Computers and sports—two things that should never be appreciated together, if you accept the high-school stereotypes about jocks versus nerds. Today we live in a post-Moneyball world where nerds with computers have quantified every aspect of athletic performance. But back in 1984, who would have expected that the big winner of the Super Bowl would be… Apple Computer?
But it’s true: Apple and the Super Bowl have been making milestones for decades. It’s a nerds-and-jocks love story for the ages, except these days it’s more about musicians than jocks. Let’s look at Apple’s long history with the Super Bowl!
Point your camera at a page, and the Spotify app uses computer vision to match text with audio. If you have to jump behind the wheel for a long drive, but didn’t want to put down The Buffalo Hunter Hunter, you can just snap a pic to jump to the spot in the audiobook where you left off in the physical book.
It works in reverse too, apparently. Point your camera at your physical book and it’ll tell you whether to flip back or forth to reach the spot you left off in your audiobook. (Spotify also today announced that it will partner with Bookshop.org to sell physical copies of its audiobooks.)
It’s a clever workaround, and has me wondering if a similar system could provide a workaround for the lack of sync on other hardware, like the Xteink X4.
That said, it does not escape me that this particular workaround is something that we end up with largely because of the imposition of Digital Rights Management on ebooks. In an ideal world, you’d simply be able to pick up any device—audio, ebook, etc.—and just keep reading where you left off.
While I don’t expect the current situation to change anytime soon, there are occasional glimmers of hope. Amazon, for example, now lets customers download DRM-free ebooks (when publishers have made them available).
I’ve argued before that Apple pushing for a world of DRM-free ebooks—the same way it once did for music—could make the company more relevant in the market once again. But it’s done vanishingly little with its ebook marketplace in recent years, and nothing on the horizon suggests anything different to come.
I cut the cable TV cord just about seven years ago, and I don’t regret the move at all. Through a judicious selection of streaming services—some free, some bundled—I’m able to see most of what I care to. And for the most part, it’s all on my own schedule.
The one pain point has been sports, which remains one of the few things keeping cable TV afloat. Even that’s changing a little bit, as streaming services are picking up coverage of more events. But to have access to everything, I’d have to subscribe to a whole host of packages, and that balloons the cost up to what I was paying for cable way back when. No thank you.
But there’s a solution of sorts when I need a sports fix, especially if there’s a can’t-miss event that I want to watch from the comfort of my own couch instead of at a sports bar or a friend’s house. It’s day passes via Sling’s streaming service.
If you’re not aware, Sling bundles up a bunch of different channels into one of two collections—Orange or Blue—that you can either buy separately or as one. It costs $45/month to buy one or the other or $69 for the whole megillah. That’s a bit steep for my tastes, but last August, Sling introduced a day pass option, where you can pay just $5 for 24-hour’s worth of access to the bundle of your choice.
So in this scenario, if there’s some event I want to watch on ESPN, I fire up the Sling app on my Apple TV, select the event from the schedule and follow the prompts to hand over my $5. (There’s a little extra tacked on for taxes, but the total bill is less than $6.) And that day pass means I don’t just get to watch one event on ESPN—for the next 24 hours I can watch anything on Sling’s Orange tier, which includes channels like the Food Network, TNT, TBS, and more.
I can tell you that Sling day passes work great in practice. I have a New Year’s Day tradition of watching the Rose Bowl game, a by-product of spending some formative years in Southern California. Or at least I had that tradition: the Rose Bowl has moved from free-to-air TV over to cable in recent years, blocking the game from my cord-cutting view.
On this New Year’s Day, though, I bought a Sling day pass, specifically to watch the Rose Bowl game. And because I made my purchase early enough in the day, I also got to watch two additional football games that were airing on ESPN. It was a nice throwback to my cable TV days, only without the big monthly bill.
There are, however, a couple pitfalls to the day pass approach. First, once you make a purchase from Sling, you’ll never be lonely again, as the streaming service will send many entreaties to your mailbox urging you to maybe consider a full monthly subscription. A quick tap of the Unsubscribe button takes care of that problem, though.
A more pertinent issue would be the fact that those day passes can add up pretty quickly if you don’t exercise some restraint. Fortunately, that’s not a problem for me, as my New Year’s Day splurge happened when there was an event I wanted to see at a time when I planned to be home. Maybe there will be similar circumstances later in the year—a World Cup match, maybe, or an NCAA tournament game. But I’m not too worried about racking up day pass charges.
