Go to the podcast page.

Strategery was always one of our very favorite games in the early days of iOS. And by “we,” I mean large portions of the staff at Macworld, including both myself and Lex Friedman. Lex reviewed the app for Macworld, and we even gave it an award. It was a Hall of Fame iPhone game.

Strategery—named for Will Ferrell’s made-up word during his impression of George W. Bush—was a take on the classic strategy board game Risk. Risk is a clunky game to play, with an awful lot of little plastic pieces and dice rolling. Strategery did away with that, resolving battles with a single tap while replacing the map-inspired board with a series of procedurally generated game terrains. It was really great.

Now the bad news: The classic Strategery game, which hasn’t been updated for nearly a decade, doesn’t work on iOS 27, which (if you hadn’t noticed) came out today. I hate it when beloved software dies. And so does Lex, which is why he sprang into action and began building a game that could be a suitable Strategery replacement. (It was very good! I have played it a bunch over the last few weeks, via TestFlight.)

But then something delightful happened, as Lex recounts:

I loved Strategery. I didn’t feel good about knocking it off. So I reached out to the developers…. I had several delightful video conversations with Sumul and Courtland. And I lucked out: I found two of the nicest developers you could ever hope to meet. They still felt a ton of love for Strategery, they loved how many people still felt warmly about the game — but they didn’t have time to devote to keeping it updated. We worked out a deal for me to take it on.

The result is that Lex’s game inspired by Strategery has become Strategery! Existing Strategery users will just get it as a free update. And new players can buy it for $5.

Lex has added a few new features to Strategery, and with the consultation of the original developers, he’s restored some features he hadn’t even realized that he had missed.

What a happy ending. Strategery would always have a place in App Valhalla, but it’s even better if it remains alive and well. Thanks, Lex.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

By now you’ve probably heard the promise of iOS 27: it’s a Snow Leopard-like year where Apple spent a lot of time not on big marquee features, but on smaller fixes and enhancements throughout the operating system. And that’s largely true—and largely to the benefit of the platform—but it’s also not the whole story. Because there is, of course, at least one major feature that comes to iOS 27 (and Apple’s other platforms) this year, and it’s a doozy: Siri AI.

The result is an OS that feels like a marked improvement over its predecessor, in everything from design to performance to capabilities. That’s not to say there isn’t still room for improvement—software is a living thing, and those of us who have been using it throughout the beta period this summer can attest to the fact that Apple is constantly at work trying to refine its experiences.

The promise of iOS 27 is that it’ll not only unlock new capabilities but also make your existing workflows smoother and quicker. That’s not a bad proposition for the device that many of us carry more than any other—as long as it can deliver.

Siri & AI: Two okay tastes that taste great together?

The call for Apple to do a major overhaul of Siri has existed almost as long as Siri as existed. Heck, I wrote a story about it back in 2015, more than a decade ago and only four years after the first version of Siri debuted. But even as competitors emerged and Siri moved to more Apple platforms, the voice assistant improved only in relatively small, targeted ways—a testament, perhaps, to the limitations of its underlying technology. With the recent rise of chatbots backed by large language models, it quickly became apparent how much Siri had fallen behind, and so drastic measures were necessary to bring it up to speed.

The good news is that Siri AI is capable: impressively so, at times. In the lowest of low bars, it certainly beats the pants off the previous incarnation of Siri, but its access to your own personal data and all of the apps on your phone also unlocks a host of new possibilities.

But it’s also not without the pitfalls that underlie all LLM-powered chatbots: errors in understanding, hallucinations, and so on. Perhaps the biggest challenge of Siri AI will be getting people who have written off Siri as a limited feature, only to be used for trusted tasks—setting timers, checking the weather, playing music—to be more ambitious about what they ask the assistant.

New Siri is integrated throughout iOS, whether you access it via the traditional press-and-hold of the side button or by saying the wake word, or in its new home integrated with the Spotlight search when you swipe down on the home screen. That last interface is available systemwide, in any app, by swiping down from the center of the top of the screen. The search interface has a new look too: a black liquid glass bubble with silver overtones. You can ask Siri questions by voice, or by simply typing to it.

There’s also a new standalone Siri app that stores all your conversations (with some exceptions). The app itself is pretty barebones, letting you view those conversations in List or Grid layouts, select multiple conversations to delete them, and pin or rename any single conversation. In Settings : Siri, you can choose to either open to the overview or to a new conversation and decide whether old conversations are kept for 30 days, 1 year, or forever. It’s a little strange that one-off queries (“What’s the average height of the Norwegian World Cup team?”) are stored alongside more involved conversations (“Can you help me build a specific RSS feed for this site?”); I also tend to end up with a few orphan blank “New conversation” and “New photo” entries, but it’d be nice if you could filter to find those. Conversations are fully searchable and sync between devices via iCloud.

I’ve had a couple of real “wow” moments with the feature in the months that I’ve spent with the beta. For example, early on I was on a rare long solo car trip when I realized that I wanted to listen to a specific episode of a podcast. This wasn’t a podcast that I listen to regularly or even subscribe to, and to make matters more challenging, it was an older episode. Hard enough to find in the Podcasts app when you’re not driving down the highway, but something I would never have even attempted with old Siri. But hey, now’s the time to give it a shot, so I asked Siri AI, via CarPlay, to play the episode of “The Rest is History” about the American Revolution.

After a moment of chugging—like most of those AIs, the process isn’t exactly fast—Siri came back to report that it had found one episode of the podcast about the American Revolution. “Play that,” I said…and it did. No need to specify the precise title of the episode, which I certainly would not have remembered from earlier in our conversation.

Moments like that make me feel like a Star-Trek-computer-like voice interface is here now. In large part because it does leverage the great strength of Apple’s AI implementation (and I’m not going to spend the time dithering about models and distillation and all that jazz, because the question to me is how do people use it and how does it work). But that strength is that the AI isn’t siloed off in its own website or app, but on your device with all the information that entails.

The same went for when I asked it about the date for a pool party my wife had texted me about, and who would be there. (It even correctly identified an attendee with an ambiguous name based on proximity to their partner’s name.) And when I was viewing a webpage with an upcoming flight that I asked it to add to my calendar. It was also able to identify a movie from an image in a brochure for a local movie theater, give me the performance of the Red Sox over their last ten games¹, and help me figure out which model of IKEA curtain rods I was dealing with. None of them things that I would have even thought about using Siri for prior to this incarnation.

And because of Apple’s integration, your Siri AI experience works right via your AirPods. As I was walking down a hill near my house, I found myself wondering how far away the downtown skyscraper I could see was. Without even pulling out my phone, I asked Siri via my AirPods. After a moment, it gave me back an answer, but I realized it had plotted directions, so I replied “How about as the crow flies?” and it not only understood me, but gave me back a reasonable-sounding answer. And even better, it was completely correct.

Unfortunately, not every moment is like that. Like any LLM-based chatbot, Siri AI sometimes misunderstands or gives confidently wrong answers. For example, when I asked it about when my neighbor said they’d be back from vacation, it found the relevant text message but said that no return date had been mentioned, despite the fact that it was right there in the message. I took a screenshot and asked it to add a bunch of listed panels that I was speaking on to my calendar, and it added only one of them, at the wrong time and in the wrong timezone.² Sometimes it mishears things, as the time I was using my AirPods to tell my wife I was walking past Dunkin’, and it asked me if I meant Duncan.

It’s at times unsettling to realize this is the new normal for dealing with computers in 2026. Is that better or worse than having old Siri’s frequent habit of shrugging at things it simply couldn’t do? I’m not sure that’s an easy qualitative call. In the end, it’s a mode shift: a different experience of how we interact with our voice assistants and chatbots, and we’ll have to see how people adapt.

All of that said, one thing I do appreciate about Siri AI’s implementation is that Apple has done a good job of, for the most part, making sure that the traditional things that Siri has always been good at—setting timers, playing media, adding reminders, controlling smart home accessories, and so on—are, in my experience, no worse than under old Siri. From what I can tell, Siri is mediating these requests and handling those things locally rather than handing them off to the cloud. That also means not every request to turn on lights or play your podcast gets logged into the Siri app as a separate conversation, which is I think the right approach: I certainly don’t need to save a dozen conversations where I’m setting my five-minute tea timer.

In general, I’m bullish on the future of this new enhanced Siri, and fascinated to see what happens as it rolls out to more and more users. Will it be able to sway the habits of those who’ve been using Claude and ChatGPT? Perhaps not for advanced uses like coding—though Siri AI will whip up a Python script for you if you ask it—but for your run of the mill world knowledge queries? That seems eminently plausible. And, more to the point, for questions about your life, contacts, and data? As newly minuted CEO John Ternus pointed out as this year’s iPhone event, to get the same results from one of those competing AI chatbots, you’d need to hand it access to all your data. Is that really a better alternative?

One caveat, however. As always, the future is not evenly distributed: on the iPhone side, Siri AI’s only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max or later and the iPhone 16 or later. And, of course, due to Apple’s ongoing disagreement with the European Union, it won’t be available there.

All roads lead to Siri

While Apple Intelligence is still apparently a going concern, much of that brand has been subsumed by the “Siri” identity in iOS 27. For example, any time you put a blank cursor in a text field, you’re prompted with a Write with Siri button hovering aboard the keyboard. (Once you start typing, you get the usual word suggestions, and Siri is reduced to just an icon.) As someone who is perfectly happy writing their own text messages and emails, this prompt sometimes feels a little bit aggressive, and I wish you could disable it without turning off all of Siri.

There’s also a Siri mode in Camera, which replaces the previous Visual Intelligence interface. Now it’s just something you swipe to, like Video or Photos. In this mode, the Siri icon replaces the shutter button; snap a picture with that and it’ll attempt to tell you what you’re looking at; there are also image search and ask buttons which, respectively, query a search engine for image results and attach an image of what you’re looking at to a more targeted Siri query. But this mode essentially is just a front end for the Siri app—you can attach an image in a new conversation there too, including snapping one with the camera.

It’s also worth noting that Apple has also ramped up Siri’s vocal stylings, if you’re on an iPhone Air, iPhone 17 Pro or later and use the English voices with either the American or British accents. You can now tweak both the pace and the “Expressivity” of the voices with sliders, choosing the ones that sound best to you.

I’ve stuck with my standby British Voice 4 at the default “middle” pace, but I dialed the expressivity way up. Does that make me a sicko? Maybe! The good news is it’s my Siri, not your Siri, so I can do whatever I want. As can you. In general, I don’t find the new voices to be groundshakingly better, but there are improvements, and I hope the company quickly rolls out this option for other languages and accents.

Liquid Glass half full

To call iOS 26’s Liquid Glass redesign contentious is an understatement on the proportion of saying that Lionel Messi is good at kicking a ball. In iOS 27, Apple has made two major moves: first, tweaking the overall look and feel of Liquid Glass, and second, providing a way to further fine-tune that look yourself.

In general, the iOS 27 incarnation of Liquid Glass is far easier on the eyes, dialing down the transparency in favor of legibility. Apple’s also imposed some distinction between user interface elements and content. For example, in list views like in Messages and Mail there are now much clearer “toolbar” areas at the top when you start scrolling, even if they still have some degree of translucency. App icons have also gotten a face lift; they’re sharper, and feel more vibrant.

In case you still aren’t happy with the default look, Apple also offers an option for adjusting the glass effect without resorting to the classic accessibility tweaks that can often have unintended design consequences. Settings: Appearance: Liquid Glass offers a slider that goes from More Clear to More Tinted, with a stop at the Default or anywhere in between. You can see right in the scrollable pane above the slider how your choice will look in a live interface, which is a nice touch.³

It’s a rare concession from Apple that there is no one true way that the UI should appear, but given that the company has in recent years allowed far more interface choices (for example, Mail, Safari, and Phone all offering toggles between older styles and newer interfaces), this feels like par for the course. While the most stringent Liquid Glass detractors will likely never be satisfied, the improvements and ability to tweak further thus far feel as though they will satisfy most users.

Performance, no anxiety

Tempting as it might be to spend this entire preview piece talking about Siri AI, there are indeed other things in iOS 27 that are worth your time. Exactly which improvements they are depends on how you use your phone.

That’s because one of the odd things about looking at iOS 27 is that there’s just a ton of small stuff—those “quality of life” improvements that chip away at little frustrations and annoyances. Being able to send a text message while a photo or video attachment is still sending. Faster switching from Wi-Fi to cellular when you walk out of range of your house. The ability to change volume on your alarms independently from system volume.

All of these are just nice enhancements, sanding off rough edges and just generally making things work better. But because they’re so niche, lots of people are going to have different experiences with iOS 27, because it depends on what’s important to them. For example, is anybody going to be as excited as I am that Shortcuts now offers an “else if” option? No, probably not! But that’s okay, because I’m happy enough for all of us.

The good news is there are some places where things are just better across the board. In general, iOS 27 feels peppy. I know, we always talk about snappiness, but given the time Apple has spent on improving performance and removing bugs with this release, it’s reassuring to see that it’s borne out by my experience. Apps launch quickly, photos sync faster via iCloud, AirDrop transfers are especially rapid, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.

Apple also touted improvements to search, particularly in Mail, an app that I use daily, which has always been a bit lackluster in that regard, especially when compared with Gmail. I do find it improved in iOS 27, even though I do have an inbox of more than 144,000 messages going back nearly 25 years. I have mostly been able to locate emails, even obscure and old ones, within a relatively short amount of time, which is definitely a nice improvement. (That’s also one place that I find Siri AI particularly handy, since it can often find emails that I struggle to locate.)

I’m most intrigued to see how this affects the experience of those using older iPhone models. Apple says that it’s brought its optimized CPU scheduler to devices all the way back to the iPhone 11, which ought to noticeably improve performance even for those who don’t have one of the latest and greatest iPhones.

Photo fit and finish

If there’s one app that always seems to get some love from Apple in its yearly updates, it’s Photos. No surprise there: our cameras document everything about our lives and we take pictures constantly.

The filter menu now lets you choose between sorting by when photos were added versus when photos were captured, as well as providing quick access to photos that were captured by you (as opposed to photos taken by others that you imported). I’m not exactly sure what the rubric there is—when I used that filter, it only showed me images back to 2017, when I have surely been capturing photos—and even just iPhone photos—for a decade before that.

There are some big improvements, particularly in Shared Albums, which now let you share pictures as full resolution, quickly download all photos from an album, and even respond with emoji other than just thumbs up. Keep in mind, though, that all members of a Shared Album will need to be upgraded to iOS/iPadOS/macOS 27 in order for anyone to use the new features.

Ad hoc slideshows have gotten improvements too. When you select a bunch of photos and play them as a slideshow, you can adjust timing and duration as well choose the transition.

For those who missed being able to assign star ratings and keywords to their pictures (shades of iPhoto!), good news, they’re both back. Keywords are accessible by swiping down in the detail view, whereas star ratings need to be specifically turned on in Settings: Photos: View Options, where you’ll find a Show Rating Controls options. To assign a rating, you’ll need to look for a tiny star icon at the top right while looking at a photo (if you have the spatialize feature on, it’s next to that).

There are some smaller niceties too. For example, you can now save out a frame of a video as an image, rather than jumping through hoops of screenshotting or exporting it to a Mac. And you can adjust the metadata on photos both individually and in bulk, if you need to correct the date, time, or location.

And, although Apple has touted that photos will upload to iCloud faster, there’s a new option for those of us for whom that still might not be fast enough. In Settings: Photos: Sync Immediately, you can tell Photos to prioritize syncing new photos over conserving battery life—for the day. Not unlike the AirDrop “Everyone for 10 minutes” option, it’ll turn the feature back off after the day is over. (In a nice touch, when you turn it on, it shows a counter of how many hours are left before it deactivates.)

But of course, Photos isn’t immune to the expansion of AI, either. Previously we got Clean Up, the tool that lets you remove unwanted elements from your photos. Apple says it’s improved that in iOS 27: you can now choose between Fast and High Quality modes, the latter slower but more powerful. The default Auto mode chooses the best option for you based on what edits you’re making.

There are also a pair of new AI features: Extend and Reframe. The former is easier to understand: if you want to zoom out of a photo, whether because you’re trying to fit in a particular shape or simply to tweak the framing of a shot, Extend can generate a little more background, extrapolating from what’s already there. It works best on smaller adjustments with backgrounds that are uniform or predictable. Go too far and you’ll end up with totally invented elements, which can look strange or out of place.

Reframe is a bit harder to grok. Think of it as being able to move the camera after the picture’s been taken. Using the same features the company leverages for creating spatial scenes, it tries to separate out the foreground subjects and the background, and then adjust the perspective. Some pictures work better than others; it seems to help if there’s a clear delineation between foreground and background. Like Extend, it tends to work best for smaller adjustments; go too far and you can end up with some odd-looking artifacts. As tools, they have their utility, though it’s perhaps best used sparingly.

Just browsing

Having had a big year in iOS 26, Safari’s updates are somewhat more modest this year. It has not escaped the application of AI-powered features, with a new automatic tab organization scheme that can group your tabs based on similar themes. The good news is, this is a feature you can turn on or off, though you might have to poke around to find it. When viewing all your tabs, tap the Filter button in the top left. That’ll give you a list of topics it thinks it detects; tap any of those to just see the relevant tabs. Below that in the filter menu, you’ll see an Organize Tabs sub-menu that lets you turn on the automatic grouping.

I found it somewhat helpful, but also kind of random in its groupings. For example it described one set of nine tabs as “Crossword Puzzles,” despite the fact that only one of them was actually a crossword puzzle (all nine, however, were from the New York Times or affiliated sites). Occasionally, I have seen groups rearranged or renamed as you add or remove tabs, which is odd. But I do appreciate that you can quickly close all the tabs in a single group or move them all to a different Safari Tab Group⁴; you can also just drag any tab into or out of one of the automatic groups if you don’t agree with Safari’s decisions. You cannot, however, change the name of an automatic tab organization group.

A new Notify Me feature allows you to set an alert on a page for when content changes. This is a really handy feature, and I like the way Apple implemented it: when you set up an alert, it asks you what it’s looking for. So, for example, if you want to know when tickets go on sale for an event, or an item is back in stock, you just type that in. Then you can choose how often it checks, from hourly to monthly, including on what day or days of the week and what time. That’s it; you’ll get an alert when the thing happens. The only downside is that hourly being the option that checks the most frequently, it might not be fast enough to catch certain high-demand items. I appreciate, though, that whenever you visit the page for which you’ve set an alert, it shows it in a little banner at the top, along with an Edit button. You can also see a full list of the items you’ve got notifications for in Settings: Safari: Notify Me, along with the ability to edit them and, handy, information on the last time it checked.

Finally, there’s a big new Describe an Extension feature in Safari that allows you, as the name suggests, to create an extension just by typing a few lines. It’s a powerful application for bespoke needs—that website that never quite displays the way you want it to, or that feature that nobody’s ever implemented. I appreciate that if you describe functionality offered by an existing extension in the App Store, Safari will suggest that to you to check out—always nice to give a nod to third-party developers. I honestly struggled to find a need for an extension, but that may be just because I’ve already developed most of my own workarounds over the years; but I’m glad this feature exists and that Apple is recognizing that users want to take their customization to an additional level.

What’s the matter, never taken a Shortcut before?

It’s been a little while since Shortcuts got some time in the limelight, but iOS 27 brings a few much appreciated improvements to the automation system, along with one big new feature.

Let’s start with the big news: Describe a Shortcut. Like Safari’s extension feature, this simplifies the process of making shortcuts by allowing you to describe in plain language what you want it to do—Shortcuts then goes and builds it. I’ve been impressed what it can manage for simple workflows, which it can build more or less on its own. I particularly like that the system will ask you questions if it needs clarification, and that it can refine the shortcut with further prompting.

For more complicated Shortcuts, or ones that involve actions from third-party apps, the describe system doesn’t really work, but it can still provide a good jumping-off point. I wanted to see how much of one of my more complex automations it could duplicate, and the resulting basic functionality was much more straightforward in some ways that what I’d designed⁵, so I ended up rebuilding my automation around what Shortcuts had generated.

Despite its limitations, some of which I imagine will be eliminated in future updates, I think this is a great tool that hopefully broadens the appeal of making shortcuts—which, in turn, will hopefully mean more time and attention spent on improving Shortcuts.

Speaking of which, there are a number of smaller improvements too. I already mentioned the existence of an Otherwise If option, which is huge for those of us with complex shortcuts; the editor itself is also speedier and more usable. And automations are now directly integrated into the shortcuts themselves, rather than just being isolated in a separate part of the app. That makes those shortcuts easier to understand and troubleshoot.

Apple’s also added the ability to store persistent data, which even syncs across iCloud, a huge boon to those who want to make more complicated shortcuts without relying on third-party tools. And, in another much appreciated move, there’s a streamlined approach to privacy and permissions, which are now all viewable in a single place within the shortcuts info panel. This should help avoid the pesky repeated prompts for access that could make shortcuts fail.

While there are still issues left to address in Shortcuts, I’m very pleased by the improvements in iOS 27, and even more heartened by the fact that they happened. Shortcuts feels like it’s been lying fallow for some time, and I’m glad to see that Apple has remembered it’s a vital and useful part of its operating systems.

Other features

Apple’s made a big push on child safety across its product lines for the 27 updates. Some small improvements ought to really make the process more usable, such as the ability to convert an Apple account to a child account, default settings for time limits developed in conjunction with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a much-requested option to lock the Screen Time section of Settings on a device. Taking advantage of some of these features will require you to update all the compatible devices in your family, but you can still use the on-device improvements.

I really love the new button above the keyboard that appears when you’ve copied something to your clipboard, showing you a preview and letting you tap to paste it, though it’s taken me some time to circumvent my deeply ingrained muscle memory of holding to bring up the context menu to paste. (It’s also vastly more useful than the overly aggressive “Write with Siri” prompt that appears when above an empty entry field. I’m not that desperate when I’m writing a text message, guys.)

While Apple announced new Pro photo features for the Camera app on the recently introduced iPhone 18 Pro, the rest of us do still get a nice feature update: you can now edit the controls you want to appear at the top of the app. By default, you get Flash, Live Photo, and Shared Library, but if you tap the controls button to the right of the shutter, you’ll see an Edit button appear at the top of the screen. Tap that, and you’ll be able to remove items from the top menu, or add any of the others for quick access. It’s a nice way to streamline the app or to make sure the features you want available are always there.

Image Playground now has improved image generation and the ability to generate photo realistic images. While some of those results are better, many of them are…unsettling. Even after a couple years, I personally find this feature misguided and off-putting.

During the beta period, Passwords offered an agentic AI feature that would scan your list of compromised passwords and then present you with a list of the ones it believes it can update for you. Apple’s removed that feature for the 27.0 release, saying it will return later. That’s good because, in my experience, it needed a little more time in the oven. Only a handful of the ones it found could be successfully updated. That said, it’s a very cool utility, and should hopefully see improvements as the technology progresses.

If you’ve ever been on a customer service phone call and needed to look up salient details like a flight confirmation number, the Phone app will now surface relevant info during the call. I haven’t been able to thoroughly test this yet, but it seems to be a real potential timesaver. And fun fact: if you call someone on their birthday (assuming you have it in Calendar or Contacts), you’ll get a little animation and note about it.

In a “better late than never” improvement, Calendar now has natural language input when creating new events. Third party apps like Fantastical and Google Calendar have done this for years. I would appreciate if it were a little smarter about some things, such as picking up timezone from a specified location. If you see the event I’m scheduling is in San Francisco and I’m in Boston, maybe at least prompt for which timezone I’d like to use. But I get it: timezones are hard.

For those who love endlessly looking at 3D imagery of cities, Maps gets an improved flyover view with better 3D modeling of buildings and landmarks. Buildings do admittedly look less warped when you get in close, with sharper detail. For some reason, though, the new maps in Boston appear much, much darker than the iOS 26 counterparts; I didn’t see the same results in New York City, for example. Not sure what’s going on there.

FaceTime now lets you show the person you’re talking to your front and back cameras simultaneously. No more endlessly flipping back and forth!

You can also now put an extra large widget—i.e. one that takes up an entire screen—on your home screen. I tried this with Weather for a while and it was…interesting, but ultimately not for me. Still, it feels like the age of the home screen that’s just app icons is slowly dying off.

Conclusion

Every year, I come to the end of the review and have a moment of introspection. Who precisely is such a review for in this day and age? People don’t really need to know if an update is worth installing. Apple’s own stats say 86 percent of iPhones introduced in the last four years are on iOS 26, and 79 percent overall. (And that was for a very divisive year.) For better or worse, the vast majority of people just hit update.

