It’s WWDC week and John Moltz had the temerity to go on vacation, which means it falls to me, his dutiful editor, to file something. Also, Jason’s on the road somewhere, so really, there’s nobody to stop me. The power is intoxica—wait, is this zero-proof power? Rats.

Anyway, down to business.

If you take away anything from this week’s WWDC, it’s that Apple and Google are just friends. Plus, Siri is good now, and Tim Cook says “good byyyyyye.”

WWDC unplugged

The week of Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference often goes by in a blur, whether it’s an hour-long keynote or binging seventy-two developer sessions in just eighteen hours by setting them all to run at 2x—look, I might need to iterate my spatial scenes faster with Reality Composer Pro 3! You don’t know me!

After three days of that, you too might wake up alone and cold on the Rainbow Stage, a blown-up printout of a wall of features slide covered in red pen and incomprehensible scribblings plastered to your face with drool.

I speak, of course, hypothetically. Where would I even find a printer at Apple Park?

This week’s conference not only featured the keynote and platforms state of the union¹ as usual, but also an unusual and intimate jam session headlined by Apple execs Craig Federighi, Mike Rockwell, Amar Subramanya, and Sebastien Marineau-Mes with Jason and some others in attendance.

The upshot? Craig would like you to know that just because Apple is parterning with Google for their AI features, the company is still doing its own thang.

Of course, we don’t have the Gemini app as our app. In fact, none of that client code is part of how we run on iOS.

All right, but I mean, it is the same model that Google uses, right?

For these models, we use none of the models that Google deploys to their customers, nor do we use the infrastructure and means by which they deploy models to their customers.

But surely all that world knowledge is pulled in via tools like Google Search.

And then, when it comes to the knowledge base, we of course don’t use Google Search or anything like that as the foundation of our system.

I see. Great, well, moving o—

The amount of the Google Assistant we use is none.

YES, WE GET IT, CRAIG. Settle down. Geez. Just say that Google never returned your Color Me Badd CD back in fifth grade and you’re still irked about it like a normal person.

That happened to all of us, right?

Anyway, somewhere, a single tear is rolling down Sundar Pichai’s cheek as The Dandy Warhols “We Used to Be Friends” blares out of a Google Home speaker.

Meet the new Siri, not the same as the old Siri

If there was a highlight from this week’s WWDC announcement, it was consistent corner radii in macOS, which, believe it or not, got cheers and applause at the live event. Who am I kidding, you’re not surprised. You people know who you are.

But if there was a second highlight, it was the unveiling of a brand new version of Siri, built with AI. It’s called—wait for it—Siri AI. Yeah. Somebody got paid a fortune to come up with that and then took the rest of the day off, and if I sound jealous it’s because I am.

Siri AI aims to deliver a slew of advanced features that might look familiar to you if you watched the 2024 WWDC keynote or were anywhere near a TV while Apple ran a series of ads starring Bella Ramsey that it didn’t manage to memory hole quite fast enough to avoid a class action lawsuit.

During the keynote, Apple presenters showed that Siri AI was able to handle complex queries with aplomb, whether it was providing details of the World Cup schedule, whether your shoes will fit in a bag, or that most difficult of tasks: planning a party. Because we all know that when we leave party planning to humans, we end up with seventeen appetizers and no entrees, isn’t that right, Brian?

For those who have access to the new Siri AI—and haven’t been stuck on Apple’s interminable waitlist—it so far seems to be largely living up to expectations. As long those expectations do not include having it be your girlfriend or working in Europe.

But it’s certainly beating the pants off the old Siri, who is no doubt off to travel the world and have untold adventures, just like the dog at the end of Old Yeller. (Note to self: really should finish that book some day.)

Tim Cook’s last dance

But it wasn’t all celebrations and popping champagne this week at Apple Park, as the keynote ended on a bittersweet moment as Tim Cook signed off for his last presentation as CEO.²

Those in person at Apple Park got to hear a touching intro from Craig about Tim’s lasting impact on Apple:

From the beginning, Tim was a champion for the renaissance of the Mac, for Apple silicon, for Swift and our developer tools, and for powerful AI at the foundations of hardware and software.

