If you’re part of the Apple IT community and would like to participate in this year’s survey, it’s just a click away. Results will be posted at the end of the month.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

You might have noticed that, after installing iOS 26.4, your iPhone is behaving differently. Some actions (like changing your password) require a one-hour wait, followed by biometric authentication. You never had to do this before. Why now? Because with iOS 26.4, Apple has decided to enable its Stolen Device Protection feature on all iPhones. This feature may not make you safer—or feel safer—but it should prevent or severely deter misuse and hijacking of your iPhone and Apple Account.

Alternatively, you may not have noticed this—several sites reported in February 2026, during the 26.4 beta testing period, that Stolen Device Protection was automatically enabled in the update. Or a dark pattern—a user-interface design that pushes you to a particular decision without removing one or more others—may have caused you to opt in. However, I’ve found no confirmation from Apple, nor do various sites that write about Apple have a definitive answer!

So this is a good time to review Stolen Device Protection, whether or not you had it enabled without your permission.

One who steals my iPhone, steals my Apple Account

Months after a report in the Wall Street Journal about multiple people being assaulted or shoulder surfed to unlock a stolen iPhone, and from there to hijack the owner’s Apple Account, Apple added Stolen Device Protection. This feature flipped the script on iPhone authentication, requiring Face ID or Touch ID to access certain features or make significant changes—a passcode no longer sufficed. It also added a cooldown period, requiring a one-hour delay in many circumstances before those biometrically authenticated actions could occur.

The scenarios are very straightforward:

• Shoulder surfing: You’re at a bar with someone, and a stranger offers to take your picture. Your hand them your iPhone, and they make some attempt and say it’s locked. They hand it back and enter your passcode. Now they take your photo—and run off with your phone, or someone later grabs it when you’re distracted. What might have happened is that they intentionally locked the phone, and a nearby confederate is using their iPhone or another device to zoom in and record high-resolution video of you as you enter your code.
• Violence: The Wall Street Journal’s account included instances of people being drugged at bars or at people’s homes, then convinced to give out their passcode. If drugging failed, or sometimes, instead of it, violence or coercion is used. As recently as February 2025, a news report from Minneapolis quoted both law enforcement and victims.

With a passcode, those with criminal intent can access all sorts of stuff stored on your phone, including bank accounts, and use Apple Pay. What’s worse is that the Wall Street Journal reports documented that with a passcode, a thief or attacker could initiate an Apple Account reset, allowing them to hijack your account, change its password, and render it inaccessible to you—perhaps forever! (Apple is being sued about recovering such stolen accounts.)

Now, it’s unclear how many people suffered this kind of crime. It might have been dozens or hundreds—maybe it was thousands? There’s no comprehensive law-enforcement data, and Apple has offered no insight. Stolen Device Protection can cause minor to major inconveniences, depending on which features you can’t use for an hour, so I assume Apple found the issue significant enough to roll it out in 2024—and to push people to enable it in 2026, if not enable it for them.

Note that this remains an iPhone-only feature, even though an iPad could be exploited the same way. I have to infer either that Apple has had almost no reports of exploitation via iPad passcode theft, or that they are balancing the average iPad user who is out and about with that device against the complexity of managing Stolen Device Protection.

If you have Stolen Device Protection enabled or want to, let’s go over what that entails.

Manage Stolen Device Protection

On your iPhone, go to Settings: Privacy & Security: Stolen Device Protection. If it’s disabled and you want to turn it on, you will be unable to do so if you don’t meet a number of requirements:

• Two-factor authentication on Apple Account: Nearly everyone has enabled this, or Apple has upgraded them to it.
• iPhone passcode: If you don’t have a passcode, I’m not sure we should be friends anymore.
• Biometrics: Face ID must be enabled; or, with older iPhones, Touch ID.
• Significant Locations: A slightly obscure feature, you find this in Settings: Privacy & Security: Location Services: System Services: Significant Locations & Routes.¹ Apple stores this information only on your devices, and uses end-to-end encryption to sync the data among them.² You can’t view these locations—only see a few recent ones, and a total number of stored records. You can tap Clear History and confirm to remove them.
• Find My: Find My has to be enabled on your iPhone, and it can’t be turned off as long as Stolen Device Protection remains on.

Once enabled, you see two options: Away from Familiar Locations and Always. Familiar Locations ostensibly leans on Significant Locations, but I’ll warn you that I have, on multiple occasions, been in my home, a place I spent a significant majority of my time, and was told by Stolen Device Protection that I wasn’t in a familiar location.

When you try to carry out certain actions, that’s when the protection kicks in. There are two kinds of deterrence:³

• Biometrics required (always): If you try to use stored passwords or passkeys from the Passwords app, view the virtual card number assigned to an Apple Card or Apple Cash, or try to disable Lost Mode in Find My, among other actions, you must use Face ID or Touch ID. A password won’t suffice. If someone stole your passcode and iPhone, they don’t have your face or fingertip.⁴
• Security Delay: For other tasks, a one-hour countdown timer starts if you have Always enabled or set to Away from Familiar Locations and are in such a place. At the end of that timer, you must use Face ID or Touch ID before proceeding. This includes updating your Apple Account password or signing out of Apple Account on the device, turning off Stolen Device Protection (a little meta, there), or adding or removing Face ID or Touch ID. This makes it much harder for a thief to perform any critical action. In case of drugging, that has sometimes included still being in proximity of the person—why not add light kidnapping to assault?—but that appears to be rare.

I suspect that with Stolen Device Protection, a thief flings the iPhone away as soon as possible, except in even rarer circumstances than the above.

If you’re not typically in environments in which you might be at risk of the specific kind of theft or violence discussed above, Stolen Device Protection can be overkill and a pain. As noted above, I do spend most of my time at my house, working from a home office, and I avoid crowded bars and other venues.

However, if you like the additional protection and are willing to deal with the timeout or location-based iffiness of Stolen Device Protection, turn it on and give it a try, if Apple hasn’t already done so for you or snookered you into it. And you can always turn it off—it just might take an hour.

For further reading

I write about all sorts of security and protection, mostly focused on people having physical proximity to your devices, in Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

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Apple and the Apple community mark half a century, the company relents on security updates, and the iPhone is forever.

Apple at 50

Happy 50th birthday, Apple! Like a bad guest at your party, we’re all going to make it about us.

Yes, to mark the event, members of the Apple community took to the web to publish their individual stories about their long personal relationship with the Mac and Apple and that time they visited the Apple campus and Steve Jobs tried to fire them in an elevator even though they didn’t work there.

Chris Breen describes Apple’s reaction to his mistreating of the company’s glorious products. For Dan, Apple is like an energy field; it surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the Apple community together. The Mac made Shelly Brisbin’s career possible. Jason arrived on the scene just in time to document Apple’s low point and James Thomson was at Apple for Jobs’s return. This writer made some mistakes and David Pogue, uh, I assume formed the band The Pogues?

Look, there are a lot of these stories, I haven’t read through all of them just yet, but I will.

Pogue has a new book out—“Apple: The First 50 Years”—which John Gruber says is “remarkable, essential, and unique work”. That was enough for me to order a copy.

Apple did a little celebrating itself, going so far as to get a Beatle to perform in Apple Park. And the good one at that.

I’m sorry, Ringo, that was mean. You’re good, too.

The set list for Paul McCartney’s performance is kind of wild.

…”Help,” “Got To Get You Into My Life,” “Blackbird,” “Lady Madonna,” “Something,” “Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da,” “From Me To You,” “Getting Better,” “Let It Be,” and “Hey Jude” featured alongside Wings cuts “Coming Up,” “Let Me Roll It,” “Let ‘Em In,” “Band On The Run,” and solo favorites “Maybe I’m Amazed” and “Every Night.” The show closed with “Golden Slumbers.” McCartney also staged his famous “Live and Let Die” pyrotechnics segment.

As impressive as that is, I hear The Spin Doctors are going to perform at Dell’s 50th anniversary in 2034. So… you know.

(No apologies to Dell for that joke.)

The company also put a special animation on its home page and doled out gifts to employees to celebrate.

Speaking of employees, some former ones showed up for the party, including Scott Forstall, Jon Rubinstein, Ron Johnson, and Bertrand Serlet. Rumor has it they even let them make some products again for Old Timers’ Day at Apple Park.

OK, not really. There are rules against that.

Pick one

Whether due to the Apple community’s continual shaming in columns and podcasts or as a result of a long-term rollout plan or just through an administrative error, Apple has finally shipped a version of iOS 18 that contains much-needed security patches. So, if you’ve held off on upgrading for “reasons” — reasons like “I don’t want an operating system that simulates early onset glaucoma.” — you’re in luck.

As Jason notes, you get what you pay for, however (in this case the cost is Liquid Glass). By not upgrading to iOS 26, you are missing out on a more robust security system. So, you still have to decide “Do I want an operating system I can see clearly or one that protects me better?” You can’t have both.

Here’s to 50 more

While others may think we’ll soon all be walking around talking to our AI pins and wearing goggles and subsisting on diet of nothing but Space Food Sticks and Tang (finally!), one man disagrees.

In an interview with Steven Levy at Wired, Apple SVP of Marketing Greg Joswiak says the iPhone will not last just 10 more years or 20 more years but a whole other lifetime of Apple, 50 more years.

While AI may be the new hotness (that would explain all the water shortages), what are you gonna run it on? Probably an iPhone.

“It’s hard to imagine not,” says Joswiak. “That’s where everybody else struggles. They don’t have an iPhone, and so they’re scrambling for what to do. A lot of what they talk about ends up being accessories for an iPhone.”

Personally, this is good news for me because I already have an iPhone. So I’m set for like 50 more years. Nice.

A breathtaking image, taken by a human being on the Artemis II spacecraft, of our entire planet:

NASA astronaut and Artemis II Commander Reid Wiseman took this picture of Earth from the Orion spacecraft’s window after completing the translunar injection burn.

Just to be clear, this is the night side of Earth, illuminated by the full moon. You can see greenish Aurorae on the edges of the planet at top right and bottom left. There’s a hint of the sun (which is behind the Earth in this shot) peeking around on the bottom right. If you’re having trouble orienting, look for the Sahara: it’s toward the bottom left, with the Strait of Gibraltar and the Iberian peninsula just below. There’s no up or down in space, but this photo was posted with the south pole at the top. The vast blue expanse we’re seeing is mostly the Atlantic.

A full resolution version is available. And for all you photo nerds out there, Morag Perkins points out it was taken with a Nikon D5. (There are also some iPhones on board, but they didn’t take this shot.)

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

It’s probably just as well. You would not be able to handle the sheer hair of it all. Most of it on me, some of it inexplicably on the Mac. But, for the record, it was an SE FDHD with two floppy drives and an external 30 MB hard drive. I bought it used in 1990.

And I loved it.

I was hooked. It helped that I had just started grad school and could stay up all night playing Shufflepuck Cafe, Shadowgate and Strategic Conquest when I should have been studying.

I continued to buy Apple products throughout the ‘90s — an LC, then a Quadra 610, a Performa 6400, a PowerBook 520c, two Newtons and finally a Power Mac — when everyone in my family was buying PCs. (Now they’re all on Macs.)

I followed Apple rumors like crazy. Apple was working on a game system! A set-top box! Taligent was going to save the company! No, it was going to buy BeOS!

By 2001, it hit me: it was the rumors that were crazy, not me. Most of these people didn’t know what they’re talking about. I could write this stuff!

Hey! I could write this stuff!

So I did. I started writing Crazy Apple Rumors Site. And guess what? Yeah, it changed my life. But it also just led to some funny stories.

The first one I remember is after publishing a story one night (I wrote most of them after coming home from work), I woke up the day to find a message in my inbox from one Phil Schiller.

Normally that would be cool! An Apple executive! Emailing little ol’ me! Wow!

But there was a problem. The piece I had published the previous night was… less than flattering. Because the Enron trials were going on at the time and Schiller had given a speech at the annual QuickTime conference (yes, there used to be a QuickTime conference) that some said paled in comparison to a Steve Jobs show, I wrote that attendees wished Schiller had just pled the Fifth as so many Enron executives were doing.

So, when I saw his name in my inbox I did not think “Wow!” — I thought “Oh, crap.”

To his credit, Phil was extremely good natured about the jab and we went on to exchange emails over the years about various pieces I wrote. Schiller became a CARS staple, launching any number of my patented bad Photoshop jobs. My last exchange with him was to express my condolences on the death of Steve Jobs in 2011.

Some of my ideas were certainly better than others. One piece joked that Apple was introducing “iPorn.” That was it. That was the joke. In my defense, I was very young.

OK, I was in my late 30s. There. Are you happy? I’m not.

To create evidence of this claim, I took a screenshot of Apple’s homepage, added a blurred out pornographic picture to it and posted it with the article. I really could have and should have been doing literally anything else.

The day after posting that gem, the phone rang. Because I had a PowerBook in for repair at the time I was thrilled to see that the caller ID read “APPLE LEG”. If only I’d known what the truncated last two letters were. Instead I naively thought “Ah! News about my repair!” It was not that at all.

When I answered the phone, the woman on the other end identified herself as being with Apple Legal.

Ah. “AL”. Those were the missing two letters. She explained she was calling to demand that I take down the screenshot of their homepage with the porn added, claiming it violated the company’s copyright on the images. Presumably the non-pornographic ones. Upon hearing this, I immediately referred her to my lawyer who informed her of the fair use doctrine and hahaha, no, I folded like a cheap suit. I hand-drew a version of the image and posted that in its place.

(It is now hilarious that one of my current beefs with the company is that it continues to offer up apps that make non-consensual porn. Who says irony is dead?)

There were many other fun stories, including the time I wrote a piece saying that, for reasons unknown, the then 43-year-old Avie Tevanian was going through puberty again; slamming doors, pouting, stomping around the Apple campus and generally making all the other executives miserable. Do I know why I wrote this? I do not. This also prompted contact from the upper echelons of Apple corporate. Tevanian emailed me the next day to point out the big mistake in my article: I got his age wrong. He was actually 42.

But the big story was the one I would not find out the rest of until watching The Talk Show Live from WWDC back in 2019 seventeen years later.

Some time around May of 2002, I got an email from Schiller asking me if I would ever consider coming to work at Apple. As someone who spent way too much time thinking about the company, it was like being asked if you want to move up to The Show. But I live in Tacoma, WA, and remote work was not on the table with Apple. My wife and I were both happy with our jobs and loved living in Tacoma (shut up). So, after sweating it for a bit, I replied that, while I was flattered, it didn’t feel like a move I was ready to take right then.

At the end I quipped something to the effect of “If my situation changes and I’m suddenly really desperate, I’ll let you know!”

What I didn’t know until Greg Joswiak told Apple’s side of this story to John Gruber is that hiring me wasn’t Schiller’s idea. Apparently they sometimes used to pass around my articles at Apple’s weekly marketing meetings and, one time, Steve Jobs read one of my pieces at a meeting. Aloud. After what I’m sure was uproarious laughter, Steve said “That guy’s a pretty good writer. Why don’t we reach out to him to see if he wants to come work at Apple?”

Schiller wasn’t just idly asking me a question about my long-term career goals. Steve Jobs was saying “Hey, dumbass, do you wanna come work here, make history and also a bazillion dollars in stock options?”

And I said…

(this is what I said)….

“Only if I get desperate!”

Well, happy 50th, Apple. It probably wouldn’t have worked out anyway.

My son’s been curious about the progress of the flight, so this morning at breakfast, I pulled up the NASA tracker so we could see where they are, but I found the interface pretty clumsy to use on the phone.

But this is 2026, where people who are excited about something can whip up their own solution. That’s just what accessibility advocate Jakob Rosin has done with this very cool web dashboard. There’s live data from NASA of the spacecraft’s speed and position, a timeline of all the events during the mission, and even audio radar of spacecraft positions that I find weirdly soothing. Definitely worth checking out if you’re keeping up to date on Artemis’s flight, although I do wish it had a visual representation of the spacecraft’s position and route. (That you can find on the NASA interface.)

[via Allison Sheridan on Mastodon]

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Like so many people, I have a story about discovering and falling in love with the Mac, and how it changed my life. My college newspaper switched to an all-Mac production workflow a year after I arrived on campus with my Apple IIe, and once I started using the Mac I would never go back. Not only did my work at that college paper set me on my career path in general (journalism), but technology (and the Mac) in particular.

In the late ’80s and early ’90s, before the world discovered the Internet, it was readily available on college campuses. By the time I left UC San Diego, I had started a magazine distributed only over the Internet. Unfortunately, I was born way too early to start a career on the Internet.

Fortunately, when a bad economy led me to go to graduate school rather than seek out a job, my career path was laid before me. My Mac obsession only continued—I pored over issues of Mac magazines before buying my first PowerBook. And I became a graduate assistant for a class that was focused on desktop publishing, which is where I met Pam Pfiffner.

Pam was a senior editor at MacUser magazine, and before too long I began asking her if the magazine might be hiring summer interns. In hindsight, I feel like I basically bullied her into giving me a job, but I spent the summer of 1993 writing about CD-ROMs and other extremely 1990s things. When they offered me a full-time job, I couldn’t say no.

But as amazing and revelatory as the Mac was for me as a writer and editor of print and online publications, I rapidly discovered that the Apple of the period was a mess. My first day as a full-time employee, a copy editor popped his head over the cubicle wall and asked me if I had heard anything about layoffs. Welcome to the media, kid.

John Sculley was the CEO of Apple in those days, and while there’s a lot to commend from that era, it had just about reached its stagnation point when I arrived on the scene. I felt very much like I had arrived at the party just in time to clean things up.

Windows 95 arrived, and even though all of us Mac stalwarts objected to it as a pale imitation of the Mac—”Windows 95: So what?” was our defiant cover when it launched—it was, in truth, a body blow to Apple. The company had squandered its lead over Microsoft, still couldn’t ship a next-generation version of Mac OS, and its sales began to crater.

This is roughly the point where my family began to ask me if it was especially wise for me to make Apple my area of specialization. And I admit, I asked myself the same thing—but I just couldn’t see myself willingly abandoning ship to write about Windows XP workstations or whatever. I was in the business to write about the Mac, not about technology in general.

