit and talk about the constraints that Kevan referred to in his remarks, and memory, and try to get both of these out at once. First of all, we were thrilled with the customer response on the latest iPhone lineup. It exceeded our expectations, to say the least, and, you know, iPhone grew 23%. What the result of that was, was that we exited the December quarter with very lean channel inventory due to that staggering level of demand, and based on that, we’re in a supply chase mode to meet the very high levels of customer demand. We are currently constrained, and at this point it’s difficult to predict when supply and demand will balance. The constraints that we have are driven by the availability of the advanced nodes that our SOCs are produced on, and at this time we’re seeing less flexibility in the supply chain than normal, partly because of our increased demand that I just spoke about.

From a memory point of view, to answer your question, memory had a minimal impact on the Q1, so the December quarter gross margin. We do expect it to be a bit more of an impact to the Q2 gross margin, and that was comprehended in the outlook of 48% to 49% that Kevan gave earlier. Beyond Q2, we don’t obviously provide outlooks beyond the current quarter, but we do continue to see market pricing for memory increasing significantly. As always, we’ll look at a range of options to deal with that. So hopefully that gives you the full view.

Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Thank you, and I appreciate all the clarity on that Tim. Maybe the second question I have for you is, maybe just touch on the China strength you folks had? I think this is very close to all-time high revenues we’ve had in China. What’s driving the strength over here and just part of the durability of the growth rate we saw in the December quarter would be helpful to understand.

Tim Cook: Sure. Greater China was up 38% year-on-year. It was driven by iPhone, where we set an all-time revenue record. So it was the best iPhone quarter in history in Greater China. It’s driven by the customer enthusiasm for the iPhone 17 lineup, and I would tell you that during the quarter, traffic in our stores in China grew by strong double digits year over year. It was a terrific quarter. Our installed base reached an all-time high in both greater China and mainland China, and we set an all-time record for the upgraders, and we saw strong double-digit growth on switchers. And according to a survey from World Panel, iPhones were the top three smartphones in urban China during the quarter. And it’s really driven primarily by the product strength and the customer response to the product strength.

We do see on non-iPhone products, that the majority of customers that are buying a Mac, an iPad, a Watch, are still new to that product. So that’s a very good sign for us, and if you look at iPad, on that same survey, iPad was the top tablet model in urban China. And according to CounterPoint, the MacBook Air was the top selling laptop model and Mac Mini was the top selling desktop model in the December quarter. So overall, great quarter in China. We could not be more happy with it.

Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Tim, congrats on announcing the partnership with Google and we’re all excited to see what you bring to market later this year. When I think about your AI initiatives, it’s clear there are added costs associated with that. We’re obviously seeing that flow through an OpEx. Can you help us understand maybe what the revenue upside potential that exists with AI? I mean, many of your competitors have already integrated AI into their devices, and it’s just not clear yet what incremental monetization they’re seeing because of AI. But you’re always disciplined with investing. You obviously have a differentiated product. So how do you monetize AI, and what’s the timeline to realizing that ROI?

Tim Cook: Well, let me just say that we’re bringing intelligence to more of what people love and we’re integrating it across the operating system in a personal and private way, and I think that by doing so, it creates great value, and that opens up a range of opportunities across our products and services. And we’re very happy with the collaboration with Google as well, I should add.

Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Now that you have kind of more time and data to evaluate this cycle, can you maybe help us understand what the primary factors are driving strength in the iPhone? I’m sure there’s a number of factors, but if you had to point to one or two, just what would they be and how sustainable do you think those are?

Tim Cook: I think it’s different for different cohorts of where people are coming from and the device that they have. But it’s a combination of things, always, that make the products sing. It’s the display, it’s the camera, it’s the performance, it’s the new selfie camera, it’s the design—the design is beloved—and so it’s all of these things that come together at once and are producing a very strong product cycle as witnessed by our December quarter results.

Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs It was encouraging to hear about the revenue growth outlook of 13% to 16% for the March quarter. I was just wondering if you could talk about any comps that we should be particularly aware of as we kind of think about each of the product categories. I know last year, you guys had MacBook Air with M4, the iPhone 16e, the iPad with A16, and the iPad Air with M3. So just wanted to ask if those things would create tough comps, or is it just less of an issue just given the new product outlook?