Wait, did the AI write this?!

But more than that, Tim loves developers.

Well, he loves about 30 percent of them. Can we put rimshots in these? I’ll have to check with my edit—oh, that’s right, I AM THE EDITOR.

Following Craig’s remarks, Tim came out on stage to a lengthy standing ovation, but saved his most personal thoughts until the closing moments of the presentation itself, really digging deep to get in touch with his emotions:

At Apple, creating the best productions in the world to deliver experiences that enrich people’s lives has always been our North Star.

It’s been the honor of a lifetime to help advance that mission with teams whose creativity, care, and conviction continue to make a lasting difference in people’s lives.

Look, it’s Tim. Don’t get expect him to get all mushy. At least he didn’t say they created a lot of value for shareholders.

Incoming CEO John Ternus is expected to take the reins for Apple’s September iPhone event, and while he might have some big shoes to fill on the operations side of the business, I think he’s likely to do pretty well with the whole presenting thing.

And if not, they can always replace him with Siri AI.

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

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

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

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

Liquid Glass was not beloved. I didn’t mind it so much on the Mac, and I found some iPhone and iPad improvements worthwhile, and the rest tolerable. Some people hated it. John Gruber notably decided to hold off on updating his primary Mac to Tahoe. Apple ironically highlighted a slider in its WWDC keynote that one could describe as “mostly forget about Liquid Glass,” with an option from “full-on, nobody wanted this” to “as close to zero as we can go without breaking the interface.” Good.

Stacey Ford, Apple’s Vice President of OS Program Management, called out a broad mandate in the keynote. “We scoured every part of the OS for opportunities to refine our systems from the UI to the foundations,” she said. “Nothing was off limits, no enhancement too small.” In other words, there are no sacred cows leftover from the design team that left, and maybe Ford and her group hate the same things that we do, and they’ve been given the authority to fix them.

Maybe as a consequence, Liquid Glass will improve legibility through several changes, which you’ll see even with the slider set to zero. The layers of Liquid Glass elements will now be rendered so that the diffusion of the underlying material won’t interfere as much with legibility. When content moves beneath a floating bar, the bar will now—shocking!—float on top and increase contrast to keep its contents comprehensible, too. Edges will now be darker, and icons sharper.

Gruber despised a secondary macOS change perhaps as much as Liquid Glass: the tiny icons on drop-down menus that were unhelpful, patronizing, and inconsistent across apps. Those are effectively gone now, with new guidance from Apple that is nearly contemptuous of the one-year glitch in the approach.

A lot of digital ink was also spilled about corner radii, dragging, and consistency with macOS 26. So much so that Apple’s Shubham Kedia—Director, Human Interface—said in the keynote this remarkable phrase: “…every window on macOS now has the same tighter corner radius ensuring greater consistency across all of your apps, even if they haven’t been updated.” It’s the weirdest time in the company’s history that an Apple leader had to utter those words, but there you go, and there was mostly rejoicing. The lower-right-corner drag area appears fixed, too, in my testing with the first beta.

Tahoe’s other missteps that will be drawn back to the norm include ending the weirdly inset sidebars, such as in Photos, which now extend to the edges; the mouse-over hand cursor has mostly reverted to pre-Tahoe format, with slightly different finger positions, and indications that it’s a Mickey Mouse-style glove; and even the default wallpaper has rolled backwards, with iOS, iPadOS, and macOS all having access to the same set, if that’s the kind of thing you like.

More generally, I heard grumblings and read long essays about the instability people experienced with Tahoe, and still do, even though we’re at version 26.5. Often, the “tweak” year involves thousands of under-the-hood fixes. Apple was more frank about making things better this year than it has been since, I want to say, the year after Yosemite.² It would be like Microsoft making fun of blue screens of death.

Apple’s Ford said, “We made things faster, smoother, even easier to use, and we took care of a bunch of things you’ve been asking about.” She later described speed improvements in iOS and iPadOS app launch times, a fix for a long-running Wi-Fi/cellular poor handoff issue, a complete overhaul of Spotlight, and much more. She noted, “We’ve all had that moment where you search for something you know is there, but it just won’t show up. So on iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, we’ve rebuilt the foundation of search that powers Spotlight, Photos, and Mail.” That is a heck of an admission of the truth we experience day to day—almost un-Apple-like.