1997 was the moment that Apple hit rock bottom. Steve Jobs was back, but the prognosis didn’t look good. The publishers of the two big Mac magazines at the time, Ziff-Davis and IDG, decided that they’d cut their losses by merging MacUser and Macworld into a single magazine, laying off more than half the employees in the process.

That decision came two weeks before Steve Jobs stood on stage at Macworld Expo in Boston and announced (with Bill Gates on a video link-up) that Microsoft had invested in Apple and recommitted to releasing Microsoft Office for the Mac. A few months later, Jobs announced the iMac. Things started to turn around—too late for all of my former colleagues and competitors, but just in time for those of us who were lucky enough to get a job at the new Macworld.

From there, it was a wild ride. The iMac announcement alone drove enormous interest in Apple, and reinvigorated everything we were doing. Steve Jobs got rid of all the old Apple connectivity standards (ADB, Mac Serial, SCSI) and replaced them wholesale with USB, which was a huge shock to Mac users. I spent the summer of 1998 writing and editing stories about how USB worked, what USB devices would be available once the iMac arrived, and how we were all going to survive without floppy disks or SCSI hard drives.

From that moment, it was clear that Steve Jobs was not ever going to worry about maintaining links to the past, because his focus was on dragging Apple into the future. It was a jolt of lightning that woke up the entire computer world, and certainly changed our fate at Macworld.

The next few years were a wild ride. The iMac’s success brought in enough cash to keep Apple alive while it developed Mac OS X, large portions of which underpin every major Apple platform to this day. The arrival of the iPod in 2001 would eventually (after the company released a Windows-compatible version, anyway) introduce the Apple brand to a generation of customers who had never, ever bought an Apple product before.

In the 2000s, Apple really took flight. Steve Jobs and retail head Ron Johnson’s idea of building a chain of Apple Stores was mocked as a guaranteed failure, but they became the perfect place to sell iPods, and once iPod buyers were in the store, they were exposed to everything the Mac had to offer. The “iPod halo effect” was real, and the Mac was reinvigorated by a user base that had never even seen classic Mac OS.

Of course, the iPhone changed everything once again. It was Apple’s first non-Mac to truly be a computer—not that Steve Jobs wanted anyone to think of it that way. Remember, the iPhone launched without any support for third-party apps, though even the day it was announced, it was obvious to a lot of us that we were headed for some sort of iPhone App Store.

The original iPhone was so limited that when it launched, there was no way to take a screen shot! To cover it at Macworld, we had to jailbreak the phone, tether it via USB, and issue unix shell commands at the moment we wanted to take the screen shot. Then we had to transfer that image back, over that USB connection, via another unix shell command.

Similarly, there were six months between the iPhone’s announcement and release. And while I certainly made hay about having been able to touch it in January—a story I recently recounted as my official Jeopardy! ancedote—it left us in a real bind when it came to covering it. Everyone wanted to know more about the iPhone, but nobody had one! And if you were, let’s say, a magazine, you probably wanted to put it on your cover!

We ended up contracting with an artist who created a 3-D model of the iPhone (and its earbuds) and then posed it in photorealistic renders for our cover and interior art. That’s right—the first Macworld cover photo of the iPhone was CGI.

Since the release of the iPhone, Apple has been on a rocketship ride. The company Tim Cook took over just as Steve Jobs passed away was a fraction of the size of the Apple of today. Apple has more customers than ever, and the Mac—a 42-year-old product!—is the biggest it’s ever been.

It has been a wild ride to write about it for the last 33 years, at Macworld since 1997, and in this particular space since 2015. I can’t wait for whatever happens next—and to write about it here.

Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news: As of Wednesday April 1, Apple is pushing out iOS 18.7.7 to all devices running iOS 18. This update, released last month for devices that were not capable of running iOS 26, is now available even for compatible devices. If you’ve got auto-update turned on but have not gone through the steps to do a full upgrade to iOS 26, this update can be automatically pushed and applied. This is good news, as those who have opted not to run iOS 26 will get to take advantage of several sets of security releases.

Now the bad news: This is happening because of some really bad security breaches like DarkSword and Coruna. As Apple noted in a security update:

We enabled the availability of iOS 18.7.7 for more devices on April 1, 2026, so users with Automatic Updates turned on can automatically receive important security protections from web attacks called DarkSword. The fixes associated with the DarkSword exploit first shipped in 2025.

Now, to be clear, security patches on an older operating system are not as effective as they are on an entirely new system, since a new OS like iOS 26 has all sorts of structural changes made for security reasons. As a new Apple security note says, iOS 26 “contains the strongest security protections.” If you’re very concerned about your iPhone being secure, updating to iOS 26 is going to make it more secure than updating to 18.7.7.

But this does mean that Apple’s patches, which seek to break the chain of bugs that led to serious security exploits, are available to many more people.

Bottom line: If you’re an iOS 26 holdout, and you’re not ready to update your iPhone, at the very least you should update to 18.7.7 and protect yourself from some seriously ugly malicious software.

Go to the podcast page.

A 50th anniversary is a good time to reflect on your relationships, and it seems lots of people have thoughts about their time with Apple today. I would definitely not be where I am in life without the company, for both good and bad, so here are mine.

Technically, my days with Apple started by playing games on my next-door neighbor’s Apple II in the late 70s or early 80s. When enough time has passed, the exact memories naturally become a little bit fuzzy. It was certainly before I got my own Commodore 64 in 1983, I know that much, but I don’t think I can exactly claim to have been there from the very beginning. Anyway, little did I know back then that I would actually get to house sit for the guy who designed the thing. Foreshadowing. 

My best friend’s dad was a university professor from California, and he had brought over an Apple II of some flavor. I don’t remember them being common over here otherwise—the UK had a weird home computer industry all of its own, but this was probably just the perspective of a little kid who only wanted to play video games.

I eventually graduated from my C64 to an Atari STe around 1989, which had many better games than a Mac, and built-in MIDI ports as well. It was also way cheaper than a Mac, and it was totally fine. There was a GUI and a mouse, and those are all the same anyway, right?

Then, just a year later, I started a degree in Computing Science at the University of Glasgow, and back then all the computers in the labs were Macs. Generally, Mac Pluses or SE/30s, with the occasional brand new LC in the second-year labs. And so I used them, and I realized quite quickly that Atari had completely ripped off the Mac GUI, and not exactly done an amazing job of doing so. 

I’ve had this experience two or three times in my life with technology, using something and realizing that it’s an inflection point for everything else going forward. The first was those early days with the Mac. Okay, so I was six years late to the party, so you are entirely right to question my definition of “early days.” Still, the user interface was so well designed and thought out, and it just made sense to me in a way that no computer had really done before. System 7 came out shortly afterward and improved everything even more.

At this point, we’d been doing most of the development work for our coursework in THINK Pascal, and I quickly realized I could use that to make my own applications. This history has been covered well, but I wrote the first version of my calculator PCalc in 1992 on my brand new Mac Classic. (Sorry, Atari.) I bought an LC II some time later, probably a month before the LC III was announced. I even fitted it with a maths co-processor! I started working on my application launcher DragThing in 1994.

Again, this is well documented, but I was soon determined to work for Apple. And a few years later, I got my wish, working in Apple’s software engineering group in Cork, Ireland. It was a lot easier to get a job with Apple in late 1996 than it is today, but my existing apps certainly helped me get a foot in the door. However, as I discovered after joining the company and moving to a different country, Apple was actually on the verge of complete bankruptcy.

I’m told that, like with having kids, you block out a lot of the difficult times of your life, and generally remember the good bits. Well, I remember a hell of a lot of bad stuff from those years, so who knows how bad it really was. 

Gil Amelio appeared and fired so many people across the company that soon our little engineering group all fit around the one table for lunch. It was an extremely stressful time to be at Apple, but also probably one of the most interesting – I got to witness the return of Steve Jobs first hand, after all. Another inflection point, really.

I worked on a bunch of things while I was there, including the only two things that actually shipped from my less than four years on that team – the Disney 101 Dalmatians and Hercules Print Studios that were bundled with Macintosh Performas. That was enjoyable and relatively low-stakes work. I learned how to program in C++, use a UI framework (Metrowerks PowerPlant), and generally work as part of a team. I was even co-team lead on the Hercules one. However, staring at pegasi all day meant that I did not see the film, and I still have not to this today.

I was then placed on the iMac project somewhat unknowingly, and ultimately the Dock and Finder – the source of all my best Apple anecdotes. Then Steve Jobs happened, I resigned, etc etc. You know how this story goes, I assume. In any case, I met a lot of good people at Apple, some of whom I am still in touch with today. Companies do not care for you, but at least some people do.

In all, it was a relatively short time working there. I was not important in the least, and I did not really do anything of note. I worked on lots of cool stuff that didn’t ultimately ship, sure. Put it this way: I am unlikely to be an entry in any Apple history book. 

And I was so relieved when I left. I was 27, and I was young enough then that I didn’t really know how stressed I had been working in that environment. The weight off my shoulders was enormous, even if being an indie developer came with its own set of slightly different artisanal weights. You know how some people have stress dreams about doing exams? I still have stress dreams that I’m back working at Apple.

I did not part from my ex on the best of terms, but it has remained a big part of my life, and we kept uncomfortably meeting up at parties.

I rewrote PCalc again after I left, and through a random pressing of my business card into the hand of one Phil Schiller at a WWDC, it ended up getting bundled with the iMac G4s in the U.S. I probably made more money from that deal (and a weekend’s work to change the app into U.S. English) than I did from all my years of salary at Apple.

I am definitely still in Apple’s orbit, or perhaps just past their event horizon. I am forgetting many things now, including Widgetgate and Lodsys.

And yes, I also ended up getting to know Woz, and stayed with him for many years in a row during WWDC time. We’re still in touch occasionally to this day. It is absolutely wild to me that I know one of the founders of Apple, who basically invented the personal computer. I got to chat to Douglas Adams because of Apple as well – he used DragThing, and I added several features to it just because he asked. Frontier scripting? Absolutely, Mr. Adams, right away, sir.

I’ve also known Jason Snell for something like 32 years at this point, since he was a youth at MacUser, and nowadays have the pleasure of doing podcasts with him at The Incomparable and Relay. So many good friends in my life have happened because of Apple, directly or indirectly.

I’m also, I will admit, doing reasonably well because of them. Then again, Apple is doing pretty well because of me. If I calculate the 30% or 15% of all the sales of PCalc in the App Store, I’ve probably easily paid back my entire Apple salary and all the PCalc licensing fees. But then again, the Apple stock I got in the late 90s is worth a little bit more these days, too, so ultimately I can’t really complain.

Whenever I purchase a new Mac with the money I have made from selling things on the App Store, it does at least make me think how ridiculously circular these things are. A disturbing amount of my lifespan has consisted of moving money slowly back and forth between Apple and me, whether I’m working for them or not. I think I’m currently ahead, but who knows what the future holds. I do sometimes wonder if I never actually stopped working for Apple.

Anyway, DragThing lasted nearly half an Apple, at 25 years. PCalc is still doing well, some 34 years later (I just need to hold on for another eight.) Dice by PCalc is a recent addition, based on my return to playing D&D, but it at least constantly amuses me. I suspect I will still be doing this long after I retire.

So here’s to the next 50, Apple. I do still miss you sometimes.

Weirdly, I was born almost perfectly in between the founding of Apple on April 1, 1976, and the release of the first Macintosh on January 24, 1984. But the former was only one of two events that occurred around that time that would go on to have a profound impact on my life. Because just over a year after Apple was founded, on May 25, 1977, came the release of the original Star Wars.

Oddly, those two events are intertwined at various points, not only with my life, but with each other. That’s true both in time and in space, where ultimately, these two influences would effectively bracket the San Francisco Bay Area, with Lucas’s Skywalker Ranch just north of the city and Cupertino to its south.

And the connection extends even further—the interplay between the rise of computer technology and its effect on modern moviemaking. John Knoll, the creator of Photoshop, would go on to work for Lucas’s groundbreaking visual effects firm, Industrial Light and Magic. A group within Lucasfilm would later evolve, with funding from Steve Jobs, into the animation studio Pixar (which, along with Lucasfilm, would be eventually acquired by Disney). I definitely had a wallpaper on my Mac in college photoshopped with Steve Jobs and George Lucas in it—what can I say, I know who I am.²

There are thematic ties, too. I wasn’t the only Mac fan amongst my friend group, but in the 1990s we were engaged in pitched battle with the behemoth that was Windows. It lent something to our identity, then—we were no less scrappy underdogs than the Rebel Alliance fighting back against the evil Empire.

(I can admit, from this later date, that I cast envious glances at my friends’ PCs, able to run games like TIE Fighter and Might and Magic, while I had to wait for those to come to my platform—if they ever did. As the years went on, I persevered, reading my monthly issues of Macworld cover to cover, devouring books like the Macintosh Bible and digging up weird shareware, as though I could keep the company going through my sheer persistence.)

For a large part of my childhood, both Apple and Star Wars struggled, falling upon hard times. After 1983’s Return of the Jedi, there were no more Star Wars movies. Meanwhile, Apple nearly tumbled into oblivion.

I vividly remember sitting in our kitchen one morning, listening to the news on the radio while my dad made his coffee, and hearing a dire story about Apple. My dad, knowing my enthusiasm for the company, asked if I thought it would survive—maybe the first time I felt like he’d ever asked me a real opinion on something happening in the world.

I won’t say that it had never occurred to me that it was possible Apple would cease to exist, but it was something I didn’t really have the tools to process. So, naturally, I assumed it would survive somehow, as unlikely as that seemed—as sure as there would be new Star Wars movies someday. The narrative’s stronger when you’re a kid, when you don’t really understand how the world works and your only real templates are stories.

So I closely followed all the developments of those dark times: the transition to the Power Macs, the attempts to create a modern successor to Mac OS, devouring every tidbit of information with no less fervor than how I digested every new Star Wars novel. Any port in a storm.

And then in another close coincidence that is too strange for fiction, dual lights at the end of the tunnel: just as Steve Jobs returned to the company he’d founded, George Lucas announced that a trilogy of Star Wars movies was on the horizon. It seemed that faith had been rewarded and hope was once again on the horizon.³

Staying foolish

My life has always been kind of a push and pull between these two influences—forces, if you will⁴—of technology and storytelling: Venn diagram circles with an overlap sometimes larger or smaller. As a teenager, I both wrote and distributed some really terrible shareware on local BBSes and, for several years, collaborated with one of my best friends to publish an online magazine for sci-fi and fantasy.⁵

In college, I majored in English because I loved writing stories, but almost all my work experience, starting in late high school, was in tech: a nascent web company, IT work at a university library during summers and vacations, teaching fellow students about technology at my college. Freshman year, I got a reputation as the English major who would fix all the computers of the engineers on our floor—even though I was only one of a handful who had brought a Mac to college amidst the sea of beige—or, increasingly, translucent blue plastic⁶—PCs.

Even after college, I worked in IT and web development while toiling away on my first novel. The first piece I ever had published was about Star Wars and it led to the conviction that I could get a job writing—and it just so happened that job was writing about Apple. The rest, as they say, is history.

Always in motion is the future

As this milestone has approached, I’ve wrestled with my own feelings about Apple. Last year, as I wrapped up my ten-year stretch as a columnist at Macworld, I wondered whether we should even be fans of a company. A year on, I feel even more confident in my conclusion that it’s probably unwise to allow your identity to be dictated in any small part by a for-profit corporation whose needs will not ultimately be aligned with yours.

Frankly, it’s a conversation I’ve had to have about Star Wars over the years—more than once.

The truth is I still view myself as an enthusiast of Apple and of Star Wars, even today. Without the former, I wouldn’t be here talking to you. I’m not sure I could have devoted this many years of my life to writing and talking about something for which I don’t have strong feelings. And without the latter, I don’t think I would constantly be writing stories that try to capture the way Star Wars enthralled me as a kid.

But being an enthusiast certainly doesn’t mean being uncritical—honestly, none are so critical as those who view themselves the true enthusiasts. Amidst the recent years’ resurgence of both Star Wars and Apple, there’s been no end of criticism—some certainly less well-founded than others—from those who profess themselves the most ardent enthusiasts.

However, if I can trot out another old trope, you either die the hero or live long enough to see yourself become the villain. That’s the knife edge Apple is poised at now; some might argue that it’s too late, that Apple has already tipped itself over onto the side of full-blown villainy.

But maybe there’s one more lesson to take away from Star Wars here: even Darth Vader managed to redeem himself in the end. You don’t have to be the scrappy underdog to make the right decision. It’s never too late to hoist the pirate flag and think different.

I am usually so focused on Apple’s present and future that I don’t spend a lot of time ruminating about its past. And yet, as its 50th birthday has approached, it’s been impossible not to think Big Thoughts about the Big Picture.

So here’s one: Apple has been remarkably consistent — across 50 years and numerous CEOs and the vast sweep of late-20th- and early-21st-century history — in a few key areas. The people change (except Chris Espinosa!), but some of the ideas have managed to stay the same. And I think that’s meaningful.

Here’s what it boils down to: Apple is a company that chooses to build the whole product, while controlling its own destiny. That was true in the 1970s, it’s still true today, and it’s perhaps the company’s definitive trait.

In the olden days…

The early personal computer market was a hodgepodge. Different companies rose and fell, all offering different devices that were essentially self-contained and proprietary—compatibility across devices was almost nonexistent. Even programs written in the same language might not run across different systems, since they might each implement the languages differently.

During those days, Apple was playing the game that pretty much everyone else does. Sure, there were some computers using the standardized CP/M operating system—you could install a card on an Apple II to let it run CP/M, even!—but mostly you got what you got when you bought the box. Apple IIs ran Apple stuff, TRS-80s ran TRS-80 stuff, the Atari 400 ran Atari stuff, Commodore PETs ran Commodore stuff… that was it.

But in the early 80s, almost the entire computer industry got flattened, and the reason was the IBM PC. Not that IBM did the flattening itself, but it had that effect: Since the IBM PC had been created using standard computer parts in order to get it out quickly, it became relatively easy for any other company to build equivalents. Its operating system was not actually owned by IBM, but was created by an upstart software company called Microsoft.