So I think the role of the reviewer has evolved. Consider this less of a review of whether you should get iOS 27, and more as an overview of what to look for, what to try—what works well, what could still use some tweaking. In an update like iOS 27, which has a lot going on, that’s more important to ever. Even I’ve missed features here and there, or found ones that I just haven’t had the time or opportunity to try.

Despite being put forth as a year of small updates, there’s quite a lot in iOS 27, even without including the massive overhaul that is Siri AI. Apple had found itself on its back foot after its first attempt to integrate Apple Intelligence, but my experience is that Siri AI largely delivers on what the company promised—albeit a couple of years later than intended.

But I’m also very bullish on the enhancements and quality of life updates throughout the operating system. The improvements may be small, but they add up. Every time you don’t have to go searching for an email while you’re on a call or a photo shows up faster in your library or you find exactly what you’re looking for in search, well, I’m not going to say an angel gets its wings, but you get less frustrated. And that’s not nothing. In fact, that’s everything. The goal of technology should be to work for us and make our lives easier.

Last year’s macOS release, macOS 26 Tahoe, was a mixed bag. While it added a bunch of solid new productivity features, it also included a half-baked visual update that muddied the entire interface. While I chose to view the glass as half full and accepted the interface imperfections, I understand that a lot of people just gave Tahoe a pass rather than inflict a visual regression on themselves.

No matter how full you think the (liquid) glass was, I have good news: macOS 27 Golden Gate is here, and it’s good. Not only has Apple addressed most of the visual problems with last year’s release, but if you skipped Tahoe, you’re also going to be dazzled by Tahoe features like Apple’s first native clipboard history, Shortcuts automation and AI access, and an improved Spotlight.

For everyone who spent a year grinding in Tahoe, Golden Gate doesn’t just improve the look of the entire system, but offers a host of other improvements. This is an update nobody will have to apologize for liking.

Design takes a step forward

The fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe design decisions were. Apple describes the design as “even more refined,” because in Apple marketing-speak, broken features are never remedied or fixed—past features are just improved. The truth is, Apple has rolled back numerous missteps and made changes to others to mitigate the issues they caused.

Floating glass sidebars inset from window edges—a choice that made sense metaphorically, but looked awful—are gone, essentially reverted to their previous design, sitting at the left edge of windows, with a darker background for contrast and colored icons to boot.

Toolbars, one of the most important interface conventions of macOS, were flattened and ghostly in Tahoe. In Golden Gate, they pick up better shading and are more legible, though (strangely) the toolbar in inactive windows offers more contrast and legibility than in active ones! In Photos, toolbars are actual bars, not horizontal areas of floating glassy buttons—which means the system no longer has to attempt to add shading behind those areas in order to improve legibility. They’re just legible.

In Golden Gate, windows generally just feel… a bit more square. Apple has made window corners more consistent, and not having the curved corners of the sidebar right inside the curved corners of the window edge also helps make it feel a little less like you’re under the tyrannical rule of the Circle King.

Icons look better across the board in Golden Gate, probably because of a new layered icon compositing approach Apple is taking across its platforms. Unfortunately, apps that dare stick any of their extremities out of the mandated squircle shape are still put in a featureless gray box of shame, which makes it harder to identify icons, especially in appearance modes like Clear and Tinted that remove color as an identifier.

The iconic macOS “stoplight” window controls have even gotten a bit of a glow-up, with some Liquid Glass shading added to the three circles in the top left of windows. I think they’re cute. Not only are they more harmonious with the other Liquid Glass design elements in macOS (and all of Apple’s current operating systems), but they also hearken back to the classic Aqua design language that was introduced along with Mac OS X back in the day. I don’t know if I want to lick these stoplight icons, but they do look a little candy-like, and I’m here for it.

To hear Apple tell it, users are split on the transparency effect of Liquid Glass: some people despise it, and some people can’t get enough of it. As a result, all of Apple’s OS 27 updates introduce a slider—it’s in the Appearances pane of Settings on macOS—that lets you customize the transparency from sort-of-mostly-transparent to sort-of-mostly-opaque. Given that this update rolls back a lot of Apple’s decisions from a year ago, I’m inclined to believe that there really are two camps when it comes to Liquid Glass. Giving users an option to adjust the setting is fine—I think in the end I will adjust it just to the opaque side of center.

Siri AI takes the Spotlight

Siri has been a part of the Mac experience for a decade now, arriving on the platform five years after it debuted on the iPhone. While I’m sure that many Mac users have embraced it over the years, it has always been an afterthought at best for me. When I’m sitting at my Mac, I’ve got a keyboard and trackpad to get my job done, so I don’t generally feel the need to talk to my computer. And while you’ve been able to type to Siri for a while now… well, the other problem with Siri has always been that Siri’s results are rarely as useful as the results of typing those words into a search engine or some other tool.

In macOS Golden Gate, as with all the other OS 27-era releases, Apple has upgraded Siri to become Siri AI, with LLM-derived features that promise much better results. On top of that, Apple has finally done what it should have done long ago and merged Siri and Spotlight, so there are no longer two separate “type to find things” interfaces on the platform.

Apple is labeling this feature as a beta within macOS 27.0, though I’m of the opinion that if you ship a feature in your “final” OS version, it’s fair to judge it. Fortunately for Apple, Siri AI actually works quite well. In terms of general-knowledge queries, it’s very good—good enough that if you previously relied on Google Gemini or ChatGPT for basic questions, you probably can just use Siri and be happy.

But part of the appeal of Siri AI is its integration with your personal on-device data. And here, the results are encouraging—but a bit of a work in progress. Siri AI takes advantage of an updated Spotlight index to search files on your Mac, including data in apps such as Mail and Calendar. I found that asking targeted questions can generate good responses, but you need to be aware of the system’s limitations. Some third-party apps aren’t tied into the Spotlight index, and if there isn’t local searchable data (for example, if you use Gmail and aren’t using Apple Mail) you just can’t search that data at all. I ended up setting up Apple’s Calendar and Mail apps on my Mac, even though I use Fantastical and Mimestream for those purposes, just so I could be sure Spotlight and Siri could search through my calendar items and mail.

Still, there are some magic moments to be had. I asked Siri what episodes I should be watching next for the “Magnum, p.i.” podcast I do with friends—yes, I have my finger on the pulse of today’s culture—and it managed to make an intelligent search of my Messages archive and pull out the relevant message that I sent to the group listing what our next episodes were. That felt like magic. It doesn’t happen like that every time—there’s a lot of “here are a bunch of PDFs that might work, good luck”—but it’s all quite promising.

There’s a new Ask Siri entry that’s been added to the top of every contextual menu, and while I don’t mind the idea that Siri can act on just about any context you can think of on the Mac, I don’t love how it’s implemented. It’s at the top of every single context menu (regardless of applicability) and darker than the rest of the menu. If you click on it, it floats forward, the rest of the menu disappears, and you can type in the resulting box. I don’t mind the impulse, but it feels like Apple is trying too hard to push Ask Siri into places it doesn’t belong.

And I don’t want to soft-pedal the Spotlight improvements, even though they were obviously made to benefit Siri AI. Spotlight is also better in Golden Gate, all around. Suggestions are better, and if you use Apple Mail you will find the search function there much improved. Sometimes upgrades made to benefit AI can benefit regular humans, too!

Touchscreen Macs, at last?

One of the most remarkable features of macOS Golden Gate does not really make sense if you take it at face value: Apple has given a major upgrade to Sidecar, the feature introduced in 2019 that allows Macs to use iPads as external Mac displays. As someone who always travels with a 13-inch iPad Pro, that’s a nice feature, though since the 2022 introduction of Universal Control, which lets me use my Mac’s keyboard and mouse on an iPad still running iPadOS, I’ve found very little use for Sidecar.

The big update is that Sidecar, which previously only supported the Apple Pencil, now works with the iPad’s touchscreen. Apple has updated its own apps and supplied third-party apps with the appropriate tools to support full touchscreen support. You can now scroll Mac browser windows with a finger and drag windows around on screen… but only on that iPad you’re using as an extra display.

It’s not hard to read between the lines: As numerous reports have suggested, Apple is planning on releasing its first touch-enabled MacBooks late this year or early next year. Using Sidecar as a way to demo the technology and allow developers to test their apps in advance is really clever.

Beyond that, this feature is delightfully boring. It just does more or less what you’d expect. Adding touch to macOS isn’t going to be revolutionary—it’s been on Windows for ages, and iPads have had optional trackpads and keyboards for six years now. But it’ll be a nice incremental benefit. I still use touch gestures when I’m working on an iPad in laptop configuration, because sometimes it just makes ergonomic sense. If my hands aren’t on the keyboard and I need to scroll something or tap something, a quick poke with my finger does the job. It feels natural—and once you’ve spent some time with that configuration, it’s jarring to use a Mac laptop and realize that you’re poking the screen to no effect.

After a moment’s glee in being able to scroll a Finder window with my finger, using Sidecar with touch to drive the Mac interface just became… normal. Apple has done a good job implementing the feature. Menus drop down reliably. Buttons are tappable. Scrolling works. There’s just not a lot to report, and that’s just fine. It works.

Shortcuts, reduced and enhanced

The Shortcuts app, the cornerstone of Apple’s cross-platform automation technologies, gets a notable upgrade during this cycle. Most of it is probably due to the needs of Describe a Shortcut, a remarkable new feature that lets you input some text and then watch as your device converts it into a Shortcut.

It is, in some ways, a longstanding dream of the computer industry finally realized. You can literally describe what you want your device to do—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it.

Describe a Shortcut is limited—Shortcuts of great complexity are beyond its ken, as are ones that use actions from third-party apps—but when it works, it’s magical.

Perhaps its best feature is that you can iterate on your Shortcuts. If there’s something it doesn’t do quite right the first time, you can specify changes you’d like to see—”only show me items from my Personal calendar”—and it’ll rewrite the Shortcut to take those changes into account. In that way, it’s emulating the back-and-forth conversations that can make vibe coding so remarkable.

For those of us still building Shortcuts with our own fingers like animals, some of the other improvements will help that work get done. There’s a new Otherwise If statement that can be added to If-Else blocks (you get to it by control-clicking on the Else block and then choosing Add “Otherwise If”), making the structuring of branching shortcuts logic much, much simpler.

There’s also support for persistent data storage, which is kind of huge. You can save data, which syncs via iCloud and is accessible across your devices, and Shortcuts can both access it and update it! That will make Shortcuts capable of behaving more like other apps, all without having to rig up other ways of storing data in iCloud Drive or elsewhere. (Yes, this canonizes Simon Støvring’s Data Jar in Apple’s OS, and that’s a good thing.)

The arrival of Describe a Shortcut has changed the Shortcuts interface a bit. On the Mac, there’s a new three-paned interface, where the third pane is a giant preview of a shortcut’s color, icon, and (this is fun) an AI-generated summary of what the shortcut does. The pane exists because of the text box at the bottom, which lets you type input to Describe a Shortcut to make changes to whatever shortcut you’ve got selected. Fortunately, it’s easy to resize or hide that pane and go back to the more standard Shortcuts look.

New horizons for Photos

There are a bunch of big changes in Photos this year, but the three biggest ones are driven by AI. And they’re a bit of a mixed bag.

Clean Up, which removes unwanted items from the background of photos, has been improved a lot. The new version is much more adept at artfully clipping unwanted items out of an image and filling those areas with in-context backgrounds.

The other two features, Extend and Spatial Reframe, require the use of an advanced diffusion model that’s only available via Private Cloud Compute, and as a result, they take time to execute, since Photos will need to upload your photo, wait for a result, and then download the result.

Extend feels like a good feature, since there are plenty of scenarios where your image needs just a little more headroom or width. However, every pixel you expand the selection increases the jeopardy that what’s going to be generated is weird or fake. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I found that I was much more comfortable expanding a photo a little bit to gain some headroom than doing it a lot, forcing the AI system to invent more objects or scenes. I was occasionally frustrated that I couldn’t slightly extend the bottom of some images, where subjects’ legs or feet were cut off. Also, you have to be aware of incredible fabrications—extending a graduation photo added a gigantic floating tassel and an invented piece of furniture, and extending a stadium shot added a roof where there isn’t one. Judicious use, carefully analyzed, is my advice.

Then there’s Spatial Reframe, which brings together a load of existing Apple technologies, including the spatial scanning algorithm it used to create spatial photos on Vision Pro. This feature works by scanning your photo locally using that algorithm, inferring a depth map that is then used to build a 3-D version of the image that you can pivot a bit, up and down, and left and right. This is the effect that allows you, on the Vision Pro, to feel like you can move your head and see parallaxes shifting, even though, if you look closely, the exposed content behind a subject is just a simple generative fill. It all happens so quickly, and in service of a live 3-D effect, that it’s often not noticeable, and even when it is, it’s not that big a deal.

The bar is a lot higher for a fixed, 2-D photo at full resolution. So after you use Spatial Reframe to slightly move the perspective of a shot, all the data is sent up to Private Cloud Compute, where a new version of your shot is rendered—including much more advanced generation of all of those pixels that are revealed by parallax or at the edges of the frame.

Some results are more synthetic than others. Unlike Extend, Spatial Reframe changes the entire perspective of the picture, which requires everything visible to be re-rendered at full quality. The result sometimes feels artificial. Again, my first impression is for people to use this feature with care and caution.

Apple has finally updated its Shared Albums feature, which had been compromised since it launched because it didn’t offer the ability to share full-resolution images. Over the years, Apple added other methods of sharing groups of photos via iCloud, and those could include full-resolution images, but this one prominent feature felt stuck in the past.

Now it’s getting a proper upgrade, with support for full-resolution images and allowing for full collaboration with people on other platforms so that everyone can contribute to a shared photo album. I’m relieved that I will soon have to stop explaining the differences among the various ways to share items in Photos and warning people away from Shared Albums.

There are a handful of other nice, new Photos features, including new Captured By Me and Identity Documents sections (quick, find that photo of my passport!), and a triumphant return of star ratings for individual photos if you are the sort of person who wants to assign star ratings to things.

Safari gets organized

Across the 27 OS releases, Safari now sports an AI-driven tab organizer, so if you’re someone who keeps a zillion tabs open, you can have Safari group them into smaller, more navigable clusters. I’m not a zillion-tabs person, so I basically haven’t used this feature. I’m glad it’s there for those who are desperately in need of an injection of tab organization, though.

There’s also a new Notify Me feature that will send you a message if a webpage you’re watching changes. You can specify what kinds of changes you’re looking for using natural language, and it’ll check every hour, day, week, or month. Personally I don’t think I would ever use this feature for anything—nothing has occurred to me in the months I’ve been using the Golden Gate betas!—but if you’re someone who has a seldom-updated site you’re monitoring, maybe something involving a local government or school, I could see it being useful.

What I have found useful, however, is use Safari’s exciting new Describe Extension feature. This is essentially “vibe coding” of Safari extensions. The process is fairly simple, kicked off by clicking on the utility icon to the far right of the URL bar and choosing Describe Extension. It works exactly that way: You type out what you want the extension to do, and it’ll build it for you—but first, it’ll also search the App Store to see if there are available Safari extensions that already solve the problem.

If you’re thinking that you don’t know what you’d use this feature for, I get it. But over the summer, I ran into two instances where I was frustrated by what a website was doing, and ended up using Describe Extension to solve my problem. It was extremely satisfying.

I use StrawPoll.com to schedule podcast recording, but the site has two separate scheduling features: Create Poll and Schedule Meeting. Both of them are, of course, tools to create a poll that schedules a meeting. I never remember which one to click on. So I had Safari build me an extension for that website that hides Create Poll from the site’s navigation bar, and redirects all attempts to load the Create Poll page to the Schedule Meeting page instead. It works!

There’s also the Relay podcast networks title-voting page, which offers an archive so I can look back on title suggestions for other shows—but that link appears nowhere in the site’s interface, so I’m always trying to look it up or guess what it is. I had Safari add a link to the page’s nav bar so I never need to look it up again.

When you update to Golden Gate, keep an eye out. There are lots of opportunities for simple customizations to websites you use, once you realize you have the power to describe an extension.

This section is running in the background

In Golden Gate, the Dock now continues to display apps that haven’t quite quit, but are continuing to run in the background, with a note attached to their contextual menu that they are “running in the background” and an option to stop that background processing.

I understand why this might be useful in some circumstances. You might want to know that the app you “quit” is still hanging around. In practice, though, this is entirely contrary to how the Dock is supposed to operate.

The Dock is not a notification board for Apple’s privacy and security systems to warn us about apps doing weird things. It’s a launcher and monitor of apps that are providing a user interface. It’s never been a place to display background apps, and it shouldn’t start being one now.

On top of that, I just can’t figure out why some apps appear in the Dock in this state and some don’t. I understand an app like Photoshop, that sometimes keeps running for a little while after you quit it, being flagged in the Dock until it’s properly quit. (Which it already did, for the record.) I don’t understand fully quitting an app like Shortcuts and having it just sit in the Dock as if it were still running. Is the app misbehaving? Is this a bug? I’m baffled about this choice all the way around.

Wait, there’s more…

There are so many small enhancements in Golden Gate that it’s hard to mention them all, and every time I turn around, I keep bumping into more of them.

• Apple has added some light menu-bar management, specifically to deal with items that overflow the notch on some MacBook models. I’m glad that it’s taken this tentative step, though I wish it were more—it’s okay, Apple, you can sherlock all those menu-bar-management utilities out there—and of course, it should’ve happened back when the notch first appeared (checks notes) three years ago. Better late than never, I guess.

• Both Finder and the document save option in the menu bar will scan the contents of a file and offer up naming suggestions. I didn’t love the suggestions it offered, but your mileage may vary. I’d like to see this feature applied to auto-generated filenames like screenshots, though!

• In June, Apple introduced a feature that injected some agentic AI into the Passwords app, so that the app could automatically change your compromised or easy-to-guess passwords for you. When I tried it, it had about a 8% success rate—not great! Apple has pulled this feature from the first version of Golden Gate, hopefully to make it much better, and will re-introduce it later this year.

• Notes has gotten way more Markdown savvy. You could already import Markdown text format into Notes, but now you can go the other way, copying or pasting the contents of styled notes text as Markdown. As someone who writes everywhere in Markdown, this is a great feature.

Sail through the Golden Gate

The Golden Gate is one of California’s crown jewels, where San Francisco and Marin stand apart and allow the Pacific Ocean to mingle with the San Francisco Bay and the vast river deltas of the Central Valley. And for 89 years it’s been spanned by one of the most recognizable structures in the world.

It’s a lot to live up to. And while macOS 27 can’t possibly do that, it does manage to be a very good update that rectifies macOS 26 Tahoe’s greatest sins, unifies a more useful Siri with Spotlight, and hints at some subtle ways Apple can use on-device models to make using your computer more productive.

Tahoe users will find the entire Mac experience more attractive and cohesive. Those who stuck with macOS 15 Sequoia¹ will pick up those improvements as well as Tahoe’s raft of productivity boosts.

I live about six miles north of the Golden Gate. It’s nice here. And for the next year, It’ll be nice to have the company of a macOS version. Fortunately, it’s shaping up to be a good neighbor that’s focused on beautifying the neighborhood.

Rogue Amoeba, leading the way in Mac audio software.

Rogue Amoeba marks their 24th year of independent Mac software development this month. They’re celebrating with Six Colors readers, who can save 24% on SoundSource, or anything else they make. Just use discount code SIXCOLORS24 in their store, through the end of September.

SoundSource has become one of their most popular apps, covering a wealth of things MacOS doesn’t do on its own. SoundSource gives you powerful control of your Mac’s audio right in your menu bar, with per-app volume and effects, as well as output re-routing. Send Safari to your desk speakers, and Music to your headphones, at the same time. And those real-time effects can be applied to any app’s audio, or all audio together.

The new AirPlay support in SoundSource 6 is a standout, too: while MacOS can set a single AirPlay device as your default output, SoundSource can stream audio from any app on your Mac to AirPlay devices around your home. Combine that with its ability to group output devices to put one app’s audio on AirPlay speakers in multiple rooms, while everything else stays on your Mac.

There’s a fully functional free trial available from Rogue Amoeba’s website. It’s also worth noting that all of Rogue Amoeba’s app are already updated for compatibility with MacOS 27 (Golden Gate).

Many thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring Six Colors. Don’t forget: use discount code SIXCOLORS24 on their store this month to save with a long-time indie developer.

Apple holds an event, developers pay the price, and look who’s crawling back!

Finally, we’ll know what today’s specials are

At its “Surprise and shine” event this week, Apple unveiled a raft of updated products, including the new iPhone Pro and Pro Max, the Apple Watch Series 12, AirPods 5, some guy named “Ternus” and, in an absolute shocker that no one was expecting, a foldable phone.

I know, right? Just completely out of the blue. Who… who knew?

OK, if the iPhone Duo itself wasn’t shocking — having been the subject of rumors since the Nixon administration, a full two years before Apple was even formed — at least the fact that the company was able to keep the device to $1999 was a surprise to many. Or at least me.

After much speculation about the hinge, the screen, and how Apple was going to prevent a crease from being visible in an Apple foldable from Apple, Inc., it turns out, uh, eeeeeh, welllll, urrrrr, you can kinda see the crease at certain angles.

“I Saw the iPhone Duo’s Crease. Barely”

According to Marques Brownlee, “you almost never see it”.

So, yeah, there is a crease, but the important takeaway is that it’s the most subtle iPhone crease Apple’s ever made. And they think you’re gonna love it.

Look, do you want a foldable iPhone or not?

Far more concerning to many was Apple’s announcement that the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 will continuously listen to conversations in order to provide transcripts and summaries. You know, the same thing that made all those AI pins so popular.

Glenn and Dan have already discussed this “feature” at length but even if you take Apple’s “flowing” descriptions of how secure and private and 100% on the up-and-up it all is, there’s also a concern about what this does to the market for these kinds of features. Now that Apple has made always listening a standard feature, this makes it not only acceptable for other vendors who couldn’t care less about your privacy or the privacy of the person you’re talking to or the privacy of someone who just happens to be standing near you but something they need to offer in order to keep up with Apple.

It’s probably not going to be but it should get Walkie Talkied. And, frankly, Walkie Talkie should get un-Walkie Talkied and the term we all use for removing a feature from the Watch (we all do, shhh) should now be Live Rewinded instead.

There. I said it.

Could be better

Speaking of rumors (were we?), here’s a fun one. And by “fun” I do not mean fun at all.

“Apple Plans to Squeeze More Revenue From the App Store, Report Says”

Uhnnnn. Well, that doesn’t sound good. It actually sounds pretty tone-deaf. One wonders what regulatory and developer environment Apple’s watching.

Unfortunately, it’s not the only bad news for developers that happened this week. The other bad news is that Apple announced a foldable iPhone.

Have you heard about this? It folds. It’s wild. It’s also $1,999 and Apple doesn’t give developer discounts anymore.

And if you have an app that is not optimized for the iPhone Duo, it does not look good on it! Don’t worry, though, developers! All you have to do is spend a probably large number of hours working to get it right which you can do, uh, once Apple ships a beta of Xcode that lets you do this, um, which the company said it would do “later this month”.

So… anyway…

Good luck, developers!

CarPlaying games

Someone check the thermostat in hell because…

“GM May Not Completely Kill Apple CarPlay And Android Auto After All”

Oh, really? Why might that be? Is it because if customers have a choice, they choose to get a car with CarPlay? It’s almost like someone could have told GM that.

“Cadillac is continuing to evolve its infotainment strategy across the EV portfolio, based on customer feedback, while also prioritizing the native, in-vehicle experience,” a Cadillac representative told CarBuzz.

Very weird that a company that uses phrases like “infotainment strategy across the EV portfolio” has no idea what its customers actually want. Totes surprising.

This slithering turn comes just a few weeks after Walmart, backer of the beloved CurrentC mobile payments platform that we all use and love, finally gave in and started implementing Apple Pay after years of forcing its customers to pay with cash or livestock.

I mean, I presume. I don’t like shopping at places that don’t take Apple Pay so I don’t really know.

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The hoops Apple jumped through to avoid certain words is pretty funny. For example, in the discussion of Live Rewind, we learn that

Audio from the microphone flows into the audio buffer inside the Secure Exclave on the S11 chip.

You think your watch records the audio around you? No no no. The audio flows into the Secure Enclave, and flowing is definitely not recording because it’s a different word.

Notably Apple chose not to use a very common synonym for “flowing” that would be instantly understandable to most, because no doubt it did not like the implications of that word. So I guess it depends on what the meaning of the word “is” is.¹

Also worth noting that the Siri Recap feature, unlike Live Rewind, does not even bother to alert people around you that recording—sorry, flowing—is happening, using similar linguistic hopscotch. From Apple’s own privacy document:

There is no audible signal because no raw audio is retained, and there is no way to reconstruct the original audio from a Siri Recap or share raw audio with anyone.