Kevan Parekh: Yeah, Mike. It’s Kevan. How are you? Thanks for the question. Yeah, I wouldn’t say there’s any particular comp issue that we’d note. As you recall, last quarter, we talked about the difficult comparison we had on Mac, but there’s nothing that rises to that kind of color that we’d outline in the outlook, and so I think it’s just continuation of the strong cycle we’re seeing, subject to the constraints that I had mentioned in the prepared remarks and that Tim alluded to a little earlier, as well.

Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs And, just on Services, advertising strong in the quarter, I wanted to ask about some of the new growth opportunities in advertising. I know you guys are doing the new ad slots in the App Store. Maybe you could just talk a little bit about that, and then any plans to do more in advertising across other products like Maps or TV.

Kevan Parekh: Sure, Michael, what I’d say just if I step back in general, I think as we outlined, we saw really good broad-based performance in our Services business. So ranging from all-time records and advertising, music, payment services, and cloud services. So I think we see really good opportunities across a lot of our service categories, and we continue to add new service offerings. We talked about what we added to the Wallet, like digital ID, and you referenced the additional ads coming in the search in the App Store, which we are excited about. It provides advertisers more ways to be discovered, and so I think we’ll continue to look for ways to expand opportunities to add value to users and also create opportunities for Apple. I think as we talked about, we crossed a really significant milestone at 2.5 billion active devices, so we really feel excited about the opportunity that provides for our services business as well.

Ben Reitzes, Mellius: Hey, guys. How are you?

Tim Cook: Hi, Ben.

Ben Reitzes, Mellius: Hey, Tim. First question is on Google partnership again. I wanted to understand how you came to that decision with regard to the AI and Siri in particular and if there’s an opportunity for you guys to share in revenue too with that partnership like you do in search.

Tim Cook: Yeah, we basically determined that Google’s AI technology would provide the most capable foundation for AFM (Apple Foundation Models), and we believe that we can unlock a lot of experiences and innovate in a key way due to the collaboration. We’ll continue to run on the device and run in Private Cloud Compute and maintain our industry-leading privacy standards in doing so. In terms of the arrangement with Google, we’re not releasing the details of that.

Ben Reitzes, Mellius: Bummer. Okay. I tried.

Tim Cook: [Laughs.] You did.

Ben Reitzes, Mellius: So, yeah, you knew it would be me.

Tim Cook: [Laughs.]

Ben Reitzes, Mellius: So, the next question is on gross margin. You know, I’m pretty shocked. I got to hand it to you, Tim, that you’re able to do 48 to 49. What’s really going on there? How are you doing that with this memory, the NAND prices? Is it due to mix that there’s less hardware and more services, and services margins are going up, how are you doing it? To keep it at 48 to 49?

Kevan Parekh: Yeah, Ben, this is Kevan. How are you doing? Well, let me start maybe by just reflecting on the Q1 gross margin. I think we talked about the fact that we landed at 48.2%. So, just above the high end of the range that we provided, you know, on the last call, and I think if you look at that performance, we were up 100 basis points sequentially. We talked about the fact that we had favorable mix. As you know, when we have a good product cycle, a strong product cycle we’re seeing for iPhone, that does lend itself to a bit more favorable opportunity on the mix and leverage side. So, we’re having a strong iPhone cycle, as Tim outlined, and so that also translated itself. We talked about products sequentially went up by 450 basis points. So I think in general, I think we’re just seeing favorable mix dynamics as well. You know, services continues to contribute as well. That business is growing double digits. So that also is a contributor. And I think we looked at our guidance,we’re providing a similar range to where we reported in December, and there’s going to be a few puts and takes. You know, we do expect to see favorable mix into services. As you know, when we move from Q1 to Q2, that tends to be the case, and that’s partly offset by seasonal loss of leverage. So there’ll be puts and takes, but, again, we feel pretty good about the guide of 48 to 49%, which is similar to the range we reported in December.

David Vogt, UBS: Maybe if we could pull out a little bit, can you help us understand how you’re thinking about the overall kind of smartphone market demand, particularly given where memory prices are headed? We’ve heard some conversations with some other OEMs as well as component providers that are worried about either the availability of components, potential market weakness in terms of demand destruction, if some of the actions to offset are higher prices. I know you don’t give out looks for the full year, but how are you thinking about all of those different vectors and what that might mean for the overall smartphone market and then ultimately what that might mean for demand for iPhones as we move through the rest of this calendar year.

