By Glenn Fleishman

Siri Classic brings old things back to life

A lot of mythology swirls around the Coca-Cola Company’s strange set of decisions in 1985 to release a reformulated version of its historic carbonated beverage in April—the so-called “New Coke”—then, a few months later, start producing the original flavor as “Coke Classic.” Movies, books, and lengthy blog entries offer competing narratives about what actually happened.

In the end, Coke Classic won. People liked its taste better, and New Coke—renamed Coke II in 1990—disappeared entirely in 2002.¹

You might think this is an analogy for Siri AI and the original Siri, which Apple has sort of dubbed “Siri Classic.” I say “sort of” because you might not know Apple uses that name at all for the Siri-before-Siri AI.

And I don’t think Siri Classic has the great taste we all missed with the release of Siri AI. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

This column is really about how you can turn off Siri AI and some Apple Intelligence features in the version 27 operating systems, even though you can’t per se disable Apple Intelligence altogether.

Hidden uncanny valley settings

When Apple introduced Apple Intelligence, it appeared in Siri & Apple Intelligence in Settings and System Settings. If you so chose, you could disable Apple Intelligence and leave everything else on.

The release of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 omitted that switch. You can still turn Siri on or off altogether, and some clever folks realized you could set Siri’s language to one not supported by Siri AI and Apple Intelligence² to disable it, although that choice can cause other inconveniences.

If that’s not to your liking, you can flip a variety of Apple Intelligence features off using Screen Time. This isn’t a hidden feature, but it’s not advertised—you can’t find it in Settings/System Settings: Siri, for instance.

Take a deep breath and go to Settings: Screen Time: Content & Privacy Restrictions: Siri, or System Settings: Screen Time: Content & Privacy: Siri. You can choose Siri Classic from the Siri menu, and it’s like you’re living in fall 2025 to summer 2026 again!³ Siri Classic is almost identical—perhaps actually identical—to the version available in the version 26 operating systems.

If you choose to re-enable Siri AI, go to the same place and choose Siri AI (Beta). Go to Settings: Siri and re-enroll in the beta, too.

That doesn’t seem very intelligent

You can flip off—er, disable—other Apple Intelligence features, too:

• Writing Assistance: So far, I’ve never found Writing Assistance (formerly Writing Tools) to be of any use. I keep Siri AI active, but disable this feature.
• Image Creation and Realistic Images: Disabling these options ensures that you don’t accidentally generate images, and that Siri doesn’t, either.
• Extensions: This option prevents ChatGPT from being consulted, whether pseudo-anonymously (without an account) or otherwise.

Apple has other locations for turning off Apple Intelligence features scattered throughout Settings and apps. To exclude apps you don’t want to be used by Apple Intelligence for information it gathers across your system, go to Settings/System Settings: Siri: Excluded Apps, tap or click Add Apps, and pick apps. (Tap or click Edit to revise this list.)

Other places to make changes, either in Settings on iOS/iPadOS or as noted, are:

• Message summaries: Apps: Messages (iOS/iPadOS) or Messages: Settings: General (macOS), disable Summarize Messages.
• Email summaries: Apps: Mail (iOS/iPadOS) or Mail: Settings: Viewing (macOS), turn off Summarize Message Previews.
• Notification summaries: Notifications: Summarize Notifications, then disable Summarize Notifications.
• Priority notifications: Notifications: Prioritize Notifications (iOS/iPadOS), and turn off Prioritize Notifications.
• Personalized Smart Replies in Mail: Apps: Mail, then disable Personalize Smart Replies.
• Voicemail suggestions in Phone: Apps: Phone (iOS/iPadOS) or Phone: Settings: Calls (macOS), turn off Suggestions in Voicemail.

Why is off so frightening?

With a Siri that mostly delivers on what Apple promised a few years ago, you can see why the company wouldn’t want to have a simple “off” switch on Apple Intelligence features. Yet, if public opinion is any guide, some people don’t want to use LLMs in any substantive form.

