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.
How far off we are from full self-driving cars, the software systems we wish would never update, the app launchers we use on our Macs, and the ATProtocol moment.
Technology professional Chris Devers1 has taken a close look at Photos’s concert feature, where it tries to tag pictures you take at musical events with the name of the show. Unfortunately, it’s a feature that’s rife with inaccuracies. Here’s just one class of example:
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).
That night was a bit of a blur, but I don’t remember a concert…
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.
AppleVis released its fourth annual Vision Accessibility Report Card, a survey of visually impaired Apple users inspired by the Six Colors Report Card:
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.
Former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky, in a post reviewing the MacBook Neo, makes this observation about how Apple got the ARM transition right and why Microsoft got it wrong:
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.
Myke has MacBook Neo FOMO and we have reviews of both Studio Display models. Also: Apple starts celebrating 50; App Store fees are lowered in China; Somehow, AirPods Max returned; Apple’s AI crisistunity; and Jason in Jeopardy!?
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.
The Get Info dialog lets you set the option to ignore ownership on non-startup volumes.
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:
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.
Disk Utility lets you find the volume UUID, which you can use to troubleshoot read-only volume issues.
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:
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!
The permissions being preserved are those on the volume from which data is copied—of course!
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/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
You can use a special sharing setup to turn any folder into a Time Machine destination. Go to System Settings: General: Sharing, click the info “i” to the right of File Sharing, and Control/right-click any shared folder or volume, then choose Advanced Options. ↩
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.
[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.]
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.
I don’t know a lot about the current state of PC laptops. (My wife has a work-issued Lenovo Thinkpad and I hide it in its little carrying case every time I spot it loose in my house. I’m sorry, but I have my standards.) But Antonio G. Di Benedetto of The Verge has reviewed the MacBook Neo as well as numerous PC laptops, and he thinks it’s not going to go well for PC makers:
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.
The MacBook Neo gets rave reviews, Apple ponders its mortality, and then we’re on to the next thing.
Why do you keep hitting yourself?
The reviews of the hardware Apple announced last week are in and would you be surprised to learn that the new iPads and MacBooks are faster than their predecessors? Huge, if true. Reviewers also spoke highly of the iPhone 17e.
Of course, the MacBook Neo was the big news and it looks like Apple may have another hit on its hands.
…the Neo embarrasses an entire class of affordable Windows laptops, but further embarrassment awaits these companies if they have nothing to answer it with.
Cyberpunk 2077, for instance, only ran well with all settings set to the lowest possible and at 720p, while Minecraft ran between 50 and 300 fps at 1080p, depending on the presets.
Our thanks this week to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring Six Colors. Their app SoundSource gives you way more control over Mac audio than Apple provides out of the box — per-app volume, audio routing, real-time effects, and a ton of new features in version 6. You can try it free, and save 20% with code 6CSPRING26 in their store through the end of March.
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.
The new Studio Display webcam (right) offers dramatically improved detail to the one on the original model (left).
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.
At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey. Your ideas inspire our work. Your trust drives us to do better. Your stories remind us of all we can accomplish when we think different.
If you’ve taught us anything, it’s that the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.
So here’s to the crazy ones.
There’s been a lot of speculation of how Apple would mark the anniversary, which has also been recognized with David Pogue’s recent book and an event, last night, at the Computer History Museum that featured several notable Apple figures.
Cook had earlier said that the company had to “build a new muscle” for looking back, something that Apple isn’t exactly known for. The company also announced in a separate press release that it would be celebrating the anniversary over the coming weeks, though it didn’t share any further details.
While this is a notable milestone for the company, it’s a shame that it comes at a time when Apple’s reputation—and particularly its relationship with those vaunted values—is feeling marred by its close association with the current United States administration.
Among the artifacts recently accessioned into the Museum’s permanent collection is an authenticated iPhone 17 Pro used during an Apple TV broadcast of Friday Night Baseball. The Sept. 26, 2025 matchup between the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers incorporated live game footage from four devices, marking the first use of an iPhone as a primary camera in a professional sports broadcast.
Apple integrated iPhones into its last couple of baseball broadcasts last year, and it’s only appropriate that it would donate one of them to the Hall of Fame’s collection. (Please note: Lots of things are in the Hall of Fame Museum’s collection, and it does not make them “hall of famers,” though technically you could say that an iPhone 17 Pro is now in the Hall of Fame. Probably more than one right now, given all the people who work there.)
In non-coincidentally related news, Apple announced the first half of its Friday Night Baseball schedule on Wednesday, marking the fifth year that Apple will be streaming two MLB games to 60 different countries and regions, exclusively on Apple TV. Apple says that iPhones “will be further integrated into the broadcast camera lineup for select games” this season.
