If you’ve ever wondered why your data transfers to external drives aren’t going as fast as you’d like, or a certain peripheral just isn’t working, you could probably use WhatCable, a helpful little app from developer Darryl Morley.
WhatCable looks at your Mac’s USB ports and anything plugged into them, and lets you know about speeds and power supply for your currently connected USB and Thunderbolt cables, as well as what their maximums are. While there are other places on your Mac that you can find this information, such as System Information, WhatCable presents it all in a well organized, easy to read manner. It even details all the devices connected to your USB hubs.
For example, after looking at it, I realized that my backup drive was only connected via a USB2 cable. Fine in general for overnight backups, but when it reminded to me when I was troubleshooting some backup issues that maybe I should switch to a high speed cable that supports USB-3.1
You can choose to run WhatCable in your menu bar, or as a standalone app; there’s also a “Show technical details” option that gives you even more information that could be helpful for troubleshooting. There are options for font size, translucency, and menu bar icon, in case you’re so inclined.
For its base functionality, WhatCable is free and available either via Morley’s site, or via homebrew. For a £9.99 one-time purchase, you can unlock WhatCable Pro, which works on up to two Macs, lets you assign names to cables so you can remember which one it is when you plug it in later, provides more in-depth diagnostics, offers live power metering to see how much juice is being delivered right now, and even 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.]
Jeremy White of Wired has a great tip that also serves as a reminder that amazing things can be found in accessibility settings:
Surely there must be a way to set up an iPhone as the perfect dumb phone for children—one with access to only the apps you deem appropriate, no internet browser, but with all-important tracking and navigation abilities—without having to pay another company to make it work? Well, there is. It’s been hiding in the iOS Accessibility menu the whole time. And, inexplicably, it’s a feature Apple barely talks about.
It’s called Assistive Access. Introduced with iOS 17, Apple designed it for those with cognitive disabilities. If you’ve never encountered or stumbled across it, it’s a distinctive iOS experience: fewer options, more focused features, easier to navigate. The aesthetic is ideal for kids: large, friendly tiles for the apps replace the smaller icons of the “normal” Apple interface.
It’s kind of beautiful. And absolutely the sort of thing you might want to give to a younger kid.
[Via Andy Ihnatko, who also detailed his own use of accessibility features to make streamlined workflow automations.]
Physical vs. digital media and how we organize it, our system for the digital “deal with it later” pile, what we do with old hardware, and iPhone ergonomics.
Apple seeks RAM in all the wrong places, Jason has two tangents about FileMaker, and we deal with a large load of somewhat puzzling rumors and legal cases.
My beloved sister-in-law-in-law (my wife’s brother’s spouse) texted me with an important problem. Her mother had managed to delete the App Store from her Home Screen. How to restore it? While this is a common problem, I realized that the process is completely unintuitive.
For her mother’s particular situation, the answer felt like a cheat code for a video game: unlock, swipe left (once or more), search, touch and hold, drag. Done.
App Library gives you a view of all your apps organized by Apple automagically. At right, the Social folder—how embarrassing!
It’s worth a full review of how modern Home Screen management even works in iOS (and iPadOS), with the App Library view off some people’s radar entirely. Apple has, fortunately, not changed this process so far in the iOS 27/iPadOS 27 betas.
Delete or hide an app
I don’t use the term baroque lightly. However, Apple’s flowchart for choices you can make when deleting an app and what happens next has added some curlicues and ornamentation that can confuse the best of us.
The iPhone ruins everything again while Apple makes some appeals.
Fertile subject matter
You ever sit down to write a weekly column and sigh heavily and think “What the heck am I going to write about this week?!”, only to open your RSS reader and being bathed in the “Pulp Fiction”-esque light of a story that has your name written all over it?
[drops to one knee in the end zone, kisses the tips of two fingers and raises them to the sky, eyes cast down in humble thanks]
Now, I’ve seen a lot of hack studies over the years so I’m always skeptical, but this one was done by actual experts in the field of U.S. fertility. And that’s not a euphemism for people who just get around a lot.
