Gnome lives in your Mac’s menubar. You hit a hotkey. A little search window appears. You type what you’re looking for — weird al, shrug, nailed it, that’s a paddlin’ — and a grid of GIFs appears. Click the one you want. It’s now on your clipboard. Paste it wherever you were typing. Joke saved. World improved.
My favorite bit: You can also add in a local folder of GIFs, so your own go-tos are always at the ready, in addition to stuff from the wider Internet.
Maybe my second favorite bit:
Wait, why is the app called Gnome? Because that’s how I pronounce the “G” in “GIF.”
The app costs $7, one time, to unlock everything. Otherwise, after five minutes you’ll be limited to “Weird Al” and Rick Astley GIFs. I’m not kidding.
My belated thanks to ZenStand for sponsoring Six Colors last week.
ZenStand is a charger that doesn’t feel like a tech product. It sits on a desk or nightstand the way normal stuff does, without announcing itself. It’s made from real wood, solid dark walnut that looks nice in a way that molded plastic never will. It’s got a weighted and adhesive base, so your phone lifts off cleanly with one hand. There are no LEDs, on purpose. A charger doesn’t need to show off that it’s a charger.
What you end up with is a MagSafe stand that does its job properly and then gets out of the way. Which, in ZenStand’s view, is what good objects are supposed to do.
I could hardly remember writing it. But write it I did, at a time when we were deep in a news-aggregation desert. It seemed like RSS had experienced a conceptual death, through neglect and intent. Google first hijacked usage by creating Google Reader during RSS’s heyday in 2005, which sank the market for paid RSS apps and led to near hegemony for Google.
Then, typical of fickle Google, the company killed off Google Reader in 2013. Because Google Reader was web-based, its loss revealed a barren marketplace. Small developers tried to fill the gap, but the pattern of usage for many people had ended.
Couple that with the emergence, by that time, of the expectation of very low prices for single-purpose apps, and little chance yet of convincing people to pay for a recurring subscription. RSS readers persisted, but it seemed like their time had come and gone.
But I was too pessimistic! Today, I’m back to daily—or multiple-times-per-day—use of a newsreader, the same one that got me addicted back in the early 2000s. Hurray, I’m an RSS news junkie again!?
NetNewsWire remains true to RSS and its identity, as you can see from this version 2 screenshot.
The battle for the Mac menu bar has raged for decades, and shows no signs of letting up.
As the number of apps and controls in the menu bar have continued to proliferate, users have had to constantly find ways to keep them in check. For years, the de facto solution was the Mac app Bartender, but after an awkwardly managed ownership transition in 2024, a slew of alternatives sprouted up to take on the venerable utility and vie for the crown.
The team behind Bartender has continued to plug away, however, and the latest release is Bartender 6, which not only continues the app’s legacy of menu bar management, but also extends into an interesting new area: the omnipresent notch of the MacBook.
Bartender’s menu bar management is about the same as it has always been.
The menu bar management options haven’t changed much from Bartender 5 to 6; you’ll find all your usual options, including the ability to customize layout, behavior, and look and feel.
There’s also beta feature called Widgets, which lets you make your own menu bar items with a plug-and-play interface that feels like a combination of Shortcuts and Yahoo Pipes. It’s interesting but feels more than a little underbaked at present; I had a hard time getting it do anything that it was supposed to do, including simply showing the current CPU usage. With some more work, it might be more competitive with the likes of SwiftBar, but right now, it’s a beta in the classical sense.
Making your own menu bar icons seems natural for Bartender, but the feature needs improvement.
Bartender 6 is available as a four-week trial; after that time you’ll need to buy a full license for $20, though generous upgrade pricing is available for owners of previous versions. If you purchased Bartender 5 in 2025, you can even upgrade for free. Note that Bartender 6 does require macOS Sonoma or later and that if you do update from 5 to 6, your settings won’t transfer—the developers say this is because of changes in Tahoe, but it’s a shame they didn’t provide an export/import option.
If that were the whole story, it might make Bartender 6 an unremarkable update. However, in addition to all of those features, there’s also Bartender Pro, a $15/year subscription that promises not only all future Bartender updates, but also advanced features, starting with what it dubs Top Shelf.
We revisit the Ultra and Neo names, consider the future of Apple’s processor manufacturing strategy, and try to imagine why possible use case there could be for AirPods with built-in cameras.