Tim Cook: Yeah, on the supply side, I had made comments earlier about the constraint that we are seeing in Q2, and that’s reflected in the revenue guidance that Kevan gave earlier. The constraint, as I’d mentioned, is due to the advanced node capacity, and it’s really a result of growing so well in Q1 with the 23% and having less flexibility partly due to that in the process to increase it as much as we would like to increase it. Beyond Q2, I don’t really want to comment on supply. Supply is the function of a lot of things in the industry that move around a lot, so I wouldn’t want to comment on that. And I commented before on memory pricing, and so hopefully that answers your question. Oh, in terms of smartphone demand— You know, we believe that, based on the information that we’ve got, is we gained share in the December quarter. Obviously, the market wasn’t growing at 23%, so we feel good about doing that, but I wouldn’t want to predict how the market reacts in the future. It’s very difficult to do that.

David Vogt, UBS: Got it. At the risk of not getting this answered, I’m going to follow up with: Can you maybe help us understand… you mentioned there’s a range of options that you’re looking at. How should we think about kind of like LTAs in the marketplace, is that an option as we move through the year, or is it more spot-based on a perspective particularly around memory, just trying to get a better sense for how we should think about the dynamics in the marketplace?

Tim Cook: It’s a range, and so I don’t want to get more specific than that. They’re different levers that we can push, and who knows how successful they’ll be, but there’s just a range of options.

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Tim, on Services you grew a pretty impressive 14%, and I know you said that the App Store with a record for the December quarter, but third-party data is showing a notable deceleration in App Store growth, maybe 7% of the December quarter relative to your 14% growth. I was hoping if you could maybe confirm that and secondarily, if it’s correct, what might be some of the drivers of that and what could be things that you could do to reverse that in future quarters?

Kevan Parekh: Hey, Wamsi. It’s Kevan here. Look, I think I want to reiterate the fact that during the summer quarter, we had a quarterly record on the App Store? As you know, we don’t provide specific color on how the individual services categories have done. But, again, if we step back, I think we saw, again, broad-based growth across all the different categories, also across various geographies. We had all-time records in both developed and emerging markets as well, and double-digit in both of those, too, and so I think in general, you know, we don’t provide you know the color at the detailed services level.

Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Okay, thanks, Kevan. I guess back to the memory price. I appreciate you have a range of options to address that. Historically, Apple’s not used a pricing lever unless FX markets got maybe very dislocated to prevent arbitrage or issues like that, but given some of these unprecedented moves in memory, would pricing be a lever that you would be willing to pull or push outside of everything else that you can do?

Tim Cook: Yeah, I wouldn’t want to speculate on that one.

Samik Chatterjee, JP Morgan: I’m just looking at your capital investment in the first quarter, which did moderate from the last one, and wondering if the partnership with Google on Gemini and sort of help collaboration to develop the next generation of Apple foundational models, does that have any near term sort of impact on your intent to use Apple Private Cloud? I know you emphasize sort of the role Apple private cloud plays in the long term, but are there any changes on that front through this collaboration? Any thoughts around that?

Kevan Parekh: I think this is Kevan here. I think in general, as Tim outlined, we weren’t going to provide any details on our arrangement and collaboration with Google. Just speaking of CapEx in general, as you know, we have a hybrid model for CapEx, and so I think that what happens is, our CapEx can be volatile, independent of kind of the volume of performance of our business. And as you know, our CapEx is made of several different line items that include tooling, our facilities, investments in our retail store, data centers, and on tooling and data centers, we leverage this hybrid model that I mentioned before, which we leverage a combination of first and third party capacity. So in general, it’s hard to read into the CapEx and draw any conclusions. So I think I would just say there’s gonna be some ebbs and flows in CapEx. Last year, remember, we did build out our Private Cloud Compute environment, and so we did have CapEx spending related to that in our results in December.

Samik Chatterjee, JP Morgan: You did mention product gross margin and the sort of drivers there for the product gross margin improvement. When you sort of highlighted mix as a driver, can you just sort of talk through what are the big differences in mix you’re seeing for iPhone 17 versus 16? And tariffs, tariffs coming in more favorable play a role at all, and what are you expecting for tariffs for the next quarter?