Let’s take a look at the study because if you don’t think I’m going to roll in this like a pig in mud, then you don’t know the first thing about me.…
My Apple TV has started yelling at me. Or at the very least, the Disney+ app on the Apple TV is now clamoring for my attention.
It used to be that when I fired up Disney Plus on my Apple TV, I could browse for something to watch in relative peace. But at some point, an update must have come along that caused the app to break its previously inviolable vow of silence. Because now, when I hover over the thumbnail for a particular movie or show, a preview starts to autoplay.
It doesn’t matter if it’s the latest Avatar picture or something from Pixar or even a Hulu original that now lives in Disney’s app — one moment of hesitation, and a preview plays until I move on to the next thumbnail and the cycle begins anew. New season of The Bear? Preview. An Indiana Jones picture? Preview. X-Men ’97? A particularly angering preview that doesn’t even feature Gambit, for crying out loud.
Disney’s Apple TV app is not alone in blasting previews whether I want them or not. In the land of streaming services, you are dealing with an attention economy, and the purveyors of streaming apps have decided the only way to command that attention is to shout as loud as possible. Hence, nearly every app from every streaming service of note turns on auto-playing previews by default, no matter how you feel about them.
And make no mistake — I feel that auto-playing just about anything is an assault on my senses. When I am trying to decide what to watch, I want to pause on a thumbnail and maybe glance at the information a bit without having to hastily scroll away once audio and video playback begin. Maybe I want to have a conversation with a family member about whether this is a program we both might enjoy without having to shout over some Na’Vi chittering at me about some sort of trouble brewing on Pandora.
The good news is that Apple TV apps have a setting for turning off autoplay previews so that you can go back to browsing through a streaming catalog in blessed silence. But there’s bad news, too — each app seemingly puts that setting in a completely different place, and it’s up to you to hunt down where that might be.
Should Apple impose some order on tvOS apps and require some degree of standardization when it comes to autoplay settings? Or should it go one step further and tell developers not to turn on that feature by default so as to spare the eardrums of paying customers? It’s not for me to say, even though the answer is emphatically yes to both questions.
But I fear my wisdom will fall upon deaf ears — and not just because they’ve already been deafened by all those autoplaying previews. So instead, I can do the next best thing, which is share the hard-won knowledge I have on how to turn off autoplay features in all the big streaming apps that might be living on your Apple TV.
Please don’t thank me. The silence is reward enough.
Apple TV
Apple’s TV app will start to preview content from the Apple TV streaming service if you let it. That’s certainly Apple’s right, but maybe I don’t want to hear about Your Friends and Neighbors each time I launch Apple’s app.
To make Apple TV shut up about the new season of Ted Lasso, go to the Settings app and select Accessibility, followed by Motion. Toggling off Auto-Play Video previews should, in Apple’s words, control whether you allow “video content to auto-play in apps like TV.” In my experience, though, the only app this setting seems to control is TV itself. For third-party apps, you’ll need to dive into settings on your own.
Tubi, HBO Max, but not really Paramount+
Tubi has among the easiest autoplay settings to disable, which is good because it also has the most annoying autoplay behavior. Tubi not only starts to play a preview if you momentarily pause while browsing through its vast library, but if you let that preview reach its conclusion, the movie or show will immediately start playing. For heaven’s sake, Tubi, your entire raison d’etre is to let me comb through the back alleys of your content to let me find something obscure to watch — stop ruining this for me!
Anyhow, with Tubi, all you have to do is head to the app’s settings where you select Video. There, you can disable autoplay to your heart’s content. See? Simple.
The story is similar for HBO Max and Paramount+—sort of. On HBO Max, choose Settings and then under the Playback tab, you can turn off a whole variety of autoplay features. In Paramount+, the Settings icon is hidden at the far bottom left of the screen, but if you just keep moving down through the side menu, you will end up selecting the Settings icon and can get where you need to go. All the Autoplay settings are under the Video tab.
