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Especially in the realm of music production, Pro Tools on the Mac remains the industry standard. Andy Slater told me, “I’ve never seen a PC in a recording studio, and I’ve been in a lot of recording studios.” Michelle Guadalupe Felix Garcia, a blind audio engineer based in Sonora, Mexico, co-founded the Audio Accessibility Alliance last year to advocate for inclusion in audio production (and live sound). “A Pro Tools user who’s blind is exactly as capable as a Pro Tools user who’s sighted,” she told me, echoing sentiments from numerous other blind professional producers and engineers I spoke to.

He also heard about how switching from PC to Mac is different for blind users:

After months of false starts, KALW eventually connected Rachel Longan with Felix Garcia, the blind engineer, who wanted to teach her Pro Tools, but Longan didn’t have access to or experience with a Mac. The differences in screen-reading metaphors on Mac vs. PC are significant, and require far more adjustment than that switch does for a sighted user.

Leland’s article gets real when it comes to problem-solving and challenges for blind producers, and he reminds us just how much of the process involves creatively hacking solutions to meet very specific needs. It’s a long, detailed piece with a ton of resources and tips.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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The MacBook Neo is apparently a big hit. So big that Apple is reportedly ramping up production.

Now the bad news: Since the MacBook Neo is powered by the A18 Pro chip from 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro, a product that’s been discontinued, there is likely a finite number of chips available for MacBook Neo production. Which is why, as reported by Tim Culpan, Apple faces a dilemma, namely: What happens when it runs out of chips to use in the MacBook Neo?

This is a really juicy question. If Apple’s hottest new Mac is limited by the number of A18 Pro chips available, there are only so many MacBook Neos that Apple can possibly sell. And if the chip isn’t being made anymore, what can the company do?

While we are all left puzzling this one, I don’t believe that this is as much of a dilemma for Apple. Even if Neo sales are higher than forecast, I do not believe that Apple simply never imagined that it might have a hit product on its hands! If there’s any company that believes in its own greatness, it’s Apple, which is why I’m pretty confident that Apple’s MacBook Neo strategy always came with a contingency plan for runaway success.

What we don’t know is what that contingency plan is. One possibility is that it would go back to its chipmaker, TSMC, and beg to get some space to build some fresh A18 Pro chips. This doesn’t make sense for a few reasons. Apple’s not using this particular TSMC chip process anymore, and TSMC’s capacity is likely sold out with business from other partners. Beyond that, the profit margins built into the MacBook Neo are based on odds and sods from the high-volume iPhone 16 Pro, not fresh new chips baked just for the MacBook Neo. If Apple asks TSMC to fire up the A18 Pro forge again, one of the main methods of making the Neo affordable disappears.

Short of there being a Mystery Chip out there that we don’t know about, I have to assume that the most obvious solution is the right one: Apple has probably always intended to replace the A18 Pro MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro model as soon as it begins scraping the bottom of the A18 bin.

Another part of Apple’s Neo strategy is a reusable design. I have to believe that the MacBook Neo was specifically designed to be updated to a new chip at very little extra cost, because every time you do major product redesigns, margins go down. That MacBook Neo was designed to last four or five years, at least, with different chips sliding in, probably once a year.

Putting a newer chip in the MacBook Neo is the obvious solution. Now, if MacBook Neo sales really are wildly beyond Apple’s greatest dreams, perhaps the company is scrambling to get an A19 Pro model ready to go. But it’s a matter of advancing an anticipated time-frame, not inventing a strategy out of nowhere. (And again, it’s a good problem to have!)

I’ve seen various arguments against this approach, but I don’t think they hold water. Will people who bought an A18 Pro MacBook Neo be bent out of shape if a newer, faster model gets released six or nine months later? I’d guess that most of them wouldn’t notice and wouldn’t care, and there are always people who are put out when new computers eclipse the one you just bought—that’s life. Would Apple risk losing the momentum of its new, hit product because a few people had their feelings hurt because Apple released a newer version of the MacBook Neo? That’s a hard no.

Another argument is that, essentially, Apple can’t release a new generation of MacBook Neo just six or nine months after it released the last one! Apple has repeatedly shown that it’s willing to ship two versions of the same product in the same calendar year—and may be about to do it again this year with the M5 and M6 MacBook Pro. Yes, it’s unorthodox, but the MacBook Neo is also a really weird new kind of Mac, and maybe the rules are different for a computer like this.

Would Apple even make a big deal out of such a move? Updating some or all MacBook Neo models to a new chip would probably amount to nothing more than a press release. Sites like this one would certainly notice and cover it in detail, but I’m not sure anyone else would notice or care.

I do wonder if Apple might extend the life of the A18 Pro model by splitting the MacBook Neo product line in two. Before the bin is entirely empty, perhaps it could upgrade the $699 model to the A19 Pro while continuing to sell the remaining A18 Pro chips in the $599 model. Then, once there are no more A18 Pros to be sold, the A19 Pro could move down on the price list. These are spec changes that we’d notice, of course, but they probably wouldn’t affect the trajectory of the MacBook Neo in the slightest.

What I don’t expect Apple to do is allow the Neo to lose its momentum by making it unavailable for some period of time while it works on its chip shortage. If that means eating into margins, it’ll do that. If that means making a quick chip change, it’ll do that. But Apple strikes me as a company with a killer instinct, and it knows it’s taking the entire cheap PC laptop market to the woodshed right now. I don’t think it’s going to pause for a moment.

Well, maybe for a moment. It should pause just long enough to ensure that the bin of A19 Pro chips is nice and full, so it doesn’t get into this situation again next year.

Go to the podcast page.

Quick—what’s the most important iPhone ever? The original started it all. The iPhone 6 Plus brought in large sizes for the first time. The iPhone X redefined the phone for a new decade.

But there’s also a strong argument to be made for the iPhone 4, which debuted in spectacular and infamous fashion, generated one of Apple’s most remarkable controversies, and also ended up being one of the most influential iPhones in terms of design.

Most important? Well, maybe. But there’s no doubt that the iPhone 4 is the most interesting iPhone ever.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

Today Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add direct-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite network and extend cellular coverage to customers beyond the reach of terrestrial networks. In addition, Amazon and Apple announced an agreement for Amazon Leo to power satellite services for iPhone and Apple Watch, including Emergency SOS via satellite.

This deal had been recently rumored. Amazon acquiring Globalstar gives it a leg up in its attempt to take on Starlink, which is the biggest player in this space. But Apple previously sank a billion-dollar-plus investment into Globalstar, whose system underpins its satellite features.

That stake seems to have bought Apple some assurances, including support for not only current but future devices. The ongoing question for Apple’s satellite features is whether users will ever end up paying for them, something that the company has been happy to continually kick down the road. It’s possible the deal is structured in such a way that Apple doesn’t have to pass on the cost to its users, at least for some period of time, but we’ll see what happens this year when the latest round of iPhones comes out.

As for Apple getting in bed with one of its competitors, Amazon is hardly the only other major tech company that Apple now has a close tie to: we know it’s using Google’s Gemini for its forthcoming AI models and, of course, it’s long depended on components made by Samsung. As tech companies get larger and larger, it’s harder and harder for them not to be collaborators.

Go to the linked site.

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Time Machine used to be a mess. I would try it with each new macOS release, get frustrated, and give up. My incoming email from readers was sometimes dominated by Time Machine problems, particularly when Apple transitioned from HFS+ to APFS as the Mac’s default startup volume file system. At one point, Time Machine volumes had to be formatted as HFS+ even after APFS became the default startup volume format.

Which is why I’m so pleased that Time Machine generally—generally, mind you—now performs as I would expect as part of my backup-and-archive systems.¹ I use Backblaze for encrypted Internet-hosted backups, Carbon Copy Cloner for nightly local clones, and Time Machine for continuous archiving and backups. I also use Dropbox and iCloud Drive for nearly all of my documents.

Often, however, I want to exclude something—or a lot of somethings—from Time Machine. A file or folder is too big (like Parallels virtual machines), a volume contains a clone of another volume (and thus should be ignored), or some data changes so frequently that it’s not ideal to archive using Time Machine.

Here’s how you can control what Time Machine archives.

Via the main System Settings interface

Open System Settings and go to General: Time Machine. Click Options. The Exclude from Backups list shows everything you’ve added, and anything Apple has included. You can drag items in or click the + (plus) icon to open a file or folder (or volume) selector. Select an item and click – (minus) to remove it.

As you can see from my list, I have many external volumes, and all of them are excluded from Time Machine—all external volumes are added to this list by default, and I’ve left it that way. After many, many hard disk drive failures, including a mirrored RAID, I no longer own enough local capacity to back up all my volumes. I put less-critical files on external volumes and rely on Backblaze.

You may also note that a couple of external volumes have Time Machine icons. Those are included in Time Machine by default, and if you select one, the – (minus) icon is grayed out. Typically, the only entry besides those volumes Apple automatically includes is /Users/Shared/adi, which is related to Apple’s digital commerce—that folder can be removed from exclusions, but I don’t know any good reason to.

Dial in your Time Machine exclusions

If you’re comfortable with the command line, you can also get to know tmutil, which provides text-based control over the same features presented in the Time Machine settings, plus quite a lot else. (In all of these examples, replace /path/to/item or similar with the actual path, of course!)

For instance, if you want to exclude a file or folder, but also may want to move that item later, use:

tmutil addexclusion /path/to/item

Wherever you relocate that item to, the exclusion follows. Or, if you want to use a fixed path and make sure it is invariant, same as the Exclude from Backups, use:

sudo tmutil addexclusion -p /absolute/path/to/item

The sudo command will prompt you to enter an administrative password because it requires elevated system privileges. The -p flag forces the time machine to excluse a path rather than a file.

A neat tip, if you didn’t know it: you can use the Finder to copy absolute paths for items:

1. In the Finder, select a file or folder.
2. Hold down the Option key and choose Edit.
3. Note the Copy “name” as Pathname option: choose it. You can also press Command-Option-C.

The Clipboard stores a path that can be quite short for a local volume, or verge on the absurd for files or folders on iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or other cloud-accessible systems. For instance, take a gander at:

/Users/glenn/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Aperiodical\ Projects\ \(iCloud\)/Flong\ Time\ No\ See\ Book/Figures/01\ Flong\ Time/flongs-per-year-chart.png

If you’d like to use the command line to check on items that are excluded or included, you can use:

tmutil isexcluded /path/to/item

You can use shell-based wildcard expansion, too, so if you did a lot of fussing with inclusion and exclusion in nested folders, you can enter the first part of the path, like ~glenn then use ./* to get a list with [Excluded] or [Included] before each directory at that level of the path, like tmutil isexcluded ~glenn/*.²

For further reading

Joe Kissell has written loads about Time Machine in Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, including strategies, complements, and alternatives.

[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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Clic for Sonos offers deep integration with native Apple technologies, with support for Widgets, Live Activities, Shortcuts, a Mac Menu Bar app, and support for Control Center. It works with your Sonos library, Apple Music, Spotify, Plex, Tidal, and TuneIn, and supports lossless and Dolby Atmos.

Try it for yourself and you’ll see. Six Colors readers can get one year for just $9.99 (30% off) or lifetime updates for $30 (50% off). Go to clic.dance/sixcolors for all the details.

Go to the podcast page.

Every morning, I start my day with breakfast, a cup of tea, and my iPad. This is the latest version of a ritual that began years ago with an actual newspaper that an actual human being left in my driveway. For the last five years, it’s all been mediated by my RSS reader, but it’s an experience that integrates newsletters and RSS feeds together in one place.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the whole experience is not quite as good as it should be. It’s a feeling that was stoked further by Terry Godier, whose essay Phantom Obligation served as an explanation for what motivated Godier to create Current, a newsreader app that tries to escape the tyranny of unread counts and reading debt and other pressures that turn reading from a pleasure into a chore.

Godier’s approach lets you treat different media sources in different ways, which is very clever. A breaking-news firehose might fade away after a few hours; a site devoted to thoughtful longform articles a few times a week or month would have more staying power.

It all makes sense to me, which is why I was surprised that when I tried Current, I bounced right off of it. I realized that the premise of Current is that it’s providing a gentle way to fade out the noise and allow users to focus on what’s important, whether it’s based on time or voice. It’s an app that seems meant for people who check their RSS readers several times a day, perhaps on their phone whenever they’ve got downtime. Makes sense to me—but that’s not me.

I’ve been so proud of my reading workflow, using Feedbin as a repository for all the newsletters I get, that I missed the other important part of that workflow: I open ReadKit once a day, read the items in my story list that interest me, and then close the iPad and go about my day. I am not looking for updates throughout the day, or using the app as a read-later service—in fact, my default view only shows me items from the past 48 hours—but as the true successor of that old morning newspaper.

This makes me realize that, rather than being frustrated that so many of my news sources these days offer newsletters but not RSS feeds, I might actually be better off subscribing to more newsletters, and unsubscribing from the equivalent RSS feeds of those sources. Yes, I’m frustrated that the San Francisco Chronicle doesn’t offer RSS, but it offers several daily newsletters that pop up in my newsreader in the morning, featuring links I can tap on to read stories in its app or on its website. Maybe that’s… better?

Similarly, I’ve started to look at some of the RSS feeds I subscribe to and realize that they’re just not important enough to drop multiple items in my feed over the course of a day. I’d actually rather have their posts collected into a bundle, whether that’s via a newsletter, my reader app, or some sort of script I write that turns the source’s new posts into a list of links.

That’s not quite the same thing as what Godier is trying to do, but it’s similar, because it suggests that the big-list-of-posts interface for RSS readers might not be quite right. If my RSS reader offered me the ability to select certain RSS feeds and display them as a single summary item with links to the stories, that would probably fit better into my reading approach. (And again, I can probably code up a simple script that generates these newsletter-like summaries and sends them to Feedbin.)

While I didn’t end up clicking with Current, I really like how Godier is challenging the entire idea of the “email inbox” RSS interface that’s been predominant forever. My insertion of newsletters into my Feedbin interface was the first clue that what I want to do is not actually read RSS, I want to read what I want using an app that makes that easy.

What is that app? What would we even call it? If it’s all email newsletters, should I just be reading in my mail client every morning? Mail clients are nice and all, but I wouldn’t call them optimized for longer-form reading. Read-later apps like Instapaper are sort of similar, but focused more on long-term storage. News apps tend to be siloed or impossible to personalize. (I am not visiting Apple News in the morning.)

I don’t have an answer here, but I’m enjoying the uncertainty. After five years of a system that has served me pretty well, I’m realizing that it’s got more rough edges than I had really noticed before. It’s okay, but it should be a lot better.

Maybe we should all revisit the assumptions we make about when and how we read. That was really Terry Godier’s point, and it’s a good one.

Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot.

The whole story is wild (albeit technical). Photon says they’re working on a fix, but really, this is something Apple should be working on.

As someone who keeps a Mac mini running in my closet, I guarantee you that I have been affected by this bug. But who remembers that it’s been 50 days since the last time your Mac server became entirely unresponsive other than pings? Unless I’m traveling, I just shrug, reboot the Mac, and go on with my life. Not great.

Update: I’ve heard from some people who report very long uptimes on Mac servers running older versions of macOS. I guess the bigger question is, what OS versions does this actually impact? Tough thing to test, given that the bug appears only after 49+ days.

Go to the linked site.

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Like millions of people around the world, I have a mixed marriage: I’ve long used Macs, but my wife Kat’s personal computer is a Windows PC.

That categorization isn’t entirely fair, though—because Kat also uses an iPhone and wears an Apple Watch every single day. We have an Apple TV in the living room and a HomePod mini in the kitchen. She’s certainly no stranger to the world of Apple devices. If anything, the Lenovo laptop that largely lives underneath our TV is the odd one out in the house.