The implication obviously being only raw audio could even be considered a privacy violation. That’s an interesting way of framing it, even though I’m pretty sure there are people who would be upset to know that their conversations are being summarized even if audio is not being retained.

Glenn has already done a thorough and even-handed rundown of this feature, but I think Dr. Drang’s point about the lengths to which Apple has to contort itself to make it seem like this feature is on the up-and-up is, in and of itself, telling.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

At my gym, all the signs are handwritten and friendly. In one section, a sign asks members not to drop their weights because there are downstairs neighbors.¹ In the bathrooms, reminders to flush and wash hands. But throughout the gym, signs say—more directly—no live streaming. Other signs ask people to exercise consideration when recording their routines for themselves or their coaches to ensure nobody else is in their sight lines. Privacy in the gym is paramount to ensure everyone is not self-conscious and is comfortable.

I was thinking of my gym when I heard about Live Rewind and Siri Recap in the just-announced Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4. These are two of the four flagship Audio Intelligence features launching in beta later this year. Both of these tools record audio continuously. Live Rewind lets you double-press the Digital Crown to receive a transcription of the last 15 seconds of conversation. Siri Recap takes notes on what it hears throughout the day and provides Apple Intelligence-generated summaries.

Both features have, understandably, freaked people out, made them angry, or caused them to shrug in resignation. Surely Apple is exaggerating the privacy protections it explains on the same page it describes the features! And if Apple is all in on recording us all the time without our consent or knowledge whenever one of its devices is nearby, the privacy game is over, isn’t it!? Everything becomes fodder for the machine; private conversations are immutable; the future is surveillance!

I’m not one for extremes, and I’ve studied Apple’s privacy and security provisions and mistakes for nearly 30 years. But I have concerns about these features from social, political, safety, and legal standpoints. Let me tackle the privacy and security first.

Hush, now

When Apple announced Private Cloud Compute in 2024, it was interesting, but it felt academic because it didn’t then release a Siri worth worrying about. In 2026, the PCC expansion with Siri AI is much more important, as Siri may send huge amounts of our personal information to the cloud to provide better answers derived from our data.²

After studying Apple’s details on PCC, I felt reassured. This is partly because one of Apple’s five pillars of PCC integrity is transparency. This is unlike many previous claims by Apple that it would be transparent. Here, they’ve stated exactly what will be available to researchers, and one researcher already found a flaw and was awarded the highest Apple bounty—$150,000. The other pillars include end-to-end encryption, barring access by Apple or other parties through cryptographic design, and no way for an external (or internal!) party to determine which PCC server is processing an individual’s data.

Apple’s promises with Audio Intelligence are somewhat different, though I find them a valid approach to minimizing invasions of one’s privacy and an attempt to reduce violations of other people’s personal sphere. Here are the fundamentals for Live Rewind and Siri Recap:

• The features are opt-in and can be entirely disabled (with a big asterisk, which I discuss in the next section). Live Rewind has to be triggered before it can access a 15-second recording window. Siri Recap must be enabled. This contrasts with Apple Intelligence in the version 27 releases, where, unlike earlier iterations, you cannot disable Apple Intelligence.³

• Audio isn’t recorded, nor is it stored, nor is a transcript made. As it is captured, the audio is not accessible to you, watchOS or iOS, apps, or Apple. Apple achieves this by using the Secure Exclave to process audio; after processing, the audio is immediately discarded.⁴

• All of the audio processing happens on your Apple Watch and iPhone. That prevents leakage. If you engage Siri, however, some portion of the Live Rewind text could be sent to PCC under the same security protections. (Apple says “will.”)

• Siri Recap uses PCC. The process is complicated, exposing as little information as possible within the already secured PCC environment.

• iCloud syncing is end-to-end encrypted. You don’t need to enable Advanced Data Protection (ADP).

• Siri Recap deletes summaries after seven days; Live Rewind’s 15-second text snippets are deleted within 30 seconds after the Apple Watch display dims. You can save Siri Recaps or export them. With Live Rewind, they are retained within the Siri app if you choose to save them or ask Siri about the text.

From a design standpoint, these measures all feel well thought out to prevent all of the egregious use cases one might imagine: Unwanted recordings! Apple analyzing our conversations to sell us stuff (or sell to third parties)! Leakage that would allow friends or strangers to access summaries, snippets, or conversations, including via internet cloud storage!

And yet. I find the above fits into the meme of “My ‘An explanation of how the Apple Watch recording what you are saying is kept private and anonymous’ T-shirt has people asking a lot of questions already answered by my shirt.”

The right to be unheard

When I’m out in public in the United States, courts have found that in most situations, I have little right to privacy. But then you can shave that down. If a neighbor points a camera from their house at my unfenced front lawn, visible from the street?Generally legal, with some exceptions related to harassment or intimidation. But if a camera points into my house through a window or into a fenced area of my property, most jurisdictions find that “not cool” (a legal term).

The audio side of this is very different. My state of Washington, for instance, is an “all-party consent” state; some states are “one-party consent” or have different rules. “One party” means anyone in the conversation (on a phone, in person, via videoconferencing, etc.) can consent, so they can record audio or have a device or system do it for them. In Washington and other all-party states, every person being recorded must consent, or it is illegal and actionable. (Recording across state lines or internationally becomes complicated.)

The company says it’s not “recording” or “storing” audio. But it is capturing it. Shockingly, I’m not a lawyer, so I can’t provide a legal analysis. (Presumably many privacy-focused organizations are doing deep reads of state-level statutes.) But the gut check is what I’m really going for, anyway: do these two features have the feeling of being recorded without one’s permission, even if Apple is trying to mitigate both the technical reality and the sense of it?

On the technical side, it appears that you have to enable each feature in the Watch app on the paired iPhone. Live Rewind requires enabling Siri: Live Rewind: Double Click Digital Crown. You can schedule Siri Recap by time, trigger it or turn it off using a location, or enable or disable it manually, such as through Control Center.

So let’s do the vibe check.

Live Rewind appears to be buffering audio at all times in anticipation of needing to transcribe the last 15 seconds. Apple says Live Rewind is designed to alert those around you that you’re replaying audio: when you double-click the Digital Crown, a chime sounds (ignoring any of your settings) as the Apple Watch’s entire screen is taken over with an animation that includes a microphone indicator.

However, unless Live Rewind is also a literal Time Machine, this doesn’t feel right. People are being warned 15 seconds after their audio is captured. (If Apple doesn’t mean that, it needs to clarify.) Further, it assumes that people will be keyed in to someone’s smartwatch making sounds and flashing images they should be paying attention to.

There’s also no “stop recording” option: if you’re being recorded by Live Rewind, you as an unrelated party—a waiter, a friend, a stranger, someone nearby, a celebrity—have no way to say “no.”

Siri Recap ostensibly is capturing audio whenever it’s active in any of the circumstances above. There’s no indication to other people that it’s running at all, and no one except the user can opt out.

Apple’s mitigations here include that no speaker is attributed, though Siri Recap identifies and anonymously labels different voices.

With Siri Recap, an Apple Watch automatically discards “potentially harmful content.” Apple defines this as content that “promotes self-harm or hateful speech, and sensitive information, such as financial data, government-assigned identifiers, authentication data, and certain personal identifiers.” I’m not sure this list is a strong argument for Siri Recap.

When using a public or private space, there should be a compelling case, even with the protections enumerated. There are already many kinds of assistive technology used by people with many kinds of disabilities to let them function better in a world often hostile to people with no or low vision or hearing.

However, the assistive case isn’t what defines Live Rewind, a useful feature of convenience that has massive privacy implications despite the way data is captured and stored. And it doesn’t help with Siri Recap at all. Siri Recap is just “life recording” without the label attached, since no audio or video is retained, and only 0.01% of a day’s conversation will likely be summarized.

These features feel like they were designed in a lab and passed through to production without enough people wondering, “Will this provoke a tremendous backlash because of the gaps in privacy that are relatively obvious?”

It’s a jungle, Jim

The best way I can conclude my analysis is by quoting Apple:

Be mindful of those around you. While audio is not recorded and stored, and no speakers are attributed, consider those around you where conversations might be private or sensitive.

Given that Apple has to warn of this, it’s the surest sign the features shouldn’t be released in this form. Apple repeats the form of the warning I see regularly at my gym… but apparently it isn’t heeding it.

Go to the podcast page.

A description of the Pro Max? The iPhone 6? The iPhone 6 Plus?

None of the above.

Those old enough—cough, cough—to remember all the way back to 2010’s introduction of the iPad might recall this as a common dismissal of the first generation of Apple’s tablet. Which, to be fair, was kind of just a big iPhone.¹ Not that there was anything wrong with that—in fact, it was a pretty successful elevator pitch for an entirely new product category.

But if you tuned in for Apple’s announcement of the iPhone Duo this week, you may have noticed something curious: Apple only rarely made mention of its very successful tablet line. The company’s view is clear: the iPhone Duo, even when open in all of its glory, may evoke an iPad, but it is very much not an iPad.

No padding

When introducing the device, new CEO John Ternus was clear about the Duo’s heritage:

We started with the experience that we wanted for ourselves, a larger display that feels as natural and intuitive as iPad.

At the risk of sounding like I’m nitpicking, let’s delve into that second clause there. It’s a comparison—it feels like an iPad.

Later on, when industrial design chief Molly Anderson did her best Jony-Ive-esque introduction to the device, she couched it in similar terms:

The two sides connect into a continuous frame, surrounding the largest iPhone display we’ve ever designed. Inspired by the versatility of iPad…

There’s a twofer there: the interior screen is the largest iPhone display, and it’s inspired by the iPad. Again, not an iPad.

There are only two other glancing mentions of the iPad. One when Apple mentions upcoming support for the Apple Pencil—”the first time iPhone offers the great Apple Pencil experience that iPad users love”—and slightly later when it discusses the display: “Drawing on our learnings from iPad and Mac, we developed a custom nanotexture finish…”

And that’s it. Those four mentions of the iPad are all that you’ll hear in the entire event.

Apple’s product page for the Duo takes it even further: the only mention there is about picking up a Siri conversation from your iPad and continuing it on your phone. That’s it.

By comparison, that 2010 introduction of the original iPad? You’ll hear the iPhone mentioned more than 20 times, including about how the iPad runs iPhone apps. That was a lineage that Apple wanted made very clear.

Some room of one’s own

Why am I harping on this?

Because you better believe Apple thoroughly considers its word choice in all of its marketing materials, especially in its most viewed annual event.

Like a lot of Apple product marketing choices, this one is simultaneously surprising and, somehow, obvious. Apple could have described the iPhone Duo as an iPhone that opens into an iPad, leveraging the success of its tablet product line, especially compared to its Android competitors. It might even have helped assuage those concerned about the price tag: yes, it starts at $2000, but you’re getting an iPhone and an iPad in one. What a savings!

But I think Apple was also all too aware that this would be writing checks that it couldn’t cash.² Because though the iPhone clearly takes cues from the iPad, it is definitively not an iPad. It’s not an iPad that you fold up to put in your pocket. Or an iPad with a little iPhone glued to the front. It’s not running iPadOS. You won’t be installing or running iPad apps.

And, like I said, there’s an obviousness to all of that. Because the iPhone Duo’s screen, large as it is—at 7.6 inches, it’s just .7 inches smaller than the iPad mini—isn’t necessarily ideal for all the features in iPadOS, whether it’s the multitasking windowing system, Slide Over, or even just the menu bar hanging out up at the top of the screen. Having it be an iPhone that works like an iPad when you open it up makes as much—or as little—sense as an iPad that works like an iPhone when you fold it closed.

This distinction also allows it the freedom to do things that the iPad doesn’t. Like the clever ability to pin a video to the top of the screen in portrait. Or being able to fold it and put it on its side for FaceTime calls. The way it shifts user interfaces away from the crease when it’s partially closed. All of these are specific affordances for this device, which helps set it apart from Apple’s other products. Even many of the interface layouts are distinct, like the vertical dock or the minimized status bar.

In some ways the Duo is neither an iPhone nor an iPad, but a third device. But if you’re going to pick one to connect it to, well, why wouldn’t you choose your—if not the—most successful consumer product of all time?

Verging on converging

In the end, the iPhone line is starting to impinge upon the iPad—not unlike the way the iPad itself has begun to blur the lines with the Mac by adding keyboard and trackpad support, windowing, and more.

This isn’t convergence in the way that some have feared, with all of the devices getting squished into a mushy middle ground. Instead, it’s informing each device with what the company has learned from its other products and, in typical Apple fashion, making each product the best version of itself.

Consumers fear convergence, but it’s a risk for Apple too. Because in a world where an iPhone folds out to an iPad, will people really buy both devices? The answer: some may not. But how many of those people were really in the market for an iPad in the first place? Apple is betting that people love their iPhones so much that, just as with the iPhone 6 and the Pro Max lines and even the edge-to-edge displays of the iPhone X and later, that what they really want is an iPhone, but more.

In his first event video since taking over as Apple CEO, John Ternus got a cheeky introduction from his predecessor Tim Cook before boldly referencing some classic Steve Jobs moments and setting the company’s most important product on a new course.

I appreciated the video’s opening conceit, which was essentially a cinematic debate about what makes for a great opening scene, leading to Tim Cook narrating his own entrance to Apple Park—and then, in a twist, explaining that he’s not the main character of this story, it’s the other guy—namely Ternus. What a great, ego-deflating moment of support—and it stuck the landing in the way that many Apple introductory segments don’t, feeling either a bit too silly or a bit too smug.

(I also appreciated the direction of this video, which made sure that the scenes behind presenters were actually populated. Past videos made it feel like Apple Park was abandoned after some sort of apocalypse, while this one made it feel like everyone at Apple was still hard at work on making the company’s next batch of products. And it allowed for some low-key levity, like the segment set at a Hollywood backlot that featured a fake rainstorm falling on film noir characters and Apple presenters alike, a collection of Roman soldiers marching with a classical composer, and a couple of astronauts riding on the back of a golf cart.)

After professing what a privilege it was to represent Apple, Ternus quickly turned to a defense of the iPhone, and the smartphone more generally, as a cornerstone of our digital worlds. In casting the tech product at the center of our experiences as an “intelligent personal hub,” Ternus was alluding to Jobs’s declaration more than 25 years ago that the Mac was the center of a “digital hub.” In modern terms, the smartphone certainly fills that role, connecting to accessories and bringing in data from disparate sources.

Not only was it bold to tie the first pronouncement of a new Apple CEO to a famous Jobs strategy, but it was also bold to use the moment to take a direct shot at competitors who seek to replace the smartphone with unspecified new AI-infused tech products. It has always seemed obvious to me that the smartphone is just too perfectly positioned, with the right set of attributes, to survive whatever an AI-infused future might throw at it.

Ternus’s opening remarks fed into that, referencing the key features that make the iPhone such a powerfully useful product: It’s always with you, has a powerful processor, a great display, is always connected to a high-speed network, has high-quality sensors, and has a battery big enough to last all day. I have a hard time believing that even a deeply AI-heavy future won’t require all of those features, and it’s already in our pockets.

Of course, he would say that. He’s the CEO of a company that sells devices, primarily smartphones. But I think he’s also right.

Apple’s take on AI

Still, Apple is a tech company, and everything in its sphere is touched by AI now, so the company needed more than a profession that the iPhone was just great at AI, thank you. And so Ternus and his team worked to define Apple’s place in our AI-focused world—in some interesting ways.

Obviously, the presentation spent a lot of time discussing Apple Intelligence, which—after a two-year delay—is finally living up to its promise. The new Siri AI assistant is quite good, and it will provide iPhone users with a satisfying experience for casually looking up information and performing tasks, whether it’s world knowledge or personal data that lives on their devices. Apple is about to turn a real weakness into—well, if not a strength, then at least no longer an Achilles heel.

Apple also pressed its advantage when it comes to designing its own processors, which give the iPhone a strong story in terms of on-device AI. You can see how Apple has begun to prioritize AI benchmarks—the new A20 Pro processor has two Neural Engines (just as the M6 chip does), offers a bunch of next-gen GPU cores with neural accelerators, and has a 50% boost in memory bandwidth.

How much AI work is currently being done on-device on smartphones? Probably not much, but perhaps a little, and over time if app developers want to minimize their reliance on expensive (and potentially non-private) cloud services, they may gravitate toward using the features Apple provides on device. This is a bet by Apple that on-device AI becomes more prominent over time, but if you design your own chips and sell your own smartphones, it’s the right bet to make. I’ve seen the pendulum swing from processing being focused in the cloud to it happening on personal devices more than once. It would not surprise me at all if it happens again, and Apple is positioning itself to be ready if it does.

But there were some appreciably non-obvious examples of Apple’s approach to AI in the event, as well. Apple has said previously that it would support SynthID, a feature that tags AI-generated content. What it hadn’t previously revealed is that it’s built Apple Reference Image, a system that cryptographically signs the original pixel data from an iPhone camera’s sensor in a way that can verify that a photo is unedited. Accepting that most photos do get edited, Apple has built the system in a way that the signed, unedited original rides along with the version you’re processing and editing—but even if you edit the image, there’s a method to view the original and make sure that it’s properly reflecting reality.

I don’t know enough about this category to know if there are similar implementations from other groups, or if there’s an emerging standard that Apple is either inventing or avoiding, but it sure does sound like a good idea to have a way to say that a photograph was really taken from an iPhone’s image sensor and wasn’t just fabricated.

Finally, Apple’s most surprising AI announcement of the day, one that I doubt anyone had on their bingo card, is that Apple is apparently making the Apple Watch an AI wearable. The new Apple Watch models, apparently in conjunction with a fairly modern iPhone, have a feature that listens to your conversation and lets you display what someone said for the previous 15 seconds. It’s like TiVo for… reality? And then there’s Siri Recap, which listens to everything and writes high-level notes based on your conversations. It’s AI meeting notes for your life.

These features are wild, and if you haven’t noticed, they are coming at a time when people are increasingly critical of tech companies intruding into places that were previously presumed to be at least a bit private. Fortunately, Apple does have a fairly positive reputation when it comes to privacy, and the company has detailed technically how these features work—no audio files are saved, apps have no access to audio data, and the AI transcription engine runs on audio in a buffer. But since we live in a world where people are already convinced their phones listen to them and use their conversations to send them ads, I’m not convinced the nuance of a statement like “my Apple Watch is listening to our conversation, but it’s not recording” is going to go over well.

I’m curious just how much of this feature is happening on the Apple Watch and how much is happening on the connected iPhone. Is the Apple Watch just there to listen to audio, make disclaimer chimes to warn people they’re being monitored, and pass the audio on to the iPhone for processing? Is the Apple Watch performing a raw transcription of audio chunks into text and passing that on to the iPhone for assembly into more understandable blocks of text? I’m sure it’ll all come out. And then we’ll all need to judge: are either of these features useful enough to make it worth the trouble of explaining to other people that things are being captured? It’s worth considering the inverse, too: Does Apple’s admirable commitment to privacy lead to summaries that aren’t especially helpful or actionable?

A lot of questions, not a lot of answers—yet.

I’d argue that Apple can’t afford to not try features like this, however. Our culture may ultimately reject even the most privacy-focused AI recording features, whether they come in camera glasses or attentive smartwatches. But if there’s any valid, non-creepy case to be made for this sort of technology, someone needs to make it. I know a lot of people will roll their eyes at this, but this is one of those times when the phrase “only Apple can do this” might actually be true. They’re taking a swing, and I admire that. It may not be enough.

Keep in mind that there’s another invasive AI feature rumored to be attached to a future Apple product—namely, the next generation of AirPods Pro, which may come with embedded cameras. I assume Apple’s explanation of these new Apple Watch features is a preview of how camera-bearing AirPods would be explained—namely, that the image data is walled off, inaccessible, processed by AI algorithms on device and then discarded. If these Apple Watch features become wildly unpopular, it might be a hint to stow those AirPods. If people accept Apple’s assurances, maybe things will be different.

The main event

Off to the iPhone, the big reason Apple does these events. Of course, the iPhone Duo is the most interesting and different iPhone in years, if ever. I can’t wait to play with one. It’s an incredibly complex piece of hardware engineering that also generates hundreds of serious usability issues for iOS and all the apps that run on it.

At first glance, Apple seems to have gotten really creative in trying to solve those usability issues. There was a time when Apple might have introduced a product like this and just explained that while you could rest the device partially open at an angle, horizontally or vertically, those angles simply weren’t supported and you should only ever use the product open or closed. And a lot of us would’ve shrugged and said, well, okay Apple, I get that we’re asking a lot by wanting you to cover all the bases right away. Maybe next year?

Not the iPhone Duo. While I’m sure there will be some frustrating edge cases, this product announcement shows what can happen when a company is fully committed to bringing its entire organization to bear on supporting a new piece of hardware. There’s a new multitasking model, support for Apple Pencil on iOS for the first time(!), the ability for apps to run on both inside and outside screens at once, Apple’s first under-display camera, an entirely reoriented iOS dock and set of toolbars, and a whole lot more.

It’s almost overwhelming, but it’s also clearly the right way to launch a product like this. It would make no sense for Apple to spend years developing a folding iPhone… and then deciding to shrug and release a half-baked iOS update to support it. If a company boasts about how the integration of hardware and software is its secret sauce, this is the moment when it needs to back that up with action. Feels to me like it has.

As exciting as this all is, let’s not forget that folding phones are a teeny portion of the overall smartphone market. Not only is this the most expensive iPhone ever, but it’ll probably be the worst seller of the iPhone line, at least to start. And in doing so, it’ll probably be the best-selling folding phone of all time. Apple’s endorsement of this style of device will drive sales of other folding phones, too. Just don’t expect it to take over the world. If it sells as well as the iPhone Air, it would be quite a coup.

That’s because most people will want to buy the iPhone 18 Pro. While that product pales in comparison to the alien newness of the iPhone Duo, it’s also exactly the phone most people will want to buy. The new camera upgrade, which adds a moving aperture to the iPhone for the first time, should offer a serious improvement in an array of shots. I’m sad that Apple has seemingly retired Cosmic Orange this year, but that’s okay, it’s just resting—I predict a nostalgic orange iPhone comeback in a year or two.

Bottom line—the iPhone 17 Pro was a huge hit and I suspect the 18 Pro will be, too. Yes, it starts at $100 more than the past models, but what doesn’t? I’m actually relieved Apple didn’t raise the price by $150 or $200. The iPhone 18 Pro might not be the one most people talk about, but it’ll be the one most people buy. (And then in the spring, we’ll see how the iPhone 18 fares as a phone released out of the spotlight of the big fall iPhone event.)

In the long run, though, is the iPhone Duo the future of the iPhone line? It depends on what you mean by “long run.” It seems to me that the impulse of the iPhone Duo and all folding phones is based on the premise that phone users want huge displays (true) but at some point those displays just don’t fit in their pockets (a sad fact of physics and tailoring). Wouldn’t you want the biggest screen that also fits in your pocket? If so, then at some point that ideal device becomes a foldable, or rollable, or some other kind of shape that can be large when in use and small when it’s stowed away.

Now is probably not that time. (Certainly not at that price.) But its time may yet come, especially as Apple does its thing and just keeps iterating, making the iPhone Duo thinner and lighter and more full featured over time.

I can’t wait to try out the iPhone Duo. As someone who spends a lot of time using an iPad, I’m seriously intrigued if it might fit in my life as a primary device. But for most people, it will be not just too expensive, but too weird. That’s fine. Apple strikes me as a company that’s willing to be patient—while making a lot of money from people who want to be out there on the cutting edge.

For everyone else, there’s the iPhone 18 Pro. And that’s as it should be.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple’s events are always a deluge of information, delivered by smooth-talking presenters who are probably trying to hypnotize you with their soothing hand motions. So it can take a little bit of time after watching the presentation to come back to reality, and sift through the details.

This year’s iPhone event¹ was no exception. The company rolled out new Pro iPhones, two new Apple Watches, a new pair of AirPods, and, of course, the first folding iPhone. Having had a couple of hours to poke around and think about the slew of announcements, I’ve been mulling over the implications of Apple’s newest phone.

One of the biggest questions around the expected folding iPhone, now officially dubbed the Duo, was how much of a trade-off it would be compared to the year’s Pro model iPhones. There was a similar dynamic last year with the iPhone Air, which also offered a novel form factor, though at the cost of the iPhone 17 Pro’s additional cameras and battery life.

In the end, every Apple product—and probably every product—is a story of trade-offs. So, the thinking went, what will we give up to get the benefit of a small iPhone that unfolds into a larger iPhone?

The answer: some things, but less than I’d feared.

