Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government “prohibited” the company “from sharing any information,” but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will “detail these kinds of requests” in a separate section on push notifications in its next report. Ars verified that Apple’s law enforcement guidelines now notes that push notification records “may be obtained with a subpoena or greater legal process.”
Push notifications aren’t run on an app-by-app basis; rather, they all travel through servers controlled by Apple and Google. These requests can give up a surprising amount of information, perhaps the least of which is the actual content of the notification. For example, it could reveal which app or device the notification was sent to, as well as presumably timestamp data. Even in cases where it didn’t reveal sensitive content, information could be gleaned from seemingly innocuous information. (I have no trouble believing that a sufficiently clever intelligence apparatus could, for example, use something like Apple or CARROT Weather’s live precipitation notifications to derive location information based on where it was raining at the time.)
Stopping these request, were issued by foreign governments, is difficult if not impossible. But allowing Apple to acknowledge them in its transparency reports is a step in the right direction; at the very least, it encourages developers to be more careful about any unencrypted information shared in those notifications.
This is the classic cat-and-mouse game of intelligence: governments and their agencies will always look for new information to exploit, while companies (hopefully) try to increasingly protect their information from snooping.
Folks who follow me on Twitter (currently known as X) are probably aware of my years-old, depressing, frequently updated and repetitive thread pointing out studios and filmmakers downplaying or outright lying about the use of digital visual effects on their projects. “We did it all for real!” is the message given in interviews, production notes and featurettes. The truth is these movies frequently contain hundreds or even thousands of digital visual effects shots, and sometimes the sequences they’re directly referencing are made entirely out of digital effects.
Todd brought receipts. I can only assume studios do this because they think some viewers want to be sold “purity” and that means the illusion that all effects are practical? But there’s no such thing as “purity” and this sort of marketing insults so many filmmakers who work very hard to make incredible effects for the films we watch.
A question from reader Jack B. has led me on a journey of reflection about the result of Apple iterating on macOS for a couple of decades. “I’m hoping for a new MacBook Pro for the holidays,” he wrote. “Do you have any good pieces on Six Colors highlighting the best apps/utilities?”
The short answer is that we don’t, though we have written stories about our favorite apps of the year for most of the last decade. But I thought Jack’s suggestion was interesting, so I opened a file and started writing down my notes about what utilities I simply must install when I start using a new, default Mac.
The thing is, my personal list has been built up over time. It’s a bricolage of utilities that I’ve integrated over the years in order to offset some of the deficiencies of macOS. Sure, we all have specialized tools that we use to do our jobs, and I could list those somewhere, but what Jack was asking was far more general: What are good apps and utilities to augment macOS?
This is when I realized that, over the two decades I’ve been using what was once Mac OS X, Apple has filled in so many of the limitations of macOS that there’s precious little that I would consider a must-have utility today. The early days of OS X were rough. It was a new operating system with a lot of gaps in functionality, and third-party apps rushed in to fill the cracks. But over time, Apple did what it does—adding feature updates here and there that won’t satisfy every need of the power user but will satisfy everyone else.
I got the religion about launcher utilities when my old boss Rick LePage recommended LaunchBar to me (a couple of decades ago!). I was able to turbocharge the speed at which I controlled my Mac by using my fast typing skills, coupled with an intelligent launcher utility. Quicksilver was a similar popular utility back then, and then Alfred came along, and recently Raycast joined the party.
But all the while, since its introduction in 2005, Spotlight has kept getting better, faster, and more versatile. Can it do everything I use LaunchBar to do? Well, no, but it can come pretty close. So close, in fact, that I would hesitate to recommend any of these launcher utilities to someone starting out from scratch. Spotlight’s pretty great. It may be all you need. Start with that, and then, if you want to up your productivity game, bring on LaunchBar, Alfred, or Raycast.