When we bought her that laptop for personal use a year or so back, price was one of the primary drivers—until the MacBook Neo, the $500-ish computer range was a market in which Apple simply didn’t compete. But when the Neo arrived last month, I thought this seemed like an ideal time to see what would happen if we took advantage of Apple’s two-week return period and tried to replace her personal PC with a Mac. So, I ran down to our Apple Store one Sunday and picked up an Indigo MacBook Neo with 512GB of storage for her to put through its paces.

This wasn’t just an opportunity for her, though—it was also a chance for me to see what it was like for someone who has largely only used a Mac in passing to switch up their habits and use it full time. The result was, honestly, illuminating. In addition to jotting down some thoughts about our experiment, we’ve also recorded a podcast in which Kat and I discussed her experience, including what won her over and what areas didn’t quite work for her.

Making the jump

One thing that jumped out at me when I was first helping her set up the MacBook Neo was the acclimation process. There are plenty of things that we long-time Mac users take for granted as the way things work, but if you’re switching from another platform, they can seem not only unobvious, but downright hostile.

For example, I noticed she ran into a lot of problems with two-finger clicking. Apple’s trackpads are often considered best of breed, but they can be jarring to somebody who’s not used to them. She would frequently bring up context menus by accident, because she’s used to resting her second finger on or near the trackpad while clicking. This is one of those habits that simply takes time and muscle memory to adapt to, but it can definitely get in the way when all you’re trying to do is click a button.

Sometimes there are larger differences that just need to be re-learned. For example, Windows has long featured a very keyboard-driven interface in which you can access most of the drop-down menus without resorting to using a pointing device. While this is technically possible in macOS, it’s not quite the same: either you have to use some specific workaround like using the Command-? shortcut to access the Help menu and then search or use the arrow keys, or you have to enable macOS’s Full Keyboard Access, which is an extreme option that can really disrupt the user interface.

We also ran into some idiosyncrasies that seemed particular to this experience. For example, this version of the MacBook Neo shipped with the previous version of the iWork apps, before their inclusion in the Creator Suite. Not only did this lead to some weirdness where you opened an app and were immediately told to download a different version of that app, but there was some sort of bug upon first run that really degraded the performance: in Numbers, for example, we dealt with repeated spinning beachballs as we tried to do anything as simple as enter data into a cell. It’s the kind of experience that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, even if subsequent uses later in the week were fine.

It’s the ecosystem

As for the positives, they tended to fall into two categories. The first I’ll call “quality of life” advantages. The build of the MacBook did not go unnoticed, with the solidity of its aluminum chassis and a keyboard that she deemed excellent. (She remarked several times on how much she enjoyed its clicky-clacky nature.) The Neo also runs far cooler than her Lenovo laptop, despite its lack of fan, and has a vastly superior battery life.

She, did, however knock the MacBook Neo on one hardware feature—or lack thereof. And no, it wasn’t the two USB-C ports or that one is slower than the other. It’s the lack of a touchscreen. That’s a feature that even budget PC laptops have had for a long time, and Apple—arguably the king of touchscreens!—has refused to bring to its computer platform. Coming from the Windows side, I can understand how weird that is—at least for now.

But the biggest win were what I’d call the ecosystem advantages. Since Kat already uses an iPhone and an Apple Watch, having all her passwords synced and at her fingertips—literally, since I sprang for the model with the Touch ID sensor—was deemed life-changing. Likewise, the ability to use apps like Messages on her Mac and have it seamlessly integrate with her phone was a real plus. However, we did run into one small hiccup there: at first, Messages wasn’t showing names of contacts; we discovered that was because Contacts had only synced about a dozen address records. After some further poking around, it turned out that most of her contacts were stored not in iCloud, but in her Google account. Once we set that up to sync, things worked fine, but it was another hoop to jump through to get everything working properly.

Similarly, she really appreciated the integration with Apple Pay and Touch ID. That’s a workflow she’s gotten very used to on her iPhone and Apple Watch, and its ease and simplicity is familiar—and equally good—on the Mac.

Where the Mac doesn’t always Excel

However, despite her generally positive reception to the MacBook Neo—which I think surprised even her—Kat was equally adamant that one place she’d never be able to use the machine is in her work. The main reason: Excel.

Kat spends a lot of her professional life in Excel, doing work like finance or advanced modeling—tasks that I cannot even pretend to understand. Now, Microsoft does of course make a version of Excel for the Mac. However, while it shares most of the same features as its Windows counterpart, most is not all. One key feature that she relies on in her work is a slew of powerful keyboard shortcuts that simply have no Mac equivalent.

I couldn’t believe this was the case in the year 2026, but sure enough. I even uncovered a Reddit post detailing this discrepancy, which itself links to a very lengthy Microsoft support document on all the keyboard shortcuts.

While you could laboriously remap many of these options to a Mac keyboard, the question simply becomes: why? In the strange eventuality where she was forced to use a Mac for her work, it would probably be far more expedient to simply run a Windows version of Excel in an emulation environment than create bespoke equivalents. But retraining all her muscle memory and skills? That’s a non-starter.

Goodbye, MacBook Neo

After two weeks, I’m sad to say the MacBook Neo was packed back in its box and returned to the Apple Store to spend more time with its family. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the poor Windows users.

Honestly, this wasn’t a slight on the Neo itself—the simple truth is that Kat just doesn’t use her personal laptop for much. In fact, the biggest competition to the Neo was not the Lenovo, but her iPhone, which is where she does most of her everyday computing tasks. Like many of us, she’s gotten used to a life that’s phone-first and only turns to a computer when she really needs something like a keyboard.

Ultimately, were that Lenovo to break tomorrow¹, Kat deemed that she would be tempted—perhaps even likely—to replace it with a MacBook Neo. But as it stands today, that PC is still alive and kicking, and thus we don’t have the need to buy a replacement that will, itself, barely get used.

Despite the Neo’s return, I consider the experiment to be an overall success. For someone who has long been frustrated with her experience using a Mac whenever she had to sit down at my desk², Kat ended up surprisingly pleased with the Neo. Were she to end up using a Mac more, I believe she might even find herself delighted with all the other features she has yet to discover. It gives me hope that our house may still someday be united in platform harmony.

If you’re part of the Apple IT community and would like to participate in this year’s survey, it’s just a click away. Results will be posted at the end of the month.

Go to the linked site.

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You might have noticed that, after installing iOS 26.4, your iPhone is behaving differently. Some actions (like changing your password) require a one-hour wait, followed by biometric authentication. You never had to do this before. Why now? Because with iOS 26.4, Apple has decided to enable its Stolen Device Protection feature on all iPhones. This feature may not make you safer—or feel safer—but it should prevent or severely deter misuse and hijacking of your iPhone and Apple Account.

Alternatively, you may not have noticed this—several sites reported in February 2026, during the 26.4 beta testing period, that Stolen Device Protection was automatically enabled in the update. Or a dark pattern—a user-interface design that pushes you to a particular decision without removing one or more others—may have caused you to opt in. However, I’ve found no confirmation from Apple, nor do various sites that write about Apple have a definitive answer!

So this is a good time to review Stolen Device Protection, whether or not you had it enabled without your permission.

One who steals my iPhone, steals my Apple Account

Months after a report in the Wall Street Journal about multiple people being assaulted or shoulder surfed to unlock a stolen iPhone, and from there to hijack the owner’s Apple Account, Apple added Stolen Device Protection. This feature flipped the script on iPhone authentication, requiring Face ID or Touch ID to access certain features or make significant changes—a passcode no longer sufficed. It also added a cooldown period, requiring a one-hour delay in many circumstances before those biometrically authenticated actions could occur.

The scenarios are very straightforward:

• Shoulder surfing: You’re at a bar with someone, and a stranger offers to take your picture. Your hand them your iPhone, and they make some attempt and say it’s locked. They hand it back and you enter your passcode. Now they take your photo—and run off with your phone, or someone later grabs it when you’re distracted. What might have happened is that they intentionally locked the phone, and a nearby confederate is using their iPhone or another device to zoom in and record high-resolution video of you as you enter your code.
• Violence: The Wall Street Journal’s account included instances of people being drugged at bars or at people’s homes, then convinced to give out their passcode. If drugging failed, or sometimes instead of it, violence or coercion is used. As recently as February 2025, a news report from Minneapolis quoted both law enforcement and victims.

With a passcode, those with criminal intent can access all sorts of stuff stored on your phone, including bank accounts, and use Apple Pay. What’s worse is that the Wall Street Journal reports documented that with a passcode, a thief or attacker could initiate an Apple Account reset, allowing them to hijack your account, change its password, and render it inaccessible to you—perhaps forever! (Apple is being sued about recovering such stolen accounts.)

Now, it’s unclear how many people suffered this kind of crime. It might have been dozens or hundreds—maybe it was thousands? There’s no comprehensive law-enforcement data, and Apple has offered no insight. Stolen Device Protection can cause minor to major inconveniences, depending on which features you can’t use for an hour, so I assume Apple found the issue significant enough to roll it out in 2024—and to push people to enable it in 2026, if not enable it for them.

Note that this remains an iPhone-only feature, even though an iPad could be exploited the same way. I have to infer either that Apple has had almost no reports of exploitation via iPad passcode theft, or that they are balancing the needs of the average iPad user who is out and about with that device against the complexity of managing Stolen Device Protection.

If you have Stolen Device Protection enabled or want to, let’s go over what that entails.

Manage Stolen Device Protection

On your iPhone, go to Settings: Privacy & Security: Stolen Device Protection. If it’s disabled and you want to turn it on, you will be unable to do so if you don’t meet a number of requirements:

• Two-factor authentication on Apple Account: Nearly everyone has enabled this, or Apple has upgraded them to it.
• iPhone passcode: If you don’t have a passcode, I’m not sure we should be friends anymore.
• Biometrics: Face ID must be enabled; or, with older iPhones, Touch ID.
• Significant Locations: A slightly obscure feature, you find this in Settings: Privacy & Security: Location Services: System Services: Significant Locations & Routes.¹ Apple stores this information only on your devices, and uses end-to-end encryption to sync the data among them.² You can’t view these locations—only see a few recent ones, and a total number of stored records. You can tap Clear History and confirm to remove them.
• Find My: Find My has to be enabled on your iPhone, and it can’t be turned off as long as Stolen Device Protection remains on.

Once enabled, you see two options: Away from Familiar Locations and Always. Familiar Locations ostensibly leans on Significant Locations, but I’ll warn you that I have, on multiple occasions, been in my home, a place I spent a significant majority of my time, and was told by Stolen Device Protection that I wasn’t in a familiar location.

When you try to carry out certain actions, that’s when the protection kicks in. There are two kinds of deterrence:³

• Biometrics required (always): If you try to use stored passwords or passkeys from the Passwords app, view the virtual card number assigned to an Apple Card or Apple Cash, or try to disable Lost Mode in Find My, among other actions, you must use Face ID or Touch ID. A password won’t suffice. If someone stole your passcode and iPhone, they don’t have your face or fingertip.⁴
• Security Delay: For other tasks, a one-hour countdown timer starts if you have Always enabled or set to Away from Familiar Locations and are in such a place. At the end of that timer, you must use Face ID or Touch ID before proceeding. This includes updating your Apple Account password or signing out of your Apple Account on the device, turning off Stolen Device Protection (a little meta, there), or adding or removing Face ID or Touch ID. This makes it much harder for a thief to perform any critical action. In case of drugging, that has sometimes included still being in proximity of the person—why not add light kidnapping to assault?—but that appears to be rare.

I suspect that with Stolen Device Protection, a thief flings the iPhone away as soon as possible, except in even rarer circumstances than the above.

If you’re not typically in environments in which you might be at risk of the specific kind of theft or violence discussed above, Stolen Device Protection can be overkill and a pain. As noted above, I do spend most of my time at my house, working from a home office, and I avoid crowded bars and other venues.

However, if you like the additional protection and are willing to deal with the timeout or location-based iffiness of Stolen Device Protection, turn it on and give it a try, if Apple hasn’t already done so for you or snookered you into it. And you can always turn it off—it just might take an hour.

For further reading

I write about all sorts of security and protection, mostly focused on people having physical proximity to your devices, in Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices.

[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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A breathtaking image, taken by a human being on the Artemis II spacecraft, of our entire planet:

NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window after completing the translunar injection burn.

Just to be clear, this is the night side of Earth, illuminated by the full moon. You can see greenish Aurorae on the edges of the planet at top right and bottom left. There’s a hint of the sun (which is behind the Earth in this shot) peeking around on the bottom right. If you’re having trouble orienting, look for the Sahara: it’s toward the bottom left, with the Strait of Gibraltar and the Iberian peninsula just below. There’s no up or down in space, but this photo was posted with the south pole at the top. The vast blue expanse we’re seeing is mostly the Atlantic.

A full resolution version is available. And for all you photo nerds out there, Morag Perkins points out it was taken with a Nikon D5. (There are also some iPhones on board, but they didn’t take this shot.)

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

It’s probably just as well. You would not be able to handle the sheer hair of it all. Most of it on me, some of it inexplicably on the Mac. But, for the record, it was an SE FDHD with two floppy drives and an external 30 MB hard drive. I bought it used in 1990.

And I loved it.

I was hooked. It helped that I had just started grad school and could stay up all night playing Shufflepuck Cafe, Shadowgate and Strategic Conquest when I should have been studying.

I continued to buy Apple products throughout the ‘90s — an LC, then a Quadra 610, a Performa 6400, a PowerBook 520c, two Newtons and finally a Power Mac — when everyone in my family was buying PCs. (Now they’re all on Macs.)

I followed Apple rumors like crazy. Apple was working on a game system! A set-top box! Taligent was going to save the company! No, it was going to buy BeOS!

By 2001, it hit me: it was the rumors that were crazy, not me. Most of these people didn’t know what they’re talking about. I could write this stuff!

Hey! I could write this stuff!

So I did. I started writing Crazy Apple Rumors Site. And guess what? Yeah, it changed my life. But it also just led to some funny stories.

The first one I remember is after publishing a story one night (I wrote most of them after coming home from work), I woke up the day to find a message in my inbox from one Phil Schiller.

Normally that would be cool! An Apple executive! Emailing little ol’ me! Wow!

But there was a problem. The piece I had published the previous night was… less than flattering. Because the Enron trials were going on at the time and Schiller had given a speech at the annual QuickTime conference (yes, there used to be a QuickTime conference) that some said paled in comparison to a Steve Jobs show, I wrote that attendees wished Schiller had just pled the Fifth as so many Enron executives were doing.

So, when I saw his name in my inbox I did not think “Wow!” — I thought “Oh, crap.”

To his credit, Phil was extremely good natured about the jab and we went on to exchange emails over the years about various pieces I wrote. Schiller became a CARS staple, launching any number of my patented bad Photoshop jobs. My last exchange with him was to express my condolences on the death of Steve Jobs in 2011.

Some of my ideas were certainly better than others. One piece joked that Apple was introducing “iPorn.” That was it. That was the joke. In my defense, I was very young.

OK, I was in my late 30s. There. Are you happy? I’m not.

To create evidence of this claim, I took a screenshot of Apple’s homepage, added a blurred out pornographic picture to it and posted it with the article. I really could have and should have been doing literally anything else.

The day after posting that gem, the phone rang. Because I had a PowerBook in for repair at the time I was thrilled to see that the caller ID read “APPLE LEG”. If only I’d known what the truncated last two letters were. Instead I naively thought “Ah! News about my repair!” It was not that at all.

When I answered the phone, the woman on the other end identified herself as being with Apple Legal.

Ah. “AL”. Those were the missing two letters. She explained she was calling to demand that I take down the screenshot of their homepage with the porn added, claiming it violated the company’s copyright on the images. Presumably the non-pornographic ones. Upon hearing this, I immediately referred her to my lawyer who informed her of the fair use doctrine and hahaha, no, I folded like a cheap suit. I hand-drew a version of the image and posted that in its place.