Unfortunately, while Paramount+ will let you turn off “autoplay video,” that setting does not stop previews from autoplaying. Instead of letting you do that, Paramount+ gives you the option of holding down the center button on any preview to enter an “immersive preview mode” where they made the whole plane out of the preview. Frankly, yet another reason to give anything with Paramount’s imprimatur on it a wide berth.
Netflix
If Tubi is the easiest app for managing autoplay annoyances, then Netflix may be the worst. That’s because you can’t do it from the app on your Apple TV.
Instead, you need to head to Netflix in your web browser of choice, where you select your profile icon, followed by Account. From there, you select Edit Settings followed by Playback Settings followed once more by Autoplay Controls. There’s a box called Autoplay Preview While Browsing on All Devices — uncheck that and make sure to save your preference. Autoplay should be just a filthy memory the next time you access Netflix on your Apple TV.
Peacock and Disney Plus
I’m lumping these two services together because they put their autoplay controls in the exact same place. That’s not to say that the setting is easy to find, though, as both Peacock and Disney do a bang-up job hiding the control where you would least expect to find it.
In either app, go to the screen with your account profiles and click on the edit icon for the one you want to adjust. On Peacock, under Autoplay Preferences, you’ll see a toggle for Autoplay Trailers. For Disney, the Playback and Language Settings section has Background Video and Background Audio toggles; turning off the former takes care of both, while adjusting just the latter means that video previews will play silently.
Does the fact that this setting lives in the user profiles for both Peacock and Disney Plus mean that you’ll have adjust playback controls for each profile in your account? Indeed, it does!
Amazon Prime Video
Near as I can tell, Amazon Prime Video is the rare streaming app that doesn’t autoplay previews as you’re rummaging through its library of shows and movies. At the very least, nothing autoplays when I’m in the app, and whether that’s because of the overall Apple TV settings I’ve adjusted or something with Amazon itself, I’m satisfied with the result.
[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.]
EveryMac is a site with a comprehensive set of specs for Mac models, current and historic, that’s celebrating an anniversary today:
On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched.
Thirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since then — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your support through the years.
Back in 1995 I worked on a project for MacUser magazine called the Mac Catalog, which was a FileMaker-based spec database much like EveryMac’s. I was the person who brought the Mac Catalog to the web for the first time, in fact! The Mac Catalog died along with MacUser, but it makes me happy to see that EveryMac has survived.
A vulnerability in Apple’s “Hide My Email” tool lets almost anyone discover a person’s real email address that is supposed to be hidden by the feature, and Apple has failed to fix it for more than a year, according to a security researcher and 404 Media’s own tests.
This information originates with Tyler Murphy, who runs EasyOptOuts, a service that aims to help you remove your private information from the web. Cox says he confirmed the issue by creating a new Hide My Email address and providing it to Murphy, who returned the associated private iCloud email in about five minutes.
According to Murphy, he reported the vulnerability—the full details of which neither he nor 404 are disclosing—to Apple a year ago, and as of the end of May, the company said a security update was due “in the coming weeks”, though it still had not been patched as of the story’s publication.
While it’s hard to determine without the exact details how serious this vulnerability is, Murphy and Cox’s demo and Apple’s response do suggest that it is of concern for those relying on the feature, which is part of Apple’s paid iCloud+ service.
I’m sure you’re wondering why I’ve called you all here to this elegant dining car. It’s simple: one of you—yes, one of you—is a murderer.
Spare me your protestations! One of you has brutally killed Apple’s profit margins in cold blood. A detestable crime, in this day and age. If we cannot protect shareholder value, what, then is sacred?
So you will permit me, before identifying the guilty party, to say a few words? Thank you. For it will surprise none of you, certainly, that Apple’s margins had no shortage of enemies.
Take you, MacBook Neo. Was it you who wished to carve into Apple’s profits by providing a low-cost alternative to PC laptops? That $599 price point was attractive, wasn’t it? Too attractive to possibly be allowed to stand. And that made you angry, didn’t it?