Similarly, while I’m backing up my data eight ways to Sunday, the first step in backing up your Mac is plugging in a big enough hard drive and configuring Time Machine. It’s a great place to start. Yes, you probably want to do an offline backup because if your backup drive is located in the same place as your computer, they can both be destroyed in a fire, flood, or other natural disaster. So your next step might be something like Backblaze. And yes, you might want to go further and use a cloning utility like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper. But Time Machine is, once again, a good start.
I’ve used Dropbox for years and paid for it for most of those years. There are still some Dropbox features that I use that iCloud hasn’t replicated, but that number has shrunk quite a lot in the last few years. iCloud has improved in reliability and added features like shared folders, which means it has more than enough features for most people who are living entirely in Apple’s ecosystem.
My first three installations on a new Mac are usually LaunchBar, Dropbox, and 1Password. But even when it comes to password management, Apple has built up functionality that’s so strong that it’s hard for me to recommend something else. Sure, if you’re sharing passwords with people on other platforms or if you yourself use other platforms, you’ll need more than what Apple offers. But if you’re just trying to generate and store strong passwords, one-time codes, or passkeys, Apple has you covered.
The more I think of it, the more I realize that Apple has identified the most common holes in macOS functionality and has systematically eliminated those holes for the broadest section of its Mac customers. Tools that once filled gaps are now just nice-to-have upgrades from the base Apple functionality.
The biggest gap I can think of that still exists is clipboard history. Many apps can act as clipboard managers—I’ve been using the one in LaunchBar for years, and Pastebot is a popular favorite—and once you use a clipboard manager, it’s hard to go back to Apple’s concept, unchanged in nearly 40 years, that there’s a single clipboard and once you copy something new, the old clipboard is gone forever. I now reflexively copy multiple items in one app and then paste those items into a different app rather than doing the old back-and-forth. I rely on the clipboard history to dig out an item from half an hour ago without having to look it up again.
Not to give Apple new ideas about how to make more utilities sort of obsolete, but imagine if macOS and iOS gave you the ability to access your clipboard history, synced across devices! Wow, that would be amazing—and given how locked down iOS is, it’s a feature that only Apple can provide.
Another area of interest is file management and automation. I recently wrote about how Folder Actions is somehow still a thing in macOS. Think about offering users the ability to select a folder in Finder or Files and build actions that would occur when those folders changed. Folder Actions enabled some of that, and utilities like Hazel have taken it to the extreme. Sure, power users can run wild with features like this, but I think regular users might appreciate being able to say, “When a file in this folder is older than 60 days, file it away somewhere else,” or “Delete all the disk image files in my downloads folder older than 60 days.” There’s something there.
I’m hesitant to suggest that Apple invest even more time in macOS window management given the existence of Spaces and Stage Manager, but Apple hasn’t upgraded the ability of users to move and resize windows within a space. Microsoft has invested a lot in this over on Windows, and there are several popular Mac windowing utilities such as Moom out there. It might be worth it for Apple to make it easier for users to quickly tile windows in order to tidy up their screens.
This is why I struggle with Jack’s question. For basic use, macOS is pretty solid and comes with a bunch of useful apps right out of the box, too. Sure, there are lots of great nerdy utilities you can use to spiff things up—I love SwiftBar, for example. And I still need a load of stuff specifically to do my job, like BBEdit and Logic Pro and Audio Hijack, and the list goes on.
But the truth is, unless you’re a longtime Mac user who has integrated your personal collection of utilities into the way you use your Mac, you might not need all that much. So that’s my advice for people getting new Macs who don’t carry that legacy with them: Start with what’s there and then explore when you find where the built-in tools can’t meet your needs.
Except a clipboard manager. You should totally use one of those. It’ll change your life.
I always knew that the Apple community had a bunch of different subcultures, but I was taken aback when Apple announced that it would add a new feature to iOS, and a bunch of people got angry about it. Why in the world would you argue against Apple adding a new feature that will make the iPhone user experience appreciably better for many users?