This Siri AI downgrade is an option, but it feels like a half measure compared to a true off switch for Apple Intelligence, even if it were buried like the Siri Classic choice.

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

[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 Jason Snell

Inside the iPad mini: OLED at the center, versatility all around, and a… vibrating display?

In the midst of Apple shipping a foldable iPhone and announcing its first touchscreen laptop, you might have missed an oft-overlooked l’il gadget that also got a load of love last week: the new OLED iPad mini.

But I didn’t miss it. In fact, last week in Los Angeles I sat down with Apple VP of Mac and iPad Product Marketing (and friend of the show) Tom Boger and Apple VP of Hardware Engineering Dave Pakula to dig into the new version of Apple’s beloved small iPad.

Who is the iPad mini for?

I’ve always been struck by the level of enthusiasm iPad mini users feel for the device, but also by the diversity of use cases they bring to the party. Maybe those are connected, and the iPad mini is so intensely loved because it fits (metaphorically and literally) into so many different niches.

“What a lot of people don’t realize about the mini is, it’s used by an incredibly diverse set of users,” Boger said. And while the iPad is generally embraced for its portability, the iPad mini is the most portable of them all. “From the pilot who straps it to their leg in a helicopter, to a doctor who’s doing some serious stuff with an iPad mini that just fits perfectly in their lab coat, to field service technicians. And for them, something like IP67¹ is huge for them.”

(That’s the iPad mini’s dust and water ingress rating, a first for the iPad product line. It means there’s less concern about taking the iPad mini out into the field, whether it’s raining or dusty or—thanks to the new nanotexture display option—very, very sunny.)

But just to be clear: the new iPad mini is not meant to be a water toy. Boger said that someone he spoke with was excited about using it to read in the bathtub, and Boger’s expression as he told that story suggested a little unease. This is not a product meant to be dunked.

“Using it in the bathtub was definitely not a grounding recommendation for us,” Pakula said. “This is really just about giving people more confidence in the ways many of them already want to use their iPad today. You don’t need to have your iPad under the umbrella. You don’t need to worry about it if your kid spills a glass of water or if it gets a little bit messy while you’re cooking. But please don’t throw it in the pool.”

A design driven by OLED

This new iPad mini has a load of new features compared to the older model. Not just that IP67 rating, but a new audio system, an OLED display, the same A20 Pro processor found in this fall’s iPhone Pro and iPhone Duo… oh, and it’s thinner and lighter, too. It’s a wholesale change for a product that hadn’t been updated in two years and deserved some love and attention.

According to Boger and Pakula, the driving force behind all the design decisions this time around was the display change.

“OLED is unquestionably a better display experience than LCD in so many ways,” Pakula said. “You’ve got the incredible contrast ratio… We’ve got much higher peak brightness, going up to 1,200 nits. What I also really love about this display is that it goes all the way down to 1 nit.” That’s great for pilots in the cockpit at night, but also for people who want to read in bed and not disturb their partner.

That decision made, “from an integration standpoint, it opened up all sorts of really cool doors for us,” Pakula said. “We were able to make the product thinner because there’s fewer layers in the display stack and the OLED panel itself is thinner. We were able to make the screen go from 8.3 inches to 8.5 inches in the same footprint because of the narrower borders of OLED… Once we flipped the switch and said, we’re going to do this thing on OLED, it opened up a tremendous number of opportunities and everything got better because of it.”

For example: “There’s not a single use case that doesn’t benefit,” Pakula said. “Reading outdoors with 1,200 nits and nanotexture, reading in dark environments… watching movies with a high contrast ratio, everything gets better.”

Sounding out the Acoustic Display

One major change in this new iPad mini’s design is the fact that its two side speakers are gone, leaving long stretches of smooth metal around the frame that usually had speaker grille holes. Instead of traditional speakers, Apple built what it’s calling the Acoustic Display, which uses the iPad’s screen itself as part of the audio system. And while Apple makes water-resistant devices that still have traditional speakers, Pakula says that the whole journey started with that water and dust resistance in mind.