(It is now hilarious that one of my current beefs with the company is that it continues to offer up apps that make non-consensual porn. Who says irony is dead?)

There were many other fun stories, including the time I wrote a piece saying that, for reasons unknown, the then 43-year-old Avie Tevanian was going through puberty again; slamming doors, pouting, stomping around the Apple campus and generally making all the other executives miserable. Do I know why I wrote this? I do not. This also prompted contact from the upper echelons of Apple corporate. Tevanian emailed me the next day to point out the big mistake in my article: I got his age wrong. He was actually 42.

But the big story was the one I would not find out the rest of until watching The Talk Show Live from WWDC back in 2019 seventeen years later.

Some time around May of 2002, I got an email from Schiller asking me if I would ever consider coming to work at Apple. As someone who spent way too much time thinking about the company, it was like being asked if you want to move up to The Show. But I live in Tacoma, WA, and remote work was not on the table with Apple. My wife and I were both happy with our jobs and loved living in Tacoma (shut up). So, after sweating it for a bit, I replied that, while I was flattered, it didn’t feel like a move I was ready to take right then.

At the end I quipped something to the effect of “If my situation changes and I’m suddenly really desperate, I’ll let you know!”

What I didn’t know until Greg Joswiak told Apple’s side of this story to John Gruber is that hiring me wasn’t Schiller’s idea. Apparently they sometimes used to pass around my articles at Apple’s weekly marketing meetings and, one time, Steve Jobs read one of my pieces at a meeting. Aloud. After what I’m sure was uproarious laughter, Steve said “That guy’s a pretty good writer. Why don’t we reach out to him to see if he wants to come work at Apple?”

Schiller wasn’t just idly asking me a question about my long-term career goals. Steve Jobs was saying “Hey, dumbass, do you wanna come work here, make history and also a bazillion dollars in stock options?”

And I said…

(this is what I said)….

“Only if I get desperate!”

Well, happy 50th, Apple. It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway.

My son’s been curious about the progress of the flight, so this morning at breakfast, I pulled up the NASA tracker so we could see where they are, but I found the interface pretty clumsy to use on the phone.

But this is 2026, where people who are excited about something can whip up their own solution. That’s just what accessibility advocate Jakob Rosin has done with this very cool web dashboard. There’s live data from NASA of the spacecraft’s speed and position, a timeline of all the events during the mission, and even audio radar of spacecraft positions that I find weirdly soothing. Definitely worth checking out if you’re keeping up to date on Artemis’s flight, although I do wish it had a visual representation of the spacecraft’s position and route. (That you can find on the NASA interface.)

[via Allison Sheridan on Mastodon]

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news: As of Wednesday April 1, Apple is pushing out iOS 18.7.7 to all devices running iOS 18. This update, released last month for devices that were not capable of running iOS 26, is now available even for compatible devices. If you’ve got auto-update turned on but have not gone through the steps to do a full upgrade to iOS 26, this update can be automatically pushed and applied. This is good news, as those who have opted not to run iOS 26 will get to take advantage of several sets of security releases.

Now the bad news: This is happening because of some really bad security breaches like DarkSword and Coruna. As Apple noted in a security update:

We enabled the availability of iOS 18.7.7 for more devices on April 1, 2026, so users with Automatic Updates turned on can automatically receive important security protections from web attacks called DarkSword. The fixes associated with the DarkSword exploit first shipped in 2025.

Now, to be clear, security patches on an older operating system are not as effective as they are on an entirely new system, since a new OS like iOS 26 has all sorts of structural changes made for security reasons. As a new Apple security note says, iOS 26 “contains the strongest security protections.” If you’re very concerned about your iPhone being secure, updating to iOS 26 is going to make it more secure than updating to 18.7.7.

But this does mean that Apple’s patches, which seek to break the chain of bugs that led to serious security exploits, are available to many more people.

Bottom line: If you’re an iOS 26 holdout, and you’re not ready to update your iPhone, at the very least you should update to 18.7.7 and protect yourself from some seriously ugly malicious software.

Go to the podcast page.

A 50th anniversary is a good time to reflect on your relationships, and it seems lots of people have thoughts about their time with Apple today. I would definitely not be where I am in life without the company, for both good and bad, so here are mine.

Technically, my days with Apple started by playing games on my next-door neighbor’s Apple II in the late 70s or early 80s. When enough time has passed, the exact memories naturally become a little bit fuzzy. It was certainly before I got my own Commodore 64 in 1983, I know that much, but I don’t think I can exactly claim to have been there from the very beginning. Anyway, little did I know back then that I would actually get to house sit for the guy who designed the thing. Foreshadowing. 

My best friend’s dad was a university professor from California, and he had brought over an Apple II of some flavor. I don’t remember them being common over here otherwise—the UK had a weird home computer industry all of its own, but this was probably just the perspective of a little kid who only wanted to play video games.

I eventually graduated from my C64 to an Atari STe around 1989, which had many better games than a Mac, and built-in MIDI ports as well. It was also way cheaper than a Mac, and it was totally fine. There was a GUI and a mouse, and those are all the same anyway, right?

Then, just a year later, I started a degree in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, and back then all the computers in the labs were Macs. Generally, Mac Pluses or SE/30s, with the occasional brand new LC in the second-year labs. And so I used them, and I realized quite quickly that Atari had completely ripped off the Mac GUI, and not exactly done an amazing job of doing so. 

I’ve had this experience two or three times in my life with technology, using something and realizing that it’s an inflection point for everything else going forward. The first was those early days with the Mac. Okay, so I was six years late to the party, so you are entirely right to question my definition of “early days.” Still, the user interface was so well designed and thought out, and it just made sense to me in a way that no computer had really done before. System 7 came out shortly afterward and improved everything even more.

At this point, we’d been doing most of the development work for our coursework in THINK Pascal, and I quickly realized I could use that to make my own applications. This history has been covered well, but I wrote the first version of my calculator PCalc in 1992 on my brand new Mac Classic. (Sorry, Atari.) I bought an LC II some time later, probably a month before the LC III was announced. I even fitted it with a maths co-processor! I started working on my application launcher DragThing in 1994.

Again, this is well documented, but I was soon determined to work for Apple. And a few years later, I got my wish, working in Apple’s software engineering group in Cork, Ireland. It was a lot easier to get a job with Apple in late 1996 than it is today, but my existing apps certainly helped me get a foot in the door. However, as I discovered after joining the company and moving to a different country, Apple was actually on the verge of complete bankruptcy.

I’m told that, like with having kids, you block out a lot of the difficult times of your life, and generally remember the good bits. Well, I remember a hell of a lot of bad stuff from those years, so who knows how bad it really was. 

Gil Amelio appeared and fired so many people across the company that soon our little engineering group all fit around the one table for lunch. It was an extremely stressful time to be at Apple, but also probably one of the most interesting – I got to witness the return of Steve Jobs first hand, after all. Another inflection point, really.

I worked on a bunch of things while I was there, including the only two things that actually shipped from my less than four years on that team – the Disney 101 Dalmatians and Hercules Print Studios that were bundled with Macintosh Performas. That was enjoyable and relatively low-stakes work. I learned how to program in C++, use a UI framework (Metrowerks PowerPlant), and generally work as part of a team. I was even co-team lead on the Hercules one. However, staring at pegasi all day meant that I did not see the film, and I still have not to this today.

I was then placed on the iMac project somewhat unknowingly, and ultimately the Dock and Finder – the source of all my best Apple anecdotes. Then Steve Jobs happened, I resigned, etc etc. You know how this story goes, I assume. In any case, I met a lot of good people at Apple, some of whom I am still in touch with today. Companies do not care for you, but at least some people do.

In all, it was a relatively short time working there. I was not important in the least, and I did not really do anything of note. I worked on lots of cool stuff that didn’t ultimately ship, sure. Put it this way: I am unlikely to be an entry in any Apple history book. 

And I was so relieved when I left. I was 27, and I was young enough then that I didn’t really know how stressed I had been working in that environment. The weight off my shoulders was enormous, even if being an indie developer came with its own set of slightly different artisanal weights. You know how some people have stress dreams about doing exams? I still have stress dreams that I’m back working at Apple.

I did not part from my ex on the best of terms, but it has remained a big part of my life, and we kept uncomfortably meeting up at parties.

I rewrote PCalc again after I left, and through a random pressing of my business card into the hand of one Phil Schiller at a WWDC, it ended up getting bundled with the iMac G4s in the U.S. I probably made more money from that deal (and a weekend’s work to change the app into U.S. English) than I did from all my years of salary at Apple.

I am definitely still in Apple’s orbit, or perhaps just past their event horizon. I am forgetting many things now, including Widgetgate and Lodsys.

And yes, I also ended up getting to know Woz, and stayed with him for many years in a row during WWDC time. We’re still in touch occasionally to this day. It is absolutely wild to me that I know one of the founders of Apple, who basically invented the personal computer. I got to chat to Douglas Adams because of Apple as well – he used DragThing, and I added several features to it just because he asked. Frontier scripting? Absolutely, Mr. Adams, right away, sir.

I’ve also known Jason Snell for something like 32 years at this point, since he was a youth at MacUser, and nowadays have the pleasure of doing podcasts with him at The Incomparable and Relay. So many good friends in my life have happened because of Apple, directly or indirectly.

I’m also, I will admit, doing reasonably well because of them. Then again, Apple is doing pretty well because of me. If I calculate the 30% or 15% of all the sales of PCalc in the App Store, I’ve probably easily paid back my entire Apple salary and all the PCalc licensing fees. But then again, the Apple stock I got in the late 90s is worth a little bit more these days, too, so ultimately I can’t really complain.

Whenever I purchase a new Mac with the money I have made from selling things on the App Store, it does at least make me think how ridiculously circular these things are. A disturbing amount of my lifespan has consisted of moving money slowly back and forth between Apple and me, whether I’m working for them or not. I think I’m currently ahead, but who knows what the future holds. I do sometimes wonder if I never actually stopped working for Apple.

Anyway, DragThing lasted nearly half an Apple, at 25 years. PCalc is still doing well, some 34 years later (I just need to hold on for another eight.) Dice by PCalc is a recent addition, based on my return to playing D&D, but it at least constantly amuses me. I suspect I will still be doing this long after I retire.

So here’s to the next 50, Apple. I do still miss you sometimes.

Weirdly, I was born almost perfectly in between the founding of Apple on April 1, 1976, and the release of the first Macintosh on January 24, 1984. But the former was only one of two events that occurred around that time that would go on to have a profound impact on my life. Because just over a year after Apple was founded, on May 25, 1977, came the release of the original Star Wars.

Oddly, those two events are intertwined at various points, not only with my life, but with each other. That’s true both in time and in space, where ultimately, these two influences would effectively bracket the San Francisco Bay Area, with Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch just north of the city and Cupertino to its south.

And the connection extends even further—the interplay between the rise of computer technology and its effect on modern moviemaking. John Knoll, the creator of Photoshop, would go on to work for Lucas’s groundbreaking visual effects firm, Industrial Light and Magic. A group within Lucasfilm would later evolve, with funding from Steve Jobs, into the animation studio Pixar (which, along with Lucasfilm, would be eventually acquired by Disney). I definitely had a wallpaper on my Mac in college photoshopped with Steve Jobs and George Lucas in it—what can I say, I know who I am.²

There are thematic ties, too. I wasn’t the only Mac fan amongst my friend group, but in the 1990s we were engaged in pitched battle with the behemoth that was Windows. It lent something to our identity, then—we were no less scrappy underdogs than the Rebel Alliance fighting back against the evil Empire.

(I can admit, from this later date, that I cast envious glances at my friends’ PCs, able to run games like TIE Fighter and Might and Magic, while I had to wait for those to come to my platform—if they ever did. As the years went on, I persevered, reading my monthly issues of Macworld cover to cover, devouring books like the Macintosh Bible and digging up weird shareware, as though I could keep the company going through my sheer persistence.)

For a large part of my childhood, both Apple and Star Wars struggled, falling upon hard times. After 1983’s Return of the Jedi, there were no more Star Wars movies. Meanwhile, Apple nearly tumbled into oblivion.

I vividly remember sitting in our kitchen one morning, listening to the news on the radio while my dad made his coffee, and hearing a dire story about Apple. My dad, knowing my enthusiasm for the company, asked if I thought it would survive—maybe the first time I felt like he’d ever asked me a real opinion on something happening in the world.

I won’t say that it had never occurred to me that it was possible Apple would cease to exist, but it was something I didn’t really have the tools to process. So, naturally, I assumed it would survive somehow, as unlikely as that seemed—as sure as there would be new Star Wars movies someday. The narrative’s stronger when you’re a kid, when you don’t really understand how the world works and your only real templates are stories.

So I closely followed all the developments of those dark times: the transition to the Power Macs, the attempts to create a modern successor to Mac OS, devouring every tidbit of information with no less fervor than how I digested every new Star Wars novel. Any port in a storm.

And then in another close coincidence that is too strange for fiction, dual lights at the end of the tunnel: just as Steve Jobs returned to the company he’d founded, George Lucas announced that a trilogy of Star Wars movies was on the horizon. It seemed that faith had been rewarded and hope was once again on the horizon.³

Staying foolish

My life has always been kind of a push and pull between these two influences—forces, if you will⁴—of technology and storytelling: Venn diagram circles with an overlap sometimes larger or smaller. As a teenager, I both wrote and distributed some really terrible shareware on local BBSes and, for several years, collaborated with one of my best friends to publish an online magazine for sci-fi and fantasy.⁵

In college, I majored in English because I loved writing stories, but almost all my work experience, starting in late high school, was in tech: a nascent web company, IT work at a university library during summers and vacations, teaching fellow students about technology at my college. Freshman year, I got a reputation as the English major who would fix all the computers of the engineers on our floor—even though I was only one of a handful who had brought a Mac to college amidst the sea of beige—or, increasingly, translucent blue plastic⁶—PCs.

Even after college, I worked in IT and web development while toiling away on my first novel. The first piece I ever had published was about Star Wars and it led to the conviction that I could get a job writing—and it just so happened that job was writing about Apple. The rest, as they say, is history.

Always in motion is the future

As this milestone has approached, I’ve wrestled with my own feelings about Apple. Last year, as I wrapped up my ten-year stretch as a columnist at Macworld, I wondered whether we should even be fans of a company. A year on, I feel even more confident in my conclusion that it’s probably unwise to allow your identity to be dictated in any small part by a for-profit corporation whose needs will not ultimately be aligned with yours.

Frankly, it’s a conversation I’ve had to have about Star Wars over the years—more than once.

The truth is I still view myself as an enthusiast of Apple and of Star Wars, even today. Without the former, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’m not sure I could have devoted this many years of my life to writing and talking about something for which I don’t have strong feelings. And without the latter, I don’t think I would constantly be writing stories that try to capture the way Star Wars enthralled me as a kid.

But being an enthusiast certainly doesn’t mean being uncritical—honestly, none are so critical as those who view themselves the true enthusiasts. Amidst the recent years’ resurgence of both Star Wars and Apple, there’s been no end of criticism—some certainly less well-founded than others—from those who profess themselves the most ardent enthusiasts.

However, if I can trot out another old trope, you either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. That’s the knife edge Apple is poised at now; some might argue that it’s too late, that Apple has already tipped itself over onto the side of full-blown villainy.

But maybe there’s one more lesson to take away from Star Wars here: even Darth Vader managed to redeem himself in the end. You don’t have to be the scrappy underdog to make the right decision. It’s never too late to hoist the pirate flag and think different.

I am usually so focused on Apple’s present and future that I don’t spend a lot of time ruminating about its past. And yet, as its 50th birthday has approached, it’s been impossible not to think Big Thoughts about the Big Picture.