Your Mac doesn’t have one kind of sleep—it has several. That fact is generally uninteresting until you find you can’t easily put your Mac into display sleep or system (idle) sleep automatically when you walk away from it or close a laptop’s lid. Let me help you help your Mac drift into the arms of Morpheus by digging beneath the surface.
Scattered sleep settings
Recently, I got frustrated with this recurrent problem on the Mac in my studio. Generally, I want this Mac’s displays to sleep and the system to lock, but to remain active, since I access it remotely and it handles networked Time Machine backups. I thought I’d correctly configured the various System Settings, scattered across different panes, several releases ago.
There are three settings to be aware of:
Lock Screen. In the System Settings app, select Lock Screen, note the “Turn display off… when inactive” setting or settings: “on battery” and “on power adapter” appear on a laptop; nothing on a desktop.1 You can choose an interval here. Never is an option, and could be your problem.
The Lock Screen pane in System Settings on a desktop Mac, where the display-sleep timers live.
Battery. On a laptop, go to the System Settings app and select Battery and click Options. There, you can enable “Wake for network access,” which is set to “Only on Power Adapter” by default, to wake your Mac as needed for certain incoming network traffic. Your Mac will wake up—and sometimes your display will, too. If set to Always, this can wake your laptop while it’s on battery power, and potentially leave its display active, which could drain your battery.
The Battery Options dialog on a laptop, where “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off” and “Wake for network access” are configured.
Automatic sleeping. Apple enables a setting by default that keeps your Mac active when the display goes to sleep. The location and phrasing are slightly different between laptops and desktops. On a laptop, the setting is in Battery’s Options dialog, as above, and reads “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off.” On a desktop, find it in the Energy preferences, where it’s called “Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off.” Disable this switch if you want your Mac to sleep when the display powers down.
My Energy pane, in System Settings, shows the power adapter and UPS options, as I’m connected to a UPS.
Conversely, if you’d like a quick, manual way to put your display to sleep, you’ve got two options:
In the System Settings app, go to Desktop & Dock, click Hot Corners (found at the bottom), and choose Sleep as an action for one corner.
Press Control-Command-Q to activate Lock Screen, or choose Lock Screen from the Apple menu. I don’t love this keystroke, to be honest, because it’s perilously easy to type Command-Shift-Q, which logs you out of your account, shutting down all the apps.2
The Hot Corners dialog with the bottom-right corner assigned to Put Display to Sleep provides a quick way to sleep the display.
Unfortunately, tweaking these settings didn’t help my situation. The answer lay in Terminal, where I ran commands to reveal low-level information about what was keeping my Mac from display sleep.
Power management shows who’s keeping you awake
Apple does provide an excellent tool that shows what’s affecting power management and lets you control it: pmset.3 Even better, you can paste in the following to use that command to extract just sleep-related assertions, or activities that have an impact on sleep:
pmset -g assertions | grep -i sleep
When I typed this just now, I had a modest list, preceded by a summary:
The first three lines tell me the off/on status as a 0 (off) or a count (1 per set of connected items) about whether any application or other process affects those categories:
PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep: When showing 0, as it is for me, there’s nothing that will block the display from sleeping on your Lock Screen delay choice. If this is 1 or higher, the display will not go to sleep.
PreventSystemSleep: A non-zero value, as in my case, means something is actively preventing the system from sleeping at all, even if I tried to put it to sleep manually.
PreventUserIdleSystemSleep: With a value of 1 or more, a process prevents your Mac, when idle, from engaging system sleep. If you perform an action, like choosing Sleep from the Apple Menu or closing the lid on a laptop, it will sleep.
You can see that I have several typical items in the filtered list below. The three lines listing com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep (twice) and com.apple.Music.playback relate to my current situation: I’m listening to the Music app via my Mac’s headphone jack, which is connected to speakers.
Maybe I shouldn’t have chosen the tea kettle from Amphetamine’s options for alternative menu bar icons?
I have no idea why QuickTime Player, shown next, would prevent idle sleep—that seems strange, as it was inactive and had no open files. Quitting it removed that assertion. (Apparently, the specific language it uses is a legacy assertion, so it isn’t properly counted in the summary.)
Screen Sharing (screensharingd) is also an odd duck. Normally, if you have a Screen Sharing session connected to your Mac, its display can go to sleep, but the system stays active. In this case, this is a transient state: I use Bartender, which has to use Screen & System Audio Recording, which appears as a form of screen sharing when active, to determine which system menu items are currently visible.