And even there, you’ve got options. In addition to its day passes, Sling also has 3-day ($10) and weekly ($15) options, which can come in handy if there’s a multi-day sporting event on the calendar. I imagine those will get a workout in some corners when March Madness rolls around.
Cord cutting remains tough if you’re a sports fan, particularly if you blanch at the idea of committing to multiple streaming services just to watch your favorite teams. But at least Sling’s day passes give you a little more flexibility when it comes to unwinding with a good game.
[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.]
Our cozy gaming habits, list view vs. column view throwdown, whether AI coding integeration makes us want to build apps, and the rumored Apple products that we’ll instabuy.
Is it age? Obliviousness? A delayed mental unacuity from my heart surgery last November? Or could it be a Shazaam/Berenstain Bears scenario? All I know is that the first version of this article took Apple to task for including a menu in the Phone app for macOS 26 Tahoe that, in fact, was there all along.
The Phone app introduced in Tahoe for the Mac (and on iPadOS 26) made it much easier to deal with telephony across your devices. Instead of cramming phone features relayed through your iPhone into FaceTime, you can use a full-fledged Phone app. I have been a big fan of it, since I spend most of my working hours standing in front of a desktop Mac. I far prefer using my hard-wired USB headset for calls than AirPods or, gasp, holding my iPhone to my ear!2
After months of using the Phone app successfuly, I suddenly couldn’t get audio input to work. The Phone app has minimal controls and—I thought—no option to select audio input or output, which, in other apps, means the system selection rules apply.
I use several Rogue Amoeba apps and installed the latest version of SoundSource to see if that helped. Maybe there was an audio routing problem? But no: no settings were active and quitting the app didn’t change the input problem.
I can see myself talking.
Checking the Sound pane in System Settings, I could see that the correct microphone was selected for input and, crucially, showed that it registered me speaking in the “Input level” section as I tested it. I could also be heard on Zoom and Google Meet, and could record audio locally.
Clearly, something else was at work! I called up my old pal Jeff to do some testing. (He’s also a technology writer, so we trade off troubleshooting.) After trying several things, I launched FaceTime by clicking the camera icon on the Phone lozenge that appears by default in the upper-right corner of your display during a call.
Jeff still couldn’t hear me! Interesting. FaceTime’s input and output controls are ancient and mysterious. Audio and video are both controlled from the (inappropriately named) Video menu, and it turned out that my audio input was set to a screen-sharing program I no longer use. I changed it to the microphone that was set as my system default, and suddenly my voice rang out.
The ridiculous FaceTime Video menu, which contains audio settings for FaceTime and Phone (undocumented), is so long I’m showing it sideways.
“Ah ha!” I thought to myself—and said to Jeff and to editor Jason Snell—”I am a very clever chap and should document this as an article for Six Colors,” which Jason agreed to. In editing the article, Jason said, “Isn’t there a Video menu in the Phone app?” Despite my recollection that there was none, and my recent checking for such a menu, there it was on my Mac. It must have been there all along, and, Westworld-like, it didn’t look like anything to me.
In my defense: Why, why, is there a Video menu in an app called Phone that doesn’t use video?3 Apple doesn’t document this in the Phone part of its Tahoe manual And I wasn’t the only one unaware of it: Jason and Jeff didn’t know it existed either, until Jason was pushed past the Somebody Else’s Problem Field level of awareness.
I guess this is how I keep humble. Despite decades of using a Mac, I can still miss a Video menu in an audio app.
No, I went back and checked 26.0 release videos and screen captures. It was there. ↩
Let us not even consider the possibility of using speakerphone mode, despite how well the iPhone handles audio input and noise cancellation. ↩
You can launch FaceTime Video calls from the Phone app, but the Phone app has no video features. ↩
When you open Transit, you’re presented with a list of nearby routes. You can pin your favorites to the top (left). A map view and handy slider let you know how far your bus is from the stop you’ve selected. (middle) When your stop is near, Transit zooms in, and gives you time to signal that you’d like to get off.
I’ve been a fan of the Transit app for a long time. Apple and Google Maps can provide similar information about how and when to catch a bus or a train, but Transit has always focused more tightly on those modes, with lots of real-time data, and a social component, if you’re into that sort of thing.