Kevan Parekh: Yeah, so there’s a few things to unpack there. So on the overall margin on product side, I think I mentioned that we had favorable mix of products and leverage. I think given the strong iPhone cycle we’re seeing, that was, I would say, probably a higher favorability than you might have seen in maybe other cycles, and as well, as you know, in Q1, typically we do see the impact of the cost structure of our new products that we launch. And in this case, we are seeing a more favorable offset from mix of products and leverage versus historical sequential changes from Q4 to Q1. On the tariff piece, we had outlined an amount of $1.4 billion for the December quarter, and we landed roughly in that range and at that level.

Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: Tim, I think you touched upon this earlier on the Gemini integration and Apple Foundation Model. How to think about the difference between Apple Foundation model functionality and third-party models? Does the Apple Foundation Model evolve to a different layer in the AI software stack? How to think about it as you partner with third-party frontier models?

Tim Cook: Yeah, Krish, you should think of it as a collaboration. And we’ll obviously independently continue to do some of our own stuff, but you should think of what is going to power the personalized version of Siri as a collaboration with Google.

Krish Sankar, TD Cowen: Got it. So, a quick follow up, just a lot of discussion on memory pricing. Given that the memory constraint or commodity scarcity is impacting both the smartphone and the PC markets, and Apple arguably having more purchasing power. Do you think this is a chance for you to increase your market share both in iPhone and Mac at the expense of competition who might have more constraints in getting access to memory?

Tim Cook: Yeah, I don’t really want to talk about kind of what has happened, and we do believe as I had shared that iPhone gained share in the December quarter, and if you look at Mac for the full calendar year of ’25, we also believe we gained share, and so we feel very good about our position.

Atif Malik, Citi: Tim, some of the industry pundits are comparing the iPhone 17 upgrade cycle to the 2020-2021 years, as some of the iPhone 12-13 users upgrade. Curious if you agree with that view, and also if you can layer on the impact from Apple Intelligence to the refresh rate.

Tim Cook: I think each iPhone cycle has its own unique characteristics, and so I wouldn’t compare it to a specific one. I think iPhone 17, the family of 17, is a unique product that brings several very compelling features in one product and it has done extremely well, and so we feel quite good about it.

Kevan Parekh: And I’ll just add to Tim’s comment that we talked about the fact that we have a large and diverse installed base of customers, and so this product has really resonated with multiple cohorts, whether you’re on older devices or newer iPhones as well. So we’ve seen really strong reaction to the product lineup.

Atif Malik, Citi: There was a lot of discussion on supply constraints, and I’m surprised that you guys are constrained on advanced packaging as you generally get your share at the big foundry. How long will these supply [constraints] impact your ability to ship through demand?

Tim Cook: It’s difficult to estimate demand when you haven’t met the demand. And so obviously we have internal estimates on that, but I don’t want to share those. But it’s very difficult. And just to be clear, it’s the advanced nodes, like three nanometer to be specific, where the latest SOCs are produced on, as to what is gating the Q2 supply. And it’s a direct result of the 23% growth and that far outstripping what we had internally estimated and having more limited flexibility in the supply chain for some period of time. But I don’t want to estimate when supply and demand will balance at this point.

Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: I’ll try and stay away from the memory question. I’m curious, and, obviously hearing a lot of focus on the China demand, but I’m curious, you also called out India, and so, can you maybe unpack some of the things that you’re seeing in the Indian market as far as iPhone traction—any kind of color on what is a very large install base in India that seems to be a good growth opportunity for Apple still?

Tim Cook: Yeah, thanks for the question. We did set a quarterly revenue record during the December quarter, and to go a little further down, we set quarterly revenue records on iPhone and Mac and iPad, and an all-time revenue record on Services. So it was a terrific quarter in India. We really like what we see there. It’s the second-largest smartphone market in the world and the fourth largest PC market. And we still have, despite very nice growth history, we have modest share there, and so we think there’s a huge opportunity for us there, and we could not be more excited about it. The other thing that I would point out is that the majority of customers that are buying iPhone and Mac and iPad and Watch are all new to that product and so it speaks very well to opportunity there.