What happened next changed the entire computer market: Dozens of companies began making IBM PC compatible computers running MS-DOS from Microsoft. The generic Microsoft/Intel PC was born, and almost every other competitor was ruined. Atari and Commodore hung on for a while, but by the early ’90s, there were only pretty much two kinds of personal computers anyone would seriously consider buying: IBM PC compatibles running Microsoft software, or the Mac.

That was it. The rest of the market had capitulated. Only Apple hung on. And as someone who started writing about Apple during that time, I can tell you that nobody expected Apple to make it. Analysts either wrote that Apple should become like the other PC makers and just license Microsoft Windows, or that Apple should become like Microsoft and just license Mac OS to PC makers. Those were the choices.

Apple, to its immense credit, stayed true to itself. (Let’s not mention that brief dalliance with Mac clones.)

The whole widget

To me, this is the core of what Apple is as a company: It makes the whole product. It is not a licensee adding value, like so many of its competitors. This is an attitude that started with Woz designing the hardware and software to work together, leaving a deep impression on Steve Jobs. That impression combined with Jobs’s innate focus on creating a complete product (in an era where most computers were still sold as assemble-it-yourself “kits”) and created an enduring legacy.

People often call Apple’s obsession with owning and controlling the primary technologies behind its products the Cook Doctrine, after current CEO Tim Cook, but that’s a value that goes back to Steve Jobs. Among the more modern examples of this approach:

• Safari came to be because, as the Web rose to prominence, the Mac was increasingly judged based on its performance at Web browsing, and the default Mac browser was Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Microsoft’s allocation of Mac development resources helped determined the success of Apple’s key product. That was a no-go.

• iWork (Pages, Numbers, and Keynote) exist because it means that every Mac, iPhone, and iPad can work with Microsoft Office apps and documents right out of the box, without any extra purchase required. In releasing its own productivity suite, Apple provided instant Office compatibility and no longer needed to rely on Microsoft to do the right thing with its Mac software releases.

• Apple silicon itself is Apple’s reaction to being held hostage by the long-term plans of chip suppliers who didn’t have Apple’s interests at heart. Every Intel chip that appeared in a Mac came from an Intel road map that was built based on the overall needs of the computer market, of which Apple was a tiny part. Every Apple silicon chip in a Mac comes from Apple’s own product road map, and the chip improvements are based entirely on Apple’s needs and synchronized with Apple’s software-development road map.

• The C1/C1X chips that serves as the cellular connection in the iPhone 16e, iPhone 17e, iPhone Air, M4 iPad Air, and M5 iPad Pro—and will eventually power every new Apple device with cellular connectivity—is a reaction to Apple’s frustration with the dominant cellular radio provider, Qualcomm. Apple can now tune its own cellular chips to its own specific needs rather than relying on the parts Qualcomm builds for the entire market.

(Are AI models a primary technology? Who knows. Apple tried to build some, failed, and has decided to pivot to use Google’s AI models… for now. But if Apple ever feels that it absolutely has to have its own AI models running on its devices and in its data centers, I have no doubt that it will spend whatever it costs to make that happen. It’s just in the company’s DNA.)

You may have your own favorite examples of Apple going its own way, and counter-examples of Apple going with the crowd. Certainly, Apple has chosen to pick its battles. The G3 iMac, for example, dumped all the proprietary connectivity that Macs used to have, and just supported the industry-standard USB. Compatibility can be valuable to Apple, to a point. But beyond that point, the company knows it must go it alone—or it’ll end up being just another face in the crowd.

Over 50 years, that’s one thing that has remained true about Apple: You never forget that you’re using an Apple product. It doesn’t do generic—not in 1976, and not in 2026.

It’s Apple’s 50th anniversary — you might have read something about that lately. And I’ve been writing about the company for more than half of that time, roughly 27 years if my math is correct. Companies may last a good long while, particularly when they have a track record of great products, but the writers who report on them invariably crumble to dust.

Still, my bones haven’t entirely blown away in the lightest of breezes just yet, so I figured I would weigh in with a few insights gleaned from chronicling Cupertino’s comings and goings for half my existence on this planet. Honestly, I might as well get something out of the deal.

The challenge is, you’ve probably had your fill of listicles chronicling Apple’s Best Products of All Time or the Most Memorable TV Commercials or Steve Jobs’s Most Viral Moments or what have you. I know that I have. Besides, while I know my onions when it comes to Apple, my opinion on the most significant Apple product (the iPhone 3G) or the best commercial (the sage iMac G3 serenaded by Kermit the Frog, naturally) or the most memorable thing Steve Jobs ever said (“Just avoid holding it that way”) carries no more weight than anyone else’s. In fact, there are folks whose Apple knowledge is far more encyclopedic than my own who are better equipped to weigh in on all that.

But what I can do is empty out my reporter’s notebook, with some random stories, stray observations and items I’ve largely kept to myself over the last 27 years. With tech reporting seemingly done with me, there’s no reason to keep this stuff under my hat any longer.

The occasion may call for 50 of these — one for each year of Apple’s existence — but let’s be honest: you’d stop reading after around 17, and I’d be scrapping the bottom of the tank long before we got to the last item or two. (“No. 33: Didja ever notice that Apple employed both a guy called Woz and a guy called Joz? That’s pretty weird, huh?”) So let’s stick with 10 random thoughts about Apple as the company celebrates its golden anniversary.

My Most Awkward Encounter with Apple

Back in 2001, I was handed an original iPod, not long after Apple’s press event to show off its new music player. It’s probably forgotten with time, but the MP3 players of that era weren’t very durable, and if you were foolhardy enough to take one on a run, you ran the risk of skips caused by mechanical shock. And heaven help you if you accidentally dropped one of those things.

The iPod was going to be different, Apple told us. Not only would Apple’s music player have more storage, it was going to be durable enough to survive real world use in a way that rival devices simply could not. So I decided to put that to test, probably ill-advisedly.

I commissioned a more physically active colleague to go work out with that iPod in tow, along with one very specific instruction: be especially brutal with the device. “Let’s find out just what kind of a licking this thing can take,” I remember saying at the time.

It turns out the iPod was pretty durable, though not indestructible. We did manage to damage the device, but only after deliberately tossing it from a moving bicycle. Otherwise, for a 2001-era piece of tech, it withstood a fair amount of abuse before finally succumbing to our more violent impulses. I patted myself on the back for conceiving of a handy piece of consumer tech journalism that would give readers insight into just what they could expect from an iPod in terms of durability and went about my business without giving the story another thought.

At least until Apple asked us to return the iPod.

Companies don’t always do that, as they’re happy to leave review units in the hands of publications for use as reference devices when subsequent updates come along. But occasionally, you do get asked to return the equipment, Q-from-James-Bond-style, and this was one of the occasions. But I held out hope that Apple would agree that proving just how much punishment an iPod could take was enough of a service to more than make up for the non-operable loaner.

Apple did not agree. I don’t remember the poor soul who was tasked with explaining to Apple why their once-pristine iPod was coming back in such a decidedly scuffed-up state, but whoever it was made certain to let the company the name of the dastard who so recklessly ordered the iPod beaten to a pulp. It would be many years before Apple ever trusted me with a loaner device again, and even on those occasions, the hand-off was made with decidedly sideways glances.

The part of the Apple campus I’ve never seen

I’m not a frequent visitor to worldwide Apple HQ, but I’ve been around the place a bit. I’ve even gone inside a building or two, though never uninvited, I hasten to add. I’ve had lunch at one of Apple’s on-campus cafeterias, and let me tell you after also dining at Google’s campus, your tech industry workers are being fed very well.

I have not, however, been inside the Steve Jobs Theater, which seems odd since Apple has been holding events there for the better part of a decade. Part of that’s the nature of my role in covering Apple events — I’m usually coordinating coverage and editing people’s work, and it’s easier for me to do that watching the live stream from the comfort of my office.

The closest I’ve come was in 2017, the very first time in fact that the Steve Jobs Theater hosted any product launch. I was a late addition to the coverage team on hand to look at the iPhone 8 models and the new iPhone X, and as a consequence, I was directed to watch the event from an outdoor overflow area on a nearby TV. Which is how I normally cover such product launches, only without the 90-minute commute.

I don’t know what you remember about that 2017 event — the Apple Watch Series 3 maybe or the Apple TV 4K or one of the trio of aforementioned phones. For me, it’s the smell of fertilizer baking in the warm Bay Area sun on the freshly landscaped area surrounding the Steve Jobs Theater. On the bright side, at tech events for other companies, the smell of manure typically originates from the stage, so Apple has that going for it at least.

Watching an event on a TV outside of the closed doors where the products in question are actually being launched is hardly my most traumatic Apple press event experience, though. That’s a close tie between the iPhone 6s launch, held inside the kiln-like Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, and the 2014 Apple event where I covered the iPhone 6 and Apple Watch preview announcements only to be laid off from my job 24 hours later. Good times.

My favorite Apple launch event

Look, over the course of 27 years, Apple events are going to blend together, particularly when you’ve stopped attending them in person. Nevertheless, a few stand out, especially since i was in the room where it happened.

My very first Macworld Expo in January 2000, Steve Jobs announced he was dropping the “i” from his iCEO title — basically, no longer an interim title, which seemed like a big deal at the time. I was also at the WWDC keynote where Apple held a funeral for Mac OS 9, marking the complete transition to OS X.

But c’mon — there’s only one logical choice here, and it’s the iPhone’s unveiling in 2007. Seeing Apple take the wraps off a completely new product is going to stick in the brain pan, especially since it’s one that’s subsequently stood the test of time. (Folks who were there for the Apple Vision Pro unveiling: I do not think time will be as kind to that moment.) Jobs’ pitch of a combination communication device/music player/mobile phone still resonates. Even AT&T’s Stan Sigman reading his contribution to the presentation off of index cards couldn’t dull the occasion.

My favorite Apple-inspired road trip

If you weren’t around for Apple’s pre-OS X era, it’s easy to forget what a significant shift it was away from the old Mac operating systems to the more modern design and capabilities of OS X — especially after previous efforts to update the OS went nowhere. (For us old timers, “Copland” is more than just a 1997 Sylvester Stallone vehicle or the misspelled last name of The Police’s drummer.) Apple had been working on a new OS for a while, and finally, in the fall of 2000, Mac users were going to get a chance to give it a try.

In fact, the public beta of Mac OS X was going to be revealed at that year’s Apple Expo in Paris, and I jokingly suggested to Macworld’s then-editor that it would be a hoot to send me to cover it.

“I don’t speak a lick of French,” I told him. “I don’t even have a passport. Wouldn’t it be hilarious to fly me over there and watch me flail my way through covering the event?”

“It would be hilarious,” the editor unexpectedly agreed. And that’s how I wound up getting an expedited passport, hopping on a flight to Paris and wandering about an indifferent metropolis without anything resembling a concrete game plan.

The turn-of-the-century tech boom was a hell of a time, kids.

Anyhow, I managed, covering both the OS X news and the surprise launch of the key lime iBook. That said, there was one moment of pure jet lag-induced panic that occurred moments before Steve Jobs stepped on stage to make his assorted announcements: What if, I thought, he delivers this entire speech in French, and I’ve come all this way to not understanding a blessed word he’s saying? Fortunately, whatever multilingual capabilities Apple’s CEO possessed were not on display that day, and I was able to fulfill my journalistic obligations.

My least favorite Apple keynote

Jason Snell and I used to have a running gag back in the days when print, not online, was king and we would reserve a sizable chunk of Macworld’s print edition for last-second coverage of all the Macworld Expo keynote announcements Apple was sure to make. But what would happen, we wondered, if Apple didn’t announce much of anything, leaving us with all those pages to fill and very little to write about.

Our joking Plan B: Run an article called “What Went Wrong?” featuring a picture of various Apple executives shrugging.

We came dangerously close to having to do that at the New York edition of Macworld Expo 2001 where Apple announced… well, some stuff. We got a recap of the recent Apple Store openings — hey, they were new at the time — and a lot of talk from developers showing off OS X native apps for the still-nascent operating system. The lone hardware announcement centered around new Power Mac G4 towers, punctuated by a lengthy discussion of what Apple called the “megahertz myth” to address differences in performance between Macs and PCs. Put another way, Apple’s big product announcement at that Expo was punctuated by an 8-minute deep dive on processor pipelines.

We managed to produce the necessary copy to fill those empty magazine pages that night. But it took some doing.

Apple event celebrity sightings

Attend enough Apple-hosted or -adjacent events, and you’re going to run into famous people. For example, if you walked the show floor of a Macworld Expo in San Francisco any time between 2000 and 2009 and didn’t see comedian Sinbad at some point, I’m guessing you were just popping into Moscone Center to use the restroom.

I’m notoriously bad at recognizing people, but even I can recount a couple celebrity encounters. Once, I waited in line to get in for an Expo keynote standing directly behind Adam Savage of Mythbusters fame. And during the iPhone 6s launch held in the hotbox that was the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, I stood patiently waiting for a demo of one announcement or another — memory tells me it was gameplay on the Apple TV — when Charlie Rose big-footed his way in front of me and took my turn. Definitely the worst thing Charlie Rose has ever been accused of.

(Glances at Charlie Rose’s Wikipedia page.)

Oh. Um. Scratch that.

I’m told Gwen Stefani was at the 2014 iPhone launch, though I never ran into her or her apparently sizable entourage. But while U2 was busy surreptitiously downloading their Songs of Innocence album to the rest of your iPhones, they were also blowing out my ears at the same event.

Most awkward encounter with an Apple executive

Celebrity encounters are all well and good, but who’s a bigger name star than the men and women who run Apple? I don’t often rate face time with the higher-ups at the company, but there was one time where Tim Cook and I had the briefest of interactions. You will be surprised to learn it did not reflect well on me.

I was leaning against a wall in San Jose’s McEnery Convention Center, waiting for a colleague to wrap up a product briefing, when a gaggle of people strolled by, with Tim Cook at the center of the throng. For some reason, he looked over in my general direction at the same time I was watching him pass by, and that’s how I found myself in a staring contest with Apple’s CEO.

I don’t exactly have the friendliest appearance. My resting face makes it appear as if I’m trying to recall how you’ve wronged me, and if ever I try smiling, it looks like I’ve suddenly remembered. So I decided to offer some sort of gesture to convey a spirit of collegiality — I gave Tim Cook what I hoped passed for an amiable nod of acknowledgement. Judging by the mix of confusion and apprehension that flashed across his face, I don’t think I was entirely successful.

So, Tim Cook, if you’re reading this, and you’re still wondering why that glaring fellow nodded at you at that one WWDC many years ago, rest assured that there’s no ill will on my part.

My favorite portrayal of Apple in a movie

I saw 2013’s Jobs twice, which is probably two times more than anyone outside of Ashton Kutcher saw it. Both times were press screenings for a review I was commissioned to write about the movie. The first screening happened well before the movie’s release and Act Three of the picture felt so haphazard to me that I thought for sure that Jobs would be recut prior to arriving in theaters. Hence, the second screening right before the premiere, in which I discovered, nope, the movie was going to wind up exactly the same.

So Jobs isn’t my favorite picture about Apple, and I have to confess that the 2015 Steve Jobs biopic didn’t resonate with me either. No, for big-screen Apple thrills, I suggest turning to the small screen in the form of 1999’s Pirates of Silicon Valley, a made-for-TV movie staring Noah Wylie as Steve Jobs and Anthony Michael Hall as Bill Gates. (John DiMaggio — TV’s Bender — plays Steve Ballmer, and sadly, we do not get to hear “Developers, developers, developers” in the Bender voice.) Pirates of Silicon Valley isn’t the least bit accurate, but it’s a good character study that has something to say about ambition and our impulses to create.

If there’s a runner-up, I’d steer you toward Golden Dreams, a short video that used to run in the part of Disney’s California Adventure that now houses the Little Mermaid ride. There, you can look in as two seemingly random guys named Steve assemble a rudimentary computer while Whoopi Goldberg looks on, pointedly taking a bite out of an apple.

Goofiest Apple product of the last-half century

By this point, it’s probably clear that I find the off-beat aspects of a company’s history to be just as vital as the landmark hits that everyone talks about. I think we all should be serious about our work without being too serious about ourselves, so the things that are going to stand out to me about Apple’s first 50 years are going to reflect that. And occasionally, Apple has had some fun, too.

How else to explain the moment in 2004 when Steve Jobs — co-founder of the company, lauded visionary, subject of many a profile attesting to his business savvy — stood up in front of a packed house and introduced the world to iPod Socks? Jobs is fully committed to the bit, hailing the socks as a “revolutionary new product.” A hint of a smile flashes on his face as he tries to convince the world that, yes indeed, they need to swaddle their music players in brightly colored socks. “They keep your iPod warm,” Jobs insists, and you might for a moment feel like he actually means it.

We can talk about great Apple products and shake our heads at the few missteps. But life is about fun, and there’s no other way to describe iPod socks.

Most symbolic photo of my time covering Apple

Let’s end by circling back to the original iPod — the launch event, specifically. There’s a photo that makes the rounds in my circle of associates, pulled from the launch event video where the cameras have cut to the crowd. And there, you can clearly see Jason Snell watching as the iPod is unveiled. Seated next to him is Rick LePage, Macworld’s editor in chief at the time, and Jon Seff, another Macworld editor.

I’m there, too, though you wouldn’t know it from that shot. For a long time, I assumed I had been sitting next to Jason, so that I was cropped out of the photo — kind of like a real-life version of that Nathan Fielder meme — “Out on the town having the time of my life with a bunch of friends. They’re all just out of frame, laughing too.” — only in reverse. Here, it’s just me who’s been cropped out of the shot, having the time of my life.

And that seemed like a fitting way to sum up my time covering Apple. The company announces something significant, and I’m right there, if only slightly out of the shot.

Of course, that’s actually not the case. In fact-checking this article, we discovered that I am not seated next to Jason, but rather in the row behind him. And yes, we have the photos to prove it.

So as it turns out, I’m not as peripheral to this Big Moment in Apple History as memory had once dictated. Turns out Apple can still surprise us all after 50 years, even those of us who’ve seen it all.

Go to the podcast page.

When I saw my friend Antony Johnston’s post on Six Colors, I instantly thought, “yeah, me too.” And as it happens, the very Mac model that changed Antony’s life put me on an entirely new road, too.

