By Philip Michaels

September 15, 2026 4:06 PM PT

App report: The apps that go with you

One of the benefits to being part of the Apple ecosystem is the plethora of apps that work across all of Apple’s devices so that you can access them whether you’re sitting in front of a Mac, out and about with your iPhone or even strapping on a Vision Pro headset. Come on — somebody out there has to be wearing one of those things.

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

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

Voice Keyboard Pro

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

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

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

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

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

Play

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

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

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

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

Skyscraper

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

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

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

Einfall

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

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

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

Eyes Forward

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

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

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

[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]

By Glenn Fleishman

September 15, 2026 3:30 PM PT

Apple ties iCloud+ pricing to video summaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His current books in preparation, which you can pre-order, are Flong Time, No See, and That One Matt Bors Comic. Other books include Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Dan Moren

September 14, 2026 10:17 AM PT

iOS 27 Review: Little things mean a lot

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

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

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

Continue reading “iOS 27 Review: Little things mean a lot”…

By Jason Snell

September 14, 2026 10:17 AM PT

macOS 27 Golden Gate Review: Bridging the Tahoe gap

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

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

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

Design takes a step forward

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “macOS 27 Golden Gate Review: Bridging the Tahoe gap”…

By Glenn Fleishman

September 10, 2026 5:13 PM PT

Should your Apple Watch always be listening?

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

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

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

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

Continue reading “Should your Apple Watch always be listening?”…

By Dan Moren

September 10, 2026 6:46 AM PT

Don’t call it an iPad

“It’s just a big iPhone.”

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

None of the above.

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

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

No padding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some room of one’s own

Why am I harping on this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Verging on converging

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

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

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

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]