Tap on a route you’re interested in to see how long you’ll need to wait for the next bus or train. Scroll right to see more departures. You can also select your destination stop, and use the Go button to plot your trip.
It had been a long time since I’ve used Transit, so updates haven’t been on my radar until I found myself in Northern California recently. I needed to use BART, the AC Transit bus system, and San Francisco’s MUNI, all in the course of a weeklong trip. And when I opened Transit, I discovered that a lot of things about using the app have gotten better with the release of version 6.0 last year.
Transit has always been best as a “live” app, the kind you want by your side when you need to know if you’ve missed the bus, or how long it will be before the next one comes. It works great for route-planning, too, but so do the “big two” mapping apps. Transit also excels when you’re on a train or bus, watching for a stop.
What’s new are the big, bright boxes that tell you how long you need to wait for your transit vehicle, offered with real-time data, when available. It’s also easier to scroll a list of stops your vehicle will make, because the list is bigger and bolder onscreen. As before, you can use the Go feature to plot your route, live, and have Transit tell you where and when to get off, with any combination of phone and Apple Watch notifications.
If you’re planning a trip, Transit offers a lot of preferences you can adjust, whether it’s limiting the amount of walking you need to do, or getting there quickly, whatever the mix of modes. These have been beefed up, but they’re a little hard to find for the beginner.
There’s always been a social component to Transit, from usage badges to aggregated data that gives the app more information about the routes its users frequent. In the most recent version, there are also poll questions, meant to gather information about vehicles, stops and safety. Multiple choice questions pop up when you’re on a bus or train, and it’s easy to either ignore them or participate. If you answer two or three multiple-choice questions, Transit will ask if it can send you more, or if you’d rather not. It might be annoying to some riders, but it’s a way to pass the time while you ride, and the questions are all on the app’s screen, not pushed to your phone as notifications… Which feels like a nice balance.
Apple lets you store payment cards in two places on your devices. Apple Pay is for point-of-sale (POS) transactions at a payment terminal or the like, as well as for payments in apps or in Safari. AutoFill Cards, the name of the menu items, lets you, er, automatically fill cards within Safari, and in any browser that supports Apple’s autofill framework.
Why does Apple have two places to store credit and debit cards? Why is the way you set them up similar, but not identical? When can you use one and not the other?
I thought I knew the full answer prior to researching my new book, Take Control of Wallet, but it took a lot of careful reading and testing to understand what I had been missing.
(Yes, I wrote an entire book about Wallet. You may laugh! But Take Control Books publisher Joe Kissell and I agreed on it after I realized how many pain points I kept finding as an ostensibly experienced user. Wallet has a lot of unexplored territory for many people—including me!)
Yes, Apple can still learn from Google and Samsung. (Shutterstock)
For the past decade and change, I’ve tested and reviewed a large number of Android phones, augmenting the iPhone expertise I’ve built up since seeing the very first iPhone live and in person at Macworld Expo 2007. And while that parade of phones has included some winning devices, my overall impression of the Android experience falls somewhere along the lines of “How do people live like this?”
That’s largely a reflection of the haphazard way Android phones receive their software updates. Some, like Google’s own Pixel devices, get new features right away, while others see updates once phone makers and wireless carriers are good and ready to release them. As someone used to downloading iOS updates the moment they’re available, that throws me. Android partisans tell me I’m being silly — sometimes politely, sometimes less so — and they may well have a point.
But even if some elements of the Android experience don’t land with me, I’d have to be a pretty narrow-minded person not to appreciate the features that do deliver. Android phones get a lot of things right — and some of those are missing in action when it comes to the iPhone.
Look, Apple didn’t sell more than $201 billion in iPhones during its 2024 fiscal year by listening to my advice, and I certainly don’t expect the company to start casting sideways glances toward Android phone makers to surreptitiously gather ideas on how to spruce up the next iPhones. But I do think there’s some merit in looking at areas where Android phones excel and how adopting something similar might give the iPhone a boost.
After all, we have some evidence that this already happens to some degree. Google added a rather distinctive horizontal camera bar to the Pixel 6 back in 2021. And while I don’t think the iPhone 17 Pro’s extended camera array is a direct copy, it certainly seems to draw some inspiration from what the Pixel has offered for years. Bringing the new look to the iPhone also allowed Apple to shift around internal components so that the current iPhone can benefit from a bigger battery and a vapor chamber, so there are benefits to adopting, adapting and improving.