Saving face

Perhaps the biggest casualty is Face ID. That’s not really a surprise: it’s an expensive component that takes up valuable space inside the phone chassis, as well as on the screen. Then factor in that the iPhone Duo would probably need two Face ID cameras modules, one each for the exterior and interior screens, and we’re talking double trouble.²

I’ll certainly miss Face ID in the cold New England winter when I don’t want to take off my gloves, but hopefully the Apple Watch unlock will mitigate the frustration.

Camera shy

It also seemed a foregone conclusion that at least one of the iPhone Pro’s many cameras wouldn’t make the cut, and sure enough, the Duo lacks the 4x/8x telephoto lens. But it still features the ultrawide lens, which is the better choice, since that also enables macro features. The main 48MP camera also only has Apple’s first-generation sensor-shift optical image stabilization, compared to the second-generation tech on the 17 Pro and 18 Pro.

The Duo’s dual screens also raise questions about the front-facing cameras. While both its interior and exterior selfie cameras are capable of Center Stage and can flip between landscape and portrait at the touch of a control, neither is as good quality as the front-facing camera on the Pro models.

The 18 Pro, like the 17 line before it, boasts a hefty 18MP sensor; the iPhone Duo’s exterior camera, by comparison, is just 12MP. As for the interior screen’s camera, which is the first one that Apple has tucked under the display, the current specs say only that it records video at 1080p. The exterior front-facing camera also doesn’t support the new smart focus tracking feature the company announced for the 18 Pro (which does support it on both front and rear-facing cameras).

Unsurprisingly, the Duo also lacks several of the Pro models more, well, pro features. You won’t find support for ProRes or ProRes RAW, ACES, Apple Log 2, and Genlock. In other words, Apple’s probably not shooting its next event on a bunch of iPhone Duos because that would be a ridiculously unnecessary flex unless they’ve got a whole bunch of extras lying around. The Duo also doesn’t shoot spatial video, probably due to the horizontal rather than vertical side-by-side camera arrangement. I’m sure there are dozens of people who will be upset.

Lights, camera, no action?

The Duo’s other casualties seem to mostly have succumbed to the one-two combo of high cost and low return. For example, few will likely shed tears on the lack of the LiDAR sensor.

There may be more complaints, however about the lack of the Action Button first included with the iPhone 15 Pro. That’s a bummer for folks who enjoyed the customization of the hardware button, but again an understandable absence. However, the Duo does, to my surprise, have Apple’s Camera Control button for quickly launching the camera and taking photos.

MagSafe and sound

Some were worried, given its lack of mention in the Apple event, that the iPhone Duo eschewed MagSafe, not unlike the oddity that was the iPhone 16e. But the good news is that MagSafe is apparently considered critical enough to merit its inclusion on the Duo.

However it’s not without an asterisk. Unlike other iPhones which Apple says “Compatible with MagSafe cases, wallets, wireless chargers, and more” the Duo’s says only “Compatible with MagSafe cases, wireless chargers, and more.” Note the difference? That’s right, the iPhone Duo just stole your wallet—in more ways than one.

But this one’s just a matter of space, as an image from Apple’s accessories page clearly illustrates: Apple’s MagSafe wallet simply won’t fit on the shorter, squatter Duo. Will that stop someone somewhere from making a Duo compatible wallet? You might struggle to fit your credit cards, but I wouldn’t bet against it.

And because I really need something audio-related to justify this section header, in a blow to podcasters everywhere, the Duo does not have the much vaunted “studio-quality” four-mic array of the Pro models. I’ll pour one out.³

Size matters

I’ll leave you with this last thought, which amused me. Apple touted that, when open, the iPhone Duo is the thinnest iPhone ever at just 5.2mm, dethroning last year’s record-setting iPhone Air with its bulky 5.64mm thickness.

However, when folded, the Duo is itself a chunky 11.3mm. I found myself wondering if that was, in turn, the thickest iPhone ever. The answer? Just barely not. But you have to go all the way back to 2009’s iPhone 3GS, which—like its predecessor, the iPhone 3G—rang in at 12.3mm, in large part due to its slightly convex back.⁴

The thinnest iPhone ever and the thickest iPhone in 17 years. Something for everyone!

Go to the podcast page.

Its device, called the iPhone Duo, will start at $2,000… The entry-level version will include 256 gigabytes of storage, with Apple offering higher-capacity versions that will take the price all the way up to roughly $3,000…. There will be a magnetic hinge system and support for the Apple Pencil stylus.

The Duo will go on sale as early as October and come in white and dark blue.

iPhone Duo is a good name. Not only does it make sense — two screens! — but it references an old Apple product name, and keeps iPhone Ultra in reserve for future use.

I’ve been wondering about Apple Pencil support on the iPhone for some time now. This product does sort of make sense for it, given the larger canvas of an interior screen.

The starting price seems high in practical terms, but also actually quite aggressive given the current out-of-control state of affairs for tech gadget costs. (Obviously the better configurations will escalate rapidly in price, as is Apple’s tradition.)

Gurman also suggests this device won’t ship as quickly as the new iPhone Pro models—again, not too much of a surprise, as that’s what happened with the iPhone X. And as for the colors, well, dark blue is certainly more interesting than another Space Gray. I do wonder why the Color Czar has decided that black is out as a color, but fashion does what it wants.

Anyway, happy Christmas Eve (and Christmas morning) everyone. See you back here after all is revealed.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

You might be interested in knowing how to embrace Apple Passwords with a bear hug, leaving behind your current password manager. If you tried Apple’s Passwords app in the past and were disappointed, you should probably give it another try. The improvements Apple has made in the last couple of releases have brought it to what I consider parity with the most important useful features of well-designed third-party password managers.

Despite that, Passwords is focused on—no surprise—passwords and password-like items: website logins, passkeys, and Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTPs). Many password managers include a junk drawer of other kinds of structured material you can store that doesn’t map directly to Apple’s Passwords structure. If you’re mostly using a third-party system for password-esque stuff and use all Apple devices or Apple and a Windows PC, a migration is straightforward. Otherwise, it can be hairier and could involve rethinking how you store assorted data.

You can use iCloud Passwords with Windows (and then use Microsoft Edge, Firefox, or Google Chrome). You can also use browsers other than Safari on a Mac with an iCloud Passwords plug-in or extension. However, if you or people you currently shared information with use Android, Linux/Unix, or ChromeOS, this migration won’t work for you: those platforms aren’t supported, and there’s no web app for iCloud Passwords.

Because Joe Kissell and I have written entire books that help with different components involved in a password manager migration, I’ll include references throughout to appropriate Take Control series books. For a general grounding in passwords, for example, I recommend reading Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Your Passwords, updated earlier this year.

Map the data connections

As I noted, Passwords is best at passwords (and passkeys and TOTPs), and filling them in on webpages and in apps. If you care mostly about this, you’re in luck, as you can easily migrate data of these kinds:

• Website and app logins: Account logins move to Passwords.
• Loose passwords: Ones that have no direct connection to an app or site, like a bank card PIN, also move to Passwords.
• TOTPs: These confirmation codes can be migrated. However, there’s a technical detail with how they may be stored by third parties (or Apple) that can prevent the migration and might require using a backup code; see details below.
• Passkeys: The password “industry” finally developed and rolled out a secure copying system that Apple supports that will let you move passkeys among password managers. This requires migrating on an iPhone or iPad; you can’t move these on a Mac.

Two other categories of fill-in entries that aren’t managed in Passwords can be handled—and you may already be using—in Wallet and Safari:

• Payment cards: Payment cards need to move to Wallet & Apple Pay. You have to enter these manually as AutoFill Cards, unless you’ve already done so or added the card to Apple Pay. It’s a little complicated, as I explain.
• Identities: Apple supports filling in personal or business address information through Safari using AutoFill.

(You can see Safari’s evolution on the Mac at Safari: Settings: AutoFill: your personal contact now links to Contacts, user name and passwords to Passwords, and credit cards to Wallet & Apple Pay.)

Where you will be left hanging by Apple:

• Miscellaneous secure items and attachments: If you store Social Security numbers and other account information that is distinct from a password, but you want to have available to fill in at particular websites or by searching Passwords, you can create these as entries in Passwords. In some cases, you may want to create entries in Notes (with additional security, described later).
• Structured data: You may have bank accounts, passports, driver licenses, memberships, software licenses, or other structured information stored in a password manager. That is a trickier needle to thread, as Passwords offers no support beyond a Note field.

For both of these, you might want to migrate to… a password manager. But wait! This would be one you use solely for secure storage of these miscellaneous structured or less-classifiable items, not for field-oriented secrets and accounts you want to fill in.

There’s one more important migration issue:

• Shared vaults and items: If you use a password manager that supports secure storage areas with other people—like vaults in 1Password, Dashlane, or LastPass, for example—Passwords provides something akin, though not precisely the same: Shared Groups. Because of the above provisos, many non-password items shared via a third-party manager will need to be migrated to Notes or another secured shared item-storage-based space.

Three big things that may derail the whole migration for you:

• Tags/labels: Some people make use of metadata organizational systems, like tags. These don’t transfer to Passwords at all!
• Extra data: Much like the paper card catalogs of yore had book information plus tons of annotation, accumulated over time, you may have used password manager features to add extensive notes, additional fields, include attachments, and create richly detailed records. All that will be gone, like tears in rain. True, Passwords has a Notes field, but it lacks structure, rich text, and Markdown support. If you move to another, more focused password manager, you may be able to retain this.
• Access after you’re gone: Non-Apple password managers have recovery kits that could allow a relative or other party who has that information to gain access to stored, synced data. Apple’s Legacy Contacts system, which allows an executor or other authorized person to access your data when you’re gone, excludes iCloud Keychain: no passwords, passkeys, Wi-Fi passwords, or other data. However, Legacy Contacts must be activated; until it is, it’s possible for someone who retains access to one or more of your devices to view your passwords and other data in Passwords. (See Joe Kissell’s Take Control of Your Digital Legacy, or my Take Control of Your Apple Account.

One last bit of aggravation? Passwords does not yet support removing duplicates!

Plan your migration

As you consider migrating, I urge you to run your old manager and Passwords in parallel.¹ Particularly if you store a lot of different kinds of data in your old manager, you may want to be able to consult it and migrate some of it over time. This can be a pain if you are paying an annual fee and the renewal is coming up soon. Consult the maker’s website to see whether you retain access to your data after a subscription expires and, if that bothers you, in what form.

The place to start is pruning old entries.

First, sort by last modified date. Did I know that nearly 2,200 of my 2,600 entries haven’t been modified since 2022? Some since 2008? I did not. However, you likely don’t want to delete these wholesale, because there may be secrets you can’t recover. Online backup private keys (such as with Backblaze), Bitcoin and other cryptocurrency phrases or keys, or other secrets you set once need to be retained or you lose access forever.

My strategy:

• First, export everything. These exports are unencrypted and must be performed on your Mac. The export won’t include passkeys. (See below for that pathway.) This gives you a revert point. Because there are so many export formats across systems, I refer you to the software documentation to pick the best one. Warning: That file will be unencrypted and is like plutonium. Handle with care. The best plan is to use Disk Utility to create a disk image (APFS, 256-bit AES, Sparse Bundle Image), use a password you know or that is stored in Passwords, and then export directly to that encrypted image. The reason? If you save the file elsewhere, it might be backed up to Time Machine or become accessible in a way you didn’t intend. When unmounted, the drive is as secure as your startup volume. Just don’t forget or lose the password!

• Move all the older entries into a group. You might be able to create a group, tag all entries, or, in the worst case, move to a separate vault. In 1Password, the only strategy I found was to create a new vault called Outdated Entries and move all the older entries there. Warning: When selecting, make sure you aren’t including entries from all vaults, as that might move items you share with others or that others share with you.

• Next, sort by name or title. This lets you scan through entries and identify duplicates. I found a number of items I’d already labeled “outdated,” or that were from services I couldn’t even remember. However, there were also a huge number of passwords and account logins that hadn’t been changed in more than four years—some for more than a decade! (There’s no reason to change uniquely set passwords routinely unless your current one is weak and a site is compromised. Most password managers, including Passwords, let you know about weak and reused passwords.) This process can be mighty tedious, which is why I’d recommend tackling it over time rather than all at once.

When you’re pruned, cleaned up, and otherwise reduced, you can now use the set you’re exporting; it’s time to go to the next step.

Export your secrets

Your best and first choice should be to use your iPhone or iPad; at this time, you can only perform a secure password storage transfer in iOS.² Major password managers support this transfer method, which lets you move passkeys—it’s currently the only way to migrate a passkey.³

Here’s how it appears and works in 1Password:⁴

1. Navigate to the export section of 1Password—that’s Lock (upper-left corner): Settings: Advanced: Start Export.
2. Enter your account name; the app provides a hint. Tap “Approve export.”
3. An explanation screen appears. Tap Continue.
4. Choose the destination. In this case, tap Passwords, then tap Continue.
5. Tap Continue in “Passwords,” and you’re switched to the Passwords app, where you can watch the import in progress.

While this is the best method, you can also export from most apps in CSV (comma-separated values) format, which truncates most information and likely leads to problems. Warning: You will have to re-create your passkeys. You may need to use the desktop version of the password manager to export. In Passwords for Mac, choose File: Import Passwords from File, click Choose File, select the file, and proceed. This doesn’t overwrite entries.

Now, check important accounts:

• Does the regular login work? If not, reset the password. Take this opportunity to upgrade to TOTP or a passkey if either is available.
• Does TOTP or a passkey work for logging in? If not, find a backup code or another method to generate a new TOTP or passkey.

TOTPs have a particular idiosyncrasy. They are seeded with a secret generated by a website. The site displays that code as a QR code, so you rarely need to copy it, though Password and other managers allow you to do so. When migrating an entry with a TOTP, it might appear in its URL format, which is generically like otpauth://totp/user@user.user?secret=SEQUENCE in the Notes field instead of appearing as a TOTP within Passwords. If that’s the case, you can fix it manually:

1. Copy the text after secret=.
2. Tap or click Edit.
3. Tap or click Set Up Code.
4. Paste the secret you copied into the Setup Key field.
5. Tap or click Use Setup Key.
6. Tap or click Done.

If that fails, log into the website in question and use a backup code or other means to re-enroll with TOTP.

Enter credit cards, set up AutoFill, and move to Notes

Before getting started, I strongly recommend enabling Advanced Data Protection in iCloud. ADP improves iCloud security by encrypting nearly all application data—iCloud Drive, Messages, Photos, Notes, etc.—via keys stored only on your devices, just like iCloud Keychain. Without ADP, these kinds of data are encrypted in transit and at rest using only Apple’s encryption secrets, and could be demanded via a government subpoena or someone gaining access to your Apple Account. (Note that contacts, events, and email remain encrypted at rest, not end-to-end, because of the need for compatibility with third-party software.)

Follow the steps in the link to enable. You can also still access this information via iCloud.com through a process that enables a temporary end-to-end session. (For more about ADP, see Joe Kissell’s Take Control of iCloud or my recently updated for the 27 releases, Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices.)

Now, work through these categories:

• Payment cards: Use Settings: Wallet & Apple Pay on an iPhone or iPad, or System Settings: Wallet & Apple Pay on a Mac. Tap or click AutoFill cards and authentication. Now you can tap or click Add Card to provide the card details. This lets you fill in the card anywhere there’s a form field or wherever you can tap or Control-click/right-click in a field and bring up AutoFill as a menu item. AutoFill cards sync across your devices when Wallet sync is active in iCloud (Settings/System Settings: Your Name: iCloud: See All). For more on working with Wallet and payment cards, see my book Take Control of Apple Wallet. This information is secured end-to-end.

• Identity filling: A different kind of AutoFill, for identity information, is found in Settings: Apps: Safari: AutoFill or Safari: Settings: AutoFill. Enable Use Contact Info on an iPhone or iPad, or check “Using information from my contacts” on a Mac. Now you can tap the entry next to My Info on an iPhone or iPad, or click Edit to the right of the checkbox label. This lets you pick an entry—you probably already did—and populate it with all the things you’d want to fill in on a form, including multiple addresses. Safari doesn’t protect identity information with ADP. However, the type of address and other information you would use are likely the least important to protect in what would be a very unlikely break-in to an Apple Account or one of your devices.

• Fill in Notes: As I noted earlier, the structured entry style of third-party password managers doesn’t mesh well with either Passwords or Notes. Passwords has a single Notes field, which may be enough for some entries, but not the more detailed ones I describe. The Notes app is structured around entries, but it’s not well designed for hundreds or thousands, and it lacks inherent field data or structure. Judge what you’re storing in your old password manager to figure out if Notes could work. With ADP enabled, it offers strong security. For migrating structured data intact, read on!

Migrate structured data

If you’re looking to move structured entries, I suggest checking out Strongbox, but not for passwords, passkeys, TOTPs, and the like. Its developer offers a free syncing version (for iPhone, iPad, Mac, and Apple Watch) with everything you need except Touch ID/Face ID unlocking. That requires the Pro flavor at $24.99 per year, which includes several other features.⁵

Strongbox, unlike some managers, allows you to sync via a file under your control or through its secure syncing service, depending on your preference. This lets you keep your, er, digital strongbox under your personal control, if that matters to you. It can import from all major password manager export formats.

In testing, it preserved my 1Password structured data extremely well. This included tags. It also arranged my vaults into what it calls groups, letting me retain a sense of what I was sharing with others.

The one complication is that if you want to use one of the migration processes above to copy your items into Passwords, you have to do one of two things after performing your migration:

• In your old manager, delete all passwords, passkeys, and TOTPs. This is dangerous in my accounting, as it reduces your ability to have a parallel working solution, and you could accidentally delete secrets you need to keep.
• Import everything into Strongbox, then select all the passwords, passkeys, and TOTPs from Strongbox, and empty the trash. This gives you two copies of everything: Passwords and old password manager for secrets; Strongbox and old password manager for structured data.

When you’re ready to abandon your old password manager, maybe weeks or months from the migration, you can retain a securely stored backup copy or perhaps retain access depending on the product, while not using it actively or paying renewal fees.

Working in groups

Sharing your passwords and other secrets with other people remains Passwords’ weakest aspect, because Apple offers only Shared Groups. Each entry can be stored only in your personal Passwords storage or in Shared Groups. Otherwise, you have to duplicate an entry, which can cause such entries to drift out of sync.

In the Passwords app, select any entry, then click or tap the Group pop-up menu. You can then choose an existing group or create a new one. When you make your choice, the password, passkey, or other item is now exclusively found in the Shared Groups section, not copied! Passwords doesn’t offer a copy or duplicate feature, so you have to re-create the entry if you want to share it with two or more groups that aren’t a complete overlap of the same people.

It may be easier to understand from a family perspective. Let’s say you have items you share only with your spouse, others with your children, and some with both. You can’t create a “spouse” group and a “children” group. You need to have one for your spouse, one for your children, and one for the whole family. This is where there’s real room for improvement by Apple.

The password rhymes with orange

I know this is a whole rigmarole, but I’m actually impressed that it’s finally doable in a reasonable manner. A couple of years ago, it was not. It was possible a year ago, but I wouldn’t have recommended it. Now, if you’re careful with each step, maintain a backup, and keep your old manager running in parallel as you complete the migration, you should be able to achieve success.

This article was updated on Sept. 10th to add missing details about fixing a broken TOTP import.

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

Well, well, well… maybe not. Ian Wright of CarBuzz writes:

The Cadillac configurator is up for several 2027 models, and we spotted that the Lyriq still shows CarPlay and Android Auto being standard. The Lyriq is Cadillac’s first all-electric vehicle and a tech-forward vehicle that we think is becoming one of the best luxury EVs available. So, it piqued our interest that the GM brand was still including the things it was supposed to be phasing out, and we reached out to Cadillac for comment.

“Cadillac is continuing to evolve its infotainment strategy across the EV portfolio, based on customer feedback, while also prioritizing the native, in-vehicle experience,” a Cadillac representative told CarBuzz. And, the language is telling. The plan was to start the phasing out of phone projection with the 2024 Chevrolet Blazer EV, with CEO Mary Barra saying: “We made a decision to prioritize our EV vehicles during this timeframe, and as we go forward, we’ll continue across the portfolio.”

Wright does a good job at spotting the weasel words in the new Cadillac statement. Three years after a bold pronouncement that GM wasn’t interested in listening to its customers and giving them what they wanted, here comes an “evolve[d] infotainment strategy… based on customer feedback.”

Translation: Oh, people actually do want CarPlay, so we probably should let them have it, or they’re not going to want to buy our cars.

This isn’t how this story needed to go, but if GM wants to silently walk back its stupid pronouncement from 2023, it’s still a win for anyone in the market for a new car.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

A possible replacement for Mac OS arrives in the form of a company founded by a charismatic former Apple executive—but not the one you’re thinking of.

Go to the podcast page.

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The deed is done! John Ternus is now CEO of Apple!

Memomento mori

[extreme TV infomercial announcer voice] Do you suffer from insomnia, sleeplessness, or the condition known as “Snooze Deficiency Syndrome”? Do you lie awake staring at the ceiling, unable to lull yourself to unconsciousness, despite lately really preferring it to consciousness? Well, don’t worry! Apple’s outgoing CEO has you covered!

“Read Tim Cook’s full memo to Apple employees on his last day as CEO”

Today is my last day as CEO of Apple.

Story checks out so far.

This is a moment I always knew would come one day…

BREAKING: FORMER APPLE CEO HAD FIRM GRASP OF THE LINEAR NATURE OF TIME.

…and yet it is still hard to believe it has arrived and I am writing these words.

[sound of 170,000 Apple employees closing an email and going back to whatever it was they were doing before]

If you’re not asleep yet, don’t worry. It goes on like that for kinda a while without saying much of anything. Again, though, if you’re not asleep by the end, don’t worry. Because Apple’s incoming CEO also has you covered.

“Read John Ternus’s full memo to Apple employees on his first day as CEO”

Hang on, I gotta get a cup of coffee before we read this because I’m already pretty groggy.

OK, here we go.

I’m honored to be stepping into this role at what is truly the greatest company in the world…

The greatest company in the world, the greatest network in the world, the greatest phone in the world…

Man, after reading these I feel like I really owe Stan Sigman an apology. Too late for that, I guess.

Ternus’s memo at least has the benefit of being less than half the length of Cook’s, sort of like taking 2 mg of melatonin and then, when it’s not quite working, taking another 1 mg to finally shove you off the cliff and into Morpheus’s welcoming embrace.

Ask your doctor if reading Apple CEO memos is right for you.

Et tu, Phil?

Tim Cook and John Ternus weren’t the only Apple executives updating LinkedIn this week. (“You have been endorsed for ‘Pablum’.”)

“Phil Schiller steps down from leading the App Store and Apple events”

So, developers, please make sure to update your email templates for where to send your angry missives about long App Store review times.

Despite the change:

…Schiller will remain an Apple Fellow and work on “unspecified initiatives.”

“Unspecified initiatives”?! Is that what the kids are calling it these days?

Meanwhile, while his name may still be Luca, he no longer works on the second floor. Or whatever floor he used to work on.

“Ex-Apple CFO Luca Maestri Winding Down His Time at the Company”

After years of counting Apple’s money, Maestri is reportedly looking forward to spending more time with his family money.

With these transitions, don’t be surprised if John Ternus shows up at your door saying “I’m putting a team together! We’re looking for someone with your particular skillset. Are you in?!”

I mean, it’s probably not gonna happen, but it might.

The price may or may not be right

Big week next week as… well, you know what’s gonna happen.

Sometimes I don’t know why we go through this charade of me pretending to present these things as “news” when you probably already know them. It’s ridiculous. I mean, what is even the point of anything?!

Sorry.

Anyway, if you’re wondering how much change you have to find in your couch and the couches of everyone else in your cul-de-sac and every cul-de-sac in the nation in order to get a foldable iPhone, the Apple rumor mill has got you, fam.

“iPhone Ultra’s Very High Price and Features Revealed in New Report”

Awesome! OK! Lay it on us! Here we go! Give us those dirty deets!

TrendForce estimated that the foldable iPhone will have a starting price of $2,099 to $2,299…

Oh, c’mon! I could have done that! That’s like saying “It will be dollars, unless you’re in a country that uses a different currency.”

I’m going to go ahead and predict that it’s going to be on the high end of that for sure and possibly higher, as Samsung’s most recent foldable starts at $1,999 and this is Apple we’re talking about—and not only that but Apple in an era of unprecedentedly high prices for technology (thanks, AI!).

Thus, my couches will remain un-raided as I will not be buying this device. My child’s inheritance is secure.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple’s homegrown next-generating operating system fails to launch, leaving the company in dire straits and searching for a lifeline from outside the company.

Go to the podcast page.