The final item, powerd, is the setting noted earlier: “Prevent sleep while display is on.”
When previously looking through this list, I came across an online reference to a Mac utility called caffeinate. Folks, I’ve said before I have to keep humble despite being a technology writer for what is now nearly 30 years: I had never seen this command-line tool before, to my knowledge, and, according to Google, I have never mentioned it in my archived writing.
caffeinate was introduced 13 years ago by Apple as a cutely named option you can use to keep the display awake. For instance, to keep the display forced awake for an hour, overriding other settings, enter:
caffeinate -d -t 3600
Now, I was aware of Amphetamine (free from the Mac App Store). But I didn’t quite understand—or, let me be honest, maybe have forgotten—that it performed the same function, relying on the same system hooks caffeinate employs, and putting a friendly menu bar wrapper around it.
Finding the caffeinate reference led me to look for Amphetamine, which in turn revealed the problem. Perhaps due to some errant menu bar clicking, I had activated Amphetamine, thus locking my display on. My confusion might stem from three factors. First, I forgot I had it installed. Second, I used Bartender to put the icon in its Hidden list, so it wasn’t displayed in the active bar. Third, I used the icon selection option to change the menu bar picture from a pill to a tea kettle—you know, drinking tea might keep you awake? I regret my decision, as I didn’t recognize what it was when I made that decision, seemingly years ago.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t just turn it off in the app—I had to quit the app, then toggle the active state to turn it off. Sadly, we humans can’t turn off our caffeinated mode to go to sleep.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
I have an uninterruptible power supply (UPS), so I see “on power display” and “on UPS” (meaning when the UPS is actively providing power). ↩
If you have Keyboard Maestro, you can remap the Command-Shift-Q keystroke to do nothing or prompt you before logging out. ↩
You can use pmset to create limited sleep schedules, a feature available via System Preferences in macOS prior to Ventura. ↩
Starting today, end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging begins rolling out in beta for iPhone users running iOS 26.5 with supported carriers and Android users on the latest version of Google Messages. When RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they can’t be read while they’re sent between devices. Users will know that a conversation is end-to-end encrypted when they see a new lock icon in their RCS chats. Encryption is on by default and will be automatically enabled over time for new and existing RCS conversations.
Apple first talked about adding this feature more than a year ago, and first beta tested it in a previous version of iOS. With today’s release of iOS 26.5, it’s now available—pending carrier support, of course.
I’m glad to see the company implementing this: while iMessages have always been encrypted, which Apple points out in its press release, security of our messages should be table stakes.
This news does mean encrypted RCS messaging will functionally be available in Messages on macOS as well, since texts and RCS messaging are already facilitated by your iPhone, as long as your phone is running 26.5 and it’s supported by your carrier and your account.
Looks like Apple would rather sell more MacBook Neos than protect that number that gets announced every quarter. This is good news for people in cheap laptop hell begging for a glass of cool water.
It’s also a bit of a relief considering what’s happening to other parts of the Mac lineup right now.
Stop drinking our milkshake
Hey, how’s everyone enjoying AI? All good? Having fun? No downsides, right? I mean other than the slop and the non-consensual porn and the possibly detrimental environmental impact and the many, many potentially negative mental health consequences.
Apple recently made its decision and opted to put more units of the Neo in customer hands… As a result, it’s now asking suppliers to prepare capacity for 10 million units of the debut version of the Neo, up from an initial estimate of 5 million to 6 million, my sources tell me.
This renewed commitment to meeting demand means Apple must also ask TSMC for a hot lot of A18 Pro chips, the same processor used in the iPhone 16 Pro. The system-on-chip is made using TSMC’s N3E process, with the initial production run underway at least two years ago.
The net result of this is that the cost of making MacBook Neos is going to go up, but Apple has (quite rightly, in my opinion) decided that it’s more important to keep MacBook Neo momentum rolling than to maintain higher margins.
Apple recently cut some Mac mini and Mac Studio configurations as it manages RAM costs and shortages, and Culpan says that it’s certainly on the table for Apple to do the same on the MacBook Neo.
The simplest answer is probably to eliminate the $599 model entirely, but changing the base price point threatens to undermine the entire premise of the Neo. It’s a tricky one. This is how John Ternus earns his paycheck, I suppose.