Kevan Parekh: Yeah, and Aaron, I heard you mention the installed base. We’re seeing strong double digit growth in the install base in India as well, which is really encouraging.

Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Part of this current generation iPhone cycle is, you clearly deepened some of your own internal silicon capabilities on the device. I’m curious if we should think about that as a lever and maybe a supportive factor to gross margin that might be underappreciated? Any thoughts on where we go from here as far as continual opportunities of internalizing your own silicon.

Tim Cook: Yeah, I’ll let Kevan talk about the gross margin, but in terms of the product, which is at the heart of what we think about in the user, Apple silicon has just been a incredible game changer for us, starting with iPhone, and then on iPad, and of course the Mac as of a few years ago. And so we believe it’s a game changer and a major competitive advantage.

Kevan Parekh: Yeah, and as far as impact on gross margin, we have been, as you know, investing in core technologies like our own silicon, our own modem, and certainly while those do provide opportunities for cost savings and can be reflected in margins, they also, importantly, provide the differentiation that’s really important for our products as well, and give us more control over our roadmap. So I think there’s a lot of strategic value to it, but also we are seeing investments in our core technologies impacting gross margins in a positive way.

Richard Kramer, Arete Research: Tim, when you think about how Apple might manage AI, do you see that evolving towards more edge AI or on-device services versus cloud-based AI? And are you confident you’ve reserved sufficient data center capacity to support the widespread Siri adoption, especially given that you’re not following the other hyperscalers and sharply increasing CapEx?

Tim Cook: The answer is that we see both being important, the on-device and the Private Cloud Compute, and so we don’t see it as an either/or, we see it as a both, and we believe it’s a differentiator because of our privacy approach. In terms of, do we have enough capacity? It’s hard to estimate with precision what the demand will be. But we’ve done sort of the best job that we can do, and either have or are putting capacity in for it.

Richard Kramer, Arete Research: Okay, and you mentioned the 2.5 billion active device number, but Apple Intelligence features have only been available since the 15 Pro. So can you speak at all to roughly what portion of your iPhone or overall active device install base is now AI-capable, and has this been a factor in maybe a more gradual pace of launching wider AI services?

Kevan Parekh: Yeah, Richard, this is Kevan. You know, we don’t provide that specific number, but it is a growing number, as you can imagine, in our install base, and so we’re encouraged by the amount of devices now that are capable. But we’re not going to provide a specific figure on that today.

Richard Kramer, Arete Research: Okay, well. I had to try. Thank you.

Kevan Parekh: [Laughs.]

Company revenue was up 16% versus the year-ago quarter. iPhone and Services revenue also set all-time records. China growth was up 38% after four years of flat-to-down growth. iPad revenue was up 6% while Mac revenue was down 7% in a quiet quarter.

At 2pm Pacific/5pm Eastern, Apple will spend an hour on the phone with financial industry analysts. We’ll have our usual live transcript, followed at 5pm Pacific/8pm Eastern by our own live analysis on YouTube:

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

Apple did not disclose terms of the deal or what Q.ai’s technology will be used for, but said the startup has worked on new applications of machine learning to help devices understand whispered speech and to enhance audio in challenging environments. In a statement, [CEO Aviad] Maizels said “joining Apple opens extraordinary possibilities for pushing boundaries and realizing the full potential of what we’ve created, and we’re thrilled to bring these experiences to people everywhere.”

Maizels was also the founder of PrimeSense, which Apple acquired back in 2013 and used as part of the basis for Face ID. Two of Q.ai’s co-founders will be joining the company as well. Though Apple didn’t confirm the price tag, the Financial Times has reported (paywalled) that the deal was worth almost $2 billion, which would make it the company’s second biggest acquisition after the 2014 purchase of Beats for $3 billion.¹

There were lots of rumors in the last year that Apple might purchase an AI company to offset the challenges it’s had in the market; in the end, Apple opted to partner with Google to provide foundation models for its technology.

Overall, this feels more like a traditional Apple acquisition: a smaller company, more targeted in its use case, with talented staff that it can bring onboard. Apple’s already done plenty with machine learning around audio (including the translation features of the AirPods Pro and different audio modes in videos shot on the iPhone), and this would set them up well for improving everything from microphone performance to perhaps some of its live captioning features—perhaps in a future smart glasses product, for example.