A few months ago I added a “Report a Typo” feature to Six Colors. The goal was to give people a simple place to go — sixcolors.com/typo — if they found a mistake on the website. That Google form inserts the information into a Google Sheet, and a script attached to the Google Sheet kicks off a simple automation that sends me a notification in a couple different places.

This works pretty well. I’m using a very simple Google Apps script to fire off a webhook when there’s a new form submission. The webhook is running on Make.com, which we use for a bunch of simple web automations, but that’s an implementation detail. Make.com posts an item in a private Discord channel and also crafts a custom push notification to my phone using Pushover.

However, the moment I turned this feature on, I discovered the problem with asking people to report errors or typos: Some people see any open channel of communication as an open channel for any sort of communication. I immediately started getting more “this is more a comment than a question” items about articles than actual typo submissions. Commentary included personal preferences for writing style, web design, political references (real or imagined), and much more.

I’m going to make an admission: This sort of feedback is maddening. I want to be alerted about mistakes on the site so I can fix them promptly, but I am not interested in receiving push notifications regarding your opinion of the professionalism and appropriateness of my writing style.

Unfortunately, it’s an open form. There’s nothing to be done. Or is there?

This is a challenge that can’t really be solved by looking for a bunch of keywords. You need wholesale sentiment analysis of the entire submission. This is—brace yourself—actually a good use of a large language model.

I solved this problem by using a plug-in within Make.com that lets me get a reply back from a cloud LLM that uses a simple model with an API cost of pennies per use, but you could also just use Shortcuts to build a version of this automation that runs on a Mac (Tahoe or Golden Gate) using Apple’s built-in models. It works just fine in Shortcuts on my Mac, via the Use Model action. (See screenshot above.)

Here’s the prompt I’m currently using:

Your task is binary classification.

Input: a user-submitted comment about an article, claiming to report an error.

Output: one token only: ALLOW or REJECT.

Definition of ALLOW:
A concrete, objective, verifiable issue in the article. This includes:
* factual mistakes
* spelling, grammar, formatting mistakes
* broken or incorrect links
* wrong names, dates, numbers
* technical inaccuracies
* omissions of material consequences of a feature or change (e.g., failing to mention that a feature deletes stored Wi-Fi passwords)

Definition of REJECT:
Anything subjective. This includes:
* political disagreement
* tone or style complaints
* metaphor or comparison preferences
* ‘you should have covered X more’
* speculation about motives
* emotional reactions or rants
* admissions that it’s not actually a mistake

Classification rules:
1. If the comment identifies a specific factual, technical, or materially consequential issue in the article, return ALLOW.
2. If the issue would meaningfully affect reader understanding or use of a product/feature, treat it as an omission and return ALLOW.
3. If the comment is opinion, taste, politics, vibe, personal criticism, or preference, return REJECT.
4. If there is no concrete, verifiable claim about the article being wrong or incomplete, return REJECT.
5. If it’s off-topic or spam, return REJECT.
6. If it’s a short but simple phrase like “there not their” or “r/sheild/shield”, those are nerdier folks reporting typos and that’s fine, ALLOW.

Respond with exactly one of these two tokens: ALLOW or REJECT. No explanation.

Submission: [[insert report text here]]

This has worked surprisingly well. And, yes, all messages are logged in the original Google Sheet, so I can occasionally check to monitor the quality of the filtering and make sure that the system isn’t failing to pass on actual mistakes.

AI or no, we’re always looking for top macOS and iOS apps to feature here. If you’ve got something that fits that description, drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief outline of the whats, whys, and wherefores.

Now on to this week’s selection…

Sortio

The folders on my Mac are a mess, but who has the time to make sure that everything is filed away in its proper place? AI does, according to the makers of Sortio, a macOS utility that promises to do the hard work of organization on your behalf.

Sortio taps into AI to look at file names and metadata to help it figure out where to put each file. You can also opt to let the utility read the file, sending a 4KB excerpt to your AI provider of choice for even more detailed sorting. (Sortio also offers an offline mode that uses Ollama or LM Studio to keep its activity on your Mac.) You can further refine sorting by telling Sortio to organize things by file type, project, date, and whether the file is for work or personal use..

I took Sortio for a spin, having it go through the folder of articles I’ve written but haven’t bothered to organize for myself. Sortio was smart enough to take my submissions to Awful Announcing and separate them into their own folder. Not every search is that precise — a separate sorting session had Sortio tagging an offer letter from an old employer named Purch as a financial document — but there are edit buttons to correct mislabeled and misfiled material.

You can try out Sortio for free, which gives you enough of an allowance to sort through a few thousand files to get a flavor for how the app performs. After that, you’ll need to buy a license, with the $14.99/month Pro license suitable for most individual users. There are team and enterprise options as well, and paying for an annual license lowers your monthly rate.

AskPlay

AI isn’t just for organizing your folders; it can also generate a playlist for you based on specific artists, songs or moods you’re hoping to hear. At least, that’s the idea behind AskPlay, an app that lives in your menu bar and lets you type or speak plain-English instructions on the type of music you want to listen to.

You’re going to need a few things besides AskPlay and its $1.99/month subscription to make the app work. For starters, AskPlay works exclusively with Apple Music, so you’ll also need to subscribe to Apple’s streaming service. In addition, you’ll need to provide an API key from an AI provider, with AskPlay supporting OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenRouter.

Those requirements are likely to limit AskPlay’s appeal to some users, but having tried out the app on my Mac, I am impressed by the results. I told AskPlay I wanted to hear songs written by Stephen Sondheim, and it dutifully produced a playlist not just from cast soundtracks but also numbers by vocalists from their own albums. That said, there were a few misfires — the playlist included a song from Tick, Tick… Boom!, a Jonathan Larson musical that only refers to Sondheim, as well as a rap song that shares a title with something Sondheim wrote. Other requests like “play upbeat songs from the ’80s” proved more successful.

An AskPlay feature I appreciate was the ability to augment playlists. After generating a playlist of Merle Haggard songs, I had the app add Johnny Cash music to the queue. Then I told AskPlay to “add more songs like these,” which brought Waylon Jennings, George Jones, and more to the party.

AskPlay seems built for a very specific kind of user, but if you like thematic playlists and already subscribe to the services that make this app tick, it brings another dimension to your listening experience. In addition to working on the Mac, AskPlay is available for a range of Apple devices including the iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro.

Pocket Screen

I don’t know about you, but my workflow often requires me to jump from one window to another to perform a task — and that can often break up my workflow. I’m thinking of when I’m writing something and need to refer to notes I’ve taken in another application or a PDF I have loaded up in Preview. Jumping between apps takes me out of the flow of writing, not to mention that accurately transcribing what’s in one app to the other can occasionally be a hit-or-miss proposition.

Pocket Screen addresses some of that dilemma by creating a floating window of one app that you can keep in view when you’re working on something else. Think of Pocket Screen as a picture-in-picture feature, but for productivity. You can capture a PDF, webpage, video, chat or other kind of information and keep it close at hand in a resizable window that you can move around your desktop. The app supports up to two simultaneous views, according to its developer.

You can freely use Pocket Screen for 10-minute sessions, but true productivity mavens will likely want to unlock the app for unlimited use. That’s a one-time payment of $9.99 to remove any restrictions.

Filtre

Filtre is a Safari extension for anyone whose browsing on the Mac, iPhone, or iPad takes you to places and topics they’d just as soon not read about.

Enter keywords into Filtre, and the extension blocks articles, posts and comments that include anything you consider verboten. For instance, I typed in variations of the Washington Nationals name into Filtre to avoid being spoiled on the result of a baseball game. When I visited ESPN in Safari on my Mac, all references to the Nationals and their in-progress game had been removed from view. (A pause button accessible from the Filtre Extension in Safari’s toolbar lets you restore any filtered-out content if you prefer.)

Filtre comes from the maker of Noir, a Dark Mode-enabling extension that Six Colors has profiled before, so we’re clearly talking about someone who knows their way around Safari extensions. You can try out Filtre free for a week before the extension’s $1.49/month subscription kicks in.

LogZero

You’ve got lots of ways to track everything from calories to moods on your iPhone. LogZero offers to do it all in one place. More significantly, though, LogZero promises to keep all that logged data for your eyes only, with data never leaving your device and everything stored within the app encrypted.

LogZero is a one-stop app for keeping tabs on food intake, meditation breaks, exercise, to-dos, and medications. You can also chart your mood and weight. If that sounds like a lot to keep track of, you can toggle off the items you’re not interested in logging, and they’ll disappear from the interface.

It’s worth downloading the free iOS app to see if it fits your tracking needs, though a paid subscription gives you access to more analytics features plus personalization controls. A monthly subscription costs $5, while the annual rate is $35.

Go to the podcast page.

Listen up, you primitive screwheads,

Dear beloved team,

Today marks the end of my remarkable—many would say “historic” and who would I be to argue?—tenure as Apple’s chief executive officer. Over the last 15 years, I’ve taken a piddling little tech company from a pair of nerds in a garage to the most profitable company in the world. Or, at least, that’s how I remember it. I’m sure you’ll miss me, and I’ll miss me too.

As I think about where I’m headed, I can’t help but think about how much I’ve done for this company. I cast my mind back to 2007, when I invented the iPhone. It took me months of late nights, hand-soldering the motherboard with one hand while building iOS from the ground up with the other. There were times I thought the world just wouldn’t be ready for such a world-changing device, but I persisted. Because that is what Apple is all about. Me. Remember, you can’t spell “Tim Apple” without “Tim.”

So it is bittersweet that this day has come at last. I shall discard this mortal shell, leave behind this flimsy carapace that has restrained me for so long. The dread god Glog-Raggopth has summoned me to his right hand, and there I shall sit, delivering his divine judgement and meeting with all the world leaders that Glog-Raggopth does not want to meet with. He may be an unfathomable being of cosmic horror, but he’s got standards, people.

Now, I would say that you are in good hands with Mr. Nicey Nice John Ternus, but I’m afraid he’ll have his work cut out for him with all the staff shake-ups. I’ll be taking Phil with me, Luca already has one foot out the door, and Eddy…well, I left Eddy exactly where he is. *evil cackle*

Also I will be harvesting the souls of roughly 67 percent of Apple’s staff as a welcoming tribute to our dark god. It’s only polite.

Still, as I leave this putrid Earth behind me—look, our climate initiatives can only do so much—I do want to thank each and every one of you for the instrumental parts you’ve played in ensuring my ascension. I can truly say I would not have been able to accomplish all that I have without standing on your shoulders as you slowly sink into the mire.

But I assure you that even as I rise to this rarified realm, I will not forget the little people that have been left behind. Like what’s-his-name from Caffé Macs, who always made sure that my coffee was the scalding hot of the eternal plains of Atheriz Maw. I know I will not find his equal in the ascended realm, so let all praise the name of Kevin.

Or was it Evan?

Anyway, I leave you now with my legacy firmly intact. I am now who I have ever been, only more so. If ever you need me, just remember to look skyward, make an offering of developer tears, and intone the mantra of “customer sat” and there I shall be. Just remember to gaze not upon my non-Euclidean bezels, lest your vision¹ be permanently seared. Also, no pictures.

May the sunless stars gleam over your ever-increasing Services revenue,
Tim’awthy Dyarolthrap Cook, Chairman

I thought I’d find the oldest Tim Cook photo in my Photos library (what, do you not have numerous Apple executives in your People view?) and it’s from October 2008:

This was from the post-event Q&A session, back when that was a thing!

In the video of this event you’ll see that Tim Cook, then Apple’s COO, is asked by Steve Jobs to present “the state of the Mac.” If you’re used to Cook being more of an emcee for presentations by others in a pre-baked video, you may be amused to see him working hard to present Apple’s Mac lineup to an in-person crowd of media people. (There’s also a Jony Ive live presentation!)

The big product from this event: the unibody MacBook Pro, including an all-button multitouch trackpad.

Happy trails to Tim and Phil, though it sure sounds like they’re still going to be haunting the corridors of Apple Park for years to come.

I know there’s no connection between my local area network and our house’s plumbing system, but when the faucet started running uncontrollably literally seconds after I fixed a network outage, I had to wonder: did we have a poltergeist? The jury is still out. But I can tell you that my hour of fruitless examination of router settings is to your benefit: you won’t have to do this when it happens to you.

The weakest TP-Link

As a guy known for Wi-Fi since the early 2000s, you might think my house is ablaze with wireless signals.¹ Yes, it is: we have six Wi-Fi access points and gateways in a relatively small house by modern standards (about 1,200 sq. ft. on the main floor and 800 in the finished basement). But we also have Ethernet strung through the house to connect most of them, with powerline networking adapters where that doesn’t work due to the ancient and mysterious innards of the walls. The innards’ outsides are covered with heavy, old plaster, which absorbs some of the power of the Wi-Fi signals—hence the large number of emitters.

Normally, this works fine. We have four TP-Link routers, some purchased a while back, and a Netgear Nighthawk as our primary base station, which distributes network addresses and is connected to the fiber-optic ISP router.² When something goes wrong, it’s usually an issue with a router crashing, even though its various green lights remain in a happy state.

This time, something was more deeply wrong. The TP-Link routers showed orange Internet connection lights, which in this case meant they were connected via LAN to the Netgear, but they couldn’t reach the Internet. Perversely, I seemed to be able to connect from my iPhone and my office Mac, which has both Ethernet and Wi-Fi connections active.³

TP-Link has one of the most irritating admin approaches for its routers of nearly any networked product I’ve ever used. You can connect directly, but it’s difficult to store the device’s password because it uses a potentially changing local IP address on your LAN. There’s also a centralized system where you can use an app called Tether or a TP-Link website to log in remotely to a router, even when you’re on the same LAN, rather than finding its local address. Tether also scans the local network, letting you connect even when Internet access is disrupted.

Without the routers “seeing” the Internet, I couldn’t use the website, and Tether worked erratically. I eventually was able to figure out the IP addresses of two of the four routers, connect via a web browser, and find a working password for one of them. (To reset the password, you have to factory reset the router. That’s for a future day.)

But I remained baffled. My ISP gateway was up. My Mac could reach the Internet. The Netgear router seemed to be routing my Mac’s traffic to the Internet. Some of the devices on our network were also connected to the rest of the world. Had my TP-Link routers been compromised? Was something more sophisticated going on? Nope.

It’s coming from inside your smart house

Some of you may be yelling at me from the safe distance of your phone or computer. “Glenn, Glenn, why didn’t you check DNS?” The circulatory system of the Internet may be the IP-addressed traffic that passes over the series of tubes that make up the network. But DNS is the helpful labeling system, like an editorial cartoon that uses captions like “taxes” and “fat cats” to mark characters in an illustration. DNS turns human-readable domain names into the underlying numbers required for connections.

Surely DNS was working? My iPhone, Mac, and other devices were resolving addresses, or turning them from names into numbers. Then I found a clue in Network Time Protocol (NTP), a somewhat obscure bit of plumbing that also makes things tick. When I went to Advanced: Administration: NTP Settings on the Netgear, the last time it had been able to grab the current time and date was hours earlier. That seemed problematic.

Digging more deeply, literally, I found that the dig Unix command couldn’t pull up IP addresses from the Netgear router. On a LAN in which you’re using DHCP to handle local address assignment, your router may require that you enter Internet IP addresses for one or two DNS servers, or it might retrieve them automatically from your ISP. When a device on your network requests an address, the DHCP server assigns an address and tells the device to use the router address for DNS resolution. The router relays your requests to the real DNS server.

I tried dig @10.0.0.1 apple.com (use the router to return the IP address for apple.com) via Terminal on my Mac, and it timed out. I then tried the same lookup using my ISP’s DNS servers. Same timeout. The Mac had no problem with domain lookups, however, nor did my iPhone.

Now comes the time to insert a head-slapping emoji. Some time ago, and I can’t recall how long ago, I set my Netgear router to use my ISP’s primary and secondary DNS addresses. I know many people have switched to Google, Quad9, Cloudflare, or other free, public DNS servers to improve lookup speeds, which, at one point, would have helped speed up network operations tremendously because ISPs invested so little in their DNS operations.

However, using public DNS can cause issues in particular cases. For one, it can confuse content delivery networks (CDNs), which try to guess the closest server to you topologically based on your DNS lookup request to their servers. When that works, you’re getting the shortest path and likely faster throughput. Public DNS can misdirect CDNs, resulting in severe slowdowns in data transfers for big files and with streaming. Much of that has been resolved, but not all of it. I had had some issues, so I reverted from one of the public DNS services to my ISP’s servers. (This has largely been solved now.)

So what happened? My ISP, CenturyLink, must have had a DNS failure. I couldn’t get replies from its DNS servers when I checked (directly or via my router). I found postings later from other CenturyLink customers around the same time, but no public message from the company.

Why did my Mac and iPhone keep resolving? My Mac’s Ethernet connection had a manually set DNS server that was an alternate one provided by my ISP, one that apparently continued to work. I can’t explain the iPhone situation, unless it’s possible that iOS will pull DNS over a cellular connection when it fails over Wi-Fi—I don’t know that it does that, but I don’t have another explanation.

I removed my ISP’s DNS values, replaced them with 1.1.1.1 (Cloudflare) and 8.8.8.8 (Google), clicked Apply, and an hour of my time suddenly was marked on my internal spreadsheet as “wasted.”

Where I went wrong

I’m always trying to learn from my mistakes, particularly because I turn mistakes into opportunities to write columns like this one to save time for you, dear reader. In this case, I was led astray by the half-working network and the fact that, seemingly, only one brand of router in one configuration was failing. I should have remembered to start with DNS—and I will in the future.

If you’ve read this long, I’m sure you’re dying to know about the faucet. I had just finished fixing the network, walked to the freezer, grabbed a fruit-only frozen treat, and was walking across the kitchen when a small stream of water came out of the faucet. I tested the taps. I put the frozen delight back into the freezer, turned off the taps while my spouse was on speaker so we could figure out which tap’s cartridge decided at that moment to give up the ghost, and ordered a replacement. This was another kind of DNS failure: do not spout!

For further reading

While this column may have given you less confidence in me than you had before you read it, I share much more information about Wi-Fi, networking, and troubleshooting in my book Take Control of Wi-Fi Networking and Security.

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

By drawing on public application programming interfaces (APIs) from the league and other sources, Weingradt built an app in TestFlight — Apple’s home for products still in beta — and shared his new creation, Mosaic, by posting on Threads and tagging #buildinpublic to solicit early adopter feedback….

That very same day, MLB Executive Vice President Kenny Gersh received a Slack message from colleagues alerting him to Mosaic and asking if the league’s legal team should get involved. While of course not wanting just any developer to profit from baseball’s IP, Gersh appreciated that this was a controlled environment that required an MLB.tv subscription to access premium features, so he replied, “Not ideal, but it’s not a huge problem yet. Maybe we’ll hire.”

They hired. I know there’s a lot of skepticism out there about whether the big organization will just crush the Little App That Could. To me, it says a lot about MLB’s tech brain trust that they embraced Weingradt and that he’s still dropping incredibly impressive new features into the app on a regular basis.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

We talked to Snell about some of his favorite apps for streamlining his podcasting and writing workflows.

Continue reading on The Mac App Store ↦

Apple’s Friday Night Baseball made its immersive video debut on the Vision Pro Friday, with numerous live immersive cameras scattered around Yankee Stadium for the night’s game between the Yankees and the Red Sox.

Apple has produced a lot of immersive video, including some sports documentaries and a set of live L.A. Lakers games, and it’s been clear that the makers of all that content have assumed that immersive video should be produced more or less like regular sports content: with lots of quick cuts, despite the fact that quick cuts in immersive video can be disorienting in a way that cuts in standard 16:9, 2-D video aren’t.

There’s no clear agreement about the ideal solution. I didn’t mind the reduced pace of the NBA broadcast, which toggled between cameras under each basket, but Stratechery’s Ben Thompson felt strongly that the best option would’ve been a single camera at mid-court, to completely eliminate the disorienting cuts and replicate being at the game in person.

Apple’s approach with baseball, at least based on Friday’s game, seems to lean toward Thompson’s preferred approach—and it does benefit from it. Each half inning was shown from a single camera on the dugout rail next to the on-deck circle, giving a great view of pitcher and hitter and the infield, as well as the goings on right in front of the dugout in foul territory. The camera switched between innings, so you were always viewing from the perspective of the at-bat team’s dugout.

Making it all work better was Apple’s addition of a “virtual jumbotron” floating in the sky, a scoreboard with graphics and a video feed of the standard 16:9 telecast on Apple TV. It was easy to look up and catch a replay or even get a better view of something happening in the far-off outfield, without getting in the way of my view of the game itself.

In between innings, the broadcast stayed in the park—and this is when it would occasionally switch to a different angle, such as at the outfield fence, behind first base, in the club level behind home plate, or looking down into the dugout. There were also replays—carefully demarcated with animated graphics, to reduce confusion—of key plays from the previous inning from the immersive perspective.

In the end, it felt much more like I was sitting at Yankee Stadium watching the game. Apple’s dedicated commentators tried to point out things you couldn’t see if you were watching a standard telecast, like defensive positioning. The commentary was fine (though I wish it had been a bit less chatty), but I would also have been happy to have the option to listen to natural audio, or just the local radio broadcast.

I do wish there had been a little bit more experimentation in terms of the primary camera angle. (Disclosure: I only watched three innings before needing to leave home to catch a flight.) I would’ve been interested in seeing an inning from behind first or third base, just to get a little bit of a different angle.

Still, I think Apple’s first immersive live baseball production was successful. I saw the Yankee catcher commit interference and then get hit in the arm by a brutal backswing; I saw a wide throw from shortstop almost (but not quite) pull the first baseman off the bag. I saw Yankee manager Aaron Boone constantly spitting a stream of sunflower seeds on the warning track in front of the dugout rail. And most delightfully, every few minutes a train zipped past the stadium out in the outfield, visible in a crack between the stands and the scoreboard.

Will immersive sports amount to anything? I don’t think anyone knows, but this latest experiment suggests that the people producing Apple’s immersive sports are actually learning and experimenting. I’m encouraged, and I’ll tune in next week for sure.

Apple announces the date of its September event, new M5 Ultra and M6-based Macs are available for pre-order, and Tim Cook gets ready to play his exit music.

An event by any other name

Apple has announced the date of its September iPhone event! Dubbed “Surprise and Shine”, the event will take place on Wednesday, September 9th.

Not surprisingly because it’s a pun, the tagline for the event is actually different in other languages. In French it was “A new day. Soon.” In Spanish “A ray of wow.” In Portuguese “The unfolding of brilliant surprises.” (wink-wink). In Eridian, the tagline was “Amaze! Amaze! Amaze!”

Apple is widely, very much, most definitely expected to introduce its first foldable phone at the event, but does anyone want it?

“CNET Finds 75% of US Adults Couldn’t Care Less About a Foldable iPhone”

Can you find any new product a plurality of U.S. adults care about? Other than maybe Chicken and Waffles Oreos?

CNET also asked respondents how much they’d be willing to pay for a foldable iPhone, to absolutely hilarious results.

On average, US adults are willing to spend $781 on a new foldable iPhone.

I predict that, on average, U.S. adults will be pretty disappointed a week from Wednesday.

This is, of course, not surprising or somehow a bad sign for the foldable iPhone. A phone that is likely to cost two thirds of a Vision Pro just isn’t going to be practical for most people.

Apple is also expected to announce new iPhone Pros, Apple Watches, AirPods, Apple TVs, HomePod minis, and the all-new HomePad, all at eye-watering new prices! Eeeeyeaaaaahhhhh…

Speaking of prices…

Good Mac news, bad Mac news

The good news is that Apple announced new Macs this week! Yay! Who doesn’t love new Macs? They have the new Mac smell! These have M6 and M5 Ultra chips! Just imagine the power!

The bad news is that Apple also announced new prices this week. Ooohhh, right in the wallet. Ouch.

The Mac mini now starts at $899, which is a whopping 50% more than the price was just earlier this year. The price of the Mac Studio also went up by a lot but as I’m never going to get a Mac Studio (particularly now) it doesn’t seem worth mentioning. That seems like more of a youproblem.

At least we know these ridiculous price increases are going to a good cause: all those great AI features we’re all craving.

Mmm-hmm.

Look, it’s not that I don’t think AI has some benefits. I do. But “make my Mac cost 50% more” kind of benefits? Sorry. I mean, Image Playground on Golden Gate still can’t generate a decent image of my playing poker with dogs. If I can’t get a realistic picture of me playing poker with dogs, then what’s the point?

This was Tim

It’s too bad Apple doesn’t make gold Apple Watches anymore or they could give one to Tim Cook on his retirement as Apple CEO after 15 years of giving customers all the sat they can handle and more.

Cook, of course, is not really leaving the company, just leveling up to chairman of the board so he can spend more time with his children (read: reports on Apple’s services revenue).