So here’s one: Apple has been remarkably consistent — across 50 years and numerous CEOs and the vast sweep of late-20th- and early-21st-century history — in a few key areas. The people change (except Chris Espinosa!), but some of the ideas have managed to stay the same. And I think that’s meaningful.

Here’s what it boils down to: Apple is a company that chooses to build the whole product, while controlling its own destiny. That was true in the 1970s, it’s still true today, and it’s perhaps the company’s definitive trait.

In the olden days…

The early personal computer market was a hodgepodge. Different companies rose and fell, all offering different devices that were essentially self-contained and proprietary—compatibility across devices was almost nonexistent. Even programs written in the same language might not run across different systems, since they might each implement the languages differently.

During those days, Apple was playing the game that pretty much everyone else does. Sure, there were some computers using the standardized CP/M operating system—you could install a card on an Apple II to let it run CP/M, even!—but mostly you got what you got when you bought the box. Apple IIs ran Apple stuff, TRS-80s ran TRS-80 stuff, the Atari 400 ran Atari stuff, Commodore PETs ran Commodore stuff… that was it.

But in the early 80s, almost the entire computer industry got flattened, and the reason was the IBM PC. Not that IBM did the flattening itself, but it had that effect: Since the IBM PC had been created using standard computer parts in order to get it out quickly, it became relatively easy for any other company to build equivalents. Its operating system was not actually owned by IBM, but was created by an upstart software company called Microsoft.

What happened next changed the entire computer market: Dozens of companies began making IBM PC compatible computers running MS-DOS from Microsoft. The generic Microsoft/Intel PC was born, and almost every other competitor was ruined. Atari and Commodore hung on for a while, but by the early ’90s, there were only pretty much two kinds of personal computers anyone would seriously consider buying: IBM PC compatibles running Microsoft software, or the Mac.

That was it. The rest of the market had capitulated. Only Apple hung on. And as someone who started writing about Apple during that time, I can tell you that nobody expected Apple to make it. Analysts either wrote that Apple should become like the other PC makers and just license Microsoft Windows, or that Apple should become like Microsoft and just license Mac OS to PC makers. Those were the choices.

Apple, to its immense credit, stayed true to itself. (Let’s not mention that brief dalliance with Mac clones.)

The whole widget

To me, this is the core of what Apple is as a company: It makes the whole product. It is not a licensee adding value, like so many of its competitors. This is an attitude that started with Woz designing the hardware and software to work together, leaving a deep impression on Steve Jobs. That impression combined with Jobs’s innate focus on creating a complete product (in an era where most computers were still sold as assemble-it-yourself “kits”) and created an enduring legacy.

People often call Apple’s obsession with owning and controlling the primary technologies behind its products the Cook Doctrine, after current CEO Tim Cook, but that’s a value that goes back to Steve Jobs. Among the more modern examples of this approach:

• Safari came to be because, as the Web rose to prominence, the Mac was increasingly judged based on its performance at Web browsing, and the default Mac browser was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s allocation of Mac development resources helped determined the success of Apple’s key product. That was a no-go.

• iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) exist because it means that every Mac, iPhone, and iPad can work with Microsoft Office apps and documents right out of the box, without any extra purchase required. In releasing its own productivity suite, Apple provided instant Office compatibility and no longer needed to rely on Microsoft to do the right thing with its Mac software releases.

• Apple silicon itself is Apple’s reaction to being held hostage by the long-term plans of chip suppliers who didn’t have Apple’s interests at heart. Every Intel chip that appeared in a Mac came from an Intel road map that was built based on the overall needs of the computer market, of which Apple was a tiny part. Every Apple silicon chip in a Mac comes from Apple’s own product road map, and the chip improvements are based entirely on Apple’s needs and synchronized with Apple’s software-development road map.

• The C1/C1X chips that serves as the cellular connection in the iPhone 16e, iPhone 17e, iPhone Air, M4 iPad Air, and M5 iPad Pro—and will eventually power every new Apple device with cellular connectivity—is a reaction to Apple’s frustration with the dominant cellular radio provider, Qualcomm. Apple can now tune its own cellular chips to its own specific needs rather than relying on the parts Qualcomm builds for the entire market.

(Are AI models a primary technology? Who knows. Apple tried to build some, failed, and has decided to pivot to use Google’s AI models… for now. But if Apple ever feels that it absolutely has to have its own AI models running on its devices and in its data centers, I have no doubt that it will spend whatever it costs to make that happen. It’s just in the company’s DNA.)

You may have your own favorite examples of Apple going its own way, and counter-examples of Apple going with the crowd. Certainly, Apple has chosen to pick its battles. The G3 iMac, for example, dumped all the proprietary connectivity that Macs used to have, and just supported the industry-standard USB. Compatibility can be valuable to Apple, to a point. But beyond that point, the company knows it must go it alone—or it’ll end up being just another face in the crowd.

Over 50 years, that’s one thing that has remained true about Apple: You never forget that you’re using an Apple product. It doesn’t do generic—not in 1976, and not in 2026.

It’s Apple’s 50th anniversary — you might have read something about that lately. And I’ve been writing about the company for more than half of that time, roughly 27 years if my math is correct. Companies may last a good long while, particularly when they have a track record of great products, but the writers who report on them invariably crumble to dust.

Still, my bones haven’t entirely blown away in the lightest of breezes just yet, so I figured I would weigh in with a few insights gleaned from chronicling Cupertino’s comings and goings for half my existence on this planet. Honestly, I might as well get something out of the deal.

The challenge is, you’ve probably had your fill of listicles chronicling Apple’s Best Products of All Time or the Most Memorable TV Commercials or Steve Jobs’s Most Viral Moments or what have you. I know that I have. Besides, while I know my onions when it comes to Apple, my opinion on the most significant Apple product (the iPhone 3G) or the best commercial (the sage iMac G3 serenaded by Kermit the Frog, naturally) or the most memorable thing Steve Jobs ever said (“Just avoid holding it that way”) carries no more weight than anyone else’s. In fact, there are folks whose Apple knowledge is far more encyclopedic than my own who are better equipped to weigh in on all that.

But what I can do is empty out my reporter’s notebook, with some random stories, stray observations and items I’ve largely kept to myself over the last 27 years. With tech reporting seemingly done with me, there’s no reason to keep this stuff under my hat any longer.

The occasion may call for 50 of these — one for each year of Apple’s existence — but let’s be honest: you’d stop reading after around 17, and I’d be scrapping the bottom of the tank long before we got to the last item or two. (“No. 33: Didja ever notice that Apple employed both a guy called Woz and a guy called Joz? That’s pretty weird, huh?”) So let’s stick with 10 random thoughts about Apple as the company celebrates its golden anniversary.

My Most Awkward Encounter with Apple

Back in 2001, I was handed an original iPod, not long after Apple’s press event to show off its new music player. It’s probably forgotten with time, but the MP3 players of that era weren’t very durable, and if you were foolhardy enough to take one on a run, you ran the risk of skips caused by mechanical shock. And heaven help you if you accidentally dropped one of those things.

The iPod was going to be different, Apple told us. Not only would Apple’s music player have more storage, it was going to be durable enough to survive real world use in a way that rival devices simply could not. So I decided to put that to test, probably ill-advisedly.

I commissioned a more physically active colleague to go work out with that iPod in tow, along with one very specific instruction: be especially brutal with the device. “Let’s find out just what kind of a licking this thing can take,” I remember saying at the time.

It turns out the iPod was pretty durable, though not indestructible. We did manage to damage the device, but only after deliberately tossing it from a moving bicycle. Otherwise, for a 2001-era piece of tech, it withstood a fair amount of abuse before finally succumbing to our more violent impulses. I patted myself on the back for conceiving of a handy piece of consumer tech journalism that would give readers insight into just what they could expect from an iPod in terms of durability and went about my business without giving the story another thought.

At least until Apple asked us to return the iPod.

Companies don’t always do that, as they’re happy to leave review units in the hands of publications for use as reference devices when subsequent updates come along. But occasionally, you do get asked to return the equipment, Q-from-James-Bond-style, and this was one of the occasions. But I held out hope that Apple would agree that proving just how much punishment an iPod could take was enough of a service to more than make up for the non-operable loaner.

Apple did not agree. I don’t remember the poor soul who was tasked with explaining to Apple why their once-pristine iPod was coming back in such a decidedly scuffed-up state, but whoever it was made certain to let the company the name of the dastard who so recklessly ordered the iPod beaten to a pulp. It would be many years before Apple ever trusted me with a loaner device again, and even on those occasions, the hand-off was made with decidedly sideways glances.

The part of the Apple campus I’ve never seen

I’m not a frequent visitor to worldwide Apple HQ, but I’ve been around the place a bit. I’ve even gone inside a building or two, though never uninvited, I hasten to add. I’ve had lunch at one of Apple’s on-campus cafeterias, and let me tell you after also dining at Google’s campus, your tech industry workers are being fed very well.

I have not, however, been inside the Steve Jobs Theater, which seems odd since Apple has been holding events there for the better part of a decade. Part of that’s the nature of my role in covering Apple events — I’m usually coordinating coverage and editing people’s work, and it’s easier for me to do that watching the live stream from the comfort of my office.

The closest I’ve come was in 2017, the very first time in fact that the Steve Jobs Theater hosted any product launch. I was a late addition to the coverage team on hand to look at the iPhone 8 models and the new iPhone X, and as a consequence, I was directed to watch the event from an outdoor overflow area on a nearby TV. Which is how I normally cover such product launches, only without the 90-minute commute.

I don’t know what you remember about that 2017 event — the Apple Watch Series 3 maybe or the Apple TV 4K or one of the trio of aforementioned phones. For me, it’s the smell of fertilizer baking in the warm Bay Area sun on the freshly landscaped area surrounding the Steve Jobs Theater. On the bright side, at tech events for other companies, the smell of manure typically originates from the stage, so Apple has that going for it at least.

Watching an event on a TV outside of the closed doors where the products in question are actually being launched is hardly my most traumatic Apple press event experience, though. That’s a close tie between the iPhone 6s launch, held inside the kiln-like Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and the 2014 Apple event where I covered the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch preview announcements only to be laid off from my job 24 hours later. Good times.

My favorite Apple launch event

Look, over the course of 27 years, Apple events are going to blend together, particularly when you’ve stopped attending them in person. Nevertheless, a few stand out, especially since i was in the room where it happened.

My very first Macworld Expo in January 2000, Steve Jobs announced he was dropping the “i” from his iCEO title — basically, no longer an interim title, which seemed like a big deal at the time. I was also at the WWDC keynote where Apple held a funeral for Mac OS 9, marking the complete transition to OS X.

But c’mon — there’s only one logical choice here, and it’s the iPhone’s unveiling in 2007. Seeing Apple take the wraps off a completely new product is going to stick in the brain pan, especially since it’s one that’s subsequently stood the test of time. (Folks who were there for the Apple Vision Pro unveiling: I do not think time will be as kind to that moment.) Jobs’ pitch of a combination communication device/music player/mobile phone still resonates. Even AT&T’s Stan Sigman reading his contribution to the presentation off of index cards couldn’t dull the occasion.

My favorite Apple-inspired road trip

If you weren’t around for Apple’s pre-OS X era, it’s easy to forget what a significant shift it was away from the old Mac operating systems to the more modern design and capabilities of OS X — especially after previous efforts to update the OS went nowhere. (For us old timers, “Copland” is more than just a 1997 Sylvester Stallone vehicle or the misspelled last name of The Police’s drummer.) Apple had been working on a new OS for a while, and finally, in the fall of 2000, Mac users were going to get a chance to give it a try.

In fact, the public beta of Mac OS X was going to be revealed at that year’s Apple Expo in Paris, and I jokingly suggested to Macworld’s then-editor that it would be a hoot to send me to cover it.

“I don’t speak a lick of French,” I told him. “I don’t even have a passport. Wouldn’t it be hilarious to fly me over there and watch me flail my way through covering the event?”

“It would be hilarious,” the editor unexpectedly agreed. And that’s how I wound up getting an expedited passport, hopping on a flight to Paris and wandering about an indifferent metropolis without anything resembling a concrete game plan.

The turn-of-the-century tech boom was a hell of a time, kids.

Anyhow, I managed, covering both the OS X news and the surprise launch of the key lime iBook. That said, there was one moment of pure jet lag-induced panic that occurred moments before Steve Jobs stepped on stage to make his assorted announcements: What if, I thought, he delivers this entire speech in French, and I’ve come all this way to not understanding a blessed word he’s saying? Fortunately, whatever multilingual capabilities Apple’s CEO possessed were not on display that day, and I was able to fulfill my journalistic obligations.

My least favorite Apple keynote

Jason Snell and I used to have a running gag back in the days when print, not online, was king and we would reserve a sizable chunk of Macworld’s print edition for last-second coverage of all the Macworld Expo keynote announcements Apple was sure to make. But what would happen, we wondered, if Apple didn’t announce much of anything, leaving us with all those pages to fill and very little to write about.

Our joking Plan B: Run an article called “What Went Wrong?” featuring a picture of various Apple executives shrugging.

We came dangerously close to having to do that at the New York edition of Macworld Expo 2001 where Apple announced… well, some stuff. We got a recap of the recent Apple Store openings — hey, they were new at the time — and a lot of talk from developers showing off OS X native apps for the still-nascent operating system. The lone hardware announcement centered around new Power Mac G4 towers, punctuated by a lengthy discussion of what Apple called the “megahertz myth” to address differences in performance between Macs and PCs. Put another way, Apple’s big product announcement at that Expo was punctuated by an 8-minute deep dive on processor pipelines.

We managed to produce the necessary copy to fill those empty magazine pages that night. But it took some doing.

Apple event celebrity sightings

Attend enough Apple-hosted or -adjacent events, and you’re going to run into famous people. For example, if you walked the show floor of a Macworld Expo in San Francisco any time between 2000 and 2009 and didn’t see comedian Sinbad at some point, I’m guessing you were just popping into Moscone Center to use the restroom.

I’m notoriously bad at recognizing people, but even I can recount a couple celebrity encounters. Once, I waited in line to get in for an Expo keynote standing directly behind Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame. And during the iPhone 6s launch held in the hotbox that was the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, I stood patiently waiting for a demo of one announcement or another — memory tells me it was gameplay on the Apple TV — when Charlie Rose big-footed his way in front of me and took my turn. Definitely the worst thing Charlie Rose has ever been accused of.

(Glances at Charlie Rose’s Wikipedia page.)

Oh. Um. Scratch that.

I’m told Gwen Stefani was at the 2014 iPhone launch, though I never ran into her or her apparently sizable entourage. But while U2 was busy surreptitiously downloading their Songs of Innocence album to the rest of your iPhones, they were also blowing out my ears at the same event.

Most awkward encounter with an Apple executive

Celebrity encounters are all well and good, but who’s a bigger name star than the men and women who run Apple? I don’t often rate face time with the higher-ups at the company, but there was one time where Tim Cook and I had the briefest of interactions. You will be surprised to learn it did not reflect well on me.

I was leaning against a wall in San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center, waiting for a colleague to wrap up a product briefing, when a gaggle of people strolled by, with Tim Cook at the center of the throng. For some reason, he looked over in my general direction at the same time I was watching him pass by, and that’s how I found myself in a staring contest with Apple’s CEO.

I don’t exactly have the friendliest appearance. My resting face makes it appear as if I’m trying to recall how you’ve wronged me, and if ever I try smiling, it looks like I’ve suddenly remembered. So I decided to offer some sort of gesture to convey a spirit of collegiality — I gave Tim Cook what I hoped passed for an amiable nod of acknowledgement. Judging by the mix of confusion and apprehension that flashed across his face, I don’t think I was entirely successful.

So, Tim Cook, if you’re reading this, and you’re still wondering why that glaring fellow nodded at you at that one WWDC many years ago, rest assured that there’s no ill will on my part.