The new feature is RCS, which will dramatically improve the quality of text communication between people who use iPhones and people who use Android phones. (And yes, the timing of Apple’s announcement makes it clear to me that this is very much designed to take some of the political heat off of Apple in the European Union.)
I’ve always assumed that the Apple community would agree that Apple’s products should be great. We use these products, for work and home and life in general. We love it when they’re good and hate it when they’re bad.
Few would deny that trying to send texts or photos in Messages to Android users has been pretty awful for a very long time. Why wouldn’t you want that to get better?
Beeper, a startup led by former Pebble CEO Eric Migicovsky, announced a new version of its Android app that supports direct on-device compatibility1 for iMessage. Quinn Nelson has an excellent explanation video and Jacob Kastrenakes at the Verge has an article about it.
As Kastrenakes explains:
Beeper Mini avoids some of those problems because it’s operating in a fundamentally different way. Its developers figured out how to register a phone number with iMessage, send messages directly to Apple’s servers, and have messages sent back to your phone natively inside the app. It was a tricky process that involved deconstructing Apple’s messaging pipeline from start to finish. Beeper’s team had to figure out where to send the messages, what the messages needed to look like, and how to pull them back down from the cloud. The hardest part, Migicovsky said, was cracking what is essentially Apple’s padlock on the whole system: a check to see whether the connected device is a genuine Apple product.
Can Apple just flip a couple of switches and stop these shenanigans? Based on how Beeper described its technology to Nelson and Kastrenakes, not easily. It’s not against the law for Beeper to circumvent Apple’s systems, and it uses a standard authentication method that’s also used by legitimate Apple devices.
In a time when Apple’s being assailed by multiple regulators for uncompetitive behavior, it would not look great if the company were to crush Beeper, even if it could do so easily. Instead, it might take a months- or years-long overhaul of its authentication systems to do so. And would it be worth it? Beeper is making a calculated gamble that Apple will let this go.
In the meantime, if you’re an Android user who desperately wants access to blue bubbles, here’s Beeper Mini.
In other words, there’s no insecure server running in the middle that sees all your messages. ↩
Myke returns to the show to discuss chip packaging (in the U.S.A.) and the potential of AI models to make using a computer easier. Then, by request, we spend some time talking about how we got into this business.
Three situations that money seemingly has failed to fix: the Apple Card, Elon Musk and Apple’s modem project.
Credit declined
They say that breaking up is hard to do, but when you’ve lost $3 billion because of the relationship, you tend to be motivated to find a way to make it happen, even if it means dividing up your streaming service plans.
According to The Wall Street Journal, it’s splitsville for the richest company in the world and the company that looks out for the richest people in the world.
The tech giant recently sent a proposal to Goldman to exit from the contract in the next roughly 12-to-15 months, according to people briefed on the matter.
Apple is currently shopping for new partners for the Apple Card—American Express and Synchrony Financial are said to be two potential companies—but when Goldman Sachs has been so vocal about what a bad deal it was for them, one wonders who’d be lining up for some of that.…
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy, but of course it isn’t. Forcing restarts without user approval will lead to data loss (and angry users), but most users don’t install updates themselves!
OS updates are the single most common issue Kolide’s customers want them to
solve. Kolide reaches out to users directly with instructions on how to get their devices into compliance. The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta.
The holiday season is peak streaming season, too! We discuss the seasonal opportunities for streamers, plus: your letters. [Downstream+ subscribers also get: Amazon’s Black Friday NFL experiment, YouTube & Sunday Ticket, and the coming sports/RSN implosion.]
It wouldn’t be Apple software update season without a bizarre fixation on an otherwise innocuous feature. Yes, everybody’s up in arms about NameDrop, because if there’s one thing you never want to share with anyone, it’s your contact details. Especially to people who you want to…uh…contact you.
But allow me to peel back the curtain and reveal the real truth of the matter: this is all a smokescreen. A cleverly planted story intended to distract attention from the real Apple features that you need to be worried about. The ones that you don’t even know exist, because if you did, you’d never pick up a technological gadget ever again.