“That is a huge project,” he said. “There are thirty-five different seals we needed to manage and design and validate…. The first thing that we did, is you look at all the openings in the enclosure and you say, ‘Are there any of these we could get rid of?’ And we had some brainstorming sessions and one of the things that came to light with talking with the acoustic folks is actually that because of the very specific size of iPad mini, the cover glass and the enclosure actually resonate in the audible range, around mid-range frequencies, so you can get bass and mid-range acoustics transmitted through them.”

A larger slab of glass would’ve lowered the frequencies to inaudible ones, and a smaller one might have boosted them too high, but the iPad mini was in the sweet spot—so they went for it. “We built these special drivers that sit underneath the display and they couple through the display and transmit the mid-range and the bass directly through it without needing speaker ports,” Pakula said.

Unfortunately, higher frequencies wouldn’t pass through the display, so they needed an additional piece of hardware. “We designed these two little tiny tweeters, one at the top of the product and one at the bottom, and [there are] these little tiny hidden ports that are squeezed between the aluminum [frame] and the glass [bezel], you can’t even see them,” he said. “For a device of this size, it’s a surprisingly good audio experience.”

An iPad is an iPad

Every time I’ve reviewed the iPad mini, I’ve been struck most by how it is ultimately… just a small iPad. Apple refuses to build a device that’s only halfway an iPad, or is incapable of doing what the platform as a whole does. I have edited complex podcasts using Ferrite Recording Studio on the iPad mini, and it has never let me down.

“When we’re talking about the mini, the one way we like to describe it is, ‘It’s the full iPad experience in the palm of your hand,'” Boger said. Is it looking to attack specific use cases? “The answer is really no. The answer is this celebration of the diversity of how people use it. It’s so many different ways that people use it. And the trick is to enable as many of those capabilities as possible.”

He continued: “And if you kind of look across the industry, there’s nothing like the Mini, right? Anything that typically has been in that size form factor, it’s been very low-end, very just consumer oriented—watch some movies, throw it in the back of the car with your kids. The iPad mini is used by such a diverse group of people that it has to be incredibly capable. The hallmark of iPad in general, especially the mini, is versatility. And so this made it even more versatile. And any time we can make the iPad more versatile is a good thing.”

By Philip Michaels

App Report: Picture perfect

Let’s set aside the Mac this week and turn our app spotlight to the iPhone… and a more specific part of the iPhone at that — the camera.

A few of the following apps promise to extend the capabilities of your iPhone’s cameras, even if you haven’t paid up for the more sophisticated setup found on the Pro models. As for the rest, they’ll help you manage the photos you wind up taking and storing on your phone.

Do you have an app you’d like us to take a look at? Send an email to apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description — the app’s name, what it does and what it costs. We consider every app tip we receive, though due to the heavy volume, we won’t be able to respond to each and every email.

Now let’s turn our attention back to the big picture of this week’s camera-focused apps.

Continue reading “App Report: Picture perfect”…

By Philip Michaels

iPhone 18 Pro Review: Highest Pro price ever poses a challenge for upgraders

Apple doesn’t roll out new iPhones every September because it’s fond of fall colors. In fact, if you’re a fellow old like me, you might remember the days when models like the iPhone 3G or iPhone 4 hit stores in the summertime. It wasn’t until 2012 and the iPhone 5 that Apple settled on fall release dates for its main models.

The fall rollouts are timed so that retail shelves are packed with new models just in time for the holiday shopping season. That way, people pressed for new gift ideas can always grab the latest iPhone model, and Apple’s financial division can celebrate a merry Christmas indeed toting up the sales figures.

A glance at the calendar right at this moment reveals that we find ourselves in that sweet spot right between the September release of the new iPhone 18 Pro models and the time when people start stampeding to stores, online or otherwise, looking for gadgets to buy ahead of the holidays. And that means deciding whether the latest iPhones should replace whatever phone you happen to be carrying around at the moment.