With Hovercraft, you stay on camera. Your slide sits next to you, big and legible. You reach up, pinch it, move it where you want it. You never stop talking. No clicker. No option-tab. No moment where you lose the room.
It’s a virtual camera (so, compatible with pretty much any videoconferencing app) in which case your slide deck (a PDF) is a movable object within the frame. You use hand gestures to position it and shrink it. It hovers—hence the name— in front of you, and you can also use keyboard shortcuts or hand gestures to toggle it on or off or send it full screen.
What I like about this is that it’s using the camera system rather than requiring screen-sharing modes that sometimes just mess up what you’re trying to do. In my brief testing I struggled to get the hand gestures right, but I would imagine that in time—I can only aspire to be as laid back as Adam is in his video demo—I will get the hang of it. This will be a nice addition to my user-group Zoom presentation arsenal.
We read between the lines of Apple’s latest record financial results to see how they will impact future products and aquisitions in the Ternus Era. Plus: An Ultra name conundrum, Johny Srouji’s burnout, and F1’s stateside debut.
Macs don’t do well when they start to approach full storage. The operating system doesn’t provide enough safeguards and backoff options to help you cope with what can become a disaster, requiring a full drive restore! I wrote about this happening with my younger child’s MacBook two years ago. That article was about the abject failure of attempts to get a Mac working after it had reached maximum Mr. Creosote levels. What about avoiding this altogether?
Six Colors reader John wrote in with this particular problem, which has been plaguing him across multiple Mac laptops but doesn’t occur on his Mac mini. John pays Apple for 6 TB of storage and is using nearly 4 TB. Logging in and out of iCloud seems to resolve his full-storage issue, but it comes with a lot of wasted time and some syncing problems.
I suspect one or more things in his case:
iCloud eviction delays: iCloud isn’t properly evicting data (deleting the local copy, as there’s a cloud copy), or doing so rapidly enough, as the drive starts to fill. The nature of iCloud Drive and iCloud storage for apps and the system is that only as much is cached locally as needed, and the oldest, least-used data is evicted with no user involvement. See below for help on that.
Aggressive Photos iCloud syncing: Photos is aggressively retrieving data in such a way that, even with Photos: Settings > iCloud > Optimize Mac Storage enabled, it’s filling up the drive. (John has over 100,000 items in Photos, so it’s a likely suspect.)
Local temporary backup caches: Some form of locally cached backup might be filling his drive before it uploads or transfers the files. Both Time Machine and Backblaze use local caching as a technique, and if you have slow Internet service or haven’t backed up to Time Machine in a while (more common with a laptop, if you attach a drive for this purpose), it can get out of hand.
APFS snapshots: You can also wind up with what are called “APFS snapshots” that correspond to Time Machine backups that take up space on a drive. These are managed by Time Machine, and the oldest should be deleted automatically over time, but I found in 2021 that some people were having issues with these snapshots growing to occupy an ever-larger portion of their storage. (See “How to manage Time Machine snapshots using Disk Utility in macOS Monterey” at Macworld. And see the DaisyDisk discussion, next.)
After reviewing the above, if none of that explains the problem or helps, I’ve got more advice ahead.
Diagnose what you’re storing
You can use System Settings: General: Storage to get a look at what’s using storage across your drive, but I find it both unreliable—it crashed while testing—and frustrating, as the granularity isn’t high enough.
Instead, I turn to one of my all-time favorite utilities: DaisyDisk ($10, lifetime license), an app that scans your drives and reveals the kinds of data stored by category, including the important “hidden space” section. I don’t need it often, but when I do, it’s usually the only tool that can diagnose unsolvable problems.
DaisyDisk provides a graphic look at the way your drive is full of stuff you may, or may not, need.
DaisyDisk lets you peer into the innards of your drive with color-coding to help you visualize how your usage is distributed among file types. One extremely useful feature is that you can drag and drop at any level of the navigable directory hierarchy to a “collector” spot in the lower-left corner to target items for deletion. Then click Delete and confirm, and it’s gone. This is particularly helpful with the APFS snapshots discussed above.
Manually evict files from iCloud
Apple does offer a manual tool to dump files from local storage without deleting them from iCloud. In the Finder, Control/right-click any item in iCloud Drive, and choose Remove Download. This only works for files that are currently downloaded.1 You can use it on folders, too, but every item in a folder must be downloaded to evict the folder and its contents.