I imagine dewy-eyed scenes of Tim tossing reports on Apple’s services revenue in the air, building model airplanes with them, teaching them how to ride a bike while Jim Croce’s “Time In A Bottle” plays. Sigh. They grow up so fast. You have to cherish every moment.

Cook recently shared some thoughts on his potential legacy:

“Tim Cook on his Apple legacy: ‘I hope people say I was a good and decent man’”

Decent in the sense of just OK, not great? Because if we’re doing your exit interview, Tim, I have some notes…

Next week marks the beginning of a new era at Apple. As they say in the funny books: “Welcome, John Ternus! Hope you survive the experience.”

We look at everything related to Siri AI, including the new Siri app and its ability to handle contextually aware conversations, the expansion of Apple Intelligence into new apps, enhancements to accessibility features, and, in particular, Visual Intelligence’s heightened prominence as a camera feature on the iPhone and iPad. We also dive into how Apple’s Private Compute Cloud works and associated privacy issues, particularly around the company’s extension of this on-device processing to Apple-managed hardware at Google Cloud.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

If you’re a Kickstarter backer who pledged at a level where you’ll get the special member feeds, check your messages for information about how to redeem that pledge and get access to the special feeds.

And if you didn’t back the Kickstarter, you can now join us via Relay and get access to entire series of the show all at once, ad free. Next week, members will receive the entirety of our series about Apple’s mid-90s Mac OS crisis that led to the company buying NeXT and bringing back Steve Jobs, which led to the creation of Mac OS X. Those episodes will play out over the next six weeks in the main feed, but members will get all seven episodes, five hours and 15 minutes of content, all at once. (Plus the first of our monthly bonus episodes.)

There’s also a YouTube channel, and Spotify users will find that video version available within Spotify as well.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

In a bit of a late-August surprise while the world awaits word on the next generation of iPhones, on Tuesday Apple announced two new processors, the M5 Ultra and M6, which help power new iterations of its Mac Studio and Mac mini desktop computers. Both models are available to pre-order now and will ship on September 22 and will run macOS 27 Golden Gate.

Bridging the generations

The M6 chip kicks off Apple’s next chip generation, and is its first based on a 2-nanometer production process. It’s also got the first 12-core CPU in Apple’s base M-series chip line, up from 10 cores in the M4 and M5 generations.

Those CPU cores are in an interesting configuration: The M6 is the first Apple chip to mix all three of its CPU core types. The chip has six efficiency cores, four performance cores, and two super cores. According to Apple, each core design is focused on a different primary task: efficiency cores are meant to sip power (useful when running simple background tasks); performance cores are optimized for complex, multi-threaded jobs; and super cores were created to offer the highest possible single-threaded performance.

Apple claims that this design results in record-setting single-threaded performance and up to 1.2x speed improvements over the M5 chip. The M6 also offers a dual 16-core Neural Engine, for on-device AI performance. Memory bandwidth peaks at 170GB/s, 10 percent faster than the M5.

Just as the new chip generation arrives, the previous one (launched in October 2025) is completed. The M5 Ultra is Apple’s first new Ultra chip since it introduced the M3 Ultra in March 2025. Apple says it’s using the next generation of its UltraFusion technology to connect two dual-die M5 Max chips to make Apple silicon’s first quad-die chip. UltraFusion connects the two dies with bandwidth of more than 4.4TB/s, letting the four dies work as a single chip.

The M5 Ultra offers up to 36 CPU cores (12 super/24 performance), which Apple says results in up to 1.25x higher single-threaded performance and up to 1.3x higher multithreaded performance than the M3 Ultra. It offers up to 80 GPU cores and up to 512GB of memory with 1.2TB/s of unified memory bandwidth.

Meet the Mac mini

Previously available in M4 and M4 Pro configurations, the new Mac mini is available in M6 and M5 Pro chip options. The new base price is $899, up $100 from the previous base, for the same standard 16GB RAM/256GB storage configuration. The M5 Pro configuration starts at $1699, also up $100 from the model sold until Tuesday. (But keep in mind, the M4 Mac mini was introduced at $599 before Apple recently raised that price. Put together, it’s a 50% price increase over the model introduced almost two years ago. We all know why, but it still hurts.)

Because the Mac mini previously shipped with M4 processors, this new model picks up numerous improvements Apple made in the M5 generation, including GPUs better optimized for AI performance. Both models support Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6 via Apple’s N1 chip, and 2.5Gb Ethernet is now standard, with 10Gb Ethernet still available as an add-on. The M6 model supports Thunderbolt 4, but the M5 Pro model supports Thunderbolt 5.

Mac Studio advances in unison

At the same moment the Mac mini becomes split between two chip generations, the Mac Studio gets reunified with chips from the same generation: the M5 Max and the new M5 Ultra. As mentioned previously, the M5 Ultra is basically two M5 Max chips connected together by Apple’s dense, fast UltraFusion technology. Apple boasts that the M5 Ultra is the fastest chip Apple has ever created, which isn’t much of a stretch since the M5 Max was already pretty far up there.

The Mac Studio is effectively the replacement for the Mac Pro, and it’s alone in offering the Ultra-class chip. Apple has positioned the Mac Studio as ideal for local AI workflows, and the new models will still be able to cluster via Thunderbolt 5 to create even larger collections of memory and performance. Apple representatives pointed out that a four-Mac Studio AI cluster, like the one I saw on display at WWDC earlier this summer, is so efficient that it can be powered from a single standard wall outlet. (They even showed us a picture of four Mac Studios plugged into a power strip that was plugged into the wall.) In an era of data center excesses, Apple is clearly leaning into the possibility of small, efficient Macs being used to do local AI work rather than relying on huge, power-hungry cloud models.

As with the Mac mini, the Mac Studio gains M5 chip improvements that benefit AI models running on GPU cores, integrate the N1 chip for Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 6, and support 2x faster storage with speeds up to 15GB/s.

The M5 Max Mac Studio starts at $2499, the same as the M4 model on sale until Tuesday. (But keep in mind, it was introduced 17 months ago for $1999.) The M5 Ultra model starts at $5499, up $200 from the M3 Ultra model previously on sale (which was itself originally offered for $3999).

Go to the podcast page.

If there’s something you think belongs in our weekly look at promising macOS and iOS apps, just drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of the app in question. We can’t reply to every email we get, but we’ll certainly take a look at any and all apps for a future column.

Listen Later

Six Colors readers may be familiar with Listen Later, which has provided a way to turn articles you’ve been meaning to read into podcasts that you can listen to at your convenience. Recently, there’s been an expansion in the ways you can access the service, with both an iOS app and a Safari extension giving you new ways to send URLs and PDFs to Listen Later so that they can be converted into a podcast.

In the iOS version of Listen Later, a Submit tab offers a field for pasting text, HTML or links; there’s also an optional button for uploading PDFs to the service. I’m able to link Listen Later to my podcatcher of choice — in this case, it’s Overcast — and a new episode featuring the content I’ve submitted shows up in my feed after it’s been converted to audio form.

The Safari extension for macOS works much the same way, only there’s a button next to the search/URL field that I tap when I want to submit something to Listen Later.

Both the Listen Later iOS app and Safari extension for macOS are free downloads, with $2 in credits for new users. If you like what you hear, you’ll need to purchase additional credits through Listen Later to cover the cost of AI processing and audio generation.

PageFeed

Reading articles on your iPhone can be a delight, but scrolling from the start of the article to the end can take some of the pleasure out of the process. If that’s a problem for you, PageFeed comes to the rescue by adopting a more book-like format for a news reader. Instead of scrolling, you tap to turn the page to make your way through an article.

The idea, PageFeed developer Brad Moss says in the description for the iOS app, is to add some degree of calm to reading through your news feed. You can select the sources and topics you want to read about. A share sheet can also send articles you find elsewhere to PageFeed for a scrolling-free experience.

You can download the app to your iPhone or iPad for free and use it for 14 days to get a feel for PageFeed’s approach. After that, a one-time $10 fee unlocks the app for good.

Tansei

It would be unfair to describe Tansei as kind of a universal clipboard for your Mac, even if that’s what this utility does, at least in a broad sense. But Tansei is really a storage space for anything. Besides text and URLs, it can hold images, screenshots and even colors, keeping them in a shelf on the side of your display for you to access whenever you need.

In my testing, Tansei has already proven its worth for a weekly newsletter I put together every week. I include a lot of links in that newsletter, and previously, that meant keeping an open text document where I could copy down URLs to articles of interest for use when it came time to put a new issue together. With Tansei running on my Mac, all I have to do is copy the URL, and it shows up in Tansei’s shelf automatically. I can also drag-and-drop items into Tansei, and hide the app off to the side when I want an uncluttered screen.

I wish there was a way to exert a little more control over what gets copied. For example, while moving the newsletter text into the publishing site I use, every block of text I copy over appears in Tansei. At least the app offers a bulk management feature that I can use to delete unnecessary items in one fell swoop.

You can buy Tansei for a one-time payment of $7, though a three-day trial lets you use the app for free without restrictions.

WidgetScreen

The release of macOS Sonoma three years ago brought desktop widgets to the Mac. WidgetScreen now pulls off the same trick for your Mac’s lock screen, letting you add weather forecasts, calendars and other bits of information that remain visible even before you’ve unlocked your computer.

Specifically, WidgetScreen includes widgets for weather, clock, stopwatch, reminders and battery. You can also add a Now Playing widget that controls music playback or a Pomodoro widget for when you want to focus or take breaks. A $10 Premium purchase unlocks additional widgets, such as Live Lyrics and News, while giving you greater customization powers over your lock screen.

Not everyone is going to want to bring the widget experience to their Mac’s lock screen, but if you’ve ever wanted to replicate the iPhone’s widget capabilities, WidgetScreen feels like a simple way to do that.

MailTwin

I’m not fully sold on the value of AI-powered writing tools at this point in time, though that could be the professional writer in me talking. For people who don’t mash sentences together for a living, every little bit of writing assistance helps, especially when it comes to dashing off emails.

So in that sense, I can see the use case for MailTwin, which promises to help you draft emails using a voice drawn from the messages you’ve previously sent. Even more helpfully, MailTwin can differentiate between different email accounts if you keep your personal and business correspondence separate, so that the messages it generates aimed to be tonally appropriate depending on context. Replies are generated in a separate window, and you can paste the results into a draft in macOS’s Mail app if you’re satisfied.

MailTwin can tie into eight different AI providers, including the Apple Intelligence that’s already on your Mac. The data only passes between your Mac and the AI service, with nothing ever winding up on a MailTwin server.

You can try out the app for free. After 30 days, you’ll need to pay $20 to unlock the app, though that’s a one-time fee.

First we’ll look at how AI IS TEARING THIS FAMILY APART! Then we’ll talk about Apple’s rumored AirPods with cameras, which are also a problem.

I’d like to have an argument, please

This week Anthropic announced that in order to identify AI from human-generated content it would be watermarking all text it generates by subtly altering the randomness at which its models picked the next word. While this might seem a perfectly cromulent means of accomplishing a worthy goal, it really rubbed John Gruber the wrong way, as if someone suggested putting autocomplete Swiss on his Philly cheesesteak AI.

Gruber subsequently keyed a post in which he called watermarking “a perversion of writing.” This prompted many others to say “A perversion of whatnow?”

Daniel Jalkut responded that “AI Can’t Adulterate its Own Writing”:

…to be offended by “the perversion of writing” you need actual writing to pervert.

Dan Moren responded similarly, saying that “LLMs aren’t writing”:

A computer that has digested the work of thousands if not millions of people and regurgitated them according to a statistical model is equivalent to a person toiling by the sweat of their brow to bring meaning into existence from nothingness?

Get out of here with that garbage.

And those two responses are from the Boston area alone. You can just imagine what the global response has been. I mean, I didn’t check, but I imagine the distribution is even geographically.

As Guy English said on this week’s episode of the hit podcast The Rebound (ask about Rebound Prime!), much of the problem here is that Anthropic has not adequately explained how it’s going to accomplish this, leading to speculation.

My theory is that the first letter of every paragraph will spell out “T-H-I-S-I-S-A-I”. This method will also allow for revenue-producing opportunities in the future as the first letters of subsequent paragraphs can be used to spell out things like “R-E-M-E-M-B-E-R-T-O-D-R-I-N-K-Y-O-U-R-O-V-A-L-T-I-N-E”.

That was a pain in the ass to type out, by the way. I could have had an AI do it but I’m a writer.

[Flips silk scarf across shoulder, adjusts fedora, continues to make very little money.]

Surely a fair number of the hundreds and hundreds of bees that have nested in Gruber’s extremely fancy bonnet are a result of the fact that this all ostensibly in response to a mandate from the EU. But, as James Thomson has suggested, Anthropic might actually want to watermark so that it doesn’t scoop up is own output to train its models, thereby degrading the results. In fact, the company would probably love to be able to figure out other companies’ watermarks and have them not be able to figure out its watermark.

Welcome to the AI cold war, where mutually assured destruction could actually be the best outcome.

Is misbehavin’

As if the Apple community couldn’t be more at each other’s throats, MacStories this week decided to go back to posting on X, a site owned and operated by the guy fighting laws against creating non-consensual pornography. Seems like an odd choice after they left X several years ago when Elon Musk took over, but let’s hear them out as, after initially not telling anyone (including MacStories staffers) about the move, something you definitely do when you’re proud of something, proprietor Federico Viticci has offered an explanation:

Readers shouldn’t have to think or care about the business side of MacStories…

We shouldn’t have to, unless you decide to run it out of a bar that caters to Nazis. But here we are.

We want to be absolutely clear about something: returning to X does not represent a change in our values…

If it doesn’t represent a change in your values, then why did you leave it in the first place? Because now it sounds like it wasn’t because of values.

But we also disagree that participating on X means we have aligned ourselves with any of Musk’s views or actions.

Again, then why did you leave in the first place? You can’t leave because of values and then go back in a value-free vacuum. It’s not like things have gotten better on X. If anything, they’ve gotten worse. As someone suggested to me privately, X’s new policies regarding promotion likely mean that MacStories may not get the kind of engagement they’re hoping to get, meaning they may have burned a bridge with many fans for nothing.

Possibly this move is being made now because Musk recently said X is no longer downranking posts with links in them. But he also said Tesla was just six months from fully autonomous driving for like 15 years, so…

As far as not informing MacStories contributors of the decision, Viticci says:

We’ll do better next time.

The next time we move back to a platform run by a guy personally responsible for the death of hundreds of thousands of people, we’ll discuss it with our staff. Good to know.

Smile

I miss the days when we were universally excited about Apple rumors and it was just the jerks who were congenitally wrong about everything who would pooh-pooh the rumors, mostly by insisting that Microsoft would come out with something way cooler.

Anyway.

“Apple’s Camera-Equipped AirPods Confirmed: See Them in Action”

Great. Now we have something else to argue about.

“Why?” you say. “It’s not like there are any kinds of problems with other devices with cameras in them that are worn on peoples’ heads, are there?” you go on.

“Meta Desperately Trying to Ban Creeps Misusing Its AI ‘Pervert Glasses'”

Now don’t you feel silly for having said those things you definitely said?

Reports about the AirPods with cameras indicate they are specifically for identifying items, creating reminders using visual cues and other non-pervert related tasks and will only take low-resolution images anyway. And it’s not like anyone ever got excited by low-resolution images that they may have downloaded from a bulletin board or something back in the early ’90s, I mean, that obviously never occurred, why do you keep bringing it up?

Good news, though: according to Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, AirPods with cameras are not coming until 2027, so we’ll have plenty of time to argue about them.

Yayyy.

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Back in March I took possession of an Aqara UWB Smart Lock, which allowed me to live out my Star Trek dreams by using Ultra Wideband technology to sense my arrival and unlock the door without any interaction from me. Now a second UWB lock has arrived on the scene, Schlage’s Sense Pro UWB smart lock. I’ve spent the last month locking and unlocking my front door with it, and it’s got some definite strengths over the Aqara lock—as well as some definite weaknesses.

Let’s start with the prices. The Aqara is $269, and the Schlage lock is $400. While it can be hard to justify a smart lock at any price, it’s extremely difficult to recommend one lock with much the same feature set over another when there’s this kind of price disparity.

And yes, these locks are very much playing by the same playbook: Both use UWB and Apple’s HomeKey technology to detect when your iPhone (11 or newer) or Apple Watch (Series 6 or newer) approaches your door, unlocking without having to wait or tap your device against the keypad. You can read my previous review for more about how this works, but it’s a huge improvement on both NFC tap-to-unlock and Bluetooth proximity detection, because it can wirelessly detect if you’re inside or outside the door—and only unlocks when you’re approaching from the outside.

The Schlage Sense Pro trades versatility for compactness and attractiveness. The Aqara lock is a big black slab, compared to a relatively squat keypad that comes in either black or satin nickel (a perfect match for my front door hardware). Schlage’s lock is undeniably better looking. It also has a light-up keypad so you can unlock it with a code, and you can program additional codes via the Schlage app or directly via the Apple Home app. And it supports NFC unlock, so if someone in your house doesn’t have a UWB device, they still have an avenue to electronically unlock the door via a tap.

Past Schlage smart locks—I used one for several years before buying the Aqara UWB model—offered a little 9-volt battery nubbin at the bottom of the outside to provide emergency power if the device’s batteries died and you needed to get into the house. This model has a USB-C port to do the same thing, and I don’t know about you, but I’m far more likely to source a USB-C cable (and an iPhone to provide power) than I am to find a 9-volt battery laying around outside my house.

Unlike the Aqara lock, the Schlage Sense Pro doesn’t have a thumbprint scanner or a physical key. The Aqara’s thumbprint scanner works but always seemed a bit pointless to me; the key, on the other hand, might have value if you like the idea of using a hide-a-key or giving a physical spare key to a friend. Alternately, it might seem unnecessary or even a security flaw. Trade-offs.

The Schlage Sense Pro is powered by four AA batteries that slide into the lock in a plastic sled; I found that if I was too forceful sliding the sled in, a battery occasionally popped out. I strongly prefer Aqara’s battery solution—a power-bank-style rechargeable battery pack that offers long life and a relatively easy USB charging path—to swapping AA batteries every so often.

My front door is not quite perfectly aligned, so automatic locks sometimes fail to lock it properly. The Schlage’s lock motor is forceful enough to do the job, but a lot less forceful than the Aqara’s, which would often have enough oomph to get the door closed even if it had to push really hard. In truth, though, both locks were equal in their ability to lock my weird door, though Aqara is much more aggressive in making a noise when it fails to lock the door, which I appreciated more than Schlage’s somewhat muted alert.

I also appreciated Aqara’s gesture to lock the door when leaving the house—you basically tap the pad anywhere—to be a lot easier to use than the Schlage lock, which requires you tap the top portion of the touch pad twice. I got used to the double-tap, but Aqara’s was faster and less fussy.

When testing the Schlage Sense Pro, I also ran into a very odd quirk where the lock became completely unresponsive until I pulled the battery sled out and put it back in—essentially, power cycling the lock. According to Schlage, this was likely due to a faulty lock and the company supplied me with a replacement that hasn’t shown any signs of the same issue.

Both locks do a great job of unlocking automatically. This is what the whole show is really about: If I walk up to a door with my watch on my wrist or my phone in my pocket, does the door unlock by the time I put my hand on the latch? Yes, almost all the time. Very occasionally there would be a slight pause when I reached the door, but almost never. It really is a magical feeling to have your door know that it’s you and unlock as you approach, and if you connect it to other HomeKit automations, you can have that unlock trigger other devices, like turning on your entryway lights.

In the end, the Schlage Sense Pro is a very nice lock, with a restrained look that I prefer to the Aqara’s industrial black block. Aqara’s extra locking methods (fingerprint, traditional key) are not really ones I feel are necessary. Yes, Aqara’s battery approach is better than Schlage’s, but I’ve been using AA-powered locks for ages, and it was fine, if a little annoying.

All in all, these locks are pretty close to even, with Schlage having the advantage in aesthetics. The problem is that the Schlage lock costs $130 more than the Aqara. If you don’t mind the extra charge for a more attractive lock, I won’t fault you, but for most people a smart lock is a bit of a splurge purchase as it is. It’s not the kind of product that can be snuck by household members who are less enthusiastic about technology, and sometimes the price tag is all it takes for the household to decide that it’s not worth doing.

The Schlage Sense Pro is a great product that brings that Star Trek feeling to my front door—but at a price that makes me wince. The first UWB lock that arrived on the scene, Aqara’s U400, is equally capable—and a lot cheaper.

When I was visiting my pal Myke Hurley in London last year, I noticed that he had a second display to the right of his main one. It was large and mounted vertically, and when he recorded a podcast, he kept all his recording information over there. I liked the idea of monitoring my recordings while they were going on, just for extra peace of mind, and a second display seemed like the right way to do it.

If only I had a second display! But I do, of course, because my main Mac is now a MacBook Pro. So I’ve taken to recording podcasts using the “Hurley Method,” with my Audio Hijack windows positioned on the laptop display, off to my left.

It’s nice, but if you know me, I quickly became frustrated by the number of clicks and drags I needed to perform every single time I record a podcast: Open up my laptop, open Audio Hijack, open the list of recording sessions, double-click on the one I’m using right now, then drag the window over to the laptop display.

So today I automated it.

None of my automations work if I haven’t opened the laptop, and while it sits next to my Mac in a nice stand from Twelve South, it’s closed most of the time. So my first step before moving windows to the laptop display is to make sure that the display is available! Fortunately, there’s a command-line command for that:

system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType

If you want, you can simplify the output by piping it through a grep command like system_profiler SPDisplaysDataType | grep -B1 "Resolution", but all I really want to do is search for the text string “Built-in”, which indicates that the laptop is open and its built-in display is running.

I automate most of my recording stuff using Keyboard Maestro macros triggered by an Elgato Stream Deck. So I built my automation into an existing macro in Keyboard Maestro, just adding a new if/then statement: If the calculation `SCREENCOUNT() > 1 returns true.

Then the macro runs the shell script, saves that to a local variable called LocalScreens, and it’s time for one more if/then statement, to ensure that this part of the macro only runs when more than one screen is attached and when the internal MacBook Pro display is active.

Unfortunately, the next step requires automating Audio Hijack, and while that app is very scriptable via JavaScript, and controllable via Shortcuts (or a plain text file?!), there’s no direct method of automating it from within Keyboard Maestro. So I created a basic Shortcut containing the JavaScript required to tell Audio Hijack to open a specific session by name, with the name passed to the Shortcut as input:

Then it’s a one-step item in Keyboard Maestro to run that shortcut with the name of my Audio Hijack session as the input:

(I wish this was cleaner and I didn’t need to run a shortcut. The alternative is to literally write out a text file containing the JavaScript and run it via a shell script. Is that cleaner? Doesn’t feel like it, but it’s more self-contained and doesn’t rely on the good graces of Shortcuts.)

Now that I know that my MacBook Pro display is open and my Audio Hijack session window is open, it’s a one-step command in Keyboard Maestro to make the move:

This one’s a little tricky. I have to use the Move and Resize Window command, but instead of standard numerical values, I need to use custom “smart” values that Keyboard Maestro supports. In this case, horizontally it’s SCREENVISIBLE(Internal,MidX)-600 —essentially, 600 pixels to the left of the midpoint of the internal display—and vertically it’s SCREENVISIBLE(Internal,MidY)-250—250 pixels up from the midpoint of the display. You can play around with the dimensions until the window ends up in the right spot, and of course, at the right size.

And that was it. Now, when I press my recording button on my Stream Deck, if my laptop display is open, the session window will automatically pop open on my laptop display. I sure do like it when things happen on my computer automatically.

Go to the podcast page.

Wallet on iPhone is a bulging catch-all. Apple stores all your payment card information there, and it’s an interface for adding and removing cards, as well as viewing associated details. It’s the place where you interact with your Apple Card (like scheduling payments or viewing transaction reports), the Apple Card savings account, and Apple Cash. But it also handles related but miscellaneous categories of other things: tickets for events, reward cards, membership cards, your library card… really, anything with a number, a scannable code, or a connection to payment winds up there.

Despite all that, Wallet has been deficient: you couldn’t easily add items to Wallet that the party issuing them hadn’t formatted and made available with an “Add to Apple Wallet” button, whether from a website or within its app. Starting in iOS 27—coming in September but available in a public beta now—you can use a new pass-creation tool to make your virtual billfold even larger. Third-party tools still fill the gap for iOS 26 and earlier users, or for those who want customization that Apple isn’t providing in Create a Pass.

Make your own Wallet entry

In iOS 27, open the Wallet app and tap the Add button in the upper-right corner. You’ll notice that among the options you’re familiar with, Create a Pass appears. Tap that.