Of course, early adopters are going to take the plunge right away. But for the rest of us, deciding whether to upgrade to a new iPhone takes time, with that go/no-go decision hinging on exactly what the latest model can do that our current phone cannot.

I feel like I’m well-positioned to answer that question, having handled every iPhone since the first one came out in 2007. And, more germane to the issue at hand, I’ve also had a chance to spend some time using the iPhone 18 Pro to see just what’s different with Apple’s latest phone and how it builds upon what’s come before.

Continue reading “iPhone 18 Pro Review: Highest Pro price ever poses a challenge for upgraders”…

By Jason Snell

Quick thoughts about the new MacBook Pro

Hello from Los Angeles, where I’ve gotten a first look at the new MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display. This is an all-day event, so I expect to learn much more as we get going, but the hands-on area is completely backed up, so I’m going to put some stray thoughts here right away.

It’s not the MacBook Ultra

I was standing right next to John Gruber when John Ternus announced on stage that we were about to see the new MacBook Pro, and he gave a shrug of resignation. John had come around to thinking that it might be called the MacBook Studio. I didn’t think Apple would go there, and I guess I was right?

In the long run, technology introduced at the high end comes down to the lower end eventually. Creating a whole new line of MacBooks above the MacBook Pro would imply that Apple is more or less permanently committed to having an additional differentiated product line. I didn’t think it would go that far, when presumably all Mac laptops will get touch and OLED… eventually.

However, these new laptops are still a cut above when it comes to what they cost… and as a result, Apple is still selling the older MacBook Pro M5 Pro and Max models as well. This is very much what the company did when the first Retina MacBook Pro models hit the scene—and were so expensive that it needed to keep the more affordable non-retina models around. For a while.

But again, inevitably, every MacBook Pro and then every Mac became a Retina Mac. And so it didn’t really make sense to create a new category of MacBook, nor does it today.

An unusual upgrade

Usually, a new MacBook Pro brings powerful new chips—but not this time. These new laptops have the same M5 Pro and M5 Max chips that are in the still-available previous models. According to reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, that’s because Apple decided not to release M6 Pro and Max chips and instead jump straight to M7 next year.

So… no new chips. But the body design is entirely new, something that happens only once every few years. In addition to that PROLED XDR display (it’s a pun and all in caps and I don’t know what to think about the name?) that is a real touchscreen, the big change is that the new laptops are appreciably lighter—about 15% lighter. The 14-inch model weighs 3.0 pounds (1.38kg), compared to 3.5 pounds (1.60kg) on the previous models. The 16-inch model goes from 4.7 pounds to 4.0 pounds. The new 14-inch model is closer to a 13-inch MacBook Air in weight than the older 14-inch MacBook Pro is.

It’s also almost imperceptibly smaller—hundredths of an inch thinner, less than a tenth of an inch wider, and about two-tenths of an inch less deep. So, smaller, but not so much that you’d notice. Obviously the priority was getting the weight down.

You know what weighs the most in a laptop? The battery. And Apple’s claiming 22 hours of battery life (24 for the 16-inch model) on these systems, which is unchanged from the older ones. That’s good news in that they managed to be lighter without sacrificing battery life, but it’s bad news for anyone who was hoping for Apple to maybe stretch battery life a bit more.

Minor touch affordances

Another question I had coming into this event was just how much effort Apple would make to adapt the macOS interface for touch. The answer is: A little, but not a lot. When you touch the screen, the interface makes subtle adaptations—more spacing in menus, more feedback when selecting and dragging items—but what it doesn’t do is flip into some new Touch Mode that looks and behaves totally unlike the Mac.

Not surprising, really—this is a conventional laptop with touch, not a convertible with a fold-back or flip-around hinge that makes it into something more like a big tablet. If Apple wants to make that laptop in the future, it can—and it can add a more complex touch mode then. Instead, this interface strikes me as Apple doing right by its own MacBook Pro users by making the touch interface nice, but also acknowledging that for most people, touch will be an additive part of interfacing with their Mac, on top of keyboard and trackpad.