There’s more I won’t enumerate in detail, such as the “OS improvements” section that appears on Apple’s sites for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS, in which Apple confesses to imperfections and proclaims it has solved them. Because all iPhones, most iPads,³ a few Apple Watches,⁴ and all M-series Macs (but no Intel Macs) that could run version 26 can run 27, no harm, no foul, right? Just took a year.

These rollbacks and improvements may finally push people like Gruber to, er, cross the Golden Gate in a way that they could never bring themselves to plunge into the imperfect, quirky, and irritating waters of Tahoe. Because of how Apple pushes users to upgrade, I expect that iPhone and iPad users may find more relief, as they’re running the current release!

For further reading (and writing)

My summer’s work will include a lot of reading to write updates for around 10 Take Control Books titles. I’ll also be working to keep a new micro-site, currently called Apple Specs, up to date, where you can look up operating system and hardware features to figure out which devices and releases support them. I welcome feedback via a link on each page of the site.

I mean, the way that we have designed Siri, Siri really wants to say ‘Listen, that’s not what I’m here for, right? I’m here to help you. I can help you get things done. I can help you learn about the world.’ But if you try to engage Siri as a romantic partner, Siri’s not up for that. Siri’s 100 percent not into that.

This jibes with what I heard from my conversations with Apple this week, namely that Siri is designed to act as your helpful personal assistant. It’s further borne out by the poking around that folks like Federico Viticci have done in what they can find of Siri’s prompts.

This isn’t to say that Siri doesn’t still occasionally dip into the kind of AI speak that we’ve grown accustomed to from chatbots; I’ve definitely seen it. But I’ve also noticed, anecdotally, that Siri is quick to acknowledge mistakes and, crucially, ask for more followup information rather than doubling down. If nothing else, that feels like a key difference that I want to see from my AI interactions.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

I look at the content creators who are possibly experiencing their first WWDC, and realize: how am I still here, and still taking notes on an iPad, while these younger folks are shooting videos that millions of people will watch? I’m in between changes again, but I don’t mind it. The challenge still feeds me. I’m more comfortable now, but – miraculously – I don’t feel cynical or jaded. Some people are into that sort of attitude; I’ve always preferred to put in the work to be critical and enthusiastic about the things I like. In a world of complaints, optimism is a skill.

This was, um, 30 years of me covering WWDC. If Federico is now a veteran, please do not tell me the word for what I am. But I really enjoyed his reflections and the ongoing (yes, even for me) challenge of adapting to change, seeing things with fresh eyes, and appreciating the people who are experiencing these events for the first time.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

The last two years at WWDC, Apple has felt like it’s been in a hurry. In 2024, in a hurry to catch the AI wave before it entirely passed them by. (They didn’t catch that wave—they wiped out, lost their surfboard, and may have been partially gnawed on by a shark.) Then last year it felt like it was trying to cover up its embarrassment about AI failures by rushing out a new design scheme that felt ill conceived, especially when it came to the Mac.

This year feels different. Apple is unveiling a second take on its AI plans, but it feels like they’ve spent the intervening two years trying to make sure that this time, it sticks. And when it comes to almost every other announcement at WWDC 27, it feels like the company is taking stock, measuring twice, and cutting once. As famed basketball coach John Wooden warned his young charges, it’s important to be quick—but not to hurry.

Snow Leopard memories

It’s been 17 years since OS X Snow Leopard (and yes, that’s a link to my review of it for this very site), but its memory looms large. It is famously one of Apple’s relatively rare OS releases that mostly avoided huge tentpole features in favor of a focus on speed, efficiency, and quality-of-life tweaks that make the experience of being a Mac user better.

It’s easy to understand why these sorts of releases are rare. Just look at reaction to this week’s WWDC: I’ve seen several people refer to the keynote as “boring.” I wouldn’t go that far, but the presentation’s initial segment about platform updates was really hard to focus on… because it didn’t have a focus! It really couldn’t, unless you count the slide that contained a hundred little blurbs of text detailing individual changes or additions across all of Apple’s operating systems.