Say Cheese: Buried deep within the Health app, amongst all the stats for blood oxygen and heart rate, you might be mistaken for overlooking a little entry for a peculiar figure: Cheese Intake. That’s right, Apple is tracking just how much cheese you eat.…
While Amazon’s Kindle is the clear leader and Rakuten’s Kobo the obvious challenger, Vivlio has been building an open European alternative to these two tech giants. And it proves that you can compete with tech giants with a team of 35 as long as you have a distinct strategy with different goals…
“The idea was to create a European coalition — well, French at first, but we’re trying to make it European now — a coalition of companies with similar interests, booksellers and retailers of cultural goods, around a French and then European solution,” Vivlio CEO David Dupré told me.
Vivlio’s got a partner for hardware and has built on the open-source Readium LCP copy protection scheme. As a fan of e-readers in general and weird e-readers in particular, it’s great to see a company other than Amazon’s Kindle and Rakuten’s Kobo trying to build a digital reading ecosystem.
Upon seeing this week’s announcement from Apple promoting the top titles of the year from Apple Books, along with a new Year in Review feature, I had likely the same thought as many: “Apple still cares about selling ebooks?”
To be fair, you can’t blame the company for being gun shy. Ten years ago, Apple found itself in the crosshairs of a Department of Justice investigation over price-fixing ebooks, and the fallout of that case not only impacted Apple’s existing foray into ebooks, but also likely cooled any fervor it had for competing in the market in the future.
Unfortunately, that case also ended up only solidifying the dominance of the market’s biggest player, Amazon. So, a decade on, could Apple still mount an effective challenge to that behemoth? Maybe. But not only would the will have to be present, but the company would have to take some pretty bold steps.
Apple’s latest short film focusing on accessibility, released on Thursday and directed by Oscar-winner Taika Waititi, tells the story of a character’s search for his lost voice. The film promotes the Personal Voice and Live Speech features included in the latest versions of iOS and macOS.
The film is a children’s story narrated by Dr. Tristram Ingham, a New Zealand-based physician and disability advocate. Ingham lives with facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), a disease which causes progressive muscle degeneration, and leads to an inability to speak. His narration was created using Personal Voice on an iPhone. The film is also audio-described for those with visual impairments.
The film tells the story of a furry little character searching everywhere for his lost voice, with the aid of his friend, a young girl. There’s also an ebook, where the story appears in words and illustrations. Both are available now.
The film’s effectiveness and emotional impact does not come from the centering of disability, but from the lithe writing, imaginative visual vocabulary and trippy score, which is made up mostly of human voice samples. Like the best Apple promotional films, it is about what it’s about, far more than the products it inevitably promotes.
The film release coincides with the UN’s International Day of Persons with Disabilities, which is December 3. It was produced with the participation of organizations supporting people with speech disabilities.
Personal Voice debuted in iOS/iPadOS 17. It is intended for use by those who are at risk of losing the ability to speak. Many Personal Voice users have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which eventually causes loss of the ability to speak. After recording some 150 phrases to an iPhone or iPad, a synthetic version of the recorded voice is generated on-device. Once that’s done, the user can instruct Personal Voice to speak in the version of your voice that’s been created.
Live Speech, Apple’s other new speech accessibility feature, allows the user to type a phrase or sentence and have it spoken by the device. Think coffee orders or other quick interactions.
Turns out police departments are like some of my relatives: They see things on Facebook and uncritically pass them on without considering for one moment if what they’re posting is actually true.
Shira Ovide of the Washington Post covered the issue quite well in a recent newsletter, and Juli Clover of MacRumors wrote a nice summary of how an innocuous iOS 17 feature has been the latest target of unjustified panic:
There have been warnings about NameDrop popping up on Facebook. Police departments in Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, Ohio, and other states have been suggesting that contact information can be shared “just by bringing your phones close together.” From the City of Chester Police Department in Ohio:
“IMPORTANT PRIVACY UPDATE: If you have an iPhone and have done the recent iOS 17 update, they have set a new feature called NameDrop defaulted to ON. This feature allows the sharing of your contact info just by bringing your phones close together. To shut this off go to Settings, General, AirDrop, Bringing Devices Together. Change to OFF.”