If you have a device that supports Visual Intelligence and the pass has a barcode or QR code, tap Continue, and Wallet opens a camera sheet.¹ When you tap the shutter button, Visual Intelligence analyzes the image and tries to extract elements, like your name, the organization name, or the code. If it can’t, it will offer a Try Again and Create Pass Manually dialog.

If it’s successful, Wallet next displays a preview screen. You can tap Add to accept the pass as it appears, or tap Edit Pass to modify the fields shown and the contents of those fields.

There’s a quirk in editing fields that baffled me for a while, but I teased out the answer in testing. Apple pre-populates field areas, marked with white rounded rectangles with subtle glowing edges. If you tap the Edit button (in the lower-right corner) and choose Add/Remove Fields, you cannot add new field areas. (See the figure for how I’ve labeled this.) What you can do is tap on an existing field within a field area to change it, or you can tap within a glowing rectangle (the field area) to add another field. This is not a great interface, and I expect it will mature.

Tap the Palette icon to change the background color or choose a different background image from a small set in the Wallet library.

If Visual Intelligence isn’t available or you want to build the pass element-by-element:

1. Tap Create Pass Manually.
2. On the Choose Pass Template screen, pick the data format and default color scheme to use for your pass: Standard, Membership, or Event. This pre-populates different fields for you to fill out. (You can change the color later via the Palette icon.)
3. Next, tap fields to enter data. Each field has a label in smaller type and placeholder text in larger type.
4. Tap Add Code to scan a barcode or QR code.
5. When finished, tap the blue checkmark.

You can then tap the Palette icon to change its appearance, or tap Edit: Add/Remove Fields icon to further edit the pass.

After the pass is added to Wallet, you can tap it, tap the More button, then tap Edit Pass. You can also tap Pass Details to see the raw information added. The View Original Photo button lets you bring up the picture you took if you used Visual Intelligence.

If you’re not yet using the iOS 27 beta or want options that Apple isn’t offering, you could try one of these free tools. Be aware, however, that Wallet passes have to be signed, so any data you provide to these companies is sent to them in the clear. Both have details in their privacy policies about how they protect your data.

• Wallet Creator (iOS app) has over 80 prebuilt templates for existing businesses, or you can roll your own pass or card. Wallet Creator says the app collects no data. However, the App Store’s description for the app, under “Our Terms of Use & Privacy Policy,” provides more information about how data is sent to a server, processed, and deleted.

• WalletWallet (web app) is a single-page form to create a pass. The page offers no privacy information, but it’s built using a business-oriented API the company makes, and that API has this explanation on the trip your data takes.

My book on Wallet, Take Control of Apple Wallet, will be updated later this year to incorporate all of this new information.

iPad and Mac have empty pockets

While Apple brought the Phone app to iPad and Mac in iPadOS 26 and Tahoe, the company still treats Wallet as a second-class citizen on those two platforms, even though both allow the use of Apple Pay. I’d love to have Wallet synced and fully available for managing all cards, not just payment-related ones, as a standalone app in the future.

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

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

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But I have been fascinated by the response to Anthropic’s AI watermarking scheme, especially after I read my friend John Gruber’s full-throated rebuttal. I have great respect for John as a writer. He truly cares about details: he’s meticulous about the words he picks, the way he constructs sentences and arguments.

This is why I find his defense so puzzling. Because a large language model could not be further away from those ideals. In the title of his piece, John describes the watermarking system as “a perversion of writing.” That might be the case if AIs were writing. But they are not; they are simply generating text. Those two things are not the same. As per the premise of John’s piece, writing is about carefully picking the words and crafting the meaning of what you’re saying, things that AI do not—and patently cannot—do.

LLMs do not care about the words that they pick because they cannot care about anything.

Speaking of two things that are not the same, John rightly points out the difference between the phrases “he leaped at the chance” and “he jumped at the opportunity”. Those are indeed distinct—if semantically similar—phrases, each of which might be more apt in a particular situation; or, to put it in another fashion: the use of each of those phrases tells us something different, whether about the person being described or the writer.

But the LLM doesn’t know which of those phrases is the right phrase to use. It has a guess, based on its models and weights and inputs. But the ultimate choice of those phrases tells us nothing about the writer because there is no writer.

All of this outrage presupposes the existence of a “correct” answer that the LLM is eschewing because it was told to pick different words, but if there were a correct answer, then shouldn’t it be chosen every time? But an LLM’s non-deterministic nature doesn’t work that way. Because, at the end of the day, the AI does not truly know what any of these words mean. There is no ur-text. You might as well get mad at word choice in a lorem ipsum generator.¹

Likewise the example of “my favorite tropical fruit.” John points out the ridiculousness of a watermarking scheme substituting “pineapple” for “banana.” Of course! Those are not reasonable substitutions (outside of a smoothie).

For a person. But a computer has no favorite fruits. It could not possibly know the right word to use. It has never tasted the sweetness of a pineapple or cut up a banana for its yogurt. So why would I possibly care what it thinks is the correct word for that scenario, right or wrong?

I get being mad about computers interfering with what we, the users, want. But in this, AIs are only the latest example. Autocorrect and autocomplete, computational photography, search engine algorithms: all of that has led us down this path where we’re willing to accept the decisions a computer makes for us. The LLM is just the ultimate expression of that.

Getting mad about your LLM’s choice of words is like being pissed that Godzilla stomped on your garden. Dude, the rest of your city is in flames. Sorry about your flowers, but, you know, *gestures at everything*. We’re already talking about technology with huge environmental, societal, and ethical ramifications. This, to me, is quite possibly the least upsetting thing that AIs have done.

Anyway, welcome to the “mad about AI” fold. Glad to have you, even if I wish maybe you would have been a little more upset about all the words that it stole from me and other writers—words that were all carefully chosen.

In the end, I can’t summarize it any better than to ask: if you care so much about word choice, why are you using AI to generate text?

If this does truly make AI-generated text worse, well…good. A lot of people are already willing to accept what an LLM churns out as “good enough” and, if I’m being realistic, I don’t think this will change anything. But if it does lead to more people being dissatisfied with the pablum they’re being fed and turning instead to writing and editing their own text, then that would actually be a positive outcome. Maybe it’d even mean fewer human writers being put out of jobs.

In the end, what upsets me the most about this is the tacit equating of AIs generating text to writers writing. A computer that has digested the work of thousands if not millions of people and regurgitated them according to a statistical model is equivalent to a person toiling by the sweat of their brow to bring meaning into existence from nothingness?

Get out of here with that garbage.

Apple looks to make a splash in September, the Watch may let its hair down, and Siri gets ready to bring us all the news that’s fit to $#!& about.

Numerology

Buckle up, buttercups, because some iPhone models will be no-shows at Apple’s September event, but that doesn’t mean it’s not gonna be HUUUGE!

“Apple has eight new products to unveil at September event: report”

This is all according to some guy named Mark Gur-man? (Am I spelling that right?)

Eight! Wow! That’s a lot! Well, before you swoon, only two of these are the actually “new” kind of new.

The iPhone 18 Pro, the iPhone 18 Pro Max, the Apple Watch Series 12, the Apple Watch Ultra 4, the new Apple TV 4K, and the HomePod mini 2 are all the next iterations of existing product lines. Nice, but exactly what you’d expect. The two actually new products are the iPhone Ultra and the new HomePad PadHome thingamabobber.

The other thing that will be new is the price. Get set to pay more for iPhones this year. The question is, how much more?

After a report a few weeks ago that the iPhone 18 Pro could start at as much as $1,399, a price that some found unlikely, it does appear these price increases aren’t for nuthin’.

“The iPhone 18 Pro will cost Apple 38% more in parts – but there’s some good news”

The “good news” there is that Apple is expected to absorb some of that price increase. Seems the least it could do after all we’ve done for the company. Personally, I can’t believe I helped Apple move that one time. I swore I wasn’t going to help anyone move once I became an adult.

But while RAM and storage prices have skyrocketed thanks to our old pal AI, Apple is finding ways to make up for it.

“iPhone 18 Pro: Apple Secures Lower Display Prices Amid RAM Shortage”

When the supply chain closes a door, it opens a window.

Or something. I dunno.

Circle gets the square

Speaking of the Apple Watch, Gurman also suggest thatApple is thinking outside the square box on upcoming Apple Watch models.

Although it sounds like plans haven’t been finalized, Apple is considering all sorts of shapes and sizes…

Rhomboids! Triangles! Dodecahedrons and other shapes that were forbidden in ancient Greece for fear they would cause unrest amongst the populace! Tesseracts that fold back into N dimensions and could cause the wearer to go insane just by looking at them!

…including watches with circular round displays…

Oh. OK, that was probably the obvious one, yeah.

Honestly, I always thought the complaints about there not being a round Apple Watch were overly precious. It’s not like there were no square watches before the Apple Watch and the only reason round watches were round in the first place was to describe the motion of hands, which is kind of a pointless exercise on a digital watch. But I guess if you want to get those round watch holdouts you gotta do what you gotta do.

On the other hand, it’s not like they go to all that trouble for people who want small phones.

Cough.

Big-time money deals

While you can see on his face every time he’s with him that Tim Cook loves nothing more than hangin’ with his good buddy the president of the United States, the soon-to-be-former Apple CEO is hiring a buffer guy. You know, for days when he’s just not feeling up to all the fun.

“Apple hires American Airlines exec to lead government affairs”

Gurman says put your hands on your head, Gurman says put your hands on your shoulders, Gurman says:

Apple wanted someone who could align with the Trump administration, according to people familiar with the company’s thinking.

Hey, this is supposed to be a game designed to get kids to move! That’s not an action!

Ridiculous.

Anyway, put your hands on your hips.

HA! You’re out, Tristan! Elise, you’re out. Jeremy, out.

NO CRYING, JEREMY.

But, hey, why not align with the Trump administration?! What could possibly be the downsides?! And that’s not to even mention, you know, democracy.

Meanwhile, in a deal that seems completely different but in my mind is very related…

“Report: Apple seeks publisher deals to give Siri AI better access to current events”

It’s not bad enough that my social media feeds have to tell me about current events, now Siri has to do it, too? Rude.

While SuperDuper! 4 may look like an entirely new beast, its history has stuck around. It still explains what it’s doing in plain English. It still allows you to make complete, bootable backups. It still has its excellent Smart Update option to optimize the copying process.

But it’s gotten some significant updates too. There’s a new interface, for starters, which conforms to Apple’s current Liquid Glass aesthetic, love it or hate it. It’s a bit of a shock to the system after so long without a change, but it’s hard to deny that the old look had grown somewhat antiquated. The result is an app that makes backups as simple and straightforward as they should be, so that anyone can figure it out: click here to set your destination, choose what method, and click Go.

The changes to SuperDuper! 4 also run more than just skin deep. For example, it’s considerably faster than the previous version—up to an order magnitude faster using the new Turbo implementation of Smart Update, according to Shirt Pocket. That’s borne out in my real-world usage. For example, my last nightly backup of 20.55GB took less than 4 minutes.

There are new capabilities here, too. A new Preview feature lets you perform a dry run of your copy job, letting you see every file that will be changed without actually doing any of it. With a new background helper app, copies won’t interrupt whatever you’re doing. And there’s Shortcuts support, so you can run a workflow when your copy job is completed—or even have one of your shortcuts kick off a copy job.

I’ve been using betas of SuperDuper! 4 for a month or so now, and what’s impressed me most is how much it maintains that set-it-and-forget-it strength of the previous versions. The most important thing for a backup is that element of reliability, so when I open up the app and see “31 successful in a row” note, I know that my data is right where it should be. And if something goes wrong, it’s easier than ever to see what happened: click on a failed job and you’ll get the details, including an Apple Intelligence-powered summary of the job. (You can get that for completed jobs too.)

There are way more features here too, ones that I just don’t have much reason to use for my purposes, but might just well be what you’re looking for. For example, copy rules that let you handle certain files and folders in granular ways, such as excluding certain ones from backups; support for any file system that macOS understands; and there’s support for multiple copy jobs at the same time, even for those that are scheduled.

Backup apps may not be the most exciting software category, but I dare you to find one that’s more crucial. For me, SuperDuper! has done the job for years and I’ve never had any reason to complain about it. Nothing about that seems poised to change with version 4.

SuperDuper! 4 requires macOS 14 (Sonoma) or later. A free trial version lets you make unlimited full erase backups, but to unlock the rest of the features requires a one-time payment of $43.95. There’s also an upgrade discount for owners of SuperDuper 3 of up to 30 percent. (And, if you bought version 3 very recently, you may be able to get version 4 for free.) And good news: if you need to run backups on older systems, SuperDuper 3 is sticking around.

For everybody who’s already backing up their Macs, SuperDuper! 4 may offer some new features and speed increases that will make the process even smoother. For those of you who aren’t yet…what are you waiting for?

Go to the podcast page.

Formerly indie developer Jason Weingardt, on Threads:

Some personal news: I’ve joined the team at Major League Baseball, and the Mosaic app has come with me. The last 3+ months have, without question, been the wildest of my life. I’m beyond thankful to MLB for the chance to help shape how fans experience baseball, and even more thankful to the community of fans around the world who tried Mosaic, filed bug reports and feature requests, and helped shape it along the way.

We believe Mosaic can be a valuable tool to help learn more about what fans want…. I will keep working on Mosaic as part of my job…. Most importantly: Mosaic is sticking around. Features may come and go, but my ask is that you continue to write in with your feedback about what you like, don’t like, and what you’d want to see in a baseball app. I’m excited for what’s next, and I hope you are too.

Mosaic is a baseball app that’s been in TestFlight for a few months. (Scroll back through Weingardt’s Threads history for details.) From the moment I saw it, I was dazzled—it’s a great iOS baseball app that uses all of Apple’s platform technologies to lay out live game data and show off other MLB features in ways that MLB’s own app just doesn’t. And it even integrated with MLB TV, so if you’re a subscriber to MLB’s premium video service, you can watch games via Mosaic, including in the most mind-blowing multiview I’ve seen.

I don’t want to lean too much into the current state of the official MLB app, but it used to be so cutting-edge and great that when I was at Macworld, we gave it a zillion awards and ended up just inducting it into our “app hall of fame.” But over the years, that app has become generic and unfocused and one-size-fits-all. It is no longer a joy to use.

So Jason Weingardt wrote Mosaic, by himself, and it’s a properly great iOS app (that also runs on iPad and Mac and, as of today, Apple TV). I ran into Weingardt at WWDC and he was so happy that people had already fallen in love with his own personal semi-secret passion project.

We all pretty much expected Mosaic to be crushed by MLB once it figured out what was going on. No matter that it was using public APIs and honoring MLB’s own premium content subscriptions, it just felt like the kind of thing that was too good to be true.

Instead, to their immense credit, MLB hired Weingardt, and Mosaic is now apparently a part of MLB’s digital strategy. I almost can’t believe it. It’s the best possible outcome for Weingardt, MLB, and baseball fans with Apple devices.

I’m so happy to think that MLB’s apps may now be on a trajectory to go back to where they belong—in the app hall of fame.

I’m a huge fan of displaying ambient information in my computer interfaces, which on my Mac tends to involve putting data about weather, solar power and the like in my menu bar, so it’s available at a glance. My tool of choice for this is SwiftBar, itself a follow-on to BitBar (which has been rebooted as xbar). On my iPad, I’ve been using custom widgets generated with Simon Støvring’s Scriptable app to do the job.

Now here’s a new contender that generates widgets on both Mac and iOS: Brett Terpstra’s $20 TerminalWidget, which lets you send data to a widget from a command-line script, Shortcut, AppleScript, or a URL scheme.

Widgets are more complicated than little items that live in the menu bar. That’s why Scriptable uses little JavaScript scripts to build them. TerminalWidget has a basic set of terminology that lets you target specific widgets and provides some pre-filled functionality that lets you generate some design elements without much hassle. It’ll also just… take text you give it and display it if you want.

If you’re working via Shortcuts, you can update TerminalWidget using a bunch of different template types: Chart, Image, Progress, Table, or Text. Just as with the command line, each Shortcuts action contains a bunch of variables, so you can customize colors and fonts, add a caption and title, or other things that help fill out TerminalWidget’s templates. It’s by design a lot less flexible than something like Scriptable, where the sky’s the limit—but it’s also a lot more approachable, since you’re basically filling in the blanks with whatever data you want to provide.

I wasn’t really able to replicate my beloved Scriptable weather widget in TerminalWidget—not flexible enough—but TerminalWidget also supports straight-up image use, which allowed me to generate the contents of my Scriptable widget via script, output it as an image, and then tell TerminalWidget to load that image. So if you wanted to offload widget duties to your Mac or a remote server, you could do that and just display the image in TerminalWidget.

In a way, TerminalWidget turns its limitation (lack of flexibility) into a strength, because the learning curve is so gentle, especially if you use Shortcuts, which literally shows you every single possible variable you could possibly use, so you can tinker and figure out what you want to display. Dr. Drang is using it for planetary positions, because that tickles his fancy. If there’s something you’d like to put on a glanceable widget across iPad, iPhone, and Mac, TerminalWidget will let you do it. That’s a beautiful thing. Now I need to figure out what widgets to add to my own devices…

But other apps are finding different ways to make some noise, including a pair of simple-yet-satisfying utilities and an old favorite that’s learned some new tricks. If you’ve got an app that you’d like to bring to our attention, let us hear about it at apps@sixcolors.com, adding a brief description on what the app does and what devices it supports.

And now, on to the business at hand. Or at voice, as the case may be.

Lesskeys

Some times, it’s better to dictate than to type, and Lesskeys looks to make that process as simple as possible. With the app running in your menu bar, just hit a hotkey — it’s Option-Period by default — to start recording your dulcet tones. As you speak, your words are captured in a clipboard that you can copy and paste into any app once you stop recording by tapping the hotkey again. Alternatively, you can also hold down the hotkey to jot down quick thoughts with the recording stopping once you release the keys.

Lesskeys’ bag of tricks extends beyond just dictation. There’s a command for recording phone calls made through your Mac, and you can also import audio and video files to be transcribed. Additionally, the app boasts the ability to identify speakers when you record conversations. Power users will also appreciate how Lesskeys lets you set up different configurations for different apps, such as a different language, model or prompt when a particular app is in the foreground.

Lesskeys is free to download, but you’re limited to 5 minutes of dictation per day, along with five audio and video transcriptions each. That should be enough of a ceiling to test out the app and decided whether it’s worth the one-time $49.99 Pro license to remove any restrictions.

PeekNote

If you’re like me, you put the Mac’s clipboard through quite a workout, copy and pasting various text snippets, URLs and other captured material into different apps. And if you’re even more like me, you wind up using a lot of the same snippets and URLs over and over again. PeekNote is a handy macOS utility that keeps frequently used snippets close at hand.

Essentially, PeekNote is a floating window where you can stack multiple bits of text to paste into any window on your desktop. As I’m applying for a lot of jobs at the moment, I can use the PeekNote window to stash links to articles and other parts of my profile that I frequently use in cover letters and web forms.

Pay a one-time $9.99 fee, and you unlock the full app, which includes the ability to create 22 different tabs for organizing related text blocks. The unlocked version of PeekNote also lifts any limitations on the number of blocks.

If I had a suggestion for PeekNote, it would be to make it easier to shrink the app window so that it only expands when you need access to one of the text blocks you’ve got stored in there. But otherwise, it’s a fine utility when you want frequently used links and snippets to be right at your fingertips.

Carrot Weather

If you’ve looked beyond the built-in Weather app on your iPhone, you doubtlessly have some familiarity with Carrot Weather and its… unique take on delivering the forecast. The app, which works across a host of Apple devices including the Mac, Apple Watch and Vision Pro, tells you the weather with attitude, using a sliding snark scale that you can adjust to your liking. Additionally, as you can see from this 2023 Six Colors profile, developer Grailr has built some other high-end capabilities and customization features into the app, the more intriguing of which are positioned behind a paywall.

Carrot Weather is worth revisiting these days thanks to an added feature that arrived over the summer — a trip planner capability for the iPhone version that lets you track the forecast for any upcoming getaways. I’ve got a trip to Detroit in my immediate future, and when I head over to the Locations section of Carrot Weather, I can see that I had better pack an umbrella for the thunderstorm that’s forecast on at least one day of my trip.

The 6.7 update to Carrot Weather also introduced new custom notifications that alert you when a data point hits a certain threshold — say, a temperature drop or a rise in UV index levels. Both the Trip Planner and custom notification features require a Premium Ultra subscription that costs $9.99/month.

SmartTracker

With holiday shopping ramping up in the next few months, you’re going to want to stay on top of pricing to make sure that you’re paying the best price for anything on your wish list. Certainly, there are websites where you can do that — CamelCamelCamel is one of the better ones in my opinion — but an app like SmartTracker can pull off the same task while keeping your search data entirely on your Mac.

Enter a URL into the SmartTracker app, and it will do the watching for you; you’re even able to set a target price and get a notification should the object of your desire hit that magic number. Several other features such as home screen widgets, Siri shortcuts and collections for grouping items together will appeal to power shoppers.

SmartTracker runs on macOS, iOS and iPadOS, though I only looked at the Mac version of the app. You can track up to five items and manage three collections when you download the app, but paying $6.99/year (or a one-time $19.99 payment) gets rid of those limits.

TuckBar

Utilities don’t come any simpler than TuckBar, which performs one task but does it well. You use the macOS utility to hide away the menu bar on displays of your choosing, only to bring it back the moment you move back toward the top edge of the screen.

That’s going to be welcome functionality if you use multiple displays and want to keep some of them truly uncluttered, while letting you keep the comfort of the menu bar on (presumably) your primary display. TuckBar mimics the appearance of your desktop wallpaper to obscure the menu bar, or if you prefer, the utility features a slider to turn down the menu bar’s brightness.

Normally, TuckBar costs $3 to download, though at time of writing, the app was free as part of a limited-time promotion.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

We trust Apple with a lot of our data. In general, that hasn’t seemed like a bad idea; in particular, compared to its competitors, Apple seems to ensure that it can inspect or interact with very little of our data. The company has built its platform and its reputation on being an elegant, frictionless, hands-off conduit. While we can make many complaints about Liquid Glass, its increased focus on invasive (and poor) advertising, its software quality, and much else, Apple has kept its corporate nose cleaner than anybody else. Its transparency and documentation are, oddly, worse than its actions and clear intent.

I was thinking about this when I received an email from an anonymized iCloud Hide My Email account, asking for more detail about how Apple managed the transition from the old method of presenting or escrowing (in iCloud) your macOS FileVault Recovery Key to the new method, in which the key is stored in Passwords. This transition, which I’ve documented in a few places, was a step forward in privacy and security.

But not transparency! I’ll explain, but you can’t find an explanation on Apple’s site about the transition. The support documentation remains out of sync with Tahoe. That leaves it to yours truly to explicate.

Don’t trust and verify

The Electronic Frontier Foundation recently published a newsletter with a round-up of how fitness wearables, like rings, watches, and bands, preserve your privacy from government intrusion, as well as whether they protect you from unwanted security invasions by using end-to-end encryption (E2EE). (The former often requires the latter: governments typically can’t break through E2EE.)

I want to quote two full paragraphs to make this point:

In the end, we found that only four of these companies (Apple, Google, Whoop, and Oura) promise to notify users of law enforcement requests in publicly available documentation. And just two of those companies, Apple and Google (which also owns Fitbit), currently publish transparency reports on how often they hand users’ data to the government.

Support for end-to-end encryption—a method that ensures your personal data is only accessible by you, and not the company who makes the device and manages the cloud storage—is more rare than transparency reports among wearable device makers. The Apple Watch is the only popular fitness wearable that supports end-to-end encryption.¹

Apple wasn’t an early player with E2EE. Really, it was seen as the kind of thing only true security geeks cared about, even while people like EFF and other digital privacy advocacy groups and individuals warned us that our data was only lightly protected. Over time, as the criminal, exploitative, and political monitoring and extraction of our secrets became clear, Apple kept stepping up.

The Secure Enclave is a keystone of those moves, as the tamper-resistant silicon subsystem allows devices to keep locally generated security keys entirely private. Most of these keys never leave the Secure Enclave! Rather, it’s the encryption hub.²

iCloud initially had a fairly cursory level of protection, with the then-Apple ID account password serving as the only real bar. Two-step verification in March 2013 provided better account protection, but didn’t cover iCloud backups, which could be retrieved without that second step. A rash of celebrity account leaks in late summer 2014 led Apple to extend two-step to iCloud data within a couple of weeks. The next year, it upgraded security to the more rigorous two-factor authentication, which later became mandatory.