My favorite portrayal of Apple in a movie

I saw 2013’s Jobs twice, which is probably two times more than anyone outside of Ashton Kutcher saw it. Both times were press screenings for a review I was commissioned to write about the movie. The first screening happened well before the movie’s release and Act Three of the picture felt so haphazard to me that I thought for sure that Jobs would be recut prior to arriving in theaters. Hence, the second screening right before the premiere, in which I discovered, nope, the movie was going to wind up exactly the same.

So Jobs isn’t my favorite picture about Apple, and I have to confess that the 2015 Steve Jobs biopic didn’t resonate with me either. No, for big-screen Apple thrills, I suggest turning to the small screen in the form of 1999’s Pirates of Silicon Valley, a made-for-TV movie staring Noah Wylie as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. (John DiMaggio — TV’s Bender — plays Steve Ballmer, and sadly, we do not get to hear “Developers, developers, developers” in the Bender voice.) Pirates of Silicon Valley isn’t the least bit accurate, but it’s a good character study that has something to say about ambition and our impulses to create.

If there’s a runner-up, I’d steer you toward Golden Dreams, a short video that used to run in the part of Disney’s California Adventure that now houses the Little Mermaid ride. There, you can look in as two seemingly random guys named Steve assemble a rudimentary computer while Whoopi Goldberg looks on, pointedly taking a bite out of an apple.

Goofiest Apple product of the last-half century

By this point, it’s probably clear that I find the off-beat aspects of a company’s history to be just as vital as the landmark hits that everyone talks about. I think we all should be serious about our work without being too serious about ourselves, so the things that are going to stand out to me about Apple’s first 50 years are going to reflect that. And occasionally, Apple has had some fun, too.

How else to explain the moment in 2004 when Steve Jobs — co-founder of the company, lauded visionary, subject of many a profile attesting to his business savvy — stood up in front of a packed house and introduced the world to iPod Socks? Jobs is fully committed to the bit, hailing the socks as a “revolutionary new product.” A hint of a smile flashes on his face as he tries to convince the world that, yes indeed, they need to swaddle their music players in brightly colored socks. “They keep your iPod warm,” Jobs insists, and you might for a moment feel like he actually means it.

We can talk about great Apple products and shake our heads at the few missteps. But life is about fun, and there’s no other way to describe iPod socks.

Most symbolic photo of my time covering Apple

Let’s end by circling back to the original iPod — the launch event, specifically. There’s a photo that makes the rounds in my circle of associates, pulled from the launch event video where the cameras have cut to the crowd. And there, you can clearly see Jason Snell watching as the iPod is unveiled. Seated next to him is Rick LePage, Macworld’s editor in chief at the time, and Jon Seff, another Macworld editor.

I’m there, too, though you wouldn’t know it from that shot. For a long time, I assumed I had been sitting next to Jason, so that I was cropped out of the photo — kind of like a real-life version of that Nathan Fielder meme — “Out on the town having the time of my life with a bunch of friends. They’re all just out of frame, laughing too.” — only in reverse. Here, it’s just me who’s been cropped out of the shot, having the time of my life.

And that seemed like a fitting way to sum up my time covering Apple. The company announces something significant, and I’m right there, if only slightly out of the shot.

Of course, that’s actually not the case. In fact-checking this article, we discovered that I am not seated next to Jason, but rather in the row behind him. And yes, we have the photos to prove it.

So as it turns out, I’m not as peripheral to this Big Moment in Apple History as memory had once dictated. Turns out Apple can still surprise us all after 50 years, even those of us who’ve seen it all.

Go to the podcast page.

When I saw my friend Antony Johnston’s post on Six Colors, I instantly thought, “yeah, me too.” And as it happens, the very Mac model that changed Antony’s life put me on an entirely new road, too.

Just before I got my journalism degree in 1984, a professor named Jim Haynes sat me down and warned me that I would have more trouble finding a job than almost anyone in my class because I have low vision. I choose to believe that he meant it kindly, a warning to get ahead of any potential employers’ doubts, rather than as a pessimistic prediction about my future.

But he was right. My job search was painfully long, and I realized that at least part of the struggle had to do with the expectation that young communications specialists working for non-profits or government – a niche I thought I could play in – needed to physically paste up newsletters, brochures and other typeset publications. I’d already learned how unsuited I was for that during a college internship, what with the need to cut straight lines of galley copy and wield an X-acto knife on rubylith. I simply wasn’t equipped to do that sort of visual work.

Somewhere along the way, I went to an Apple demo of something called “desktop publishing.” With a Macintosh computer and a high-resolution printer called a LaserWriter, you could design, lay out and print a complete publication — no knives required. When I arrived for the demo, I was intrigued. By the time I left, I would have sold a kidney for a Mac-LaserWriter combo.

In my unemployed state, the only available source of funds was my parents. Ever the practical sort, they suggested that I learn more about what I now knew as DTP, before they would be willing to hand over more than $6,000 for my pipe dream.

So I rented my first Mac (a 512Ke), a copy of PageMaker 1.2, and an external floppy drive. The guy I rented it from, Robert Jagitsch, would go on to found PowerLogix, a company that sold Mac processor accelerators. I used to run into him at Macworld Expo in the 90s. But just then, his stock of Mac stuff for sale or rent appeared to live in the trunk of his car.

Without a LaserWriter, I couldn’t do much more than teach myself PageMaker. But my local AlphaGraphics offered laser prints for $1 a page. It didn’t take me long to realize I might be able to make desktop publishing work as a freelance business.

Pretty soon, my mom – who had given my sister a used VW Rabbit during college – agreed to fund a brand-new Mac Plus. It was my equivalent “welcome to adulthood” gift. I added PageMaker and a SuperMac DataFrame hard drive that cost an eyewatering $625 for 20 megabytes.

I launched the publishing business, creating everything from brochures to fancy reports for graduate students to newsletters for a city council member. AlphaGraphics was still my source for laser prints, but I quickly fell in with a group of interlocking businesses that offered scanning, full-service printing and access to Linotype typesetters that offered 1200 dpi output, versus the LaserWriter’s 300 dpi.

Eventually – four years out of college – I landed my first full-time professional job. With a Mac Plus on my desk, I edited and laid out monthly trade magazines for enthusiasts of supercomputers, DEC minicomputers and various UNIX systems. Despite a solid portfolio of published writing, I could never have talked my way into that gig without my Apple desktop publishing skills. Those years I spent at home cranking out newsletters had also made me a pretty good Mac system administrator and troubleshooter – skills that have followed me throughout my career

On this episode of The Vergecast, we begin by stepping back a bit to ask a big question: How is Apple doing right now? Obviously, by many measures, Apple’s doing great — trillion-dollar company and whatnot — but this is a company that has long taken pride in building better software, better hardware, better everything, and doing it in a better and cooler and more responsible way. Jason Snell, a longtime chronicler of all things Apple, joins the show to do a modified version of the annual Six Colors report card about where Apple stands right now.

It was a great conversation, and nice to talk about where Apple is going, given all the history that I’ve been writing about for the last few weeks.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

That’s true, so far as it goes, but this interregnum is too often simplified as when Apple CEO John Sculley got rid of Steve and ruined the company. And that’s really not true. Not only was the Jobs who was ejected from Apple completely unprepared to run the company (as his disastrous but educational years at NeXT would prove), but the Apple of this period had some real accomplishments.

From making necessary changes to the Mac to the creation of the PowerBook, Apple didn’t simply weather the 12 years without Jobs. The company made shifts, adaptations, and decisions that would become foundational to its future. Were there missteps? Most definitely. But ignoring Apple’s successes over those dozen years undermines the truer, deeper story of how Apple survived to become the behemoth it is today.

Continue reading on The Verge ↦

Let me tell you how the Mac changed my life.

In 1988 my high school form tutor, who was also head of the art department, got a Mac Plus. It was the only one in the school, as the computer room was all BBC Micros. In fact, so he said, it was one of the only school-owned Macs in England. It was kept in a locked office room, annexed off his classroom.

I loved playing computer games, and like all kids, I’d messed around with typing in BASIC programs from magazines. But whenever I strayed beyond the simple commands – LOAD, SAVE, PRINT, GOTO – I was out of my depth. I’ve never been able to get my head around DOS-like command line interfaces, let alone programming languages. They just don’t make sense to me, I’m all at sea.

(I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s because I always looked at computers as a tool, a way to do something, rather than a thing to do.)

So I don’t know why my tutor showed off that Mac to me, of all people. But I was gobsmacked by the visual interface and the tangibility of its spatial permanence model. ‘This icon here is your file. This window represents the space inside a folder. If you move the file into the folder, it will still be there, in that same visually-defined place, when you look inside again later.’

I know that sounds like the simplest, most obvious thing now, but in the 1980s it really wasn’t. Crucially, unlike a command line, it made sense to me.

So I was sold on the interface. But then what really blew my mind were the programs you could run on this thing. MacPaint. MacWrite. PageMaker. And the fonts! 12 different fonts you could place anywhere, change their size, make (some of) them bold or italic… again, this is simple and obvious stuff now, but not then.

For some reason, I don’t think any other pupils really took to that Mac. But I was hooked, and spent a lot of time in that cramped office room. I proceeded to use the Mac Plus’s tiny mono bitmap screen, paltry RAM, and single floppy drive to design and lay out two school magazines, one edition of the sixth-form ‘zine, and several judges’ pamphlets for the annual music and drama festivals¹ – plus a bunch of, um, extracurricular stuff for my regular RPG gaming group: character sheets, combat resolution tables, equipment lists…

The ironic thing is, at no point did anyone tell me that what I was doing with this Mac could be a career. My work experience at the local newspaper had shown me that ‘layout’ was something done by chain-smoking men using bromides, cow gum, and rubylith – not computers. The very thought! So after flunking my A-levels (too much partying, not to mention fooling around on that Mac), I was a little unmoored and took the first office job I saw that sounded vaguely interesting: selling stationery.

I was an OK office drone, but my creative bent was obvious to everyone. My free time back then was dominated by games, music, and art. So, encouraged by my boss to go back to school and do something creative, I flicked through the local art college brochure… and found a course called ‘graphic design’. It even mentioned using Macs. Suddenly, I was back in that annexed room, designing a school magazine, and I knew what I wanted to do.

Perhaps the most amazing thing is how small the window of time and opportunity was where all of this could happen. Much earlier, and Macs barely existed; much later, and they were already in professional use everywhere. I was lucky enough to be right in that sweet spot.

I’ve been a professional writer for 30 years now, full-time for 24. That’s how most everyone knows me. But for almost a decade prior to that, I was a graphic designer at various agencies and publishers, eventually specialising in magazines. It was working in those places that gave me access to the net, and an online community that encouraged me to take fiction writing seriously. (Shout-out to alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo!)

There’s a whole chain of happenstance and chance events, too long to go into here, that led to me eventually being published. But if you follow it back far enough, that chain started with my form tutor introducing me to a strange new computer, which changed my life.

Happy birthday, Apple.

Go to the podcast page.

After I wrote my Wall Street Journal review of David Pogue’s excellent Apple: The First 50 Years (Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books) my editor asked for a sidebar recommending other books about Apple. I consulted my own collection and also asked a few of my friends.

If the 50th anniversary celebrations and talk have made you curious about Apple history, there are a lot of books out there. Here are some recommendations:

• West of Eden (1989) by Frank Rose. A recommendation from Stephen Hackett, this book focuses on Steve Jobs hiring John Sculley, which in turn led to Steve Jobs’s own ejection from Apple. (Amazon, used.)

• Insanely Great (1994) by Steven Levy. This is the definitive story of the original Mac, placed in the context of the 1980s personal computing revolution. Levy, whose 1984 book Hackers is an astounding history of the early days of computing, gets at the heart of what made that original Mac, and the original Mac team, special. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)

• Infinite Loop (1999) by Michael S. Malone. If the year of publication doesn’t tell you what this is about, the subtitle will: “How the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane.” Recommended by John Siracusa, this is the story of Apple falling apart in the 1990s. (Amazon, used.)

• On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple (1999) by Gil Amelio and William L. Simon. Of course Gil Amelio’s tell-all about his brief tenure as Apple CEO is self-serving. And yet I enjoyed reading it, because I believe that late-90s Apple was just as messed up as he describes it, especially when it came to the utter failure to replace classic Mac OS that led to Apple buying NeXT and bringing back Steve Jobs. Was Amelio a bozo, like Jobs apparently claimed? Maybe, but you can’t deny that he was there at a pivotal moment and made the single most important decision in Apple’s history. (Used.)

• Apple Confidential 2.0 (2004) by Owen W. Linzmayer. Prior to the publication of David Pogue’s book, this was probably the best collection of stories about the history of Apple. It’s still an entertaining read. (PDF, used.)

• Revolution in the Valley (2004) by Andy Hertzfeld. One of the core members of the original Macintosh team has a lot of amazing stories to tell. We think of the tech industry today as being corporate, but the original Mac was almost a countercultural object. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)

• The Perfect Thing (2006) by Steven Levy. Levy does his “Insanely Great” thing again, but this time about the creation of the iPod. You may think, well, the iPod’s pretty dated technology now, why does it matter? But this book gives you some clear insight into the entire product development process in the early days of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)

• Creative Selection (2019) by Ken Kocienda. I’m not convinced that the definitive insider history of the creation of the iPhone has been written yet. But between Pogue’s book and this account from one of the creators of the original iPhone keyboard, we’ve got at least some good tales from that vital period. Here’s my original review. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)

• Apple in China (2025) by Patrick McGee. This is the definitive book of the Tim Cook era, at least so far, but it also covers as far back as engineering decisions made right after Steve Jobs came back to Apple. Even if you’re not interested in the Chinese angle, this book is worth reading because it reveals how Apple became and remains a titan of manufacturing, which is why it seems capable of building products nobody else can build. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)

• Steve Jobs in Exile (coming May 2026) by Geoffrey Cain. A detailed look at Steve Jobs after he left Apple, including everything that went wrong at NeXT—and how it made Jobs a better CEO when he returned to Apple. This book isn’t out yet, but I’ve read it and it’s quite good. (Pre-order: Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books.)

(Pro tip: The used books are really cheap, and it’s kind of fun to read an old, beat-up book when thinking about Apple’s history.)

I have a mostly “love/not-hate” relationship with the Medications feature in the iPhone Health app. Having accrued and had treated a variety of conditions over the years, I found Medications a welcome addition in 2022. You can add drugs you take, the frequency (or as needed), and set them to a schedule. Then you receive a notification at the time you set, plus a reminder.

While I’m generally good at “medication adherence,” I’m not perfect. For many drugs, clinical research is based on regular administration and staying on a schedule. In some cases, you can injure yourself or reduce the effectiveness of a medication if you take it erratically, sometimes even missing a few doses, as with antibiotics or antivirals.

Medications is an oddball feature, though, as it’s kind of shoehorned into Health, and doesn’t use the normal Notifications system for alerts. I am sure that is in part because of the unique elements of ensuring reminders occur and recur. But also, it’s because your medication schedule is akin to time-of-day reminders: they should always occur at the requested time.

When you travel across time zones, that’s where confusion can emerge. While on a flight, you may have seen a notification that says “Time Zone Changed,” which suggests you need to check your medication schedule. You may see this for each time zone you pass through. Tap it, and you’re taken to the Medications view, where you can tap to rewrite the time zone to the local one—that is, 8 am PDT becomes 8 am MDT, GMT, etc.

But I had the opposite problem: traveling west to east the other week, I experienced the failure of negative knowledge—I wasn’t alerted about the time zone change and wound up missing a dose of meds.¹ I haven’t had this happen since I started using Medications and traveling, so I don’t know what failed.