Just before I got my journalism degree in 1984, a professor named Jim Haynes sat me down and warned me that I would have more trouble finding a job than almost anyone in my class because I have low vision. I choose to believe that he meant it kindly, a warning to get ahead of any potential employers’ doubts, rather than as a pessimistic prediction about my future.

But he was right. My job search was painfully long, and I realized that at least part of the struggle had to do with the expectation that young communications specialists working for non-profits or government – a niche I thought I could play in – needed to physically paste up newsletters, brochures and other typeset publications. I’d already learned how unsuited I was for that during a college internship, what with the need to cut straight lines of galley copy and wield an X-acto knife on rubylith. I simply wasn’t equipped to do that sort of visual work.

Somewhere along the way, I went to an Apple demo of something called “desktop publishing.” With a Macintosh computer and a high-resolution printer called a LaserWriter, you could design, lay out and print a complete publication — no knives required. When I arrived for the demo, I was intrigued. By the time I left, I would have sold a kidney for a Mac-LaserWriter combo.

In my unemployed state, the only available source of funds was my parents. Ever the practical sort, they suggested that I learn more about what I now knew as DTP, before they would be willing to hand over more than $6,000 for my pipe dream.

So I rented my first Mac (a 512Ke), a copy of PageMaker 1.2, and an external floppy drive. The guy I rented it from, Robert Jagitsch, would go on to found PowerLogix, a company that sold Mac processor accelerators. I used to run into him at Macworld Expo in the 90s. But just then, his stock of Mac stuff for sale or rent appeared to live in the trunk of his car.

Without a LaserWriter, I couldn’t do much more than teach myself PageMaker. But my local AlphaGraphics offered laser prints for $1 a page. It didn’t take me long to realize I might be able to make desktop publishing work as a freelance business.

Pretty soon, my mom – who had given my sister a used VW Rabbit during college – agreed to fund a brand-new Mac Plus. It was my equivalent “welcome to adulthood” gift. I added PageMaker and a SuperMac DataFrame hard drive that cost an eyewatering $625 for 20 megabytes.

I launched the publishing business, creating everything from brochures to fancy reports for graduate students to newsletters for a city council member. AlphaGraphics was still my source for laser prints, but I quickly fell in with a group of interlocking businesses that offered scanning, full-service printing and access to Linotype typesetters that offered 1200 dpi output, versus the LaserWriter’s 300 dpi.

Eventually – four years out of college – I landed my first full-time professional job. With a Mac Plus on my desk, I edited and laid out monthly trade magazines for enthusiasts of supercomputers, DEC minicomputers and various UNIX systems. Despite a solid portfolio of published writing, I could never have talked my way into that gig without my Apple desktop publishing skills. Those years I spent at home cranking out newsletters had also made me a pretty good Mac system administrator and troubleshooter – skills that have followed me throughout my career

Yes, here in our universe, Apple is celebrating its 50th anniversary. A milestone! The company is looking back on its success, its technology prowess, and the way it’s made us all willing to just say “AirPods” like that’s a set of words that makes any kind of sense.

But our universe is only one of many, and while it may be the 50th anniversary of Apple in several of those as well, the company hasn’t always been as successful—or at least as successful in quite the same way—as it has been here.

For example, did you know that on Earth 1208⍺-X, Apple never abandoned cat names for its operating system? They’re currently on Mac OS X 10.21 Norwegian Forest Cat. Meanwhile, on Earth 9876t-♉︎, the Pippin is the number two console, right after the Intellivision. And on Earth 632r-⍴ everybody wears iPod Socks. Nobody’s quite sure if it’s ironic or not.

All of these worlds are like ours, but ever so slightly different. And just in case you think the grass is always greener on the other side of the quantum fence, well, be careful what you wish for. As much as some people might deride Liquid Glass, be glad you don’t live on Earth 9w4598-Ω, where Apple really ran with that whole “lickable” interface thing. Computing has never been so sticky.

So let’s take this opportunity to fire up the old multiversal radio and see if we can’t catch some dispatches from our nearby universes and see how Apple is doing there.

[static sounds]

Earth 0101010-λ

To celebrate its 50th anniversary, Apple today released its most groundbreaking product in decades, the Orb.

“Nothing is more iconic than the shape of the sphere,” said Apple CEO Jony Ive, appearing via towering hologram. “It has no beginning, no end, and speaks to where we all first issued from.”

“We think the Orb will be a big hit,” said Apple senior vice president of worldwide marketing Greg Joswiak, visibly sweating. “Our customers see whatever they want to see in it which means it can truly be any…”

[static sounds]

Earth Performis-18173U

…Apple today celebrated its 50th anniversary with the release of its most powerful computer yet, the Macintosh Quadra 3700X/II. Powered by an amazing 69050 Motorola processor running at speeds of up to 700Mhz with an astounding of 1GB of RAM and 200GB Western Digital hard drive, the 97300xfs/II will be the workstation of choice for high-end graphics applications. Its sturdy tower comes in a fetching beige, features 17 SCSI ports, and begins at just $8,999…

[static sounds]

Earth 1293857L-Γ

…and Apple CEO for Life Steve Wozniak today kicked off the 27th annual Segway Polo World Cup in Cupertino’s Steve Jobs Memorial stadium, as teams from across the globe vie to become the latest champions of the vaunted sport that has become a Silicon Valley phenomenon…

[static sounds]

Earth #000000-Δ

…would have been the 50th anniversary of Apple Computer. The now defunct company was acquired in 1997 by Dell Computer and shut down, the money returned to its shareholders. Dell, meanwhile, continues its innovative sales strategy of selling laptops by the pound…

[click]

Annnnd that’s about enough of that. Look, I won’t say that all of those universes are unquestionably worse than ours. Just as a random example, in not a single one of those other universes did Apple gift anybody odious a big golden trophy. I mean, you can only imagine what the rest of those universes think of us.

Anyway, with half a century under its belt, it’s time to start thinking about what the next 50 years might hold. I don’t want to spoil anything, but, well, better stock up on iPod Socks.

On this episode of The Vergecast, we begin by stepping back a bit to ask a big question: How is Apple doing right now? Obviously, by many measures, Apple’s doing great — trillion-dollar company and whatnot — but this is a company that has long taken pride in building better software, better hardware, better everything, and doing it in a better and cooler and more responsible way. Jason Snell, a longtime chronicler of all things Apple, joins the show to do a modified version of the annual Six Colors report card about where Apple stands right now.

It was a great conversation, and nice to talk about where Apple is going, given all the history that I’ve been writing about for the last few weeks.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

That’s true, so far as it goes, but this interregnum is too often simplified as when Apple CEO John Sculley got rid of Steve and ruined the company. And that’s really not true. Not only was the Jobs who was ejected from Apple completely unprepared to run the company (as his disastrous but educational years at NeXT would prove), but the Apple of this period had some real accomplishments.

From making necessary changes to the Mac to the creation of the PowerBook, Apple didn’t simply weather the 12 years without Jobs. The company made shifts, adaptations, and decisions that would become foundational to its future. Were there missteps? Most definitely. But ignoring Apple’s successes over those dozen years undermines the truer, deeper story of how Apple survived to become the behemoth it is today.

Continue reading on The Verge ↦

Let me tell you how the Mac changed my life.

In 1988 my high school form tutor, who was also head of the art department, got a Mac Plus. It was the only one in the school, as the computer room was all BBC Micros. In fact, so he said, it was one of the only school-owned Macs in England. It was kept in a locked office room, annexed off his classroom.

I loved playing computer games, and like all kids, I’d messed around with typing in BASIC programs from magazines. But whenever I strayed beyond the simple commands – LOAD, SAVE, PRINT, GOTO – I was out of my depth. I’ve never been able to get my head around DOS-like command line interfaces, let alone programming languages. They just don’t make sense to me, I’m all at sea.

(I’ve sometimes wondered if it’s because I always looked at computers as a tool, a way to do something, rather than a thing to do.)

So I don’t know why my tutor showed off that Mac to me, of all people. But I was gobsmacked by the visual interface and the tangibility of its spatial permanence model. ‘This icon here is your file. This window represents the space inside a folder. If you move the file into the folder, it will still be there, in that same visually-defined place, when you look inside again later.’

I know that sounds like the simplest, most obvious thing now, but in the 1980s it really wasn’t. Crucially, unlike a command line, it made sense to me.

So I was sold on the interface. But then what really blew my mind were the programs you could run on this thing. MacPaint. MacWrite. PageMaker. And the fonts! 12 different fonts you could place anywhere, change their size, make (some of) them bold or italic… again, this is simple and obvious stuff now, but not then.

For some reason, I don’t think any other pupils really took to that Mac. But I was hooked, and spent a lot of time in that cramped office room. I proceeded to use the Mac Plus’s tiny mono bitmap screen, paltry RAM, and single floppy drive to design and lay out two school magazines, one edition of the sixth-form ‘zine, and several judges’ pamphlets for the annual music and drama festivals¹ – plus a bunch of, um, extracurricular stuff for my regular RPG gaming group: character sheets, combat resolution tables, equipment lists…

The ironic thing is, at no point did anyone tell me that what I was doing with this Mac could be a career. My work experience at the local newspaper had shown me that ‘layout’ was something done by chain-smoking men using bromides, cow gum, and rubylith – not computers. The very thought! So after flunking my A-levels (too much partying, not to mention fooling around on that Mac), I was a little unmoored and took the first office job I saw that sounded vaguely interesting: selling stationery.

I was an OK office drone, but my creative bent was obvious to everyone. My free time back then was dominated by games, music, and art. So, encouraged by my boss to go back to school and do something creative, I flicked through the local art college brochure… and found a course called ‘graphic design’. It even mentioned using Macs. Suddenly, I was back in that annexed room, designing a school magazine, and I knew what I wanted to do.

Perhaps the most amazing thing is how small the window of time and opportunity was where all of this could happen. Much earlier, and Macs barely existed; much later, and they were already in professional use everywhere. I was lucky enough to be right in that sweet spot.

I’ve been a professional writer for 30 years now, full-time for 24. That’s how most everyone knows me. But for almost a decade prior to that, I was a graphic designer at various agencies and publishers, eventually specialising in magazines. It was working in those places that gave me access to the net, and an online community that encouraged me to take fiction writing seriously. (Shout-out to alt.cyberpunk.chatsubo!)

There’s a whole chain of happenstance and chance events, too long to go into here, that led to me eventually being published. But if you follow it back far enough, that chain started with my form tutor introducing me to a strange new computer, which changed my life.

Happy birthday, Apple.

Go to the podcast page.

After I wrote my Wall Street Journal review of David Pogue’s excellent Apple: The First 50 Years (Kindle, Kobo, Apple Books) my editor asked for a sidebar recommending other books about Apple. I consulted my own collection and also asked a few of my friends.

If the 50th anniversary celebrations and talk have made you curious about Apple history, there are a lot of books out there. Here are some recommendations:

• West of Eden (1989) by Frank Rose. A recommendation from Stephen Hackett, this book focuses on Steve Jobs hiring John Sculley, which in turn led to Steve Jobs’s own ejection from Apple. (Amazon, used.)

• Insanely Great (1994) by Steven Levy. This is the definitive story of the original Mac, placed in the context of the 1980s personal computing revolution. Levy, whose 1984 book Hackers is an astounding history of the early days of computing, gets at the heart of what made that original Mac, and the original Mac team, special. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)

• Infinite Loop (1999) by Michael S. Malone. If the year of publication doesn’t tell you what this is about, the subtitle will: “How the World’s Most Insanely Great Computer Company Went Insane.” Recommended by John Siracusa, this is the story of Apple falling apart in the 1990s. (Amazon, used.)

• On the Firing Line: My 500 Days at Apple (1999) by Gil Amelio and William L. Simon. Of course Gil Amelio’s tell-all about his brief tenure as Apple CEO is self-serving. And yet I enjoyed reading it, because I believe that late-90s Apple was just as messed up as he describes it, especially when it came to the utter failure to replace classic Mac OS that led to Apple buying NeXT and bringing back Steve Jobs. Was Amelio a bozo, like Jobs apparently claimed? Maybe, but you can’t deny that he was there at a pivotal moment and made the single most important decision in Apple’s history. (Used.)

• Apple Confidential 2.0 (2004) by Owen W. Linzmayer. Prior to the publication of David Pogue’s book, this was probably the best collection of stories about the history of Apple. It’s still an entertaining read. (PDF, used.)

• Revolution in the Valley (2004) by Andy Hertzfeld. One of the core members of the original Macintosh team has a lot of amazing stories to tell. We think of the tech industry today as being corporate, but the original Mac was almost a countercultural object. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)

• The Perfect Thing (2006) by Steven Levy. Levy does his “Insanely Great” thing again, but this time about the creation of the iPod. You may think, well, the iPod’s pretty dated technology now, why does it matter? But this book gives you some clear insight into the entire product development process in the early days of Steve Jobs’s return to Apple. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)

• Creative Selection (2019) by Ken Kocienda. I’m not convinced that the definitive insider history of the creation of the iPhone has been written yet. But between Pogue’s book and this account from one of the creators of the original iPhone keyboard, we’ve got at least some good tales from that vital period. Here’s my original review. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)

• Apple in China (2025) by Patrick McGee. This is the definitive book of the Tim Cook era, at least so far, but it also covers as far back as engineering decisions made right after Steve Jobs came back to Apple. Even if you’re not interested in the Chinese angle, this book is worth reading because it reveals how Apple became and remains a titan of manufacturing, which is why it seems capable of building products nobody else can build. (Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books, used.)

• Steve Jobs in Exile (coming May 2026) by Geoffrey Cain. A detailed look at Steve Jobs after he left Apple, including everything that went wrong at NeXT—and how it made Jobs a better CEO when he returned to Apple. This book isn’t out yet, but I’ve read it and it’s quite good. (Pre-order: Amazon, Kobo, Apple Books.)

(Pro tip: The used books are really cheap, and it’s kind of fun to read an old, beat-up book when thinking about Apple’s history.)

I have a mostly “love/not-hate” relationship with the Medications feature in the iPhone Health app. Having accrued and had treated a variety of conditions over the years, I found Medications a welcome addition in 2022. You can add drugs you take, the frequency (or as needed), and set them to a schedule. Then you receive a notification at the time you set, plus a reminder.

While I’m generally good at “medication adherence,” I’m not perfect. For many drugs, clinical research is based on regular administration and staying on a schedule. In some cases, you can injure yourself or reduce the effectiveness of a medication if you take it erratically, sometimes even missing a few doses, as with antibiotics or antivirals.

Medications is an oddball feature, though, as it’s kind of shoehorned into Health, and doesn’t use the normal Notifications system for alerts. I am sure that is in part because of the unique elements of ensuring reminders occur and recur. But also, it’s because your medication schedule is akin to time-of-day reminders: they should always occur at the requested time.

When you travel across time zones, that’s where confusion can emerge. While on a flight, you may have seen a notification that says “Time Zone Changed,” which suggests you need to check your medication schedule. You may see this for each time zone you pass through. Tap it, and you’re taken to the Medications view, where you can tap to rewrite the time zone to the local one—that is, 8 am PDT becomes 8 am MDT, GMT, etc.

But I had the opposite problem: traveling west to east the other week, I experienced the failure of negative knowledge—I wasn’t alerted about the time zone change and wound up missing a dose of meds.¹ I haven’t had this happen since I started using Medications and traveling, so I don’t know what failed.

Here’s the sequence of what happened (or didn’t):

• I flew across three time zones, from Pacific to Eastern. I was not alerted by Medications about the time zone change.
• I arrived in Boston, and with Settings > General > Date & Time’s Set Automatically option enabled, my iPhone and Apple Watch updated to EDT.
• The next morning, I forgot for the first time in seemingly years to take my morning meds.
• Later that morning, at 11 am EDT (8 am PDT), I must have received an alert that I missed. Medications alerts aren’t persistent in quite the same way as other notifications.

It was only late that night that I realized what had happened. Looking in Health > Medications and swiping way down to Options, I checked that Time Zone Change was enabled. It was. However, my whole schedule was three hours off. There’s no manual “reset to current time zone” button.

The workaround is to go to Settings > General > Date & Time, disable Set Automatically, switch to the old time zone, then to the new one, and then re-enable Set Automatically. At that point, I received the alert from Medications and was able to visit the app to approve changing the absolute time (8 am PDT/11 am EDT) to the relative time (8 am EDT).

Clearly, Medications has room to grow in its time zone support. Because of our body clocks, we may want to keep our medications on the absolute time: if you travel 12 time zones, you probably want to be sure you take your doses of daily meds about 24 hours apart. But there’s no good way to adjust Medications while traveling unless the alert is triggered. Calendar added an option for Floating events years ago, where they were fixed to a time of day rather than a time zone. Some kind of opposite-to-floating option or time slider needs to be added to make Medications more travel friendly.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Apple would never have made it if it weren’t for the Apple II, the company’s first hit product and the first one to generate the amount of devotion we’ve now come to expect from fans of Apple’s products. Their slogan was, and still is, “Apple II Forever!”

Continue reading on The Verge ↦

Siri is making some new friends, the foldable iPhone ship date comes into focus, and we say goodbye to the Mac Pro.

Whenever God closes a Sora, he opens a Siri

Bad news for fans of slop.

“OpenAI Is Shutting Down Sora, Its A.I. Video Generator”

Look at The New York Times putting periods into AI. You fancy.

After some pretty big hoopla about the service that let you generate dancing penguins on the moon or other works destined to be cinematic classics, shuttering it is more than a little embarrassing and not just for OpenAI.

Just three months ago, OpenAI and Disney signed a three-year licensing deal allowing Sora users to generate videos with Disney characters like Mickey Mouse, Cinderella and Yoda.

That deal was for $1 billion. I feel like I put more thought into the longevity of a $2 app before I click “Buy” than Disney did here. Admittedly, maybe I put too much thought into paying $2 for an app, but still.

While Sora is shutting down, Siri is… opening up?

“iOS 27: Apple will reportedly let Claude and other AI chatbot apps integrate with Siri”

According to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman AI apps will work through an extension:

“Extensions allow agents from installed apps to work with Siri, the Siri app and other features on your devices,” according to a message inside test versions of the upcoming operating systems.