So here’s what I’d flag up from my time looking at Android phones for features I’d like to see on the iPhone.
Despite some bumps in the road for its AI-driven features on the consumer side, Apple’s not slowing down on integrating the technology into its products. Today the company announced the latest update to its Xcode developer tool, which brings support for agentic AI coding.
Adding the agentic model opens up features like the ability for these AI models to get even deeper access to and more power with your projects. For example, the agents can look at and parse your project’s file structure to get more information, or even test and build the project all by itself. They’ll also have access to the latest documentation, allowing them to take advantage of the most recent APIs. Perhaps most impressively, these tools continue to iterate, repeatedly testing, verifying, and fixing errors until the project builds successfully.
This feature builds on top of the existing intelligence-powered tools and integrations that Apple introduced in Xcode 26 last year. Out of the box, Xcode 26.3 has built-in support for Claude Agent and ChatGPT’s Codex, allowing users to log in with their accounts or API tokens. But because this system is underpinned by Model Context Protocol (MCP), any other agent that supports the open standard can be integrated as well.
Xcode 26.3’s release candidate is available for download today.
[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 latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
It’s Super Bowl week and the start of the Olympics, so Will Carroll joins Jason to discuss Peacock’s almost-make-or-break moment, streaming fights and wrestling, and the fate of a clutch of Regional Sports Networks and other cable channels.
Six Colors subscriber Mihir writes in with a Photos question:
How do I delete just the RAW file in a RAW+JPEG pair from my photos library on my iPad or my iPhone?
The short answer: you can’t. Not directly, anyway. And it’s not just an iOS or iPadOS limitation—macOS won’t let you do it either.
I can understand why Mihir asks. An image in RAW format can occupy several times the amount of storage as a JPEG equivalent. This has to do with the nature of the image being stored, as I explain below.
There are good reasons to capture as RAW and good reasons to discard those formats later. I’ll go through the background of RAW, and then provide a workaround to Apple’s missing piece.
Pre-post-processed camera sensor data
The RAW format used by digital cameras is often capitalized as RAW, but it’s not an acronym, nor is it a format in the traditional sense.
RAW means the file contains “raw,” or unprocessed, sensor data from your camera. To produce a JPEG, TIFF, or other format, a digital camera—including your iPhone—performs post-processing to produce an image that’s immediately usable. This can involve making significant changes to dynamic range and white balance, or even combining multiple images as a form of computational photography, as Apple does with iPhone photos.
RAW+JPEG is a common way to get a high-resolution processed version and the editable original sensor data in a single package in Photos.
This makes RAW the digital equivalent of a film negative: it’s typically larger than a post-processed file, and contains information that hasn’t yet been shaved down or squeezed into a presentable output. This gives you more flexibility when editing, but it requires processing to be usable for design, printing, or sharing.
Many cameras let you set a RAW export that includes a JPEG preview usable on its own. The JPEG is the best post-processed output from the RAW, and was originally provided because desktop (and later mobile) software didn’t support RAW or didn’t always keep up to date. Without the JPEG, importing the RAW file by itself would have been much less useful.
There’s no single RAW standard—Canon, Nikon, Sony, and others each have their own proprietary versions. It has become common to write “raw” in all caps, probably to distinguish it from the adjective form.
Because the information comes more or less directly from sensors without intermediate steps, it contains much more data that appears like noise, as the variation between adjacent sensors is retained rather than smoothed away. So even for RAW formats that compress data—not all do—the files will be larger than final images intended for viewing or printing. RAW will always be much larger than a corresponding JPEG file, as JPEG is lossy by nature, and discards some information even when you’re using the maximum setting.
After camera makers began supplying RAW output, often requiring apps they released to support it, photo-management and image-editing tools added RAW processing filters to meet the needs of digital photographers. Every professional app supports importing RAW, including Photoshop, Lightroom, Pixelmator Pro, Capture One, and DxO PhotoLab. And Photos!
Image-editing apps generally treat RAW as an import format: you view a preview, then apply changes before it is imported into an editing environment where you can work on the resulting image. Photo-management apps with built-in editing tools, like Photos and Lightroom, typically retain the original RAW image, and allow you to apply modifications on top. This provides much more flexibility in achieving your desired outcome.