Here’s the sequence of what happened (or didn’t):

• I flew across three time zones, from Pacific to Eastern. I was not alerted by Medications about the time zone change.
• I arrived in Boston, and with Settings > General > Date & Time’s Set Automatically option enabled, my iPhone and Apple Watch updated to EDT.
• The next morning, I forgot for the first time in seemingly years to take my morning meds.
• Later that morning, at 11 am EDT (8 am PDT), I must have received an alert that I missed. Medications alerts aren’t persistent in quite the same way as other notifications.

It was only late that night that I realized what had happened. Looking in Health > Medications and swiping way down to Options, I checked that Time Zone Change was enabled. It was. However, my whole schedule was three hours off. There’s no manual “reset to current time zone” button.

The workaround is to go to Settings > General > Date & Time, disable Set Automatically, switch to the old time zone, then to the new one, and then re-enable Set Automatically. At that point, I received the alert from Medications and was able to visit the app to approve changing the absolute time (8 am PDT/11 am EDT) to the relative time (8 am EDT).

Clearly, Medications has room to grow in its time zone support. Because of our body clocks, we may want to keep our medications on the absolute time: if you travel 12 time zones, you probably want to be sure you take your doses of daily meds about 24 hours apart. But there’s no good way to adjust Medications while traveling unless the alert is triggered. Calendar added an option for Floating events years ago, where they were fixed to a time of day rather than a time zone. Some kind of opposite-to-floating option or time slider needs to be added to make Medications more travel friendly.

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

Apple would never have made it if it weren’t for the Apple II, the company’s first hit product and the first one to generate the amount of devotion we’ve now come to expect from fans of Apple’s products. Their slogan was, and still is, “Apple II Forever!”

Continue reading on The Verge ↦

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

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

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

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

Chance Miller calls the time of death at 9to5 Mac:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

A quiet end to what was once the flagship of the Mac product line. But time comes for us all.

Over the years, as laptops rose in prominence and other Mac desktops added power, the Mac Pro increasingly became a niche, high-end device. After the disastrous trash-can Mac Pro design, Apple made good on a promise to return the Mac Pro, and shipped a new take on the “cheese grater” enclosure. But the move to Apple silicon really killed the product dead, since Apple’s modern chip architecture doesn’t support external GPUs, which was one of the last reasons to buy a Mac Pro.

In the interim, the Mac Studio has become the top-of-the-line desktop. It’s great. RIP to a real one, but it’s time for us all to move on.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

The Apple Vision Pro feels like a product that’s waiting for the world to catch up, but the reality is closer to the opposite. The world is waiting for a reason to use it and that reason hasn’t quite shown up yet.

There’s very little wrong with the hardware. Apple built something that works in a way first-generation devices rarely do (says the guy old enough to have bought a Newton at launch) with displays that feel natural rather than novel and an interface that disappears quickly enough to let you focus on what you’re seeing.

The problem comes the moment you take it off. There isn’t a strong pull to put it back on. It’s impressive, even remarkable in bursts, but it doesn’t yet fit into a daily rhythm. That’s not a hardware problem. It’s a content problem, and more specifically, a cadence problem. Apple has treated immersive content like a prestige release schedule, carefully curated and spaced out, which works for television but not for behavior. If you want people to build a habit around something, you need volume and consistency, not occasional brilliance. Right now, Vision Pro feels like something you check in on rather than something you live inside, and that distinction matters more than anything on the spec sheet.

Neal Stephenson’s skepticism lands because it recognizes that gap. If the content never reaches a point where it becomes necessary, the headset remains optional, and optional devices rarely scale. What’s interesting is that the missing piece isn’t hypothetical. It already exists in a different form, outside of Apple’s ecosystem, and it’s showing up in a place that Apple understands better than most companies: people paying for experience.

Cosm is the cleanest example of that. It’s easy to dismiss it a high-end gimmick, a giant dome with a better screen, but that misses what’s actually happening inside those venues. People are buying tickets, planning nights around it, treating it as something closer to attending a game than watching one. The technology matters, but the behavior matters more.

Cosm is already generating meaningful revenue and drawing repeat customers, which tells you this isn’t just novelty value. It’s tapping into something real, the idea that proximity, or at least the feeling of it, has value even when the event is happening somewhere else.

The challenge for Cosm is that scaling that experience is difficult. These are expensive builds that require the right locations, the right partnerships, and enough capital to expand without diluting the quality that makes them work in the first place.

That is exactly the kind of problem Apple has solved before. It’s not just about having the cash, though Apple certainly has that. It’s about having the discipline to build a system that can expand without losing its identity and the distribution to make it visible at scale. If Apple owned something like Cosm, it wouldn’t just be a set of venues. It would be a front door. You could put an Apple Store in the lobby and it wouldn’t feel forced. It would feel like a natural extension of the experience, a place where people encounter the hardware in the context of something they already understand.

From there, the path to the home becomes clearer. Vision Pro, or whatever lower-cost version follows, doesn’t need to stand on its own as a category. It becomes an extension of something people have already bought into. The idea of watching a game “from somewhere else” is no longer abstract because they’ve already felt it in a room with other people. At home, it becomes a different version of the same experience, missing the crowd and the waiter, but gaining convenience and access.

The critical shift is in how Apple approaches rights. Trying to own sports outright is a losing strategy. The costs are too high, the competition too entrenched, and the fragmentation too deep. Apple has made smart moves with MLS, F1, and selective partnerships, but doubling down on exclusivity won’t unlock this. The better path is to work alongside the existing ecosystem. Install Cosm camera systems at major events, not as replacements for the broadcast but as an additional layer. Let networks and leagues sell that immersive feed as a premium product, with Apple taking a share for the technology and distribution. It’s additive rather than competitive, which makes it easier to scale and harder for partners to resist.

Apple has always been at its best when it connects behavior to technology in a way that feels inevitable in hindsight. Right now, Vision Pro still feels like a solution looking for a problem. The problem, or more accurately the opportunity, is already there in how people respond to immersive sports experiences. Cosm has shown that people will pay for that feeling. The hardware is close enough to deliver it at home. The gap is building the bridge between those two things in a way that feels continuous rather than experimental.

If Apple gets that right, the conversation around Vision Pro changes quickly. It stops being about whether people want to wear a headset and starts being about what they’re missing when they don’t. That’s the point where adoption tends to take care of itself.

I was sitting there in the Byte Shop in Palo Alto on an Apple-1 writing BASIC programs, and this guy with a scraggly beard and no shoes came in and looked at me and conducted what I later understood to be the standard interview, which was “Who are you?” I said, “I’m Chris.” … Steve Jobs’s idea back then of recruiting was to grab a random-ass 14-year-old off the streets.

The rest is history!

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

The fifth season of Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” premieres March 27—really, the evening of March 26 for those of us on the West Coast. For the last few years, Dan and I have been reviewing episodes on our “NASA Vending Machine” podcast and I’m excited to have the show back.

As always, “For All Mankind” is about taking big swings. There’s always a dramatic, history-changing moment or shocking twist that’s not too far away. Set in an alternative past where the Space Race kept going after the Soviets landed on the moon (yep!), season four took us to a 2003 where Mars colonists sought more autonomy by hijacking an asteroid.

This season, which takes place in 2012, is still primarily set on Mars, though there’s also some space adventure in the offing. Apple tech fans will enjoy that we’ve finally reached the iPhone era, though the iPhones on “For All Mankind” are a little thicker than the ones we remember, and they might actually be Newtons. There are also a lot of early-2010s iMacs on display.

While the first episode has to do a lot of work reminding you of what’s happened recently and setting up the new power dynamics at play this season, subsequent episodes get pretty intense, pretty fast. At times the show plays with police procedural, mystery story, even car-chase adventure… familiar TV genre stuff, except it’s all on Mars! Mireille Enos of “The Killing” plays an important new role as an investigator for the Mars Peacekeeping force who is suspicious that several different crimes might have been committed out on the surface. There are also a bunch of returning faces, some expected and some quite surprising. (And also, yes, Joel Kinnaman is still in the show even though Ed is now basically in his eighties.)

I’ve seen the first six episodes thus far, so I don’t know where it’s all going, but I’ve sure enjoyed the ride. “For All Mankind” continues to use its alt-history setting to tell dramatic, almost operatic stories that can also disturbingly have relevance to current events in our own world.

I’m pretty skeptical that Apple’s new Siri-wrapped Gemini will be able to accurately and reliably assist with automation. Gemini will be the foundation to Apple’s foundation models, but there’s no there there. Apple has no well-documented, debuggable, inspectable system to execute automation with, unless you count ancient and inscrutable AppleScript, and you shouldn’t.

Sure, LLM chatbots will spit out code (even AppleScript!) if you ask them to, but it might not work. It gets substantially worse when you’re asking LLMs questions about Shortcuts.

Go ahead and ask any chatbot to describe how to make a Shortcut to perform some automation that you’ve been wanting to do and then try to assemble what it suggests. It’s extremely tedious, prone to user error, and isn’t in any way guaranteed to work even when it’s all put together.

Agents that hook into development environments are much better than a bare chatbot because they can inspect, run, and debug the code they are generating. They aren’t perfect, but if you have an agent like Claude Code hooked up to an development tool like VS Code and start describing some Python script you want, it’ll execute and iterate until the output is what you asked for.

If humans don’t have access to documentation, to actionable debug output, logging, the ability to bypass/ignore actions as part of testing, and the ability to copy and paste snippets of code, then how can the new Siri do it?

Right now, Shortcuts works with AI models by passing some input and then receiving the output. When something goes to the model, the model transforms the data, and delivers a result back to Shortcuts. That’s a non-deterministic workflow, so any change to the model, or even just randomness in general, can produce different output. This means you can’t reliably troubleshoot or adjust it without introducing uncertainty in what new outputs you’ll get.

When working with an agent to assemble automation in an IDE, the code it builds is deterministic, so it will keep working even if the model changes. Not everything you want to automate requires LLM functionality when it runs, but not everything you automate should require hours of labor to fabricate the deterministic workflow version of it.

I really hope that the magic of new Siri isn’t going to be that it will just do things with bare actions and App Intents, magically, without any user-accessible process, or as a blob inside of a Shortcut you need to make. If I ask Siri to reorder a list, and it doesn’t do it correctly, I want to be able to access the scaffolding it created to see what went wrong, not just keep asking Siri to do it again in slightly different ways until I get output I like.

If Siri doesn’t produce anything inspectable, or it produces a Shortcut, then there’s not much work humans or AI can do to fix things.

AI cut below the rest

The problem the Shortcuts app is supposed to solve has never been solved, because no one really knows how to use Shortcuts unless they become a Shortcuts expert. Shortcuts is user-friendly in appearance, but not in practice. It’s meant to welcome people who don’t know anything about programming with its friendly drag-and-drop interface, and searchable actions panel.

Unfortunately, the names for actions don’t always say what they do, and the documentation is often a vague piece of filler that’s frequently reused for more than one Shortcut action. Even experienced programmers can get flummoxed when they try to search the available actions for seemingly standard functions, like reversing a list.

Magic connections are magic, until your script gets any longer than the length of your screen and you need to start dragging actions around, inevitably breaking connections and making unintended ones. With a text-based script you’d have to keep track of the names and spelling of your variables, but they don’t change out from under you if you add more lines of code above or below them.

You can’t do one of the most simple, and useful things in scripting, which is commenting out (ignoring/bypassing) something to test or evaluate alternatives.

A lot of the time, when people are using Shortcuts, they’re relying heavily on the run shell script action to do actual programming that lets them write normal, vanilla code, or ssh’ing into a server from iOS to do the same thing. It’s nice that Shortcuts can do that, but shell scripts aren’t cross platform, and ssh’ing into a server is in no way accomplishing Shortcuts’ mission.

Without logging, you can’t ask Siri why your automation that was supposed to run in the middle of the night didn’t run. Maybe it was a permissions issue that was never raised when the shortcut was created. You, and Siri, just don’t know.

AI rising tide lifts all boats

Again, Apple doesn’t have to do these things just for humans, or just for Siri. They are in no way mutually exclusive.

If the concern is that Shortcuts shouldn’t be like a programming language, with tracebacks, and logs which would put off “normal people” then just remember that “normal people” don’t really use Shortcuts. They ask a chatbot to just do it, and Siri, as Apple’s chatbot, could take advantage of those fiddly, programming bits and perform its role better, in a way that was auditable.

I have seen people make frantic posts on Mastodon about how AI is deskilling programmers, but the beauty of Shortcuts is that Apple already applies the deskilling at the factory.

Go to the podcast page.

Sounds bad. But if they’re not recalling the routers, and they’re not fixing them… what the heck is the government actually doing?

It’s banning future routers that haven’t been made yet.

You’re not making a lot of sense.

I warned you this was a story about Brendan Carr, known dummy and anti-consumer FCC chairperson! Specifically, the FCC is keeping new, previously unannounced, foreign-made consumer routers out of the US… unless it decides to exempt them. For reasons. We’ll get to those.

Hollister classifies this as a shakedown to somehow force more manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Gee, I wonder if there could possibly be any…let’s say exploitable…loopholes to this brilliantly concocted plan:

What if I buy one of those newer routers in Canada and bring it back home?

The FCC’s magic 8 ball says, “no,” but good luck enforcing that, Brendan.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple today announced Apple Business, a new all-in-one platform that includes key services companies need to effortlessly manage devices, reach more customers, equip team members with essential apps and tools, and get support from experts to run and grow efficiently and securely. Apple Business features built-in mobile device management, helping businesses easily configure employee groups, device settings, security, and apps with Blueprints to quickly get started. In addition, customers can now set up business email, calendar, and directory services with their own domain name for seamless and elevated communication and collaboration.

This new offering actually consolidates three existing Apple products, Apple Business Manager, Apple Business Essentials, and Apple Business Connect, and offers mobile device management for free, which will save some existing customers money. There are also some new API functions for larger organizations, and Apple is offering businesses access to Apple-hosted email and calendaring for the first time. The new Blueprints feature will make it easier for administrators to assign configurations and apps.

Also announced today is something that has been widely expected: ads in Maps in the U.S. and Canada. We now know those will arrive this summer. Apple provides additional details further on:

Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

Again, it’s not a huge surprise to see this—Apple has been working on bolstering its ad business in the past few months. But it does mean that once this feature is enabled, you’ll have to scroll past an ad to see results when you search for stuff in Apple Maps.

Ads or no, companies that use Apple Business will also be able to edit their metadata and upload pictures directly into Apple Maps.

It’ll take some time to digest these changes, but it seems like this is a simplification of Apple’s business offering, and making MDM free will be a win for smaller organizations. Unfortunately, Apple’s still only offering 5GB of free iCloud data on managed accounts, and it’s hard to think that any business should rely on Apple’s notoriously unreliable email platform.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

“This is not physically impossible; it’s only a question of whether this is a rational thing to scale up economically,” [engineer Andrew] McCalip said. “The answer is it’s really close. And if you own both sides of the equation, SpaceX and xAI, it’s not a terrible place to be. I wouldn’t bet against Elon.”

Yet betting on Elon also requires a giant leap of faith.

The third part of this series will dive deeper into detailed cost estimates, but in terms of round numbers, the bare-bones cost of deploying 1 million satellites is more than a trillion dollars. SpaceX’s two biggest previous projects to date, the hyper-ambitious Starlink and Starship programs, each required on the order of $10 billion up front. So in terms of scope and cost, orbital data centers are two orders of magnitude larger.

The part that has me curious, but isn’t really addressed in the story, is future-proofing. Companies like Nvidia are kicking out new chips at such a rate that the processors you send in to orbit will almost certainly be outdated by the time they’re operational. Will that be enough to offset the perceived gains? Are we constantly going to be launching new satellites? What happens to the old one? What if the AI bubble bursts? All fertile ground for a near-future sci-fi story, methinks, if not near-future non-fiction.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Collect your meager Kalshi and Polymarket winnings, I guess: Apple has officially announced that its 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference will kick off with an in-person event at Apple Park on Monday, June 8.