It will be interesting to see how well this works, but I think Apple’s “Bring your own AI” plan is a great way to absolve itself of, well, AI.

When, exactly, are you supposed to fold ‘em, again?

This next iPhone release cycle was already getting set to flip the table on the schedule as we have known it for years. Now it seems the table will be double-secret-flipped as, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the iPhone Fold will definitely be released sometime later than the iPhone 18 Pro lineup.

Possibly the company is just giving people more time to save up the money to be able to afford one. See, they’re just thinking about you.

And how they can get your money. That, too.

Could be worse than simply pushing a foldable back a few weeks. You could be pushing it backwards into an early grave.

“Samsung to Discontinue Galaxy Z TriFold After Just Three Months”

Maybe marketing it as having “twice as many fold lines” wasn’t the way to go.

Whether Apple sells a lot of these “late” foldables or not, one thing is certain: it will sell more than this:

“Amazon plans smartphone comeback more than a decade after Fire Phone flop”

If at first you don’t succeed and you make an absolute laughing stock of yourself… wait 10 years and do it again.

That’s how that saying goes, right?

As envisioned, the new phone’s personalization features would make buying from Amazon.com, watching Prime Video, listening to Prime Music or ordering food from partners like ⁠Grubhub easier than ever…

Because doing these things is just so hard right now. The masses are crying out, “HOW CAN WE BUY MORE FROM YOU, AMAZON?! PLEASE HELP US!” Soon Amazon will look down and whisper… “OK.” With the Fire Phone Deux, Part II, The Sequel. Where all the reviews are five stars so you have no excuses not to buy everything.

Very surprising announcements

Early this week, Apple announced… some business thing? Some sort of bundle for big time business people doing big time business? Is that what it was?

Also, it announced ads for Maps. Yayyyy.

Ugh.

Further taking care of bidness, Apple also announced WWDC 2026 will take place during the week of June 8th. Which is surprising if you’ve never heard of WWDC before.

Finally, in a truly shocking update to Apple’s Mac product lineup, the Mac Pr-eh, you know what? I can’t even fake surprise here.

“Apple discontinues the Mac Pro with no plans for future hardware”

When, as was recently pointed out, Apple’s cheapest laptop ever was beating the Mac “Pro” in single core performance, you know it’s time to be driven out to that big farm upstate and… well, quietly dispatched behind the barn.

Look, I take no pleasure in shooting a desktop computer to put it out of its misery, but this was no way to live.

Safari web apps and PWAs are a nice start, but they’re limited. Browser tabs are messy. And most tools for turning websites into apps still feel more like wrappers than real Mac software.

Unite Pro takes a different approach. It turns any website into a fast, isolated Mac app built specifically for macOS — with support for Window, Sidebar, and Menu Bar modes, deep visual customization, smart link forwarding, and native enhancements like dock badges, meeting alerts for Google Calendar and Outlook, AI overlays for ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude, and more.

What makes Unite Pro special is how much control it gives you. You can remove distractions, force dark mode on sites that don’t natively support it, apply custom scripts and styles, and shape each app around the way you actually work — while keeping sessions, cookies, and permissions separate from your browser.

Six Colors readers can get 20% off Unite Pro this week with the code SIXCOLORS. Learn more and download at bzgapps.com/unite.

Chance Miller calls the time of death at 9to5 Mac:

It’s the end of an era: Apple has confirmed to 9to5Mac that the Mac Pro is being discontinued. It has been removed from Apple’s website as of Thursday afternoon. The “buy” page on Apple’s website for the Mac Pro now redirects to the Mac’s homepage, where all references have been removed.

Apple has also confirmed to 9to5Mac that it has no plans to offer future Mac Pro hardware.

A quiet end to what was once the flagship of the Mac product line. But time comes for us all.

Over the years, as laptops rose in prominence and other Mac desktops added power, the Mac Pro increasingly became a niche, high-end device. After the disastrous trash-can Mac Pro design, Apple made good on a promise to return the Mac Pro, and shipped a new take on the “cheese grater” enclosure. But the move to Apple silicon really killed the product dead, since Apple’s modern chip architecture doesn’t support external GPUs, which was one of the last reasons to buy a Mac Pro.

In the interim, the Mac Studio has become the top-of-the-line desktop. It’s great. RIP to a real one, but it’s time for us all to move on.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

The Apple Vision Pro feels like a product that’s waiting for the world to catch up, but the reality is closer to the opposite. The world is waiting for a reason to use it and that reason hasn’t quite shown up yet.

There’s very little wrong with the hardware. Apple built something that works in a way first-generation devices rarely do (says the guy old enough to have bought a Newton at launch) with displays that feel natural rather than novel and an interface that disappears quickly enough to let you focus on what you’re seeing.

The problem comes the moment you take it off. There isn’t a strong pull to put it back on. It’s impressive, even remarkable in bursts, but it doesn’t yet fit into a daily rhythm. That’s not a hardware problem. It’s a content problem, and more specifically, a cadence problem. Apple has treated immersive content like a prestige release schedule, carefully curated and spaced out, which works for television but not for behavior. If you want people to build a habit around something, you need volume and consistency, not occasional brilliance. Right now, Vision Pro feels like something you check in on rather than something you live inside, and that distinction matters more than anything on the spec sheet.

Neal Stephenson’s skepticism lands because it recognizes that gap. If the content never reaches a point where it becomes necessary, the headset remains optional, and optional devices rarely scale. What’s interesting is that the missing piece isn’t hypothetical. It already exists in a different form, outside of Apple’s ecosystem, and it’s showing up in a place that Apple understands better than most companies: people paying for experience.

Cosm is the cleanest example of that. It’s easy to dismiss it a high-end gimmick, a giant dome with a better screen, but that misses what’s actually happening inside those venues. People are buying tickets, planning nights around it, treating it as something closer to attending a game than watching one. The technology matters, but the behavior matters more.

Cosm is already generating meaningful revenue and drawing repeat customers, which tells you this isn’t just novelty value. It’s tapping into something real, the idea that proximity, or at least the feeling of it, has value even when the event is happening somewhere else.

The challenge for Cosm is that scaling that experience is difficult. These are expensive builds that require the right locations, the right partnerships, and enough capital to expand without diluting the quality that makes them work in the first place.

That is exactly the kind of problem Apple has solved before. It’s not just about having the cash, though Apple certainly has that. It’s about having the discipline to build a system that can expand without losing its identity and the distribution to make it visible at scale. If Apple owned something like Cosm, it wouldn’t just be a set of venues. It would be a front door. You could put an Apple Store in the lobby and it wouldn’t feel forced. It would feel like a natural extension of the experience, a place where people encounter the hardware in the context of something they already understand.

From there, the path to the home becomes clearer. Vision Pro, or whatever lower-cost version follows, doesn’t need to stand on its own as a category. It becomes an extension of something people have already bought into. The idea of watching a game “from somewhere else” is no longer abstract because they’ve already felt it in a room with other people. At home, it becomes a different version of the same experience, missing the crowd and the waiter, but gaining convenience and access.

The critical shift is in how Apple approaches rights. Trying to own sports outright is a losing strategy. The costs are too high, the competition too entrenched, and the fragmentation too deep. Apple has made smart moves with MLS, F1, and selective partnerships, but doubling down on exclusivity won’t unlock this. The better path is to work alongside the existing ecosystem. Install Cosm camera systems at major events, not as replacements for the broadcast but as an additional layer. Let networks and leagues sell that immersive feed as a premium product, with Apple taking a share for the technology and distribution. It’s additive rather than competitive, which makes it easier to scale and harder for partners to resist.

Apple has always been at its best when it connects behavior to technology in a way that feels inevitable in hindsight. Right now, Vision Pro still feels like a solution looking for a problem. The problem, or more accurately the opportunity, is already there in how people respond to immersive sports experiences. Cosm has shown that people will pay for that feeling. The hardware is close enough to deliver it at home. The gap is building the bridge between those two things in a way that feels continuous rather than experimental.

If Apple gets that right, the conversation around Vision Pro changes quickly. It stops being about whether people want to wear a headset and starts being about what they’re missing when they don’t. That’s the point where adoption tends to take care of itself.

I was sitting there in the Byte Shop in Palo Alto on an Apple-1 writing BASIC programs, and this guy with a scraggly beard and no shoes came in and looked at me and conducted what I later understood to be the standard interview, which was “Who are you?” I said, “I’m Chris.” … Steve Jobs’s idea back then of recruiting was to grab a random-ass 14-year-old off the streets.

The rest is history!

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

The fifth season of Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” premieres March 27—really, the evening of March 26 for those of us on the West Coast. For the last few years, Dan and I have been reviewing episodes on our “NASA Vending Machine” podcast and I’m excited to have the show back.

As always, “For All Mankind” is about taking big swings. There’s always a dramatic, history-changing moment or shocking twist that’s not too far away. Set in an alternative past where the Space Race kept going after the Soviets landed on the moon (yep!), season four took us to a 2003 where Mars colonists sought more autonomy by hijacking an asteroid.

This season, which takes place in 2012, is still primarily set on Mars, though there’s also some space adventure in the offing. Apple tech fans will enjoy that we’ve finally reached the iPhone era, though the iPhones on “For All Mankind” are a little thicker than the ones we remember, and they might actually be Newtons. There are also a lot of early-2010s iMacs on display.

While the first episode has to do a lot of work reminding you of what’s happened recently and setting up the new power dynamics at play this season, subsequent episodes get pretty intense, pretty fast. At times the show plays with police procedural, mystery story, even car-chase adventure… familiar TV genre stuff, except it’s all on Mars! Mireille Enos of “The Killing” plays an important new role as an investigator for the Mars Peacekeeping force who is suspicious that several different crimes might have been committed out on the surface. There are also a bunch of returning faces, some expected and some quite surprising. (And also, yes, Joel Kinnaman is still in the show even though Ed is now basically in his eighties.)

I’ve seen the first six episodes thus far, so I don’t know where it’s all going, but I’ve sure enjoyed the ride. “For All Mankind” continues to use its alt-history setting to tell dramatic, almost operatic stories that can also disturbingly have relevance to current events in our own world.

I’m pretty skeptical that Apple’s new Siri-wrapped Gemini will be able to accurately and reliably assist with automation. Gemini will be the foundation to Apple’s foundation models, but there’s no there there. Apple has no well-documented, debuggable, inspectable system to execute automation with, unless you count ancient and inscrutable AppleScript, and you shouldn’t.

Sure, LLM chatbots will spit out code (even AppleScript!) if you ask them to, but it might not work. It gets substantially worse when you’re asking LLMs questions about Shortcuts.

Go ahead and ask any chatbot to describe how to make a Shortcut to perform some automation that you’ve been wanting to do and then try to assemble what it suggests. It’s extremely tedious, prone to user error, and isn’t in any way guaranteed to work even when it’s all put together.

Agents that hook into development environments are much better than a bare chatbot because they can inspect, run, and debug the code they are generating. They aren’t perfect, but if you have an agent like Claude Code hooked up to an development tool like VS Code and start describing some Python script you want, it’ll execute and iterate until the output is what you asked for.

If humans don’t have access to documentation, to actionable debug output, logging, the ability to bypass/ignore actions as part of testing, and the ability to copy and paste snippets of code, then how can the new Siri do it?

Right now, Shortcuts works with AI models by passing some input and then receiving the output. When something goes to the model, the model transforms the data, and delivers a result back to Shortcuts. That’s a non-deterministic workflow, so any change to the model, or even just randomness in general, can produce different output. This means you can’t reliably troubleshoot or adjust it without introducing uncertainty in what new outputs you’ll get.

When working with an agent to assemble automation in an IDE, the code it builds is deterministic, so it will keep working even if the model changes. Not everything you want to automate requires LLM functionality when it runs, but not everything you automate should require hours of labor to fabricate the deterministic workflow version of it.

I really hope that the magic of new Siri isn’t going to be that it will just do things with bare actions and App Intents, magically, without any user-accessible process, or as a blob inside of a Shortcut you need to make. If I ask Siri to reorder a list, and it doesn’t do it correctly, I want to be able to access the scaffolding it created to see what went wrong, not just keep asking Siri to do it again in slightly different ways until I get output I like.

If Siri doesn’t produce anything inspectable, or it produces a Shortcut, then there’s not much work humans or AI can do to fix things.

AI cut below the rest

The problem the Shortcuts app is supposed to solve has never been solved, because no one really knows how to use Shortcuts unless they become a Shortcuts expert. Shortcuts is user-friendly in appearance, but not in practice. It’s meant to welcome people who don’t know anything about programming with its friendly drag-and-drop interface, and searchable actions panel.

Unfortunately, the names for actions don’t always say what they do, and the documentation is often a vague piece of filler that’s frequently reused for more than one Shortcut action. Even experienced programmers can get flummoxed when they try to search the available actions for seemingly standard functions, like reversing a list.

Magic connections are magic, until your script gets any longer than the length of your screen and you need to start dragging actions around, inevitably breaking connections and making unintended ones. With a text-based script you’d have to keep track of the names and spelling of your variables, but they don’t change out from under you if you add more lines of code above or below them.

You can’t do one of the most simple, and useful things in scripting, which is commenting out (ignoring/bypassing) something to test or evaluate alternatives.

A lot of the time, when people are using Shortcuts, they’re relying heavily on the run shell script action to do actual programming that lets them write normal, vanilla code, or ssh’ing into a server from iOS to do the same thing. It’s nice that Shortcuts can do that, but shell scripts aren’t cross platform, and ssh’ing into a server is in no way accomplishing Shortcuts’ mission.

Without logging, you can’t ask Siri why your automation that was supposed to run in the middle of the night didn’t run. Maybe it was a permissions issue that was never raised when the shortcut was created. You, and Siri, just don’t know.

AI rising tide lifts all boats

Again, Apple doesn’t have to do these things just for humans, or just for Siri. They are in no way mutually exclusive.

If the concern is that Shortcuts shouldn’t be like a programming language, with tracebacks, and logs which would put off “normal people” then just remember that “normal people” don’t really use Shortcuts. They ask a chatbot to just do it, and Siri, as Apple’s chatbot, could take advantage of those fiddly, programming bits and perform its role better, in a way that was auditable.

I have seen people make frantic posts on Mastodon about how AI is deskilling programmers, but the beauty of Shortcuts is that Apple already applies the deskilling at the factory.

Go to the podcast page.

Sounds bad. But if they’re not recalling the routers, and they’re not fixing them… what the heck is the government actually doing?

It’s banning future routers that haven’t been made yet.

You’re not making a lot of sense.

I warned you this was a story about Brendan Carr, known dummy and anti-consumer FCC chairperson! Specifically, the FCC is keeping new, previously unannounced, foreign-made consumer routers out of the US… unless it decides to exempt them. For reasons. We’ll get to those.

Hollister classifies this as a shakedown to somehow force more manufacturing jobs back to the U.S. Gee, I wonder if there could possibly be any…let’s say exploitable…loopholes to this brilliantly concocted plan:

What if I buy one of those newer routers in Canada and bring it back home?

The FCC’s magic 8 ball says, “no,” but good luck enforcing that, Brendan.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple today announced Apple Business, a new all-in-one platform that includes key services companies need to effortlessly manage devices, reach more customers, equip team members with essential apps and tools, and get support from experts to run and grow efficiently and securely. Apple Business features built-in mobile device management, helping businesses easily configure employee groups, device settings, security, and apps with Blueprints to quickly get started. In addition, customers can now set up business email, calendar, and directory services with their own domain name for seamless and elevated communication and collaboration.

This new offering actually consolidates three existing Apple products, Apple Business Manager, Apple Business Essentials, and Apple Business Connect, and offers mobile device management for free, which will save some existing customers money. There are also some new API functions for larger organizations, and Apple is offering businesses access to Apple-hosted email and calendaring for the first time. The new Blueprints feature will make it easier for administrators to assign configurations and apps.

Also announced today is something that has been widely expected: ads in Maps in the U.S. and Canada. We now know those will arrive this summer. Apple provides additional details further on:

Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.

Again, it’s not a huge surprise to see this—Apple has been working on bolstering its ad business in the past few months. But it does mean that once this feature is enabled, you’ll have to scroll past an ad to see results when you search for stuff in Apple Maps.

Ads or no, companies that use Apple Business will also be able to edit their metadata and upload pictures directly into Apple Maps.

It’ll take some time to digest these changes, but it seems like this is a simplification of Apple’s business offering, and making MDM free will be a win for smaller organizations. Unfortunately, Apple’s still only offering 5GB of free iCloud data on managed accounts, and it’s hard to think that any business should rely on Apple’s notoriously unreliable email platform.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

“This is not physically impossible; it’s only a question of whether this is a rational thing to scale up economically,” [engineer Andrew] McCalip said. “The answer is it’s really close. And if you own both sides of the equation, SpaceX and xAI, it’s not a terrible place to be. I wouldn’t bet against Elon.”

Yet betting on Elon also requires a giant leap of faith.

The third part of this series will dive deeper into detailed cost estimates, but in terms of round numbers, the bare-bones cost of deploying 1 million satellites is more than a trillion dollars. SpaceX’s two biggest previous projects to date, the hyper-ambitious Starlink and Starship programs, each required on the order of $10 billion up front. So in terms of scope and cost, orbital data centers are two orders of magnitude larger.

The part that has me curious, but isn’t really addressed in the story, is future-proofing. Companies like Nvidia are kicking out new chips at such a rate that the processors you send in to orbit will almost certainly be outdated by the time they’re operational. Will that be enough to offset the perceived gains? Are we constantly going to be launching new satellites? What happens to the old one? What if the AI bubble bursts? All fertile ground for a near-future sci-fi story, methinks, if not near-future non-fiction.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Collect your meager Kalshi and Polymarket winnings, I guess: Apple has officially announced that its 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference will kick off with an in-person event at Apple Park on Monday, June 8.

As in recent years, the event will run for the week, starting with the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union on Monday, followed by video sessions and labs. Videos will be accessible on the Apple Developer app and website, as well as YouTube.

Those who attend the in-person event will be able to watch the Keynote and state of the union, as well as participate in other activities throughout the day. Attendees will be determined by random selection, with invitations sent out by the end of the day on April 2. You must be a member of the Apple Developer Program or Apple Developer Enterprise Program, or a winner of the 2026 Swift Student Challenge to apply. Additionally, 50 “Distinguished Winners” of the challenge will be invited to a three-day experience that includes Monday’s special event.