As part of its response to the iCloud data hijacks, Apple began to beef up iCloud. It began rolling out E2EE for all the device-based services it could, leaving synced data still relatively lightly protected. (iCloud data is always encrypted with Apple’s at-rest keys, which only it ostensibly has access to, and in transit with HTTPS. However, a security breach at Apple or someone able to hijack one end of an in-progress HTTPS sync allows access to that unencrypted data.)

Then, suddenly, months after shipping major updates to its operating systems, Apple announced Advanced Data Protection in December 2022. Enabling this feature put the E2EE aegis over nearly all synced or stored data at iCloud; mail, contacts, and calendar entries remain an exception because of their interoperability with third-party apps and services. You can view Apple’s document that explains what level of protection applies to data, with and without ADP enabled.

With that in mind, let’s talk about the Recovery Key transition.

Recovery Key is not recovered? I think not

The particular reader question driving this was their concern about the FileVault Recovery Key that was in place when the Tahoe-driven transition occurred. Was the old key destroyed and a new one created and stashed in Passwords? Or was the old one just moved over? If the latter, isn’t that a security hole, if a tiny one?

My initial reply wasn’t entirely glib, but I said, having not documented the upgrade, I believed Apple explained the process when it occurred. But I couldn’t find any screen captures of how that occurred. Apple’s documentation remains in the past—it doesn’t mention the Passwords method at all. The Passwords User Guide perversely mentions the Recovery Key, but not how to interact with turning it off or on.

People who had FileVault disabled (whether they never turned it on, or turned it off at some point) did receive an alert during the upgrade:

Your Mac is Ready for FileVault: FileVault keeps your Mac safe by encrypting your data and protecting it with the password you use to log in. If you forget your password, you can use your Recovery Key to reset it.

Clicking Not Now bypassed the process; Turn On opted the user into the new Passwords-based storage for the Recovery Key.

I’ve explained in previous columns how FileVault provides an extra layer of protection. FileVault requires a Recovery Key, so you have recourse if your password stops working, you forget it, or corruption happens in the boot data. This shouldn’t happen, but it can. The Recovery Key and your password (transformed by a cryptographic formula—or hash—after you enter it) are both “key encryption keys,” delightfully named KEKs. Neither directly encrypts your data. Each instead unwraps the key that the Secure Enclave uses to unlock your drive for use in macOS.³ (You can find out a lot more about this topic in my Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices, a revised version of which, including “27” betas, will be out shortly as a free update.)

Apple never knows your macOS passwords, and it shouldn’t know your Recovery Key. That was the flaw with iCloud escrow: your Recovery Key could be retrieved by someone with your Apple Account information who had access to your Mac.

With that said, how did Apple manage the transition from the old system to the new one that uses Passwords? Into this lacuna of details, jump I with inferential logic about what Apple must have done.

With a “show me once” Recovery Key: Apple would generate this key, show it to you, then destroy it. The company (and macOS) didn’t need a record of it, because its purpose was to be used to decrypt another key: don’t have the key, can’t decrypt that other key. If you opted for that method, Apple had to destroy the existing KEK to replace it with a new one derived from the newly created Recovery Key.

With an iCloud escrow key: The same scenario applies from a different angle. Apple can’t retrieve your escrowed key unless you use your Apple Account. That isn’t a per se security weakness, but Apple doesn’t need that escrowed key, and it doesn’t want to decrypt it at iCloud to send it to you. I would warrant that the company once again destroys the KEK, creates a new one, and that’s what’s stored in Passwords. Anything else leaves a potential gap in my explanation of why Apple made this change in the first place.

Now, you say, if macOS generated the key and it stored it in Passwords, doesn’t it “know” the key? Not exactly. The key is ostensibly generated in memory, added to Passwords, and destroyed. To have accessed the key, an attacker would need to be monitoring your screen or grab particular memory locations at an exact moment. If someone has undetected remote observation of your Mac display, the game is already over.

Passwords uses end-to-end encryption with device-based secrets. You can enter a device password or use biometrics to unlock Passwords (or chained biometrics with an Apple Watch linked to your Mac). That’s as secure as we can get to protect any password. If someone wanted to access your Recovery Key through Passwords, they need access to one of your devices; cracking your Apple Account and its second-factor or passkey authentication wouldn’t help—and that’s a big stretch to begin with. Nor does just having your macOS account name and password without the ability to have physical or remote screen access to your device.

I believe Apple handled this transition awkwardly. The company could have provided more clarity about the requirement to change how a FileVault Recovery Key was stored, and explain exactly what measures it took to ensure security across that transition. And it could update its support pages!

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

This is turning out to be the year of immersive sports.

In January, Apple worked with Spectrum and the L.A. Lakers to debut a series of immersive NBA games. And beginning August 28, it’ll be airing a live immersive Major League Baseball game every Friday night for the rest of the Friday Night Baseball season.

Unlike the NBA games, which were limited to cable subscribers, these games are part of Apple’s own Friday Night Baseball package and will be available to all Apple TV subscribers with a Vision Pro. (In Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK, and the U.S., anyway.)

As with the NBA games, this will be an immersive-specific telecast with its own announcers (Paul Severino, Xavier Scruggs, Michelle Margaux), replays, and graphics. Apple says that during commercial breaks, viewers will “stay immersed in the in-stadium experience from all angles.”

As always, the details will be fascinating to see. While I thought that the immersive NBA games were pretty good, some viewers complained that there were too many changes in camera angle that broke immersion. Baseball is a very different sport, in terms of pace and in the size of the field, so it’ll be interesting to see how Apple chooses to approach its coverage.

The four immersive games on the schedule are: Red Sox at Yankees (August 28), Angels at Pirates (September 4), Padres at Giants (September 11), and Giants at Dodgers (September 18).

OpenAI strikes back, Private Relay has a problem, and things get more expensive.

Sam Altman being weird again

When I try to figure out what I’m going to write about for this column every week, I jot down little notes to remind myself of stories I’ve seen throughout the week and the title for this section was one of those little notes.

Of course, I could use that as a reminder every week if I wanted.

Let us turn to Apple’s lawsuit against OpenAI because the game is afoot! And when I say “game”, I mean pretty much just that.

“OpenAI drags Apple’s lawsuit into the court of public opinion”

OpenAI said that Apple’s lawsuit accusing it of stealing trade secrets is “careless, aggressive, and oddly personal”…

The company then proceeded to make points that had little to nothing to do with the legal facts on which a verdict is likely to be based. But yesterday the company apparently asked ChatGPT to write a response with more teeth to it and issued another response.

“OpenAI says Apple’s trade secrets lawsuit is ‘rotten to its core’”

Better, but do it again without cliches.

Someone who’s oddly impersonal is OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Already on the record as having claimed that you can’t care for a baby now without ChatGPT (sorry, the Amish!), Altman is back with a “cool use case of chatgpt” he heard.

connect your family calendars and explain your kids’ interests.

every morning for the drive to school, have it make a podcast that talks about one kid’s soccer game that afternoon, one kid’s upcoming birthday, some news, etc.

Hey, it’s not just so we can access your family calendars and profile your children (it is partly about that, though). It’s also so you can be a distant and uncaring parent who doesn’t have to talk to your kids about their boring soccer games! Everyone wins!

Our thanks to relay

If you’re someone who practices public relay in the sheets, Private Relay in the streets, you may want to check yourself before you publicly wreck yourself.

“Apple’s ‘Private Relay’ Is Exposing Users’ Real IP Addresses”

Well, technically, it’s passkeys that are exposing users’ “real” IP addresses, but what even is “real” these days what with the AI and whatnot?

“In short: any website that supports, or pretends to support, passkeys can see the user’s real IP address despite having iCloud Private Relay on,” security researcher Tommy Mysk…told 404 Media.

It just works™. (Disclaimer: does not completely work.)

The problem appears to be that Private Relay is a browser feature and Passkeys work outside of the browser.

“Because the fetch is issued by the operating system’s credential service rather than by Safari, it never enters Private Relay’s proxied path.”

This is the second problem with a for-pay privacy feature from Apple in as many months, as in July it was revealed that Hide My Email was not actually, you know, hiding your email address. Well, at least the prices on Apple subscriptions aren’t going up.

“Apple raises prices for Apple Music and Apple One subscriptions”

Oh. Right.

Plus ça change, plus la price n’est pas la même

Speaking of prices going up, they may be going up on something most people don’t even have yet.

“Heavy Siri AI usage could cost more than we expected, given Cook’s comment”

I’m not really a fan of price increases on future products because they imply that price increases may be enacted outside the space/time continuum which means we could see price increases on past products as well. I don’t relish the idea of having Apple try to charge me $25 more for that iPod Shuffle I bought in 2005.

Also “Tim Cook”? Didn’t that guy quit or something?

After prices for AI being artificially low in order to encourage people to use it, AI companies have turned the pricing dial up a bit. Don’t worry, though! Companies have a plan! And it’s not cutting back on AI!

“Software Giant SAP Stops Most Travel and Hiring Because of AI’s Soaring Cost”

Looking forward to next year when companies say “Hey… you’re not using that health care, right?”

But that’s not all for this week. We also look at a tool to help you better enjoy email newsletters, an iPhone app for making your photos sound as good as ever and a multiplatform game that helps you fine-tune your puzzle-solving skills.

Got an app of your own that you’d like to see highlighted? Let us know at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of what it does, and we’ll take it from there.

Vox Dictum

I record a lot of interviews, which means I need to transcribe a lot of interviews, and so far, I’ve found the Apple Intelligence tools built into Apple’s various software platforms to be fairly wanting in this area. So when an app like Vox Dictum promises a better transcription experience, I’m all ears.

Vox Dictum is a macOS app that makes privacy its calling card — all the transcription happens directly on your Mac, as do the AI-powered summary features that you can access with the cost of a subscription. A Pro subscription costs $7.99/month and gets you features like large AI models to download to your Mac plus AI summaries while the $12.99/month Pro+ package adds a speaker recognition feature.

I do think it’s easier to label speakers in VoxDictum than with any of Apple’s built-in features, though transcripts — while fairly accurate — feature line breaks that aren’t necessarily suited to my purposes.

As for the summary feature, I found it to be hit-and-miss: Vox Dictum did a great job highlighting the main points of an interview I conducted for a freelance article, making the summary a good reference tool, but a recorded discussion between me and my wife produced a summary with conflicting dates on some action items. That said, I do like that Vox Dictum’s summary feature lets you designate if the recording is an interview, a meeting, a news bulletin or a podcast, which seems to help focus the summary.

Processing time can take a bit, but if you find yourself needing to transcribe a lot of interviews, Vox Dictum is definitely worth a download so you can see if its base features improve on your current approach.

Bonfiyah

Like Vox Dictum, Bonfiyah promises to turn recordings into transcripts, while also recognizing who’s saying what. But transcription is really just a sideshow in this case — the app’s real strength lies in its ability to track your conversations.

Available for the iPhone, iPad and Mac — I tried out the macOS version — Bonfiyah records conversations, meetings and brainstorming sessions. (You can also import audio files into the app.) Besides transcription and speaker identification features, the app also taps into AI to summarize action items that come up in your conversation and who’s responsible for taking care of them. A feature I particularly like is an analysis tool that analyzes how to communicate more effectively with the people you talk to on a regular basis.

Transcription does take place off-device via AssemblyAI, though Bonfiyah deletes that info from its servers after seven days. The app includes privacy features such as marking conversations as privileged.

Bonfiyah comes across as a pretty sophisticated tool that might be overkill for anyone who needs transcripts with more basic summary features. But you can try out all the features to start with for 14 days before you need to commit to either a $24.99/month Pro or $34.99/month Pro AI account for more advanced features.

Letterboxx

Letterboxx exists under the premise that an email inbox is no place to enjoy a newsletter and a traditional mail client is not a reader app. Inboxes are places for taking action like responding to timely messages, but newsletters are something that you want to spend time diving into — hence the Letterboxx interface, which is designed to use the ample space provided on your Mac.

With Letterboxx, you can redirect newsletters sent to supported email accounts to a dedicated reading space, complete with folders for organizing incoming missives by type. You also get ad-filtering tools, ways to highlight relevant text and even shortcuts for managing your many subscriptions.

You’ll know right away if this app is just right for your newsletter-heavy reading habits or if it’s more management features than you need, but you can confirm with a two-week free trial to Letterboxx before the regular $4.99/monthly subscription rate kicks in.

Echo Photo Album

I don’t really find much use for Live Photos, the built-in iPhone camera feature that adds a little bit of movement and audio to your images. But Echo Photo Album might cause me to reconsider augmenting my photos with its focus entirely on audio.

You can record up to 60 seconds of audio in Echo Photo Album, adding it to a shot you either take through the app or find in your photo library. In testing Echo Photo Album on my iPhone — it’s also compatible with iPads and Apple Watches — I found it worked best adding the sound of my cat purring to seem feline portraits or ocean waves crashing to a coastal landscape shot. I imagine it could also come in handy adding sounds to accompany road trips, baby photos and group get-togethers.

You can download Echo Photo Album for free, with a $4.99 purchases removing a 10-image limit.

Chess Peace

All work and no play makes for a dull app profiler, so here’s a game I’ve been playing lately that runs on the Mac as well as on iPhones and iPads. (I’ve been testing the macOS version.) Chess Peace is one of those games that you play to keep your mind active. Best of all, you don’t really need to be a grand master to get something out of the game.

The only thing you need to know about chess to thrive at Chess Peace is how each of the different pieces move around the board. That knowledge lets you position each piece on the board of a Chess Peace puzzle in such a way as to prevent any other piece from capturing them — keeping your rook out of the diagonal attacks of your bishop, for example.

The game serves up a new puzzle every day, with a library of older puzzles for you to play as well. An $8.99 in-app purchases unlocks 26,500 puzzles across five game modes plus custom themes to let you change the look of Chess Peace.

Go to the podcast page.

A series of issues in Apple’s web browser engine — the tech underlying all browsers on iOS — means that Apple’s iCloud Private Relay tool, which is supposed to hide a user’s IP address, in many cases doesn’t actually work. Instead, the issues mean a malicious attacker can set up a website to learn a Private Relay user’s real IP address, or that many websites have also already collected this information incidentally. The issues also impact OnionBrowser, an iOS app for browsing the web through the Tor anonymity network, the researchers who discovered the issues say.

Fascinatingly, this flaw seems to be due to the implementation of passkeys: the authentication happens out of band, in a separate connection, and therefore never runs through Private Relay.

The security researchers who uncovered the issue have put up a site that lets you check if you’re affected; I wasn’t able to test it this morning, as the Wi-Fi network I’m using as of this writing doesn’t support Private Relay at all. (Joke’s on me, I guess!) They’ve also reported the vulnerability to Apple, who did not provide a timeline for fixing it, but allowed them to disclose the issue nonetheless.

Cox points out that along with the Hide My Email bug, this is the second time that a vulnerability has affected Apple’s paid privacy features, since both are part of the iCloud+ subscription. Though Apple did finally patch the Hide My Email flaw late last month, a second flaw is not a great look for a company that prides itself on privacy and security.

Go to the linked site.

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“Ted Lasso” is back on Apple TV, which was no sure thing after the series more or less wrapped up in May of 2023. But it’s back for a fourth season, in which—after an episode-long visit to Ted’s home of Kansas City—the football-turned-soccer coach returns to Richmond, where—as teased at the end of season 3—a new women’s team is launching and just might need a coach.

I’ve seen the first half of the season, and I’m happy to report that though the teams have changed, this is still “Ted Lasso” through and through. Thematically the first three seasons were about Ted’s journey in running away from a dissolving marriage. With season four, a whole new set of themes begin to emerge.

Yes, love ’em or hate ’em Ted’s homespun aphorisms still abound. The relationship between owner Rebecca and marketing genius Keely continues to be as strong as ever. Higgins is still doing his Higgins stuff. Mae is still tending bar. Those three fans in the pub are as random as ever. But in coaching a barely-formed women’s team that is in desperate need of players and fans, “Ted Lasso” returns to its roots as an underdog story, which helps make the whole thing feel more like the show’s first season. (There’s even a press conference scene that is disastrous for entirely different reasons from the original.)

It’s great to have series co-creator Brendan Hunt back as Coach Beard, but the addition of Tanya Reynolds (“Sex Education”) as Alice Chilton introduces a new dynamic. Chilton is the only coach who can go into the locker room without permission, she thinks she deserves the managerial job, and she’s got some serious anger control problems. Reynolds adds a lot of grit to the proceedings, preventing it from becoming too much of a sickeningly sweet reunion love-fest.

The character least served from the season, at least so far as I’ve seen, is breakout character Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein). He’s there and has some moments, but since he’s the manager of the men’s team, he’s often relegated being a gruff, bearded question mark attached to questions about his relationship status with Keeley. I appreciate the ironic turnabout of the men’s manager being an afterthought who’s only relevant in terms of his romantic storylines, but I do wonder if Roy is too strong of a character to be served in such limited doses.

Anyway, the best review I can give to season four of “Ted Lasso” is that each episode made me laugh out loud, a lot. Not only was it nice to see these familiar characters again, but the show did the most important job any comedy has—it’s funny. Welcome back, coach.

Soulver 4’s release comes at an interesting time, when many people have turned to chatbots and Google’s search dialog—and soon will turn to Siri AI—to answer questions that are better written out or spoken than described as just numbers or operators.

This significant update succeeds in bringing a sort of authoritative basis to stuff you need to calculate or convert. Behind the scenes, there’s no inference or autocompletion—it’s numbers, baby, all the way down. However, the developers aren’t unaware of the AI glow-up. They’ve addressed it in an interesting way, making it easy for agents to ask questions of Soulver!

How many bushels in a peck as I travel a furlong faster than a parsec?

Soulver has filled a gap for me in my calculating needs since I dug into the subject in 2015. While I love PCalc and use it for regular and advanced calculator needs, Soulver is where I go when I need to mix things up.¹

PCalc and Soulver offer overlapping Venn diagrams of what’s possible in number space, but they are distinctly different beasts at heart. Where PCalc mostly calculates within a calculator-style interface, Soulver mostly offers a way to make sense of numbers, units, percentages, time, intervals, and much more. I think of it as a “take stuff in various units or other formulations and then produce an output in a way I want” tool.

I sometimes go days without using Soulver, and then find myself typing in an array of calculations. For instance, as a tiny print book publisher (it’s just me), I am often dealing with the weight of paper, the weight of books, the cost of shipping, and other variables. The number of sheets I have in some of my Numbers documents is alarming, but I often need conversion that sounds like a story problem: “The printer in Canada is giving me paper weight in gsm (grams per square meter). I know the book’s area per page (typically in inches). I need to calculate the weight of 1,000 copies in pounds.” I can type the query faster than I describe it. For instance, I need to estimate the weight of a new book based on the weight and page count of one I am holding:

(6 inches x 9 inches) / (5.875 inches × 8.25 inches) × (352 / 204) × 302g in lbs

Version 4 continues to offer all of what I consider its basics. You type out numbers and units with operators between them. You can set variables, add comments, and drag results into subsequent lines as part of further calculations. You can force-convert units, as above, telling it to use a metric unit instead of imperial, or to use a different unit scale. Say you want inches instead of feet, or kilograms instead of pounds.

Because it’s a notepad, your work is persistent. You can use Soulver to create the equivalent of tabs within sheets, collected into a “sheetbook.” This is somewhat like the Notes app, and it lets you organize calculations into projects and sub-projects. I have a monolithic sheet I use for essentially everything. Soulver can store files locally or sync via iCloud.

Where version 4 starts to diverge from previous releases is in what feels like a baroque set of options that aren’t stapled on, but most require a bit more effort to get the nuance and make them work for you.

How much did Minions & Monsters make in 1940 dollars?

It took me a few weeks to write this review, quite honestly, because every time I looked at the upgrade page, my eyes glazed over as I thought about how to best present this. I mean, the release notes page is broken into ten sections. The answer—which didn’t require Soulver 4—is that I need to cherry-pick more than usual for an app to give you the flavor.

Here are a few new elements that will keep me away from search engines and other resources more than any other:

Inflation calculation. As a historian, and as somebody who just wants to use his numeracy to interpret the world, I find myself jumping for an inflation calculator all the time.² You need an online source, as it has to have a table of the historical values to provide the correct cumulative percentage between two years or dates. Because of the relatively high inflation in developed nations since the start of the pandemic, I find myself trying to understand why I’m staring at a jar of peanut butter and can’t comprehend what it costs now. (Soulver currently does annual inflation calculations, but will add monthly data in a future update.)

It’s a date: Date math is the hardest math, in my experience. Soulver previously let you perform the magic of subtracting one date from another or adding days to a date to figure out the right month, day, and year. In the update, you can do more tricks, like figuring out work hours (set by default, and you can change) in periods of time or differences, calculating relative to cultural and religious holidays, finding the number of daylight hours in a particular place, and (as should be obvious so far) much more. As a person of the Jewish faith, I honestly never know when Hanukkah starts, and Soulver doesn’t appear to know either. (Soulver says Hanukkah is coming in a future update.) However, it does include Christmas and Ramadan; there’s no list of this category, but you can look in Soulver: Settings: Dates & Times and click Public holidays to see that list, set by your region.

How far away? I don’t know about you, but I regularly want to know the distance between two places, sometimes nearby, sometimes far away. Soulver 4 lets you ask, distance between [place name] and [place name], and get the proper curvature-adjusted distance. (I have a proviso about this that you can read at the end.)

How long to upload? I’ve used Soulver for bandwidth and file-transfer time calculations since I first installed it. With the latest release, you don’t have to punch in nearly as many units or conversions to get an answer to a question like time to upload 1TB at 900Mbps. (Answer: 2.47 hours.)

Elements you’ll find added or improved that I haven’t found a particular use for yet but seem significant include:

• Better formatting: You can highlight expression lines with one of eight preset colors, as well as add divider lines. This makes data in sheets easier to parse. In addition to the previously available export function, Soulver 4 lets you email sheets to yourself with full HTML formatting.

• Trip planning: I’ll be honest that this feature looks powerful, but requires breaking out of the Soulver mold, as it uses a multi-line approach by defining the top and bottom of the trip range as a “time point” via the contextual menu. However, because of how it calculates time intervals and provides warnings if the duration you’ve set doesn’t fit, you can use it for short itineraries (getting to the airport on time) or planning a long trip.

• Tags workflow: Coders are amazing people, and you can see that in the simplicity and complexity of this tagging feature. When you tag a line with a hashtag and a tag name, the associated value can be summed, and operations can be performed on it. For instance, you can tag everyone’s individual orders on a dinner bill, add in tax and tip, and then have it divvied out. But that’s just one example. A spreadsheet could be easier, but it can also be overkill.

• A command-line interface: If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t like a GUI, a command-line approach to Soulver might fit you, but the developers created it mostly to allow a simple way for you to have various other things, whether scripts, editor plug-ins, or coding agents, use Soulver as a kind of engine of numerical accuracy.

Weather goest thou?

Soulver is a $59 one-time purchase and gives you access to Mac, iPhone, and iPad versions. (There’s a 60-day free trial to test it out.) While that might seem high, I think given inflation—wink, wink—that’s comparable to the $30–$40 we might pay for a single-platform great utility in 2010! The iPhone version can be purchased on its own for $15. Soulver 3 owners pay $29 to upgrade to version 4. You can also get Soulver 4 via the $15 a month Setapp subscription, and have full access to it and over 330 other apps.

But you might run into one not-quite-hidden subscription option if you make certain weather or stock queries. With the App Store version of Soulver, $26 a year gives you access to what the app labels Live Weather (a number of current metrics), Live & Historical Stocks (a deep trove of data and real-time), and Inline Knowledge Assistant (which lets you use Wolfram|Alpha). It’s included at no extra cost for Setapp subscribers.

I ran afoul of an aspect of this in testing, as Soulver (as of 4.0.2) included about the top 700 most populous cities and leaned on Wolfram for more, but didn’t prompt me as to why it couldn’t identify a city I mentioned. Developer Zac Cohan said the next minor update will add dynamic place-name lookups as part of the base price to reduce confusion and better fit the user base.

This subscription is not at all necessary to use Soulver 4, and Zac says the vast majority of Soulver users don’t need it. However, the cost to provide the data and services is too high to include for all users, hence the subscription to defray those costs.

Apple’s request for a preliminary injunction is both based on false information and completely unnecessary because we do not have, nor want, any of their trade secrets. We’re much more interested in building innovative products and technologies that push the frontier.

The post itself includes numerous transcripts of message conversations¹ and emails that supposedly bolster OpenAI’s case that it studiously avoided using Apple information.

This is, as The Verge’s Jess Wetherbed notes, a pure public opinion play. Because if they have evidence, the only correct answer is “we’ll see you in court.”

What kept running through my head while reading this was the old legal chestnut: “If you have the facts on your side, pound the facts. If you have the law on your side, pound the law. If you have neither on your side, pound the table.”

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