One image unit, indivisible
When you import RAW+JPEG pairs into Photos, Apple treats them as a single, indivisible unit. You can choose which version to use as the basis for editing (Image: Use RAW as Original or Use JPEG as Original), but you cannot discard one half of the pair while keeping the other. Delete the image, and both files are thrown away.
Apple built Photos around a lossless workflow. This means that the original file that’s imported isn’t modified—changes are layered on top and previewed, and can be reverted back to the source image. You’d think it might engineer an override in a case like this, but apparently not.
If you need to reclaim the storage space those RAW files occupy, it’s only possible on a Mac, and it requires exporting, deleting, and re-importing.
Follow these steps if you haven’t made any modifications that you want to keep for any or all of your RAW+JPEG pairs:
Make sure to check Export IPTC as XMP to create a sidebar file with metadata you’ve added to an image.
Select the images you want to retain in JPEG format.
Choose File: Export: Export Unmodified Originals. In the export dialog, enable IPTC as XMP—this creates a sidecar file containing your metadata (titles, keywords, locations, descriptions, etc.). Without that, you’ll lose any metadata you added.
Choose a destination and click Export.
In the resulting folder, each RAW+JPEG file is represented by three files: the RAW file, the JPEG image, and an XMP sidecar.
Delete the RAW file or files from that folder.1 (If you don’t, Photos treats the two as a pair and merges them when re-importing.)
Back in Photos, delete the original RAW+JPEG pairs. These are moved to the Recently Deleted album (see below).
Reimport the folder containing just the JPEG and XMP sidecar. Photos will apply metadata from the sidecar file automatically.
Delete the folder to free up space.
The export files are split into three parts. You discard the RAW files before re-importing.
Of course, you can use the same process to jettison the JPEG and retain the RAW-formatted file.
When you delete files, if you’re sure that you have all the backups you need, you can click the Recently Deleted album in the Photos sidebar, authenticate if prompted, and click Delete All. (Or select images and click Delete X Items.) This removes the images from your Mac, iCloud Photos, and all linked devices immediately and forever. Use wisely!
Now, I noted above that this works for images that you haven’t modified in Photos. As part of its lossless workflow, exporting unmodified originals means you lose any changes unless you follow these steps:
Before step 5 above, return to each modified image in Photos.
The re-imported JPEG image should appear next to the RAW+JPEG file, because of the timestamp, which is preserved from the XMP data. Select the RAW+JPEG file, and press Command-Shift-C (Image: Copy Edits). This copies any modifications.
Now select the re-imported JPEG, and press Command-Shift-V (Image: Paste Edits).2 This applies those changes.
Proceed to delete the original RAW+JPEG file.
Because of how iCloud Photos syncs images, you may want to delete all the images you intended to first, and make sure those images have moved to the Recently Deleted folder on your devices before you re-import them.
While Mihir specifically asked about iOS and iPadOS, the export-delete-reimport workflow requires the Finder and file management capabilities that only macOS provides.
For more expert advice on Photos, you should obtain a copy of Jason Snell’s Take Control of Photos, which addresses all of the app’s features and vagaries.
A feature request, not a bug
People have been asking Apple to add a “split RAW+JPEG pair” or “delete RAW only” feature for many years, and the company hasn’t budged, likely because of its focus on lossless workflows.
In the meantime, if you find storing RAW+JPEG is taking you too close to a full volume, you could shoot RAW only on your camera, and let Photos generate a JPEG preview. If you want to convert to JPEG, you can export it from the RAW file and re-import it. Or you might switch between RAW+JPEG, RAW, and JPEG shooting profiles on your camera, as many support user-defined modes that include output formats.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
While camera makers use several different RAW file extensions, these files should appear as “raw” under the Kind column in the Finder. If not, common extensions include .cr2, .cr3, .nef, .raf, .arw, and .dng. Failing that, look for any file that doesn’t end with .jpg/.jpeg or .xmp. ↩
You may have Command-Shift-V set for another shortcut. I use it with PasteBot. In which case, you can use the Edit: Paste Edits menu item or create a distinct shortcut for it. ↩
We break down Apple’s latest financial results (including the potential supply-chain storm brewing on the horizon) and then discuss the difficult roll-out of Apple’s new Creator Studio bundle.