There are, as usual, lots of eyes on WWDC, where Apple traditionally announces all its big platform updates for the year to come. This year we’re expecting the “27” year updates, but there are big questions marks hovering around some features, like the much-delayed Apple Intelligence offerings. We’ll find out that and more on June 8.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Unite Pro takes a different approach. It turns any website into a fast, isolated Mac app built specifically for macOS — with support for Window, Sidebar, and Menu Bar modes, deep visual customization, smart link forwarding, and native enhancements like dock badges, meeting alerts for Google Calendar and Outlook, AI overlays for ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude, and more.

What makes Unite Pro special is how much control it gives you. You can remove distractions, force dark mode on sites that don’t natively support it, apply custom scripts and styles, and shape each app around the way you actually work — while keeping sessions, cookies, and permissions separate from your browser.

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I started seeing pictures in Photos that I was sure I didn’t take recently, but often of locations I knew vaguely. After a few days, I realized the issue: my older child, in college on the East Coast, and currently traveling during spring break, had a Camera setting that caused all their images to blend into a shared family library.

Fortunately, our kid is old enough, wise enough—and communicative enough with us parents—that I didn’t see anything they didn’t want me to see, but it is the kind of thing that could be awkward in some shared groups.

The issue is that the Camera app has a tiny icon that’s easy to tap and activate without realizing it. That button’s activation is then persistent for all subsequent photos you take!

Here’s how to work with this feature intentionally, and deactivate it if you never want to use it—with purpose or not!

Share with those who care

The iCloud Shared Photo Library is an oddball: you can create or belong to one, and one only, and it can be shared with the creator plus five others, who don’t need to be in your Family Sharing group, if you have one.¹ The thing that you create is called Shared Library throughout the interface.

Once you’ve created or joined a Shared Library, its availability appears in Photos on your devices with iCloud Photos enabled and, more subtly, in Camera. If you’re viewing both libraries in Photos, images from the Shared Library have the Shared Library two-person icon overlaid in the upper-right corner; videos, for some reason, do not.

On a Mac, Photos: Settings: Shared Library reveals participants and offers a Shared Library Suggestions checkbox. Enable this if you’d like your Mac to say, “Hey, maybe you should add this image to the Shared Library!” (I didn’t find this particularly useful, and disabled it.)

Go to Settings: Apps: Photos, and you’ll note an extra option on iPhones and iPads: Sharing from Camera. That’s the culprit in my offspring’s openness.

Keep Camera shots your own (or not)

You can tap Sharing from Camera or go directly to Settings > Camera: Shared Library: Sharing from Camera. With Sharing from Camera enabled, you see a yellow icon of two people side-by-side in the upper-left corner of the screen in portrait mode or the lower-left corner in landscape. Tap it to disable directly from Camera. A yellow label appears at the top of the Camera interface to indicate which library is in effect after you tap the button. When Sharing from Camera isn’t turned on, the icon appears with a line through it.

The setting is persistent within Camera, so each time you open Camera, your previous Shared Library choice remains. You can override this via Settings or by tapping the icon again.

If you never want to enable Shared Library by accident or intentionally, disable Sharing from Camera in the Photos: Sharing from Camera settings.²

If you found you put media in the Shared Library and want to return them to your own, you can fix this quite easily:

• On a Mac, select the items in Photos, and choose Image: Move X Photo(s)/Video(s) to Personal Library. You can also Control/right-click on any item in the selection.
• On an iPhone or iPad, go to the Library view in Photos, tap Select, and choose one or more items. Tap the More … icon at upper-right, and choose Move to Personal Library.

In a bit of turnabout, a few days after writing this column, I get a text from my youth: “Your photos seem to be going into my account. I think you pressed the share button in the app by accident.” D’oh!

For further reading

Our very own leader, Jason Snell, has a book that covers Shared Library and much more. Pick up a copy of Take Control of Photos to get up to speed on this and other quirky Photos features.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Because this is a Mac, it can do effectively anything you want to throw at it. I have been editing video on it and doing web and Xcode development with very little issue. Yes, my Xcode builds take longer than they do on my M4 Pro Mac, and rendering video runs slower too, but it can do it. If this is the computer your budget allows, don’t think that you can’t.

However, you’ll notice I’m not including any benchmarks in this review. I don’t think benchmarks properly express the experience of using a computer, particularly on the lower end of products. On the high end, when everything basic is child’s play, benchmarks can be helpful to understand differences at the margins. But one of the charts I’ve been seeing go around since this was announced was Geekbench single-core performance, which showed the Neo as effectively as fast as an M4. Let me tell you, if you’re using that chart to understand the performance of this computer, you are being misled.

You certainly are, if your definition of ‘use’ is Xcode builds and video editing. Matt is not technically wrong when he suggests later in his post that, in workflows requiring lots of RAM and speedy disk access, even the oldest Apple silicon MacBook Air will perform a bit better than the MacBook Neo.

When performance is in the ballpark of a five-year-old computer, you have to consider what this machine costs compared to refurbished models from that era…. I can get a refurbished M2 MacBook Air with 512GB storage and 16GB RAM for $50 less than the maxed out MacBook Neo. That M2 Air gets you significantly better performance, a better screen, a better trackpad, better USB-C ports, MagSafe, and faster SSD speeds. I feel very confident saying that the M2 Air is a meaningfully better computer the Neo.

Again, Matt’s not wrong. If you are a savvy shopper with a very limited budget and need that push beyond what the MacBook Neo can give you, you are probably better off searching for a used or refurbished MacBook Air. Last week on MacBreak Weekly, Christina Warren made a strong case for picking up a refurbished or used M3 or M4 MacBook Air, which would cost slightly more than a MacBook Neo but far outclass it in terms of features.

But this entire conversation misses the most important thing about the MacBook Neo: It is sold in every Apple Store, on Apple’s website, and in every Apple sales channel. Most people won’t think to cruise for a refurbished Air—they will just go down to their local store, or pop onto Amazon, and shop for a computer. That’s why the MacBook Neo is important. It’s available to everyone, everywhere, and Apple will stand behind it as a new product.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

David Sparks appreciates the MacBook Neo, but he’d like something smaller:

Think about it. Apple has covered the pro market with the MacBook Pro lineup. The Neo is about to cover the mainstream and budget-conscious buyer.

But there’s a gap at the top. A premium ultralight for people who travel constantly, who want the absolute minimum weight and footprint, and who are willing to pay for it. A MacBook that weighs two pounds or less, with a stunning display and all-day battery life. Not a compromise machine. A showcase.

I would question the premise that you can get “the absolute minimum weight” along with “all-day battery life” (depending on how you define that)—but I do not doubt that Apple could create a laptop with M-series performance and good enough battery life, but with an emphasis on compactness.

But is there enough of a market for a fourth class of MacBook? As someone who has known and loved the 12-inch PowerBook, 11-inch MacBook Air, and even the 12-inch MacBook, I am sadly not convinced that this is a big enough segment for Apple to target when the MacBook Air exists.

And here’s the biggest reason I think a smaller laptop may never happen: Over the last decade, everything in macOS has gotten a bit bigger—not just OS elements, but even fundamentals of app design. When I was still using an 11-inch Air, I would often discover apps that couldn’t be resized to fit on my screen. The same happened with the retina MacBook. I’m afraid that the 13-inch display in the MacBook is probably as small as modern macOS and today’s Apple will reasonably go.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Apple announces new AirPods, Tim does an interview, and it’s about App Store standards, people!

It’s the least they could do

Apparently not big enough to make Apple’s “experience” two weeks ago, this week the company announced AirPods Max 2 with the H2 chip. This updated version comes at the same price and in the same colors but with Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, and Live Translation, along with some other small enhancements.

If that seems underwhelming, it could be worse.

“Harmful chemicals found in popular headphones sold across Europe, study”

But I don’t want harmful chemicals in my earholes! My earholes are right next to where I keep my thinking bits!

Fortunately:

The safest headphones were Apple’s AirPods Pro 2 and JBL’s Tune 720BT.

I look forward to the new AirPods marketing touting them as having “the fewest harmful chemicals of any of the popular brands.”

Plain, simple Tim

Tim Cook (remember him?) was back in the news this week as he visited China yet again, this time to celebrate Apple’s 50th anniversary and attend the China Development Forum. I hope he remembered to put his business card in the fish bowl so he could have a chance to win a China Development Forum backpack or t-shirt.

Cook also sat down with ABC’s Michael Strahan for a wide-ranging interview in which he was asked about his potential retirement. As John Gruber noted, Cook’s answer was rather misinterpreted by some as “squashing” rumors of his retirement being impending when instead it was very much akin to what his likely replacement, John Ternus, said about potentially taking over as CEO. That is: “Apple is great! I love my job! People! Fun! Interesting! Next question!”

Strahan also asked Cook about his close, personal and financial relationship with President Trump. Cook’s response can best be described as large, domesticated equine droppings.

Well, what I do is I interact on policy, not politics.

This is like saying “I’m not into hentai, I just really like the overtly sexually explicit type of manga that comes from Japan.”

I’m not a political person, on either side, I’m not political.

I just happen to have donated $1 million to the inauguration of one president of one particular party. Possibly through a clerical error.

Oh, and we donated another million to give him what will undoubtedly be an extremely tacky ballroom. Just an absolute eyesore. We did that, too.

You know, if Tim is just walking around in a fugue state and is unaware that he’s taking these very political actions then he should probably be checked into a medical facility of some kind before he wakes up in a dumpster outside a Denny’s in Hoboken dressed as Mr. Met.

And so I’m kind of straight down the middle…

I must have missed the golden statues and cash awards Cook gave to the two Democratic presidents who were in office while he was CEO. Maybe I’m in the fugue state.

That actually sounds kind of nice given [waves hand at everything].

…and I focus on policy. And so I’m very pleased that the President and the administration is accessible to talk about policy.

Famously a-political Apple CEO Tim Cook: “Buying access just works.”

Noted.

Bad vibes

Bad news, lazy coders! Apple wants you to show your work.

“Apple pushing back on ‘vibe coding’ iPhone apps, developers say”

Companies behind two “vibe coding” apps that let you create tools by entering text prompts into an AI system say Apple is pushing back on the category.

[Quietly drags file named “VibeFart.xcode” to the trash. Selects “Empty Trash” from Finder menu. Single tear falls.]

Yes, Apple’s precious App Store is too good for your lazily coded apps, slackers! At least inasmuch as they violate its rule against running code that changes the way they or other apps function, according to the company.

But you know what’s not too good for the App Store? Yes, you guessed it! It’s apps like Grok and X that create non-consensual sexual material, even of minors!

You didn’t think I was going to let a week go by without mentioning that, did you?

It just gets harder and harder to take any argument about the sanctity of the App Store seriously when it’s so patently obvious you can flout the rules if you’re a racist billionaire with a penchant for frivolous lawsuits.

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When it comes to smart locks, the goal is “Star Trek,” right? You should be able to walk up to your door and, swish!, it opens to greet you.

When I was a kid, “Star Trek” doors were amazing technology, but not too many years later, even the run-down supermarket in my hometown had automatic doors that opened when you approached them. Still, the dream lives on for the home. Most homes aren’t plausibly designed to have pocket doors that slide out of the way (and I have to think it wouldn’t be up to code), or even automatically swing open.

Okay, then, a dream downgraded: When it comes to smart locks, the goal is sort of “Star Trek,” in the sense that I’d like my door to unlock itself as I approach.

A few generations into this technology, we’ve bought and reviewed a bunch of smart locks, but the ultimate dream has not been fulfilled. Bluetooth-based locks can sort of do the trick, but since Bluetooth is a non-directional technology, there were all sorts of tricks (use geotagging, wait for the phone in question to leave the area, then enable lock-on-view) to make it happen. And it wasn’t very reliable.

Next came NFC locks, which work remarkably well but require you to press your phone or watch up against the lock. It works—I never carry a key for my house anymore, because my Apple Watch is my key—but it’s not exactly the Star Trek dream.

Finally, the future is here: locks with support for ultra-wideband (UWB) technology have begun to arrive, and since UWB offers precise positioning, it’s the first technology that truly offers the potential to have rock-solid support for walking right up to the door and having it unlock before you begin to reach.

I’m all in on the dream, so I bought the $270 Aqara UWB Smart Lock U400 (Amazon affiliate link) and installed it in my front door as my deadbolt, replacing an older NFC-focused smart lock. It’s been there for a couple of months now, and I’m happy to report that the “Star Trek” dream feels real.

After having owned a bunch of these, I’m struck by how robust Aqara’s lock motor is. It forcefully slides the deadbolt into place, which is helpful since my door can sometimes be slightly misaligned, and a little force from the bolt helps push it into place. (If it fails to mechanically lock, it makes a loud beeping noise to alert you that something’s wrong, which is very important if you’re walking out the door!)

I love the options the Aqara lock provides, too. Some smart locks I’ve used haven’t come with real keys, but Aqara’s does—the keyhole is normally hidden, but just drops down from the bottom of the entry panel. There’s a fingerprint sensor on the panel that can give you the Aqara equivalent of Touch ID, but only if you use the Aqara app itself. I added my print to the lock, but have never actually needed to use it. The lock also supports NFC, like my old lock, so older devices can be tapped against the pad to unlock the door. And yes, the display lights up so you can input a multi-digit code if you like.

But the star of the show is UWB unlocking, which uses your absolute positioning in space to unlock the door only when you approach it from the outside. (There’s a clever setting that lets you set what directions it will auto-unlock from, so that if a portion of your house is in front of your front door, it won’t unlock every time you walk toward the door in your garage.) Most of the time, the door audibly unlocks when I’m maybe a foot or less away from the door. Occasionally, I need to stand at the door for a moment, but rarely longer than a second or two. It worked just as well with my iPhone and with just my Apple Watch. It never unlocks accidentally when I approach it from other directions. It really does just work.

I also appreciate the Aqara lock’s approach to batteries. A not-so-fun fact about smart locks is that they require batteries. My previous smart locks have chewed up AA batteries over the course of a few months. Aqara has instead built a rechargeable battery into the lock that’s basically the size of an iPhone power bank. It’s been months, and my battery is still at 85%, so it is going to last a long time. But beyond that, it’s just an easy USB-C charge to top it back up.

You can either remove the battery and charge it wherever (while your lock stops working), or just plug in a power bank to the lock itself. Aqara cleverly suggests just putting the power bank in a bag and hanging it on the interior door latch while it charges the lock back up, which worked perfectly when I tried it.

As with many other locks, once you’ve got a smart lock attached to HomeKit, there are various automations you can run, though I haven’t ever found any of them to be particularly useful. For me, a good smart lock gives me confidence that the door is locked or will lock itself automatically (and I can check on my phone to confirm this), and opens easily.

I’ve never had a smart lock that opens more easily than the Aqara UWB Smart Lock U400. It’s not “Star Trek,” exactly, but it’s probably as close as I’m ever going to get.

Yes, I’ve touched it.

Although the undisputed winner of the most-talked-about product award at this year’s Macworld Expo is Apple’s new iPhone, it’s actually quite a rare commodity… I don’t have an exact count, but as far as I can tell there aren’t very many real iPhones out there in the world. (And since the iPhone is still six months away from its arrival, that’s not too surprising.) And it’s too bad… let me tell you with personal experience, it’s much more impressive when it’s in your hand—or more to the point, when your finger’s running across its multi-touch screen….

I can admit that I found it quite difficult to form complete sentences while I was holding the iPhone. In terms of sheer gadget magnetism, its power can not be overstated.

I’ve always wondered what my contestant-interview anecdote would be if I were ever a contestant on “Jeopardy!”. This one would make a pretty good one, I think.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

What a funny coincidence that celebrations of Apple’s 50th anniversary would hit the same month that the company introduced the MacBook Neo, a $599 laptop that has the potential to take the Mac to new heights.

The facts that Apple was founded in 1976 and the MacBook Neo exists in 2026 shouldn’t have anything in common but that they both involve a corporation called Apple. But that’s not right: Apple’s product philosophy is more continuous than you might imagine, and that string that starts with the Apple I ends, 50 years later, in a colorful new MacBook Neo.

Apple was born in a chaotic world. Dozens of personal computer companies were building early devices, and each of them was its own island with its own software running on custom hardware. New chips and new hardware innovations like floppy disk drives (did you know that the earliest Apple computers could only read data from audio cassettes?!) meant that as a computer company, you evolved rapidly or you died.

Most of them died, of course. But Apple didn’t, in part because it was always adopting the next big thing in order to survive. It was a mindset that I always connected to Steve Jobs, a man with absolutely zero sentimentality. Apple has always been a company that knows that it needs to move forward rapidly to survive.

This has been a factor that has remained in the corporate culture, to varying degrees of strength, for 50 years. It’s not that Apple doesn’t care about taking care of its customers—it’s managed three chip transitions and one operating system transition on the Mac while providing solid support over a transitional period.

One reason this culture got reinforced is that Apple has never been the dominant ecosystem player in any market it’s competed in. (The iPod was dominant, but not really much of an ecosystem.) When you’re dominant, like PCs driven by Microsoft’s DOS and Windows operating systems, the name of the game is compatibility. Once you’ve got the bulk of the market, it’s all about consolidation.

Over time, stability and compatibility became a major reason why Microsoft was so successful. Old Windows apps just kept running. Microsoft built an entire culture about supporting its enormous base of customers, many of whom were using ancient hardware and software.

The problem with that strategy is that it’s a really bad fit for times of great opportunity. As former Microsoft executive Steven Sinofsky wrote recently, Microsoft’s greatest strength suddenly became its greatest weakness. “The pull and push of forever compatibility was not just ‘Windows DNA,’ but it was the soul of what made Windows successful and was sacred.”

The funny thing is that Sinofsky wrote that in the context of praising the MacBook Neo, of all things. Here’s why: Apple has constantly upgraded its operating system and ecosystem, from drivers to APIs to apps to the chips that run them. It’s been able to drag its technology forward in ways Microsoft never could.