Control/right-click in the Finder on a downloaded file, files, or folder (with all items in it downloadable), and you choose Remove Download to evict.
Monitor storage levels
If you, like reader John, see this filling-up issue regularly, installing an app that warns in advance can be critical. The easiest and cheapest way I’ve found for this kind of monitoring is via iStat Menus ($12). While its primary purpose is to provide a live visual display of the state of various hardware (CPUs, drives, sensors) and other information (time, weather), it can also notify you when any of several conditions are met.
One of iStat Menu’s nifty tricks is notifying you when system parameters pass thresholds or change, including storage on a drive.
One of these is whether a chosen volume has less than a specified amount of storage remaining or has exceeded an entered percentage of storage used. But this isn’t integrated with email or text, so you need to be in front of your device to know the drive is about to start bulging.
I felt, however, that there was a gap for an on-device monitoring app that could email or text you when something is on the verge of going wrong.2 So I wrote one! Welcome to Mister Plimsoll, a simple, free Mac monitoring app currently in beta that lets you set which internal or external volumes to monitor, the percentage above which you should be notified, and choose to get a Mac alert, an email, an iMessage—or all three. You can set the refresh rate for checking and the number of notifications you get each day when the percentage is exceeded. (Please send your feedback.)
Mister Plimsoll tells you when your ship, er, drive is about to sink under a heavy weight of files.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
You can also choose Keep Downloaded to mark files or folders in either state—currently downloaded or evicted to the cloud—to prevent future eviction. ↩
If you use Keyboard Maestro, you can set up a shell script that runs at an interval, checks the disk size, and emails you or uses Messages to alert you. I started down this path, but the process wound up requiring too many steps for this modest column. If you don’t use Keyboard Maestro, it’s a great app, but silly for me to recommend for this one task. ↩
It’s time to say goodbye. But before we go, we read some final letters, Steven hides in Sports Corner, and Jason answers a bit of podcast lore. Thank you all for listening to Downstream.
Now… hang on a second. Are we supposed to believe that the smart people at Apple speed-bumped the Vision Pro and then, when it didn’t sell like hotcakes you put on your face, they decided to give up on it? Because that sounds not right in several ways.
Say what you want about the Vision Pro—like it’s overpriced, too heavy, too niche a product, it doesn’t have enough experiences, those eyes are weird, it’s socially unacceptable to wear a big honkin’ thing on your fa—hey, hey, hey, alright already, we get it! I was being rhetorical when I said “say what you want”.…
Once again, I have ventured out of my home country and winged my way overseas.
This isn’t the first time I’ve written about my travel experiences. I detailed some wins and losses from my last international trip in 2024 and even wrote a post way back in 2015, in which I was considering not traveling with my Apple Watch out of fears it would get lost or stolen. Oh, how times have changed.
That said, we were attempting to travel light this time: just two carry on bags and two backpacks for two adults and one small child. And part of that was minimizing the number of devices that we needed to carry and all their attendant cables.
Overall, I think we did pretty well.
Power to the people
One of the things that I get most annoyed about when traveling is charging. I have a couple of super basic plug adapters for Europe and the UK that are fine, if bulky. But I’d been on the lookout for a nice universal power adapter—preferably one that would fit nicely in my go-bag of chargers and cables.
This time around, I found it in the form of the Anker Nano Travel Adapter (affiliate link). What I like about the Nano is first, that it’s not a giant box: it’s only about an inch thick, two inches wide, and a little over three inches long. In that, it’s not too far off from my Anker MagSafe power battery, which means it fits perfectly into the aforementioned bag.
While it doesn’t have every single power port known to humanity, it does at least cover some of the most common: Type A (US / Canada / Japan / China), Type C (Europe), Type G (UK / Singapore) and Type I (Australia). It also packs two USB-C ports and two USB-A ports, so you can charge your USB devices directly, as well offering a plug passthrough if you need to use a Type A or Type C plug.
The Anker Nano is compact and well-designed, with a bunch of USB ports.
It’s not the beefiest of charges: just 20W max, or 15W for the USB ports when sharing them, but it was plenty to charge a phone and Apple Watch overnight. (I did run into one or two instances where it seems like something didn’t charge correctly, though I wasn’t able to figure out exactly why).
I still ended up needing those extra power adapters for some additional electronics we brought for my kid, like his white noise machine and a baby monitor for our Airbnb. (We also lucked out, with the apartment we stayed at in Paris having a power strip that could accept US plugs.)