Tim Cook enjoys a night out, Apple ships new AirTags, and other things happened.
The real “Triumph of the Will” was sitting through the whole movie
In his continuing audition for the role as poster child for a public campaign against tone deafness, Tim Cook attended the premier of a hagiography of the First Lady to hobnob with the president on the same day ICE agents murdered a protester in Minneapolis.
Remember a decade ago, when our biggest concern about Apple was that it made crappy laptop keyboards?
Ah, yes, the good old days.
Here in 2026, hardware design seems to be the one thing that the company is doing right. I’ve got an M4 MacBook Air, and it’s honestly hard to find anything wrong with it. That iPhone 17 Pro in orange? A thing of beauty. Not to get ahead of Jason’s annual report card results, but it kind of feels like we’ve kind of run aground after that category.
Software quality? Ehhhh. Social impact? Hoo boy.
Look, I don’t want to be a bummer. I’m dropping the bit here for a hot minute, because it’s hard to crack jokes about Tim Cook being a robot or the dread god Glog-Raggopth waking from his slumber when they both kind of feel a bit too close to home.
To my mind, the company hasn’t been headed in this wrong of a direction since they started driving with Apple Maps.…
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As was foretold (in last quarter’s corporate guidance), on Thursday Apple reported its biggest quarter ever. The holiday quarters are always Apple’s biggest, and this was no exception. It offered the most revenue ($143.8B) and most iPhone revenue ($85.3B) of any financial quarter in Apple’s history.
Suffice it to say that the iPhone 17 family is a hit.
“This is the strongest iPhone lineup we’ve ever had, and by far the most popular,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said during his conference call with analysts. As for the quarter itself? “It exceeded our expectations, to say the least.” Spoken like a man whose most popular product, the one vital to his company’s existence, grew 23% from the year-ago quarter.
Even more interesting, though, is Apple’s suggestion that it’s still selling the iPhone 17 about as fast as it can make them—or to be more specific, about as fast as TSMC can make cutting-edge 3nm chips to power them, per Cook:
We exited the December quarter with very lean channel inventory due to that staggering level of demand, and based on that, we’re in a supply chase mode to meet the very high levels of customer demand. We are currently constrained, and at this point, it’s difficult to predict when supply and demand will balance. The constraints that we have are driven by the availability of the advanced nodes that our SOCs are produced on, and at this time, we’re seeing less flexibility in the supply chain than normal, partly because of our increased demand that I just spoke about.
Those details are really interesting. Back during the height of the pandemic, sales were constrained because Apple lacked access to “legacy nodes”—chips made on older processes for stuff like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. That is definitely not the case now, when it’s the “advanced nodes” of 3nm chips at TSMC that are just not being built fast enough because demand was much higher than Apple expected.
This also extends a long-standing story that the Chinese market really likes a new-looking iPhone. Overall, Apple’s revenue was up 38% in China. Cook said that traffic in Chinese Apple Stores grew by “strong double digits,” and cited surveys that said the iPad was the top-selling tablet in urban China and the MacBook Air and Mac mini were the top-selling laptop and desktop in the last quarter in urban China. Cook, a longtime proponent of Apple’s business in China, seems thrilled.
Department of the Tough Compare
Mac revenue was down 7% in the quarter, the poorest performance of all Apple’s categories. But it’s hard to be that down about the results, because not only did the Mac still generate $8.4B in revenue and reach an all-time high in its overall installed base, but this was all happening in a quarter that is the proverbial “tough compare”—since Apple released the M4 MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac in the year-ago quarter, and only the low-end M5 MacBook Pro in this quarter.
Full credit to analyst Michael Ng of Goldman Sachs for the most creative way possible of trying to get Apple to reveal its future product strategies: Ng asked Apple CFO Kevan Parekh if there would be any tough comparisons due in the upcoming quarter, to which Parekh replied, “There’s nothing that rises to that kind of color that we’d outline in the outlook.”
Let me translate this for you: Ng is wondering if, perhaps, Apple is going to release some nice new Macs this quarter that will mean that it’s not a “tough compare” versus Q2 of 2025. Parekh replied by essentially pointing at his previous statement and saying that the dog did not, in fact, bark.