As in recent years, the event will run for the week, starting with the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union on Monday, followed by video sessions and labs. Videos will be accessible on the Apple Developer app and website, as well as YouTube.

Those who attend the in-person event will be able to watch the Keynote and state of the union, as well as participate in other activities throughout the day. Attendees will be determined by random selection, with invitations sent out by the end of the day on April 2. You must be a member of the Apple Developer Program or Apple Developer Enterprise Program, or a winner of the 2026 Swift Student Challenge to apply. Additionally, 50 “Distinguished Winners” of the challenge will be invited to a three-day experience that includes Monday’s special event.

There are, as usual, lots of eyes on WWDC, where Apple traditionally announces all its big platform updates for the year to come. This year we’re expecting the “27” year updates, but there are big questions marks hovering around some features, like the much-delayed Apple Intelligence offerings. We’ll find out that and more on June 8.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

I started seeing pictures in Photos that I was sure I didn’t take recently, but often of locations I knew vaguely. After a few days, I realized the issue: my older child, in college on the East Coast, and currently traveling during spring break, had a Camera setting that caused all their images to blend into a shared family library.

Fortunately, our kid is old enough, wise enough—and communicative enough with us parents—that I didn’t see anything they didn’t want me to see, but it is the kind of thing that could be awkward in some shared groups.

The issue is that the Camera app has a tiny icon that’s easy to tap and activate without realizing it. That button’s activation is then persistent for all subsequent photos you take!

Here’s how to work with this feature intentionally, and deactivate it if you never want to use it—with purpose or not!

Share with those who care

The iCloud Shared Photo Library is an oddball: you can create or belong to one, and one only, and it can be shared with the creator plus five others, who don’t need to be in your Family Sharing group, if you have one.¹ The thing that you create is called Shared Library throughout the interface.

Once you’ve created or joined a Shared Library, its availability appears in Photos on your devices with iCloud Photos enabled and, more subtly, in Camera. If you’re viewing both libraries in Photos, images from the Shared Library have the Shared Library two-person icon overlaid in the upper-right corner; videos, for some reason, do not.

On a Mac, Photos: Settings: Shared Library reveals participants and offers a Shared Library Suggestions checkbox. Enable this if you’d like your Mac to say, “Hey, maybe you should add this image to the Shared Library!” (I didn’t find this particularly useful, and disabled it.)

Go to Settings: Apps: Photos, and you’ll note an extra option on iPhones and iPads: Sharing from Camera. That’s the culprit in my offspring’s openness.

Keep Camera shots your own (or not)

You can tap Sharing from Camera or go directly to Settings > Camera: Shared Library: Sharing from Camera. With Sharing from Camera enabled, you see a yellow icon of two people side-by-side in the upper-left corner of the screen in portrait mode or the lower-left corner in landscape. Tap it to disable directly from Camera. A yellow label appears at the top of the Camera interface to indicate which library is in effect after you tap the button. When Sharing from Camera isn’t turned on, the icon appears with a line through it.

The setting is persistent within Camera, so each time you open Camera, your previous Shared Library choice remains. You can override this via Settings or by tapping the icon again.

If you never want to enable Shared Library by accident or intentionally, disable Sharing from Camera in the Photos: Sharing from Camera settings.²

If you found you put media in the Shared Library and want to return them to your own, you can fix this quite easily:

• On a Mac, select the items in Photos, and choose Image: Move X Photo(s)/Video(s) to Personal Library. You can also Control/right-click on any item in the selection.
• On an iPhone or iPad, go to the Library view in Photos, tap Select, and choose one or more items. Tap the More … icon at upper-right, and choose Move to Personal Library.

In a bit of turnabout, a few days after writing this column, I get a text from my youth: “Your photos seem to be going into my account. I think you pressed the share button in the app by accident.” D’oh!

For further reading

Our very own leader, Jason Snell, has a book that covers Shared Library and much more. Pick up a copy of Take Control of Photos to get up to speed on this and other quirky Photos features.

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

Because this is a Mac, it can do effectively anything you want to throw at it. I have been editing video on it and doing web and Xcode development with very little issue. Yes, my Xcode builds take longer than they do on my M4 Pro Mac, and rendering video runs slower too, but it can do it. If this is the computer your budget allows, don’t think that you can’t.

However, you’ll notice I’m not including any benchmarks in this review. I don’t think benchmarks properly express the experience of using a computer, particularly on the lower end of products. On the high end, when everything basic is child’s play, benchmarks can be helpful to understand differences at the margins. But one of the charts I’ve been seeing go around since this was announced was Geekbench single-core performance, which showed the Neo as effectively as fast as an M4. Let me tell you, if you’re using that chart to understand the performance of this computer, you are being misled.

You certainly are, if your definition of ‘use’ is Xcode builds and video editing. Matt is not technically wrong when he suggests later in his post that, in workflows requiring lots of RAM and speedy disk access, even the oldest Apple silicon MacBook Air will perform a bit better than the MacBook Neo.

When performance is in the ballpark of a five-year-old computer, you have to consider what this machine costs compared to refurbished models from that era…. I can get a refurbished M2 MacBook Air with 512GB storage and 16GB RAM for $50 less than the maxed out MacBook Neo. That M2 Air gets you significantly better performance, a better screen, a better trackpad, better USB-C ports, MagSafe, and faster SSD speeds. I feel very confident saying that the M2 Air is a meaningfully better computer the Neo.

Again, Matt’s not wrong. If you are a savvy shopper with a very limited budget and need that push beyond what the MacBook Neo can give you, you are probably better off searching for a used or refurbished MacBook Air. Last week on MacBreak Weekly, Christina Warren made a strong case for picking up a refurbished or used M3 or M4 MacBook Air, which would cost slightly more than a MacBook Neo but far outclass it in terms of features.

But this entire conversation misses the most important thing about the MacBook Neo: It is sold in every Apple Store, on Apple’s website, and in every Apple sales channel. Most people won’t think to cruise for a refurbished Air—they will just go down to their local store, or pop onto Amazon, and shop for a computer. That’s why the MacBook Neo is important. It’s available to everyone, everywhere, and Apple will stand behind it as a new product.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

David Sparks appreciates the MacBook Neo, but he’d like something smaller:

Think about it. Apple has covered the pro market with the MacBook Pro lineup. The Neo is about to cover the mainstream and budget-conscious buyer.

But there’s a gap at the top. A premium ultralight for people who travel constantly, who want the absolute minimum weight and footprint, and who are willing to pay for it. A MacBook that weighs two pounds or less, with a stunning display and all-day battery life. Not a compromise machine. A showcase.

I would question the premise that you can get “the absolute minimum weight” along with “all-day battery life” (depending on how you define that)—but I do not doubt that Apple could create a laptop with M-series performance and good enough battery life, but with an emphasis on compactness.

But is there enough of a market for a fourth class of MacBook? As someone who has known and loved the 12-inch PowerBook, 11-inch MacBook Air, and even the 12-inch MacBook, I am sadly not convinced that this is a big enough segment for Apple to target when the MacBook Air exists.

And here’s the biggest reason I think a smaller laptop may never happen: Over the last decade, everything in macOS has gotten a bit bigger—not just OS elements, but even fundamentals of app design. When I was still using an 11-inch Air, I would often discover apps that couldn’t be resized to fit on my screen. The same happened with the retina MacBook. I’m afraid that the 13-inch display in the MacBook is probably as small as modern macOS and today’s Apple will reasonably go.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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When it comes to smart locks, the goal is “Star Trek,” right? You should be able to walk up to your door and, swish!, it opens to greet you.

When I was a kid, “Star Trek” doors were amazing technology, but not too many years later, even the run-down supermarket in my hometown had automatic doors that opened when you approached them. Still, the dream lives on for the home. Most homes aren’t plausibly designed to have pocket doors that slide out of the way (and I have to think it wouldn’t be up to code), or even automatically swing open.

Okay, then, a dream downgraded: When it comes to smart locks, the goal is sort of “Star Trek,” in the sense that I’d like my door to unlock itself as I approach.

A few generations into this technology, we’ve bought and reviewed a bunch of smart locks, but the ultimate dream has not been fulfilled. Bluetooth-based locks can sort of do the trick, but since Bluetooth is a non-directional technology, there were all sorts of tricks (use geotagging, wait for the phone in question to leave the area, then enable lock-on-view) to make it happen. And it wasn’t very reliable.

Next came NFC locks, which work remarkably well but require you to press your phone or watch up against the lock. It works—I never carry a key for my house anymore, because my Apple Watch is my key—but it’s not exactly the Star Trek dream.

Finally, the future is here: locks with support for ultra-wideband (UWB) technology have begun to arrive, and since UWB offers precise positioning, it’s the first technology that truly offers the potential to have rock-solid support for walking right up to the door and having it unlock before you begin to reach.

I’m all in on the dream, so I bought the $270 Aqara UWB Smart Lock U400 (Amazon affiliate link) and installed it in my front door as my deadbolt, replacing an older NFC-focused smart lock. It’s been there for a couple of months now, and I’m happy to report that the “Star Trek” dream feels real.

After having owned a bunch of these, I’m struck by how robust Aqara’s lock motor is. It forcefully slides the deadbolt into place, which is helpful since my door can sometimes be slightly misaligned, and a little force from the bolt helps push it into place. (If it fails to mechanically lock, it makes a loud beeping noise to alert you that something’s wrong, which is very important if you’re walking out the door!)

I love the options the Aqara lock provides, too. Some smart locks I’ve used haven’t come with real keys, but Aqara’s does—the keyhole is normally hidden, but just drops down from the bottom of the entry panel. There’s a fingerprint sensor on the panel that can give you the Aqara equivalent of Touch ID, but only if you use the Aqara app itself. I added my print to the lock, but have never actually needed to use it. The lock also supports NFC, like my old lock, so older devices can be tapped against the pad to unlock the door. And yes, the display lights up so you can input a multi-digit code if you like.

But the star of the show is UWB unlocking, which uses your absolute positioning in space to unlock the door only when you approach it from the outside. (There’s a clever setting that lets you set what directions it will auto-unlock from, so that if a portion of your house is in front of your front door, it won’t unlock every time you walk toward the door in your garage.) Most of the time, the door audibly unlocks when I’m maybe a foot or less away from the door. Occasionally, I need to stand at the door for a moment, but rarely longer than a second or two. It worked just as well with my iPhone and with just my Apple Watch. It never unlocks accidentally when I approach it from other directions. It really does just work.

I also appreciate the Aqara lock’s approach to batteries. A not-so-fun fact about smart locks is that they require batteries. My previous smart locks have chewed up AA batteries over the course of a few months. Aqara has instead built a rechargeable battery into the lock that’s basically the size of an iPhone power bank. It’s been months, and my battery is still at 85%, so it is going to last a long time. But beyond that, it’s just an easy USB-C charge to top it back up.

You can either remove the battery and charge it wherever (while your lock stops working), or just plug in a power bank to the lock itself. Aqara cleverly suggests just putting the power bank in a bag and hanging it on the interior door latch while it charges the lock back up, which worked perfectly when I tried it.

As with many other locks, once you’ve got a smart lock attached to HomeKit, there are various automations you can run, though I haven’t ever found any of them to be particularly useful. For me, a good smart lock gives me confidence that the door is locked or will lock itself automatically (and I can check on my phone to confirm this), and opens easily.

I’ve never had a smart lock that opens more easily than the Aqara UWB Smart Lock U400. It’s not “Star Trek,” exactly, but it’s probably as close as I’m ever going to get.

Yes, I’ve touched it.

Although the undisputed winner of the most-talked-about product award at this year’s Macworld Expo is Apple’s new iPhone, it’s actually quite a rare commodity… I don’t have an exact count, but as far as I can tell there aren’t very many real iPhones out there in the world. (And since the iPhone is still six months away from its arrival, that’s not too surprising.) And it’s too bad… let me tell you with personal experience, it’s much more impressive when it’s in your hand—or more to the point, when your finger’s running across its multi-touch screen….

I can admit that I found it quite difficult to form complete sentences while I was holding the iPhone. In terms of sheer gadget magnetism, its power can not be overstated.

I’ve always wondered what my contestant-interview anecdote would be if I were ever a contestant on “Jeopardy!”. This one would make a pretty good one, I think.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

What a funny coincidence that celebrations of Apple’s 50th anniversary would hit the same month that the company introduced the MacBook Neo, a $599 laptop that has the potential to take the Mac to new heights.

The facts that Apple was founded in 1976 and the MacBook Neo exists in 2026 shouldn’t have anything in common but that they both involve a corporation called Apple. But that’s not right: Apple’s product philosophy is more continuous than you might imagine, and that string that starts with the Apple I ends, 50 years later, in a colorful new MacBook Neo.

Apple was born in a chaotic world. Dozens of personal computer companies were building early devices, and each of them was its own island with its own software running on custom hardware. New chips and new hardware innovations like floppy disk drives (did you know that the earliest Apple computers could only read data from audio cassettes?!) meant that as a computer company, you evolved rapidly or you died.

Most of them died, of course. But Apple didn’t, in part because it was always adopting the next big thing in order to survive. It was a mindset that I always connected to Steve Jobs, a man with absolutely zero sentimentality. Apple has always been a company that knows that it needs to move forward rapidly to survive.

This has been a factor that has remained in the corporate culture, to varying degrees of strength, for 50 years. It’s not that Apple doesn’t care about taking care of its customers—it’s managed three chip transitions and one operating system transition on the Mac while providing solid support over a transitional period.

One reason this culture got reinforced is that Apple has never been the dominant ecosystem player in any market it’s competed in. (The iPod was dominant, but not really much of an ecosystem.) When you’re dominant, like PCs driven by Microsoft’s DOS and Windows operating systems, the name of the game is compatibility. Once you’ve got the bulk of the market, it’s all about consolidation.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

Go to the podcast page.

Apple’s software struggles with understanding who the headline act is in a multiple-band lineup.

I’m sure it doesn’t help that the listings for these shows are a metadata mess, with the names listed in seemingly any order: the headliner might be at the top of a sign, at the bottom of a poster, or in a big font on the middle of a web page.

In any case, mixing up an opener for the headliner is a common mismatch in Apple Photos concert event tagging.

For the first example, in what will become a theme, getting the tagging right for Pixies concerts seems to be a chronic problem in my Photos library. In this case, Franz Ferdinand opened for them, but FF gets top billing according to Apple Photos.

Chris has the receipts, including plenty of pictures with incorrect captions. The problem isn’t limited to confusing headliners and openers: music festivals are incorrectly labelled as a single artist, concerts are confused with shows at nearby locations or even venues with multiple rooms, and photos taken on the same date are assumed to all be at the same event, even when they’re not.

I confess this is a feature I rarely think about because I don’t go to that many live concerts. Searching my Photos library (which you can do specifically for “concerts” to see the images it’s tagged) did find a correctly identified Guster concert from June 2023—though it doesn’t mention that they were playing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra—but the vast majority were wrong, including several pictures of the Relay 10 celebration in London in July 2024, which were identified as a “Liang Lawrence Concert.” (That concert appears to have taken place the same night at a nearby venue).

All of this certainly feels like a machine learning feature just making its best guesses based on the information available with no way to determine whether something is true or not, an all-too-common occurrence. Ultimately it’s just not doing it well enough to be—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—reliable or useful. To my mind, though, the real failing—as Chris points out—is that Apple doesn’t provide any way for you to fix this. You can’t manually re-tag or even simply remove the incorrect tag. That feels like a real oversight and turns this feature from half-baked to totally uncooked.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

This year saw our highest level of survey participation to-date, as well as our highest-ever level of engagement thus far with the low vision-specific questions.

Our survey results indicate that across almost all categories, satisfaction with Apple’s accessibility offerings for blind, deafblind, and low vision users decreased when compared to 2024.