Part of that was embracing touch interfaces with the iPhone and iPad. It’s not that Microsoft didn’t have some great ideas about touch interfaces—some of the stuff it did was really cool!— but that in the end, its loyal customers pulled it backward into the abyss. The first touch-savvy version of Microsoft Office ran on the iPad. Microsoft’s own touch-friendly devices backslid to the old mouse-driven versions.

The crowning achievement of all this was Apple’s embrace of its own ARM-based chip architecture. Again, it’s not as if Microsoft and its chip partners didn’t see the strength that an Apple-style chip strategy might have. It’s that Microsoft’s customers just weren’t interested in losing compatibility with their enormous investment in Intel PCs, and Microsoft’s commitment to “run everything forever,” as Sinofsky calls it, hampered all attempts to see things differently.

In the other corner: Apple, which for the last five-plus years has been shipping Macs running ARM processors, on top of a version of macOS that spent the years running up to that transition by killing off compatibility with a lot of old software that would’ve made that transition a challenge.

This brings us to the MacBook Neo. It is the result of Apple being unafraid to break compatibility with 32-bit apps, with the old Carbon APIs, with Intel processors, the works. Part of the magic is that, as Mac users, we often don’t even notice when Apple does this, because it’s gotten pretty good at making it easy for us to migrate. (Software developers have had a harder time, often spending summers modifying their apps so that they still work when the new OS versions ship in the fall.)

50 years on, this is still Apple’s core approach: Don’t be afraid to change. Don’t be afraid to leave some old things behind. Not because change isn’t painful, because it often is. But because without change, without the ability to move forward, you’ll never be able to take advantage of new opportunities. And if you’re Apple, you’ll never be able to make a MacBook Neo.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple’s software struggles with understanding who the headline act is in a multiple-band lineup.

I’m sure it doesn’t help that the listings for these shows are a metadata mess, with the names listed in seemingly any order: the headliner might be at the top of a sign, at the bottom of a poster, or in a big font on the middle of a web page.

In any case, mixing up an opener for the headliner is a common mismatch in Apple Photos concert event tagging.

For the first example, in what will become a theme, getting the tagging right for Pixies concerts seems to be a chronic problem in my Photos library. In this case, Franz Ferdinand opened for them, but FF gets top billing according to Apple Photos.

Chris has the receipts, including plenty of pictures with incorrect captions. The problem isn’t limited to confusing headliners and openers: music festivals are incorrectly labelled as a single artist, concerts are confused with shows at nearby locations or even venues with multiple rooms, and photos taken on the same date are assumed to all be at the same event, even when they’re not.

I confess this is a feature I rarely think about because I don’t go to that many live concerts. Searching my Photos library (which you can do specifically for “concerts” to see the images it’s tagged) did find a correctly identified Guster concert from June 2023—though it doesn’t mention that they were playing with the Boston Symphony Orchestra—but the vast majority were wrong, including several pictures of the Relay 10 celebration in London in July 2024, which were identified as a “Liang Lawrence Concert.” (That concert appears to have taken place the same night at a nearby venue).

All of this certainly feels like a machine learning feature just making its best guesses based on the information available with no way to determine whether something is true or not, an all-too-common occurrence. Ultimately it’s just not doing it well enough to be—stop me if you’ve heard this one before—reliable or useful. To my mind, though, the real failing—as Chris points out—is that Apple doesn’t provide any way for you to fix this. You can’t manually re-tag or even simply remove the incorrect tag. That feels like a real oversight and turns this feature from half-baked to totally uncooked.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

This year saw our highest level of survey participation to-date, as well as our highest-ever level of engagement thus far with the low vision-specific questions.

Our survey results indicate that across almost all categories, satisfaction with Apple’s accessibility offerings for blind, deafblind, and low vision users decreased when compared to 2024.

For VoiceOver and Braille users, dissatisfaction with software quality and the presence of long-standing accessibility bugs were overarching themes throughout participant comments. For low vision users, participant comments show that Apple’s 2025 liquid glass user interface redesign had a significant negative impact on the user experience for many.

Overall, AppleVis readers gave Apple a B (3.7 out of 5). That score is down slightly from 2024’s 3.9. The survey asked readers’ opinions of VoiceOver, Braille and low-vision broken out by platform, along with scores for their overall impression of new accessibility features. Respondents also rated user experience with each OS platform and accessibility category.

iOS and iPadOS scored highest in most categories, including VoiceOver features, Braille features and low-vision features, with a 4.2 average for each. iOS and iPadOS user experience also netted 4.2 ratings.

AppleVis users believe Apple continues to struggle when it comes to fixing bugs in VoiceOver and Braille, giving the company a C – a 3.0 rating – in this category, which covers all platforms. Also at the bottom of the ratings were macOS VoiceOver user experience, with a 3.1, and three tvOS categories, which scored between 3.2 and 3.5. Low-vision features in tvOS took the greatest ratings tumble, from 2024, slipping from 4.1 to 3.2.

As usual for this survey, the comments section features a lot of strong opinions.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple’s software secret was this constant upgrading of the OS and the ecosystem (from drivers up). Microsoft’s secret was “run everything forever”. As is almost always the case in business and product development, your greatest strength (in any of the 4 Ps) becomes your greatest weakness. The pull and push of forever compatibility was not just “Windows DNA” but it was the soul of what made Windows successful and was sacred. But it was obvious then and now that it was the part that needed to change. 

This is absolutely right. It’s not that Microsoft didn’t know where it needed to go with Windows and PC designs—it absolutely did. For years, you could watch what it was doing and see it trying to push things forward—only to be dragged backward by its entire business being built on stability, legacy, and compatibility. The thing that made Windows so sticky also made it almost impossible to effect real change.

Apple, on the other hand, has never shied away from pushing compatibility changes and breaking old software and forcing users to new OS versions. That can be annoying, for sure, but it’s also gotten the Mac to where it is today, with Apple silicon in general and a product like the MacBook Neo in particular.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

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A powerful tool in the Finder arsenal is a simple checkbox: “Ignore ownership on this volume.” This option appears when you select any locally connected volume on your Mac that isn’t the startup volume and choose File: Get Info. Permissions controls who and, more importantly for this column, what can access data.

When you check the box, you override the normal permissions settings for a volume, which otherwise may restrict reading, writing, and viewing of folder contents to specific users or groups. Even if you’re the only user of your Mac, this can still cause problems, because your logged-in user doesn’t have permission to read and write everything.

While you can typically override a prohibited operation by entering your administrator password when prompted, that doesn’t always work. And any software that needs unattended access to a folder or volume can be denied, sometimes silently. I discovered a problem with this when Time Machine told me on my laptop that it couldn’t perform a backup to a Time Machine-designated folder on my Mac Studio’s external volume.¹

When I checked this external volume, it was marked as read-only. Using Get Info, I saw that the “Ignore ownership” checkbox had been… ignored! It was now unchecked. Permissions are divided into owners and groups, and the owner was system, which is a privileged user, and allowed Read & Write. One group was listed as wheel, which is a special group that system belongs to, and marked as “Read only.” The everyone group was also included, and also set to “Read only.”

Peculiar.

The Transmit is coming from inside the app

Looking at log data, the only clue appeared to be a lot of errors with Panic’s Transmit file-transfer app:

2026-02-27 08:55:06.561417-0800 0x1ed4930 Error 0x0 0 0 kernel: (Sandbox) System Policy: Transmit(16376) deny(1) file-read-xattr /Volumes/EvoLution 8TB/.Spotlight-V100

It looked like Transmit couldn’t read a number of files on the external volume in question during some routine operation. I had a tab open in Transmit passively displaying that volume’s contents, as I had downloaded a remote file to a folder on it. Apparently, Transmit polls local volumes in the background to check contents.

The answer was found in macOS’s app privacy controls, which prevent apps without permission from accessing all kinds of data, organized into categories in System Settings: Privacy & Security. I’d recently updated Transmit, and this apparently reset access in the Full Disk Access section of Privacy & Security, even though I know I had previously granted access.

Another clue was in the /var/db/volinfo.database file, which I didn’t know existed before researching this problem. This file contains a list of volumes by their Volume UUID (Universally Unique Identifier), which is how macOS ensures that two identically named volumes don’t conflict, as they have unique IDs at the system level. A 00000001 indicates permission is not ignored; a 00000000 means it is ignored!

You can find this datum most easily in Disk Utility: select the volume, then click Info. Under “File system UUID,” you’ll see the number. This may be a short string of hexadecimal (base 16) digits for an HFS+ or Apple RAID volume, or a long one for APFS volumes. For instance, one APFS volume I was having trouble with has the UUID 92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2.

The volinfo.database file isn’t updated when “Ignore ownership” changes; instead, it’s appended. Only the last state is referenced at startup, but it’s a strange way to manage this file. When I examine it, I can see the thrashing of the ownership state:

92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000001
92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000000
92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000001
92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000000
92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000001
92EA5511-1DD7-3881-84B9-ED0637645FC2: 00000000

When I looked at the Full Disk Access panel, sure enough, Transmit was disabled. I enabled it and expected to now be rewarded with the read-only status no longer mysteriously appearing.

Sadly, it wasn’t that easy.

A double negative proves to be positive

The next day, the volume is back to read-only. This time, however, I notice that, even though there’s no datestamp in the volinfo.database file, it updates whenever it’s modified. So, using ls -l /var/db/volinfo.database in Terminal, I could see that at 11 p.m., it changed back to read-only. After a little bit of contemplating what might be running at that time, I realized it was Bombich Software’s Carbon Copy Cloner.

While I use Time Machine and Backblaze, I also perform a clone of my startup volume using CCC as extra duct tape on top of my suspenders and belt.

I looked through CCC’s settings and found “Don’t preserve permissions” under Troubleshooting Settings. That certainly seemed like it could be the issue. I also found that I could use a Postflight option to set a shell (or bash) script that could run after the clone update was complete.

#!/bin/bash
sleep 5
vsdbutil -a /Volumes/EvoLution\ 8TB
mount -u -o noowners /Volumes/EvoLution\ 8TB

That script uses the vsdbutil utility to restore the volume’s status to the correct value. And then the mount operation reloads permissions in place. It worked!

But in the meantime, I sent an email to Bombich and heard back from the eponymous Mike Bombich, who said that I had created a backup job that had a conflict: CCC has to enable specific ownership (not “ignore”) on the volume it’s writing to because I was backing up a startup volume. Without ownership enabled, a full restore wouldn’t work. The issue of “preserving permissions” is about the permissions on the source volume, not the destination volume.

The short answer was that I needed to check the “Don’t preserve permissions” box after enabling “Ignore ownership” on the external volume to prevent the external volume from becoming read-only. I don’t know why this just started to crop up, but this is clearly the issue.

Mike also helpfully noted that my backup wasn’t restorable for a variety of reasons, and I’d be better off repartitioning my striped RAID external drive to create a standalone APFS volume that CCC could clone directly to. Mike’s been at this a long time!

For further reading

If you’d like to learn more about using commands in the Terminal app, I’ll be darned, but Joe Kissell has a freshly updated book on the topic, Take Control of the Mac Command Line with Terminal, revised January of this year.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

One way to celebrate your company’s upcoming 50th anniversary: the release of a product update nobody had on their bingo card.

Apple on Monday announced AirPods Max 2, the successor to its high-end over-the-ear headphones. The new models use the H2 chip found in Apple’s AirPods Pro 3 and AirPods 4 line, getting many of the same benefits, including Adaptive Audio, Conversation Awareness, and Live Translation. They come in the same colors as the most recent model of AirPods Max—midnight, starlight, orange, purple, and blue—and continue to come with the same Smart Case as the original model.

Apple says the improved Active Noise Cancelling is 1.5x more effective than the previous version, due to the H2 chip and improved algorithms. There’s also a new high dynamic range amplifier, which Apple claims will provide even cleaner audio, improved latency to help gaming performance, and the ability to use Siri Interactions, nodding or shaking your head to give feedback to the virtual assistant.

The company’s also aiming the Max 2 at music creators, by pointing out that, with the USB-C cable, they can create and mix their music in Personalized Spatial Audio with head tracking.

This update’s been a long time coming—so long, in fact, that many had given up believing it ever would. The original AirPods Max debuted in December 2020, and then received only a meager update in September 2024, swapping out the original model’s Lightning connector for a USB-C port.

I did note one interesting details while perusing the comparison page between AirPods Max and AirPods Max 2: while Apple says that the 20 hours of listening time with ANC enabled remains constant from the previous model to this one, it has declined to provide a similar benchmark for movie playback, as it did for the last generation of AirPods Max. Likewise, the previous generation cited 5 minutes of charge time providing 1.5 hours of listening time, a stat that is not listed for the AirPods Max 2. I’ve reached out to Apple to ask if there are comparable stats available and will update this story if I get a response.

One thing that hasn’t changed? The AirPods Max 2’s price tag of $549. They’ll go on sale next Wednesday, March 25, and arrive early next month.

Every year we make an original design and offer it exclusively to Six Colors members. Then sometime the next year, we make it available for everyone. I’m happy to announce that our shirt from last year is now available for everyone.

This one is a winner. I call it “The Ascent of iPhone,” and it tracks from the original iPhone all the way to the Cosmic Orange iPhone 17 Pro. John Moltz outdid himself with this design.

Also available, anytime:

• The classic Six Colors logo
• Last year’s Six Colors, Six Macs — still a fantastic design
• A bunch of variations of these with hats and tote bags are also available

And numerous other things from Six Colors and The Incomparable are available on demand at our Cotton Bureau store.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

I said in my review that the Neo embarrasses an entire class of affordable Windows laptops, but further embarrassment awaits these companies if they have nothing to answer it with. I hope they’re already working on that next generation of laptops that will actually compete at $600. And I really hope companies like Asus, Microsoft, Dell, HP, Acer, Samsung, and MSI have an actual understanding of what makes their new competition so good, and what it can do for a whole lot less than current Windows-based offerings. I reached out to all these companies, and the answers I’ve received so far are expectedly milquetoast.

I don’t know how this is all going to go, but it does feel like PC makers are going to have to up their game or they’re going to get run over by Apple’s entry into this price segment.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

The MacBook Neo gets rave reviews, Apple ponders its mortality, and then we’re on to the next thing.

Why do you keep hitting yourself?

The reviews of the hardware Apple announced last week are in and would you be surprised to learn that the new iPads and MacBooks are faster than their predecessors? Huge, if true. Reviewers also spoke highly of the iPhone 17e.

Of course, the MacBook Neo was the big news and it looks like Apple may have another hit on its hands.

The Verge says “PC makers are not ready for the MacBook Neo”.

…the Neo embarrasses an entire class of affordable Windows laptops, but further embarrassment awaits these companies if they have nothing to answer it with.

But can you run games on it?

Yes!

Sort of.

Define “run”.

Cyberpunk 2077, for instance, only ran well with all settings set to the lowest possible and at 720p, while Minecraft ran between 50 and 300 fps at 1080p, depending on the presets.

The thing is, running games is not really what it’s for. It’s for email and web browsing and “average” tasks which is to say the tasks people do most often. Honestly, when was the last time you heard of someone playing games on their Mac? It happens, but it just doesn’t happen that much. And yet the company continues to sell a ton of Macs.

As The Verge notes, if you’re a maker of PC gaming laptops, you don’t have anything to worry about with the Neo. But if you make cheaper, consumer-level laptops it’s…

…about making affordable laptops that don’t feel like a punishment to use…

Indeed.

You don’t have to be one of the crazy ones to work here, but it sure helps!

If that’s not a sign over someone’s desk at Apple, it should be.

This week Tim Cook marked the company’s 50th anniversary with “50 Years of Thinking Different” in which he name drops the company’s marquee products over the years: the Mac, the iPod, the iPhone, the Apple Watch, the Pippin, the Apple Adjustable Keyboard, the Bob Mansfield Experience Interactive DVD set… the list goes on. Strangely, Tim neglected at any point to recall that time the company pushed a U2 album onto all our phones. And somewhere Bono suddenly felt sad, though he did not know why.

In closing, Cook quoted the classic Apple “Think Different” ad run of the late 1990s.

So here’s to the crazy ones.

The misfits.

The rebels.

The troublemakers.

The round pegs in the square holes.

The square pegs in the Oval… Office… standing there looking uncomfortable while the president of the United States fields questions about his close, personal ties to a pedophile.

I think they must have cut that line from the ad.

Apple also said it would further mark the milestone in the coming days.

In the coming weeks, Apple and its global community will celebrate the company’s 50th anniversary…

You WILL celebrate it. And you’ll like it.

Hey, suits me fine. I already had a whole dance routine picked out. They couldn’t stop me if they tried.

Further updates as this situation unfolds

The company may have just delivered the much-rumored “cheap” MacBook but the Apple rumor mill, like the tides, waits for no one.

(It also smells a bit when it’s low.)

ON TO THE NEXT THING! TIME’S A-WASTIN’!

“New iPhone Fold details include rumored RAM, storage, and pricing”

The new device will feature 12GB of RAM, start with 256GB of storage, and will be priced starting at $1,999.

Let’s go back to those reviews of the iPhone 17e again. They were good, you said?

In order to accommodate the new form factor, Apple will also be making some software changes.

“iPhone Fold to Feature iPad-Style Multitasking and Layouts”

…the UI will have an iPad-like layout that supports multitasking with two apps side-by-side.

You know what else runs two apps side by side? The $599 MacBook Neo. For the price of the iPhone Fold you could get three and one thirds MacBook Neos and run six and two-thirds apps side by side.

This is just math, people! Do the math!

A funny thing happened when Apple stopped making external displays for Macs: The competition did not rush in to steal Apple’s thunder. It was almost like Apple had itself invalidated the entire category.

But after Apple shipped the Studio Display in 2022, the competition seemed to heat back up. It’s almost as if the opportunity to compete with Apple (and undercut it on price) was enough of a motivation to get in the game. Today, there aren’t a ton of displays that have Mac-appropriate screen resolutions out there, but there are far more than there were back in 2021. If you’ve bought a Mac-friendly display that wasn’t made by Apple in the last four years, you probably owe thanks to the Studio Display anyway.

Now here’s the successor to the 2022 Apple Studio Display… the 2026 Apple Studio Display. While it does offer a few improvements over its predecessor, perhaps the most important thing about it is that it remains a product in Apple’s line-up—and provides a target for other display makers to outdo.