That said, one portion of Apple’s intro video showed a developer using Xcode to test an iOS app, and they were touching the app in the iOS simulator. That… is a really cool use case. For the first time, developers will be able to touch their apps right on their laptop screen during development.

Apple sees the light

“I think you’re all really going to like this,” Ternus said on stage as he revealed the light-up Apple logo on the back of the new MacBook Pro. Spoken like someone who has been at Apple for many years and remembers the Old Ways.

Lighting up the Apple logo on the back of the display was always a fun feature. I’m sure there were all sorts of practical reasons why it made more sense to put a metallic laser-cut Apple or whatever back there, but not only did it feel less fun, it deprived the world of cafés full of little glowing Apple logos. Imagine the lost branding opportunities, Apple!

So… it’s back. I look forward to hearing Apple’s storytelling behind that decision, if there is any beyond the obvious, “why not?” But it warms my heart to see a glowing Apple logo and I hope that this retro design trend makes its way to every Apple laptop over time.

(Next up: Bring back the “breathing” sleep indicator.)

By Glenn Fleishman

Sorry, new developers, it’s vibecodetown

If you're like me, you receive three to five emails each day extolling the virtues of a new iPhone, iPad, or Mac app. If you're like Jason, you get dozens of these emails. If you're lucky, you're like neither of us—in that one respect.

They're often written in a friendly manner. They start with a reference or two to something I've written, then describe how the developer had an itch to scratch that solved a problem mentioned in my column. (Or not—the emails aren't always on target.) So they wrote TextEdit Genius (a fake name), which dramatically expands the capabilities of TextEdit. Or a Notes exporter. Or an app that lets you frame photos. Or whatever.

Don’t get me wrong. As a long-time tech writer, I love emails from developers.¹ However, these particular messages are obviously, or not so obviously, written by chatbots. Perhaps the prompt is, "Try not to sound like an LLM," and then the developers further edit so they have at least a smidgeon of a voice. The apps they promote are almost certainly vibe coded, a term I loathe that describes using AI to write software or help write it. But not all of those apps are vibe coded—and that's the problem.

If you're a serious developer, whether writing all the code by hand or using agentic assistance, with the intent to support and mature your app for years to come, how do you get the word out? How can you become a BBEdit, PCalc, or A Better Finder Attributes? In our current environment, how do you create an app that pierces through the fog?

Continue reading “Sorry, new developers, it’s vibecodetown”…

By Jason Snell

Apple clears the decks ahead of its biggest announcement

Apple’s thunder keeps rolling this week. First it was the iPad mini, and now it’s a set of relatively minor announcements that would have just gotten lost in the anticipated introduction of OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro models on Wednesday.

Apple updated the base-model MacBook Pro from an M5 chip to an M6. This is the low-end model that basically exists to snag buyers who don’t want to use a MacBook Air. (To be fair, it’s got a much better display and active cooling, too.)

But don’t be confused: This is not Apple’s big MacBook Pro announcement of the week. What’s been abundantly clear is that whatever Apple announces Wednesday—whether it’s a set of replacements for the higher-end M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pros, or an even higher-priced tier of OLED models above the existing high-end—will not impact the design or price of the $1,999 base M5 (now M6) model.

Apple also bumped the iMac to M6, retaining the existing design and colors introduced in the M1 model. There are some minor technical enhancements here, most notably Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, with 2.5Gb Ethernet (on models with the Ethernet power adapter). But Apple does not seem interested in altering the Apple silicon iteration of the iMac in any substantial way.

Finally, Apple announced a slew of Creator Studio updates, showing that the company is not going to stand still when it comes to advancing its new creative software suite. There’s new content in Final Cut, improvements to music creation and an AI helper in Logic, generative fill in Pixelmator, and a bunch of AI features (leveraging both Apple’s own models and ones from OpenAI) sprinkled throughout the bundle.

Busy week already! I’ll be in L.A. Wednesday for whatever Apple’s announcing, and will be sure to report back here.