For VoiceOver and Braille users, dissatisfaction with software quality and the presence of long-standing accessibility bugs were overarching themes throughout participant comments. For low vision users, participant comments show that Apple’s 2025 liquid glass user interface redesign had a significant negative impact on the user experience for many.

Overall, AppleVis readers gave Apple a B (3.7 out of 5). That score is down slightly from 2024’s 3.9. The survey asked readers’ opinions of VoiceOver, Braille and low-vision broken out by platform, along with scores for their overall impression of new accessibility features. Respondents also rated user experience with each OS platform and accessibility category.

iOS and iPadOS scored highest in most categories, including VoiceOver features, Braille features and low-vision features, with a 4.2 average for each. iOS and iPadOS user experience also netted 4.2 ratings.

AppleVis users believe Apple continues to struggle when it comes to fixing bugs in VoiceOver and Braille, giving the company a C – a 3.0 rating – in this category, which covers all platforms. Also at the bottom of the ratings were macOS VoiceOver user experience, with a 3.1, and three tvOS categories, which scored between 3.2 and 3.5. Low-vision features in tvOS took the greatest ratings tumble, from 2024, slipping from 4.1 to 3.2.

As usual for this survey, the comments section features a lot of strong opinions.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple’s software secret was this constant upgrading of the OS and the ecosystem (from drivers up). Microsoft’s secret was “run everything forever”. As is almost always the case in business and product development, your greatest strength (in any of the 4 Ps) becomes your greatest weakness. The pull and push of forever compatibility was not just “Windows DNA” but it was the soul of what made Windows successful and was sacred. But it was obvious then and now that it was the part that needed to change. 

This is absolutely right. It’s not that Microsoft didn’t know where it needed to go with Windows and PC designs—it absolutely did. For years, you could watch what it was doing and see it trying to push things forward—only to be dragged backward by its entire business being built on stability, legacy, and compatibility. The thing that made Windows so sticky also made it almost impossible to effect real change.

Apple, on the other hand, has never shied away from pushing compatibility changes and breaking old software and forcing users to new OS versions. That can be annoying, for sure, but it’s also gotten the Mac to where it is today, with Apple silicon in general and a product like the MacBook Neo in particular.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

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A powerful tool in the Finder arsenal is a simple checkbox: “Ignore ownership on this volume.” This option appears when you select any locally connected volume on your Mac that isn’t the startup volume and choose File: Get Info. Permissions controls who and, more importantly for this column, what can access data.

When you check the box, you override the normal permissions settings for a volume, which otherwise may restrict reading, writing, and viewing of folder contents to specific users or groups. Even if you’re the only user of your Mac, this can still cause problems, because your logged-in user doesn’t have permission to read and write everything.

While you can typically override a prohibited operation by entering your administrator password when prompted, that doesn’t always work. And any software that needs unattended access to a folder or volume can be denied, sometimes silently. I discovered a problem with this when Time Machine told me on my laptop that it couldn’t perform a backup to a Time Machine-designated folder on my Mac Studio’s external volume.¹

When I checked this external volume, it was marked as read-only. Using Get Info, I saw that the “Ignore ownership” checkbox had been… ignored! It was now unchecked. Permissions are divided into owners and groups, and the owner was system, which is a privileged user, and allowed Read & Write. One group was listed as wheel, which is a special group that system belongs to, and marked as “Read only.” The everyone group was also included, and also set to “Read only.”

Peculiar.

The Transmit is coming from inside the app

Looking at log data, the only clue appeared to be a lot of errors with Panic’s Transmit file-transfer app:

2026-02-27 08:55:06.561417-0800 0x1ed4930 Error 0x0 0 0 kernel: (Sandbox) System Policy: Transmit(16376) deny(1) file-read-xattr /Volumes/EvoLution 8TB/.Spotlight-V100

It looked like Transmit couldn’t read a number of files on the external volume in question during some routine operation. I had a tab open in Transmit passively displaying that volume’s contents, as I had downloaded a remote file to a folder on it. Apparently, Transmit polls local volumes in the background to check contents.

The answer was found in macOS’s app privacy controls, which prevent apps without permission from accessing all kinds of data, organized into categories in System Settings: Privacy & Security. I’d recently updated Transmit, and this apparently reset access in the Full Disk Access section of Privacy & Security, even though I know I had previously granted access.

Another clue was in the /var/db/volinfo.database file, which I didn’t know existed before researching this problem. This file contains a list of volumes by their Volume UUID (Universally Unique Identifier), which is how macOS ensures that two identically named volumes don’t conflict, as they have unique IDs at the system level. A 00000001 indicates permission is not ignored; a 00000000 means it is ignored!

You can find this datum most easily in Disk Utility: select the volume, then click Info. Under “File system UUID,” you’ll see the number. This may be a short string of hexadecimal (base 16) digits for an HFS+ or Apple RAID volume, or a long one for APFS volumes. For instance, one APFS volume I was having trouble with has the UUID 92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2.

The volinfo.database file isn’t updated when “Ignore ownership” changes; instead, it’s appended. Only the last state is referenced at startup, but it’s a strange way to manage this file. When I examine it, I can see the thrashing of the ownership state:

92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000001
92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000000
92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000001
92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000000
92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000001
92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000000

When I looked at the Full Disk Access panel, sure enough, Transmit was disabled. I enabled it and expected to now be rewarded with the read-only status no longer mysteriously appearing.

Sadly, it wasn’t that easy.

A double negative proves to be positive

The next day, the volume is back to read-only. This time, however, I notice that, even though there’s no datestamp in the volinfo.database file, it updates whenever it’s modified. So, using ls -l /var/db/volinfo.database in Terminal, I could see that at 11 p.m., it changed back to read-only. After a little bit of contemplating what might be running at that time, I realized it was Bombich Software’s Carbon Copy Cloner.

While I use Time Machine and Backblaze, I also perform a clone of my startup volume using CCC as extra duct tape on top of my suspenders and belt.

I looked through CCC’s settings and found “Don’t preserve permissions” under Troubleshooting Settings. That certainly seemed like it could be the issue. I also found that I could use a Postflight option to set a shell (or bash) script that could run after the clone update was complete.

#!/bin/bash
sleep 5
vsdbutil -a /Volumes/EvoLution\ 8TB
mount -u -o noowners /Volumes/EvoLution\ 8TB

That script uses the vsdbutil utility to restore the volume’s status to the correct value. And then the mount operation reloads permissions in place. It worked!

But in the meantime, I sent an email to Bombich and heard back from the eponymous Mike Bombich, who said that I had created a backup job that had a conflict: CCC has to enable specific ownership (not “ignore”) on the volume it’s writing to because I was backing up a startup volume. Without ownership enabled, a full restore wouldn’t work. The issue of “preserving permissions” is about the permissions on the source volume, not the destination volume.

The short answer was that I needed to check the “Don’t preserve permissions” box after enabling “Ignore ownership” on the external volume to prevent the external volume from becoming read-only. I don’t know why this just started to crop up, but this is clearly the issue.

Mike also helpfully noted that my backup wasn’t restorable for a variety of reasons, and I’d be better off repartitioning my striped RAID external drive to create a standalone APFS volume that CCC could clone directly to. Mike’s been at this a long time!

For further reading

If you’d like to learn more about using commands in the Terminal app, I’ll be darned, but Joe Kissell has a freshly updated book on the topic, Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal, revised January of this year.

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

One way to celebrate your company’s upcoming 50th anniversary: the release of a product update nobody had on their bingo card.

Apple on Monday announced AirPods Max 2, the successor to its high-end over-the-ear headphones. The new models use the H2 chip found in Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 and AirPods 4 line, getting many of the same benefits, including Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, and Live Translation. They come in the same colors as the most recent model of AirPods Max—midnight, starlight, orange, purple, and blue—and continue to come with the same Smart Case as the original model.

Apple says the improved Active Noise Cancelling is 1.5x more effective than the previous version, due to the H2 chip and improved algorithms. There’s also a new high dynamic range amplifier, which Apple claims will provide even cleaner audio, improved latency to help gaming performance, and the ability to use Siri Interactions, nodding or shaking your head to give feedback to the virtual assistant.

The company’s also aiming the Max 2 at music creators, by pointing out that, with the USB-C cable, they can create and mix their music in Personalized Spatial Audio with head tracking.

This update’s been a long time coming—so long, in fact, that many had given up believing it ever would. The original AirPods Max debuted in December 2020, and then received only a meager update in September 2024, swapping out the original model’s Lightning connector for a USB-C port.

I did note one interesting details while perusing the comparison page between AirPods Max and AirPods Max 2: while Apple says that the 20 hours of listening time with ANC enabled remains constant from the previous model to this one, it has declined to provide a similar benchmark for movie playback, as it did for the last generation of AirPods Max. Likewise, the previous generation cited 5 minutes of charge time providing 1.5 hours of listening time, a stat that is not listed for the AirPods Max 2. I’ve reached out to Apple to ask if there are comparable stats available and will update this story if I get a response.

One thing that hasn’t changed? The AirPods Max 2’s price tag of $549. They’ll go on sale next Wednesday, March 25, and arrive early next month.

Every year we make an original design and offer it exclusively to Six Colors members. Then sometime the next year, we make it available for everyone. I’m happy to announce that our shirt from last year is now available for everyone.

This one is a winner. I call it “The Ascent of iPhone,” and it tracks from the original iPhone all the way to the Cosmic Orange iPhone 17 Pro. John Moltz outdid himself with this design.

Also available, anytime:

• The classic Six Colors logo
• Last year’s Six Colors, Six Macs — still a fantastic design
• A bunch of variations of these with hats and tote bags are also available

And numerous other things from Six Colors and The Incomparable are available on demand at our Cotton Bureau store.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

I said in my review that the Neo embarrasses an entire class of affordable Windows laptops, but further embarrassment awaits these companies if they have nothing to answer it with. I hope they’re already working on that next generation of laptops that will actually compete at $600. And I really hope companies like Asus, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Acer, Samsung, and MSI have an actual understanding of what makes their new competition so good, and what it can do for a whole lot less than current Windows-based offerings. I reached out to all these companies, and the answers I’ve received so far are expectedly milquetoast.

I don’t know how this is all going to go, but it does feel like PC makers are going to have to up their game or they’re going to get run over by Apple’s entry into this price segment.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

A funny thing happened when Apple stopped making external displays for Macs: The competition did not rush in to steal Apple’s thunder. It was almost like Apple had itself invalidated the entire category.

But after Apple shipped the Studio Display in 2022, the competition seemed to heat back up. It’s almost as if the opportunity to compete with Apple (and undercut it on price) was enough of a motivation to get in the game. Today, there aren’t a ton of displays that have Mac-appropriate screen resolutions out there, but there are far more than there were back in 2021. If you’ve bought a Mac-friendly display that wasn’t made by Apple in the last four years, you probably owe thanks to the Studio Display anyway.

Now here’s the successor to the 2022 Apple Studio Display… the 2026 Apple Studio Display. While it does offer a few improvements over its predecessor, perhaps the most important thing about it is that it remains a product in Apple’s line-up—and provides a target for other display makers to outdo.

A mildly upgraded display

As someone who owns two of the 2022-vintage Apple Studio Displays, it’s hard for me to say that the new model is very different. It looks the same, and the most important feature of the product—the 5K LCD panel—seems to be the same.

This is not to say it isn’t a good panel. It is. It’s not going to offer the peak brightness, HDR features, and refresh rate of fancier displays (including the displays on MacBook Pros), but a lot of users don’t need those features. I never miss ProMotion when I’m sitting in front of a Studio Display, for instance.

But it’s also almost the same panel that debuted with the 5K iMac more than a decade ago. I guess this shows that displays can remain viable for a very long time, but Apple has shown no interest in upgrading the Studio Display to improve it in any of the ways it’s improved the stock display on a MacBook Pro.

Apple has upgraded the most controversial component in the original Studio Display: Its 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, which didn’t look great in low light and many other situations because pretty much every image that came out of it had to be cropped. The new camera is still 12 megapixels, but Apple says it has larger pixels and a wider aperture—and in head-to-head comparisons, yes, it looks much better.

Thunderbolt support on the new models has been upgraded to Thunderbolt 5, which is probably only relevant if you’re daisy-chaining multiple devices together. The fact that you can daisy-chain devices is because of what might be the single biggest upgrade to the display: a second Thunderbolt port. So if you want to run two Studio Displays, you can plug a computer into one, and then run a cable from that one to the other one. (I did this with my old Studio Display and the new one, and it worked like a charm.)

The whole thing is powered by an A19 chip, which is an upgrade from the A13 in the older model… However, these chips are really irrelevant when it comes to the user. Apple’s reaching into its existing bin of parts to build these devices, but they don’t really take advantage of the computing power, nor do they get in the way of you using them as dumb displays. (It is something to think that the Studio Display has more computing power and memory than a MacBook Neo… and yet you can’t do anything with that. Wouldn’t it be nice if it did something, like maybe offer an Apple TV mode so you could watch videos on it without needing to attach a Mac?)

Does it make sense?

These are meager upgrades that allow Apple to keep the Studio Display on the price list for years to come, but don’t really advance it in many meaningful ways. If you’ve already got a Studio Display, there’s no real reason to upgrade it to this model. And at $1599, it’s not a very good buy if you’re willing to shop around and buy a non-Apple monitor.

The Asus ProArt Display PA27JCV lists for $799, and I found it on sale at Amazon for $729. It’s a 5K 27-inch display with an adjustable screen and Mac-friendly controls. Is it as nice as Apple’s display? Almost certainly not, but it’s also half the price.

So if Asus will sell you a pretty nice 5K 27-inch display for half of what Apple is charging, why does the Studio Display exist?

I think it exists because some people really don’t want to shop around and like the fact that Apple makes products that really integrate nicely with other Apple products. If you’re at the Apple Store (in person or online) and buy a new Mac, you can add a Studio Display right then and there. Some people aren’t really interested in shopping around and saving money. And yes, Apple’s fit and finish will almost always be better than the competition: I considered buying an LG UltraFine display instead of a Studio Display and decided I’d rather pay a small premium to get the really nice Apple display. (Then again, the UltraFine didn’t cost half of the Studio Display back then.)

Anyway, the Studio Display is nice. But it feels like it should be better, or cheaper, or both. But it’s neither. I have bought two, and I still like them. But if I needed to buy a new display right now, I’d look at other options.

Take a stand… please

Apple claims it’s a champion of accessibility. But in my opinion, part of accessibility is ergonomics. Different people need displays at different heights, and we are all shaped differently. Apple’s continued insistence on shipping displays and iMacs that aren’t height-adjustable by default is frustrating. You spend all this money on a pricey Apple display and then, what, put it on an old dictionary? Meanwhile, even the cut-rate competition offers height adjustments.

The review unit Studio Display Apple sent me came with the height-adjustable display, and it’s glorious. That thing is a smooth, pivoting marvel of mechanical engineering, and Apple should be proud of how nice it feels to use. But it’s essentially a failure, because it adds $400 to the price of the already-expensive display. Apple should be working to engineer affordable ergonomic features on its displays and iMacs, not building luxury stands that make an $800 display cost $2000.

If Apple wants to charge users more for a smooth, luxury display stand, who am I to stop them? But basic height adjustment should be built in, period.

A lukewarm take

Apple addressed the biggest issue with the Studio Display by swapping in a new webcam that looks a lot better than the one in the old model. That’s great. What the company didn’t address is the fact that the Studio Display felt like it was selling outmoded display technology for a cutting-edge price—and it still does.

If you want to buy a Studio Display because you love the Apple aesthetic or because it’s just convenient to do so, I can’t stop you. But anyone willing to put up with non-Apple annoyances in order to save more than the cost of a MacBook Neo might want to shop around. As for me, I hope the next Studio Display update is more meaningful than this tepid set of improvements.