A mildly upgraded display

As someone who owns two of the 2022-vintage Apple Studio Displays, it’s hard for me to say that the new model is very different. It looks the same, and the most important feature of the product—the 5K LCD panel—seems to be the same.

This is not to say it isn’t a good panel. It is. It’s not going to offer the peak brightness, HDR features, and refresh rate of fancier displays (including the displays on MacBook Pros), but a lot of users don’t need those features. I never miss ProMotion when I’m sitting in front of a Studio Display, for instance.

But it’s also almost the same panel that debuted with the 5K iMac more than a decade ago. I guess this shows that displays can remain viable for a very long time, but Apple has shown no interest in upgrading the Studio Display to improve it in any of the ways it’s improved the stock display on a MacBook Pro.

Apple has upgraded the most controversial component in the original Studio Display: Its 12-megapixel Center Stage camera, which didn’t look great in low light and many other situations because pretty much every image that came out of it had to be cropped. The new camera is still 12 megapixels, but Apple says it has larger pixels and a wider aperture—and in head-to-head comparisons, yes, it looks much better.

Thunderbolt support on the new models has been upgraded to Thunderbolt 5, which is probably only relevant if you’re daisy-chaining multiple devices together. The fact that you can daisy-chain devices is because of what might be the single biggest upgrade to the display: a second Thunderbolt port. So if you want to run two Studio Displays, you can plug a computer into one, and then run a cable from that one to the other one. (I did this with my old Studio Display and the new one, and it worked like a charm.)

The whole thing is powered by an A19 chip, which is an upgrade from the A13 in the older model… However, these chips are really irrelevant when it comes to the user. Apple’s reaching into its existing bin of parts to build these devices, but they don’t really take advantage of the computing power, nor do they get in the way of you using them as dumb displays. (It is something to think that the Studio Display has more computing power and memory than a MacBook Neo… and yet you can’t do anything with that. Wouldn’t it be nice if it did something, like maybe offer an Apple TV mode so you could watch videos on it without needing to attach a Mac?)

Does it make sense?

These are meager upgrades that allow Apple to keep the Studio Display on the price list for years to come, but don’t really advance it in many meaningful ways. If you’ve already got a Studio Display, there’s no real reason to upgrade it to this model. And at $1599, it’s not a very good buy if you’re willing to shop around and buy a non-Apple monitor.

The Asus ProArt Display PA27JCV lists for $799, and I found it on sale at Amazon for $729. It’s a 5K 27-inch display with an adjustable screen and Mac-friendly controls. Is it as nice as Apple’s display? Almost certainly not, but it’s also half the price.

So if Asus will sell you a pretty nice 5K 27-inch display for half of what Apple is charging, why does the Studio Display exist?

I think it exists because some people really don’t want to shop around and like the fact that Apple makes products that really integrate nicely with other Apple products. If you’re at the Apple Store (in person or online) and buy a new Mac, you can add a Studio Display right then and there. Some people aren’t really interested in shopping around and saving money. And yes, Apple’s fit and finish will almost always be better than the competition: I considered buying an LG UltraFine display instead of a Studio Display and decided I’d rather pay a small premium to get the really nice Apple display. (Then again, the UltraFine didn’t cost half of the Studio Display back then.)

Anyway, the Studio Display is nice. But it feels like it should be better, or cheaper, or both. But it’s neither. I have bought two, and I still like them. But if I needed to buy a new display right now, I’d look at other options.

Take a stand… please

Apple claims it’s a champion of accessibility. But in my opinion, part of accessibility is ergonomics. Different people need displays at different heights, and we are all shaped differently. Apple’s continued insistence on shipping displays and iMacs that aren’t height-adjustable by default is frustrating. You spend all this money on a pricey Apple display and then, what, put it on an old dictionary? Meanwhile, even the cut-rate competition offers height adjustments.

The review unit Studio Display Apple sent me came with the height-adjustable display, and it’s glorious. That thing is a smooth, pivoting marvel of mechanical engineering, and Apple should be proud of how nice it feels to use. But it’s essentially a failure, because it adds $400 to the price of the already-expensive display. Apple should be working to engineer affordable ergonomic features on its displays and iMacs, not building luxury stands that make an $800 display cost $2000.

If Apple wants to charge users more for a smooth, luxury display stand, who am I to stop them? But basic height adjustment should be built in, period.

A lukewarm take

Apple addressed the biggest issue with the Studio Display by swapping in a new webcam that looks a lot better than the one in the old model. That’s great. What the company didn’t address is the fact that the Studio Display felt like it was selling outmoded display technology for a cutting-edge price—and it still does.

If you want to buy a Studio Display because you love the Apple aesthetic or because it’s just convenient to do so, I can’t stop you. But anyone willing to put up with non-Apple annoyances in order to save more than the cost of a MacBook Neo might want to shop around. As for me, I hope the next Studio Display update is more meaningful than this tepid set of improvements.

Thanks for being a Six Colors subscriber!

At Apple, we’re more focused on building tomorrow than remembering yesterday. But we couldn’t let this milestone pass without thanking the millions of people who make Apple what it is today — our incredible teams around the world, our developer community, and every customer who has joined us on this journey. Your ideas inspire our work. Your trust drives us to do better. Your stories remind us of all we can accomplish when we think different.

If you’ve taught us anything, it’s that the people crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.

So here’s to the crazy ones.

There’s been a lot of speculation of how Apple would mark the anniversary, which has also been recognized with David Pogue’s recent book and an event, last night, at the Computer History Museum that featured several notable Apple figures.

Cook had earlier said that the company had to “build a new muscle” for looking back, something that Apple isn’t exactly known for. The company also announced in a separate press release that it would be celebrating the anniversary over the coming weeks, though it didn’t share any further details.

While this is a notable milestone for the company, it’s a shame that it comes at a time when Apple’s reputation—and particularly its relationship with those vaunted values—is feeling marred by its close association with the current United States administration.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Kourage Kundahl, writing for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum:

Among the artifacts recently accessioned into the Museum’s permanent collection is an authenticated iPhone 17 Pro used during an Apple TV broadcast of Friday Night Baseball. The Sept. 26, 2025 matchup between the Boston Red Sox and Detroit Tigers incorporated live game footage from four devices, marking the first use of an iPhone as a primary camera in a professional sports broadcast.

Apple integrated iPhones into its last couple of baseball broadcasts last year, and it’s only appropriate that it would donate one of them to the Hall of Fame’s collection. (Please note: Lots of things are in the Hall of Fame Museum’s collection, and it does not make them “hall of famers,” though technically you could say that an iPhone 17 Pro is now in the Hall of Fame. Probably more than one right now, given all the people who work there.)

In non-coincidentally related news, Apple announced the first half of its Friday Night Baseball schedule on Wednesday, marking the fifth year that Apple will be streaming two MLB games to 60 different countries and regions, exclusively on Apple TV. Apple says that iPhones “will be further integrated into the broadcast camera lineup for select games” this season.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

While planning for a week on vacation, two things happened that totally derailed me. The Wall Street Journal asked me to review David Pogue’s book “Apple: The First 50 Years,” which pretty much wrapped up most of my beach reading. The book is long!

And then there was the text message I got from John, who claimed to be a contestant producer for Jeopardy!

In early 2023, after many years of curiosity, I took the venerable quiz show’s “anytime test” on the Web. I had no idea how I did, though I was sure I got a few wrong. Anyway, it was fun! My in-laws have been watching Jeopardy! religiously forever, and they turned me into a regular viewer. Despite being a bit game-show obsessive as a kid, being on a game show was never part of my plan. I liked the challenge of the anytime test, though.

A few weeks later, I got an email from Jeopardy! asking me to take the test again—this time with a group on Zoom, cameras on, presumably so they could watch us take the test and make sure we had passed it without any assistance.

And a few weeks after that, in June 2023, I got the call: Appear on Zoom to play a sample game with a bunch of other potential players. At this point, they told us that we had all qualified for Jeopardy!—the Zoom call was really so the producers of the show could see us and hear us playing the game.

It makes sense. Jeopardy! is a TV show, and that Zoom call was essentially a casting session. Maybe 100,000 people apply to be on Jeopardy! and only a tiny group qualify, but there are a minuscule number of slots on the actual show. Jeopardy! producers really do want the show to reflect a cross-section of North America, and the casting process helps ensure they get the right contestant mix, week in, week out.

Two and a half years passed. After a year, I assumed I was not going to make it on Jeopardy! and stopped watching every episode with a clicky pen standing in for the Jeopardy! buzzer. Ah well, it was a fun idea while it lasted.

And that’s when John texted me. His phone number was from the correct area code, and when I did a web search, I found a podcast transcript that also described getting a text from John. (I had expected a phone call, which led to an exciting moment not too long after my audition—I got a 90-second voicemail from the 310 area code. It was, of all things, a fax machine.)

I checked in with Dan Moren, who played Jeopardy last year, and he confirmed that he knew John. So I texted him back, and then we talked on the phone, which is when I got “the call”—I was going to be on Jeopardy! in one month. (And yes, future contestants searching to find out if John Barra is a real person who might text you about being on Jeopardy!—he is.)

My vacation reading suddenly consisted entirely of David Pogue’s book and trivia-themed children’s books. (That’s a pro tip from Ken Jennings himself: Children’s books are very high-density on facts. Good for trivia studying.)

So here we are: Six Colors now has three Jeopardy! players as contributors. I can’t say anything about what went down in early February in Culver City (though I can reveal that Ken had fish tacos after), but I can echo Dan’s comments about the experience: The other contestants were wonderful, and the Jeopardy! staff was supportive above and beyond the call of duty. It was a surreal experience to essentially step inside the television and play the game, for real, in front of a live studio audience. I am adding it to the memory bank of amazing experiences I never really expected I would have in my life.

So please tune into Jeopardy!—either on your local station, or the next day on Hulu or Peacock! (That’s a new development.) My good friends from the Jeopardy! contestant green room will be competing the entire week of March 16, and you can tune in to see me on Thursday, March 19.

When all is said and done, I’ll break down what happened on The Incomparable and Upgrade and, who are we kidding, the Six Colors podcast, too.

I don’t know what else 2026 has in store for me, but it’s already been a very interesting few months.

Go to the podcast page.

On Thursday, March 12, we will be on Zoom answering your questions and chatting about anything and everything you want. What surprised in this round of announcements? How does the MacBook Neo compare with the MacBook Air? Prepare your questions and comments!

We’ll be on Zoom for an hour beginning at 9 AM Pacific, noon Eastern. Join us! (If you can’t, of course, we’ll post the video afterward.)

Once again that’s Thursday, March 12:

🌁 – 9 AM Pacific
⛰️ – 10 AM Mountain
🌽 – 11 AM Central
🗽 – Noon Eastern
🇬🇧 – 4 PM in the UK we’re pretty sure, it’s confusing right now
🇪🇺 – 5 PM CET
🤖 – 1773331225 if you are a robot (Thanks for vacuuming!)

You can join using this link—don’t spread it around, it’s just for Backstage members!

If there are topics you’d like us to cover, check in to the Six Colors Members Discord (it’s fun!) and suggest them in the velvet-roped #backstage-hangout channel.

And thanks again for your support!

With the M5 generation, the MacBook Air finds itself in an unfamiliar, though not unprecedented, position: that of the middle sibling.

Previously Apple’s most affordable laptop, the Air has been undercut in that department by the new MacBook Neo, social media darling and—if you’ll pardon the expression—apple of its parents’ eye. Not since the polycarbonate MacBook’s retirement in 2011 has there been a notebook in Apple’s lineup with a lower price point than the MacBook Air, and it’s gotten used to that status, which led it to its long-running and, for the moment still undisputed, title as Apple’s best-selling Mac.

But with the eye-catching Neo now substantially undercutting the Air’s base price (itself now slightly higher than previously), and the MacBook Pro family bringing unmatched performance, what’s the MacBook Air’s role in the modern Mac lineup? Though it might seem like the Air is on the brink of an identity crisis, the truth is that, in the way of middle children since time immemorial, the MacBook Air is all about getting its job done without fanfare.

Performance, no anxiety

Though it may not boast the sheer power of the MacBook Pro, the Air, like the rest of its M5 siblings, does feature those newly rechristened “super” cores, of which it features four, in addition to six efficiency cores (none of those newfangled “performance” cores like the M5 MacBook Pro). There’s also the 16-core Neural Engine, as well as either 8 or 10 of the improved GPU cores with their Neural Accelerators.

Of course, we’ve had an idea of the ballpark of M5 performance since last fall’s first slew of products using the latest chip generation, and there’s little surprising here: just the usual generation-over-generation bump, in this case of about 11 percent in both single and multicore performance over the M4 Air. GPU saw more measurable improvement in the M5 Air, with about 31 percent better performance on average. In keeping with previous generations, the MacBook Pros, with their active cooling systems, eke a bit more performance out of those individual cores—but just a bit.

As ever, there’s little reason to upgrade from the immediately previous models—the difference between the M4 and M5 is negligible for most users. But those small improvements do add up: go back to the M3, M2, M1, and you’re talking jumps in the 38 percent, 57 percent, and 75 percent range for single-core performance. I only just replaced an M1 Air with an M4 model last year¹, and it’s a testament to Apple’s engineering how good that first generation of Apple silicon still is, almost six years later.

Memory options are constant with the previous generation, starting at 16GB standard, with options for 24GB or 32GB on the 10-core GPU models. However, memory bandwidth is up to 153GB/s, a bump from the 120GB/s on the M4 Air, even if it’s only half the bandwidth of the higher-end MacBook Pro models.

One place you will find a noticeable bump is in storage. The Air now starts at 512GB of SSD storage, double that of its predecessor, and offers up to 4TB, the same maximum as all but the M5 Max-configured MacBook Pros. That capacity increase comes with a speed improvement as well: Apple says the new SSDs are twice as fast as the previous generation and my tests concur. Compared to my personal M4 MacBook Air, the M5 registered read speed improvements of 125 percent, and an extraordinary 219 percent improvement in write speed, according to Blackmagic’s disk tests. So impressive were those numbers, I ran AmorphousDiskMark as a comparison and came away with somewhat lesser, but still outstanding gains up to 139 percent.

I ran an informal test copying a 29GB Final Cut Pro project from an external SSD to both machines, and the M5 was about 30 percent faster. It picked up a more meager 13 percent improvement in compressing that same project, though there are other factors at play there beyond sheer disk speeds. In short, your disk speed is probably not going to be your performance bottleneck here.

Apple’s also updated the wireless in this model via its in-house N1 chip, which first debuted last fall across several product lines. That means support for Wi-Fi 7 (aka 802.11be) and Bluetooth 6, neither of which I have an easy method to test, given my downright decrepit Wi-Fi 6 home network, but it’s perhaps more significant in that we will surely see N2 and N3 chips down the line, ensuring prompt and efficient support for the latest and greatest wireless technologies. And since, as with the M and A series chips, this is Apple’s own effort, the company’s penchant for control comes with a promise to make networking ever more integrated and power efficient.

Still lacking in any of Apple’s laptops, however, are cellular options, all the more apparent as the company touts its C1X modem in recently released iPhones and iPads. Might that finally find its way into a future MacBook? Maybe, but it’s not happening here.

The devil’s in the details

So much is the same with the M5 MacBook Air—the screen, the ports, the webcam, the mic and speakers, the very form factor itself—that it’s all the more significant when this year’s model does deviate from its predecessor. Two small examples caught my attention this time around.

The first, which surprised me, is the keyboard. Gone, in this generation (including the new MacBook Pros), are several keys’ text labels: tab, caps lock, return, shift, and delete. In each case, they’ve been replaced by glyphs, of the same kind long used for keyboard shortcuts in drop-down menus.

If you’re sitting there thinking “Wait, what do you mean—it’s been that way forever?” then congratulations, you’re probably outside the United States. The U.S. has remained an outlier even as the rest of Apple’s international keyboard layouts use this near universally agreed-upon standard.² This standardizes this style across Apple’s laptops (and probably soon its standalone keyboards as well), while also bringing them into line with iOS and iPadOS keyboards, which now use the same symbols (and, in some cases, have for a very long time). Labels are not totally gone, though: the Air’s keyboard still sports text on the function, control, option, and command keyboards, alongside their long-used symbols.

The second thing that I noticed was that Apple is now shipping a new power adapter with the M5 Air. Previously, the company included either a 30W adapter for the base model or a 35W adapter with 2 USB-C ports. With this model, we’re back to a single port “Dynamic Power Adapter” that is rated for 40W with a maximum of 60W. It’s a little smaller than the old dual port design—and, interestingly, lacks the standard holes on the prongs that you find on most plugs, which can add some degree of stability to the connection—but can handle fast charging with the iPhone 17, 17 Pro, and Air, as well as the 11-inch and 13-inch M5 iPad Pro models. Honestly, I’ll miss the convenience of the second USB-C port, though that adapter model is still available for purchase separately from Apple.

Air to the empire

Like the M4, the M3, the M2, and even the M1 before it, the MacBook Air remains what it’s long been—even going back to the days before Apple silicon: the best Mac for most people.

Once upon a time, the MacBook Air may have been the newest and flashiest of Apple’s laptops, whether it was being plucked from a manila envelope on stage or compared to the thickness of a pencil. But nothing stays new and flashy forever.³ After 18 years, the Air isn’t a kid anymore, and that’s okay. Squeezing between the Neo and the Pro means there’s room for the Air to chart its own course. The pressure of being the cheapest MacBook is off—all too clearly, given the $1099 base price in this generation. Apple may very well try to get that back under a thousand in the future, but for now it’s okay, because if price is your main factor, you now have a far better option.

The Air remains a truly great Mac. Those who butt up against the limitations of the Neo will be more than comfortable here: after all, it’s unquestionably better than the Neo in pretty much every way—with the exception of its color options. There’s a clear value proposition with the Air: pay more to get more. And that higher cost is reasonable for what you get, especially when you compare the starting prices of the MacBook Pro.

The Neo may vie for the title of Apple’s bestselling Mac, but it’s got its work cut out for it: the crown remains the MacBook Air’s to lose and if you come at the king, you better not miss.

Updated on March 10 at 4:37pm Eastern: An earlier version of this article had incorrect percentages for the performance gains in the SSD tests.