Look, we know there will be new MacBook Pros eventually, and probably pretty soon. Maybe they’ll help with Q2 Mac sales, though at this point they’d only be able to contribute for about half of the quarter. Still, a gold star to Ng for trying to logic his way into getting Parekh to reveal things about future product releases.
The storm clouds of financial headwinds… are called off
Apple posted a company gross margin of 48.2%, based on a 40.7% products margin and an astounding 76.5% margin on services. This was actually above the high end of Apple’s previous guidance on margin. This fact left several analysts on the call flabbergasted, none more so than Ben Reitzes of Mellius:
You know, I’m pretty shocked. I got to hand it to you, Tim, that you’re able to do 48% to 49%. What’s really going on there? How are you doing that with… the [memory] prices?
Parekh’s answer was basically that Apple tended to sell more of its high-margin products than its lower-margin ones during the quarter, which pushed margin up. What really impressed the analysts was his insistence that even this upcoming quarter, where memory price issues are expected to become even more serious, Apple says it feels “pretty good” about its guidance to another 48% to 49% margin quarter.
Looking more broadly at Apple’s forecast, the company says the second quarter should offer 13% to 16% growth versus the year-ago quarter. Considering that the Q2 2025 revenue number was $95.4B, this means Apple expects to generate somewhere between $108B and $111B in revenue next quarter. That’s just a staggering number, because it suggests that even Apple’s boring quarters are going to routinely generate more than $100B in revenue. (For the record, last year’s fourth quarter was the first non-holiday quarter with more than $100B in Apple revenue. This would be the second. There may be no going back.)
Odds and ends
A few other notes about the numbers and call before I wrap it up:
The iPad, bolstered by the A16 base iPad and the M5 iPad Pro, was up 6%.
Wearables was down 2%, marking 10 straight quarters of year-over-year decline. (I suspect the softness in this category is why Apple is reportedly planning on launching several new home-based products, including a screen-based controller and a security camera.) However, here’s an interesting tidbit: Apple said it couldn’t make AirPods Pro 3 fast enough to meet demand, and that it believes the category would have grown had it not been for that supply constraint.
Forget profits and revenues. “This quarter set an all-time record for operating cash flow, coming in at $53.9 billion,” Parekh reported. Accounting nerds, this is your stand up and cheer moment. The cash must flow!
Everyone wants to know more about Apple’s AI deal with Google, but Apple’s not talking. “We aren’t going to provide any details on our arrangement and collaboration with Google,” Parekh said. Cook emphasized that it should be thought of “as a collaboration,” rather than Google just riding in and saving Apple’s bacon. When Ben Reitzes of Mellius tried to get more out of Cook, only to be stonewalled, he replied: “Bummer. Okay, I tried,” he said. “You did,” the CEO replied through a squall of laughter.
Time for a somewhat vertiginous push through a row of poodles.
I got a chance to watch Apple’s new “Top Dogs” immersive documentary this week before its release Friday. It’s about 30 minutes total split into two 15-minute episodes, and takes you behind the scenes (and out on the main floor) at the world-famous Crufts dog show.
It’s a pretty good example of all the issue that creators of immersive video are still working out. There are some amazing moments in “Top Dogs,” mostly when you’re watching a dog and their handler close up, or when you’re in the arena in Birmingham, England, watching the dog show. Unfortunately, there are also a bunch of pretty shaky moments: distracting quick cuts, some vertigo-generating dramatic camera moves, and a reliance (albeit understandable) on non-immersive footage in order to make the narrative make sense despite the lack of the right immersive camera angle.
The more I watch immersive content, the more I realize that it requires patience to help immerse you in the scene. “Top Dogs” lacks patience, even when it pads the main dog-show narrative with side quests to Flyball and agility competitions. I found myself wanting to watch Flyball or agility for a while, just to understand how it worked, but the documentary isn’t really interested in lingering on anything.
So, does “Top Dogs” have some fun fluffy dog action? Yes! I enjoyed watching some remarkable speciments of various dog breeds, even if there was not a single Boxer in sight. But as an immersive project, I found it more representative of a style that’s probably not the right way forward for this style of video.
Every quarter after releasing financial results, Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Kevan Parekh hop on a conference call with analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and maybe brag a little about setting an all-time record or two. This is Six Colors’s transcript of the call for January 29, 2026.