Not so fast, Mac mini. You may laugh, but was it not your voracious appetite for memory and storage on behalf of your AI agents that precipitated this whole crisis in the first place?…
On Monday Apple released 26.5.2 software updates for its platforms that don’t follow the company’s usual pattern, suggesting some interesting things about how it reacts to releasing security fixes.
This update delivers security fixes that were first made available in the iOS 26.6 and iPadOS 26.6 betas.
In other words, the security fixes in 26.5.2 are based on the security fixes that were rolled into the 26.6 betas, the first of which was released publicly on May 26. That means that everyone in the security world, including bad actors, has had more than a month to analyze all of Apple’s forthcoming fixes—which still haven’t rolled out to the broad user base because 26.6 is still in beta.
With 26.5.2, Apple has decided not to wait for the entirety of 26.6 to ship to get its included security fixes out into the world. Now everyone can update to 26.5.2—and Apple recommends it—and take advantage of those security fixes immediately.
These days, reporting on security issues immediately brings up the topic of AI—on both sides. Apple says it uses frontier models to find and discover issues on its platforms, but of course, AI can also be used to analyze the changes in a beta release and deduce what bugs it’s fixing. In the AI era, the lifecycle of a beta OS release may end up being longer than Apple is willing to wait to roll out fixes.
Of course, individual bugs aren’t exploits. According to Apple, attackers need to chain multiple bugs together to create a functional exploit. Each closed bug reduces the overall attack opportunity, but Apple says none of the bugs fixed in 26.5.2 have been used in any attacks, nor was 26.5.2 released in response to any emergent security issue.
Apple raised prices! Is this a shocking move, or were Apple products just sneakily affordable before? (And can it be both?) We also parse Mark Gurman’s reports on Apple skipping over may M6 chips to go directly to M7.
We live in a modern, jet-set, hyper-fast world! When we want to buy something online, boom, zoom, we use our fingerprint or face to approve the transaction, so we can grab the next Segway outta here! We don’t have time to enter a credit card! And can we trust a webpage form? Pfeh!
All right, calm down, 1950s inner voice, it’s not that bad. Most of our transactions involving a payment card or other sensitive data can be safely handled over a secure web connection. Apple Pay in Safari is the highest standard, of course, because the payment process involves encrypted elements, and your card number isn’t disclosed to the merchant. The Wallet app in iOS and the Wallet features in iPadOS and macOS further let us automate the entry of numbers and identifiers on pages we trust.
That’s all for automated commerce. What about other scenarios where you need to provide information to someone, often a friend or a local business, in order to transfer money or conduct a transaction? How can you be sure no one else is snooping in?
Yes, after months of laughing at PC makers and customers, the joke is finally on us: Apple has raised prices in response to increasing RAM and SSD costs. After years of talking about Apple’s amazing price to performance ratio, things have finally come back to Earth a bit. Even the MacBook Neo, born so delightfully affordable, saw its price increased by $100. Sadly, this means it is no longer the cheapest laptop ever, as the March MacBook Neo was cheaper.
Tucked into the list is the most ridiculous cut of all, albeit not the cruelest:
Apple TV: $199, up from $129 (+70)
If you’re one of the six freaky little Apple Arcade super fans and desperately need the model with extra storage, it’ll now set you back $249.…
My thanks to Mojave Paint for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Mojave Paint is a new macOS image editor for power users that will feel really familiar (in the best possible way). If you use layers, masks, channels, selections, adjustments and filters all in the same editing session, Mojave Paint might be for you.
There’s so much you can do with Mojave Paint. Make pixel art. Clean up document scans. Design a flyer. Create App Store screenshots. Crop and resize photos. Do some basic photo retouching. Remove a background.
Mojave Paint is powerful, but it’s also got a simple, uncluttered UI reminiscent of the best software of the 1990s. Yes, it’s retro—but it’s also practical, since hard-edged 1x pixel graphics are high contrast and communicate precision.