This is so bizarre. NameDrop is a feature that lets you AirDrop your contact information to someone else. For the feature to work, both phones need to be unlocked and one has to be placed directly over the other. The entire new tap-to-connect system is built to use physical proximity to confirm consent to sending or receiving data, replacing the old system in which you could leave your device open to AirDrop from all users—and receive all sorts of nasty unwanted stuff from nearby randos.1
Once the physical act of tapping is done—it takes a few seconds, there’s a prominent animation, it’s nothing that is going to happen accidentally—you are given the option to share your contact information with the other person, and get to choose which information is shared! If you only want to share a phone number and not your home address, you can do that! It’s entirely in the user’s control. (If someone nefarious approached you and wanted to steal your information, they’d be better off just grabbing your unlocked phone and running away with it.)
As Ovide wrote:
We spend too much time worrying about the wrong things in technology. And that is partly the fault of public officials and news organizations that can make anything sound scarier than it really is.
I’m glad that so many sources are rushing to correct the original police department posts, but if you really want to get depressed, visit one and read the comments from all the people who are grateful for the misinformation. You’ll have to laugh to keep from crying.
At Oracle Park in San Francisco, I was once AirDropped a photo of Dick Van Dyke, with the text, “You just got an unsolicited Dick pic.” ↩
Castro has been a popular iOS podcast app for many years, but right now things look grim.
The cloud database that backs the service is broken and needs to be replaced. As a result, the app has broken. (You can’t even export subscriptions out of it, because even that function apparently relies on the cloud database.) “The team is in the progress of setting up a database replacement, which might take some time. We aim to have this completed ASAP,” said an Xtweet from @CastroPodcasts.
What’s worse, according to former Castro team member Mohit Mamoria, “Castro is being shut down over the next two months.”
Castro owner Tiny and the Castro team aren’t addressing Mamoria’s comments or responding to my emails. When I asked around, a couple of knowledgeable people told me that they’d heard Castro had been put on life support a few months ago and was unlikely to get any technical attention going forward. I can’t independently verify those secondhand comments, but they don’t contradict Mamoria’s statement. Podnews on Wednesday provided a bagful of evidence pointing to Castro’s imminent demise. (Update: Castro owner Tiny says they’re trying to find a new home for the app.)
The truth is, between Apple’s solid upgrades to the Podcast app and the rise of Spotify as a podcast-playing competitor, the squeeze has really been put on most podcast apps. Original Castro developers Supertop sold the app in 2018. Pocket Casts got acquired in 2018 and again in 2021. Stitcher shut down entirely.
It’s not that users don’t want better podcast apps. Clearly, the users of Castro and Pocket Casts and Overcast get features out of those apps that the two big apps just can’t match. But it can take a lot to drive users out of the arms of a default and into a quest to replace that default. The default app doesn’t have to be best in class—it just has to be good enough.
There’s power in being one of the incumbents, too. If you’re a Spotify customer, you don’t even need to change apps. If you’re in Apple’s ecosystem, using Podcasts adds integration with HomePods and Apple TV that other apps just can’t match.
I’m still an Overcast user, and it would take a lot for Apple’s Podcasts app to get me back. But I once had a list of must-have podcast app features that Apple failed to support that was as long as my arm; these days, I can probably count it on my fingers, and I might not need the second hand.
Which is to say, if Castro really is not long for this world, I fully expect that most of its users won’t go to Overcast or Pocket Casts, but will retreat to Apple or Spotify, companies that are unlikely to fail them, even if the cost is a little less customization or functionality. And a little more of the unique, open podcast ecosystem will be lost forever.