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I gave some first impressions on Apple’s new Creator Studio bundle earlier this week, but one thing you don’t get to see when things are under embargo is how it all rolls out to the general public, which it did on Wednesday.

What strikes me most about it is how even Apple is stuck with the App Store and its limitations. Developers are quite familiar with how limited Apple’s back-end systems are and how they can inflict frustration on developers and customers alike. But it’s another level when the same thing happens to Apple and its own apps.

For example, yesterday the old versions of Numbers, Pages, and Keynote were updated, apparently with the only new feature being a dialog box that appears when you launch it that says “Use the New Version of Numbers,” with a button to Open New Version.

Why? Seems like Apple has chosen this moment to unify the iPad and Mac versions of Numbers and its fellow apps in a single entity in the App Store, and that leaves the old versions high and dry. The right thing to do here would be to gracefully migrate that Mac app and merge it with the other apps, but apparently not even Apple can convince itself to prioritize a feature that would make the launch of its new suite a little less clunky.

I’m also struck by the fact that Apple has had to do the App Store trick of attaching subtitles to the names of every app it makes, because the design of the App Store has led to stuffing keywords into titles becoming somehow a best practice. So it’s not Final Cut Pro anymore, it’s “Final Cut Pro: Create Video.” And Numbers is “Numbers: Make Spreadsheets.”

Also confusing: Double apps! Right now, I see two versions of Final Cut Pro in the Mac App Store. They’re actually the same app, but one is the original app that someone might have purchased in the past, and the other is a bundled edition that is tied to the iPad version and available by subscription. They have different icons, but otherwise seem to be identical, version 12.0.

I’ve complained a bunch about Apple converting its free iWork apps into freemium apps with paid upsells (to a bundle that’s a bad fit for many users), but that was before I saw that if you don’t subscribe to the bundle, the new versions of Pages, Numbers, and Keynote include ads attached to interface elements promoting the Creator Studio. The first-launch screen and two prominent menu items under the application menu push the Creator Studio. There’s also a prominent toolbar button for the suite-included Content Hub so that you can browse all that great premium clip media—but if you insert it, it’s watermarked, because you haven’t subscribed.

Finally, a word about the suite’s new app icons, which I specifically did not address in my review. It’s very easy and fun to complain about icons because art is entirely subjective. You can like what you like. I will say this: The early days of OS X icons were a reaction to the incredibly limited icon palette of classic Mac OS, so apps often offered incredibly detailed, photorealistic icons to represent themselves. It felt so modern. And many of those icons were beautiful.

But let’s forget about art for a moment and consider utility. Where do we interact with icons? For me, it’s the home screen on my iPad and iPhone, and the Dock and Spotlight launcher on my Mac. In every context, these icons are very small, far too small for a gorgeous skeuomorphic icon.

Clearly, the brief given to the designers of the new Creator Studio icon set was to make them all differentiated by color and shape. While I don’t love a lot of the choices they made—there are a lot of metaphors that seem to have drifted so far from reality that they make no sense anymore—I have to admit that they are all different silhouettes and colors, which means I know that the green bar chart that looks like it’s giving me the finger is Numbers when it’s in my Dock.

Should Apple aspire to better than utility, even when it comes to something as far away from mission-critical as app icons? Yes, it should. And I don’t think the people who are complaining about app icons are really complaining about app icons. They’re pointing out a symptom of a larger disease, which is Apple losing its way when it comes to usability and software design.

But if you’ll forgive me, I find it hard to get too worked up about icon designs when Apple is putting ads for a professional creative suite in its free productivity apps. Which is the greater offense to the user experience?

The original Mac arrived 42 years ago. Draw a line from that event to this week, in which credible reports suggest that Apple is finally getting close to fulfilling many of the promises it made back in 2024 regarding adding intelligent agents to its devices. Sure, it took licensing Google Gemini to get it done, but we might be on the precipice of Apple Intelligence being what Apple said it might be almost two years ago.

The more I think about it, the more I think that Apple Intelligence might actually be the latest attempt by Apple to fulfill the dream behind the original Mac. In an era where our devices are impossibly powerful and often frustratingly complicated, maybe what we need is A Computer for the Rest of Us again.

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