One thing I ended up surprisingly not needing on this trip very much: backup batteries. I brought three: the Anker MagSafe model, an older Jackery one with Lightning and micro-USB connectors, and the beefy one included in my Away luggage. Of those, I think the MagSafe model got used once or twice, but only by my wife. The iPhone 17 Pro’s battery held out just fine for all-day usage, including plenty of wayfinding and picture taking.
Make sure you’re connected
As I mentioned in my 2024 piece, eSIMs have made it super easy to stay connected while you’re traveling internationally. Apple’s continued to try and smooth the experience: when I activated my Airalo-provided EU & UK eSIM—unlimited data for a week for about $20—after arriving in France, I was prompted to use it as a Travel SIM, which would allow me to still get FaceTime and iMessages via my U.S. phone number.
That largely worked this time, though I did still run into a couple of weird glitches. For one thing, some contacts weren’t showing up in various places in iOS (Messages, Find My) with their names, but just their phone numbers. I eventually concluded it was because their U.S. phone numbers were not formatted correctly in Contacts for some reason.1
And despite having my AT&T data roaming off, I did notice that my phone would download a kilobyte of data every once in a while—maybe 4KB total over my entire trip. This kind of “data leakage” is not unheard of, but I haven’t yet been able to find out whether the carrier is going to try to charge me their international rate—I suppose I’ll see when I get my next bill.
But between my eSIM and plentiful Wi-Fi, I never lacked for connectivity. And, thanks to my Tailscale network, I was even able to access the U.S. version of streaming services so that I could download videos for my trip home.
Tripping the light fantastic
I remarked on it during my last overseas trip in 2024, but Apple Pay has truly changed the experience of going to other countries. Before I left this time around, I popped a few leftover UK pounds and some Euros into my wallet, just in case.
I ended up never using them.
In fact, I think I only took my credit card out once, when I thought Apple Pay had failed, though in retrospect, I think it was just because the terminal wasn’t ready yet. Otherwise, I used my phone and watch to pay for everything on the entire trip, from cafés to transit. The experience was just completely seamless—a far cry from days of yore where I used to worry about exchange rates or how to get cash in country.
Tap-and-go transit remains the best experience; I was a little disappointed with Paris’s system, which still requires you buy tickets on its transit card, rather than just using a contactless payment. It meant I had to make sure to buy a ticket every time I was about to use the Metro—not especially onerous, as the Transit Card is supported by the Wallet app and you can buy tickets right from there with Apple Pay, but another point of friction. Especially compared to my trips on the London transit system, where I never had to do anything but tap my phone or watch on a gate or while boarding a bus and go.
(My thanks, by the way, to my pal Jeremy Burge, whose excellent compendium, Express Transit, prepared me for what I would experience in both Paris and London.)
And while we didn’t get to take total advantage of Wallet’s latest boarding pass features, I had an easy enough time on both our flights and our one long train journey storing all of our boarding passes digitally. Honestly, the only real challenge was physically juggling my phone and passport—hopefully some day those Digital IDs will be acceptable for international travel.
Left to my devices
I of course brought my iPhone 17 Pro and AirPods Pro 2—I rarely leave home without the two of those. I also packed my Apple Watch Series 7—no worries about it getting lost or stolen, 2015-era me—and the Apple Watch Series 10 I use for sleep tracking.2
I also packed my M1 iPad Pro because an iPad is a great device for watching video on the plane. And I was very glad that my kid had his own iPad (an old 10.5-inch iPad Pro that will, at least, run iOS 17 and, therefore, many—but not all—of the modern streaming apps and games).3
But beyond pulling out my iPad for the plane and train trips, I didn’t end up using it at all. I got far more mileage from my Kobo Libra 2 and even from—gasp—paper books. Though the iPad itself is not particularly heavy or bulky, I did find myself wondering what if I didn’t have to bring it. I mostly got by just fine with my phone—all I would miss is having a larger screen for watching videos.
You probably see where I’m going with this. What if I could just unfold my iPhone into a larger screen for those few occasions, but the rest of the time just have a phone? Hmm. It’s a compelling idea. I especially like the idea of reducing the number of devices I carry that require charging. Maybe one day I can truly get away with one device to rule them all.
The only real downside to that old iPad? A Lightning port! Which meant I needed to bring a Lightning charging cable. I’ve almost managed to banish them from our house, but not quite. ↩
[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.]