It’s hard to sell “we fixed lots of stuff.” It’s a lot easier to hype people about a handful of high-profile features. And so lots of tech companies tend to prioritize the shiny objects rather than “sweating the details,” as Apple’s Craig Federighi said right at the top of the WWDC Keynote video. This week at Apple Park, I heard more than one Apple person explicitly reference Snow Leopard, as well as iOS 12, as inspiration for the current set of OS releases.

Changes big and small

This release also feels like a real apology to Mac users. Say what you will about macOS Tahoe—for the record, I really loved the productivity features—there’s no denying that its implementation of Liquid Glass was half-baked at best. While Apple’s official position on Liquid Glass is, unsurprisingly, that it’s just in need of some tweaks based on user feedback, the story on the Mac is more dramatic. The Mac gets a rollback of several Liquid Glass missteps, including the disastrous sidebar design and the re-introducton of an actual toolbar.

And while you couldn’t hear it on the live stream, at Apple Park there was loud applause from the audience when Apple announced that it was standardizing the corner radius on all Mac windows. Seems esoteric, right? But realize, every single one of those developers doesn’t just write software for Apple platforms, but uses the Mac to write that software. They are Mac users who are technical enough to recognize some of the biggest design messes of the 26-era OSes, and knew to applaud when those goofs were being addressed.

You can’t predict what will arrive for all users in the fall based on the first developer beta, but when I booted into macOS Golden Gate on a spare laptop this morning, I was taken back to the very earliest days of OS X. Yes, the sidebars in Finder feel like coming home, and toolbars are much clearer. But it’s the glass effect on buttons—they’re bright, with highlights and an outline—that really brought on the nostalgia trip. It’s starting to feel like Liquid Glass is intentionally riffing on Aqua, the original OS X design language. Nothing says Aqua like big glossy buttons, and while I made no attempts to lick the Golden Gate interface, I did get some serious early-2000s vibes.

But honestly, the new feature that gives me the biggest flashback to the olden days is actually one of the most cutting edge of all the features Apple announced this week. Apple has always, from the very beginning, been guided by the principle of bringing high technology to regular people to solve their problems. And from the days of HyperCard in the ’80s through the introduction of AppleScript in the ’90s and Shortcuts in the 2010s, Apple has attempted to find ways to put the power of programming and automation in non-programmers.

I experienced the closest Apple has ever come to fulfilling this dream on Monday, as I sat in front of an iPad typing normal English sentences into Shortcuts, pressing Return, and watching as Apple’s AI model fashioned those requests into entirely functional Shortcuts, complete with scheduling. Typing “give me a summary of my day’s events and to-do’s every day when I wake up” actually just… worked? “Go into Do Not Disturb when I connect to my shower speaker,” too. Even a more complex command like “ask me for text and add it to a text file with today’s date on it, saved on the Desktop, prepended with the time, and create the file if it’s not already there” generated an entirely functional Shortcut.

There are a lot of caveats. The model creating Shortcuts can get a little confused, it doesn’t always work (especially with more complex actions), and it doesn’t work with third-party apps. But leaving all that aside, it’s a new-school solution to an old-school problem, one Apple’s been trying to solve forever. For a supposedly quiet operating-system release cycle, it was a pretty revelatory experience. If these are the sorts of features we have to look forward to this summer and fall, it’s going to be a pretty great cycle—regardless of the lack of flash.

I’m home after two and a half days down in the South Bay for WWDC. This year I tried to take notes at the keynote and in briefings using a traditional reporter’s notebook and a pen, which means that I’m literally emptying my notebook when I give you these first scattered impressions of what I saw.

The AI stuff

What struck me most about Apple’s AI announcements is how little the company’s stance on AI has changed since its fateful WWDC 2024 announcements. It’s still classic Apple: AI is not the end but a means to an end, with the goal of building “helpful products for people.”

So this release is not about Apple questioning its priors. Instead, it’s about getting back on track, back in the game. The goal here isn’t for Apple to blow away the competition, but to be relevant and helpful and create a foundation on which to build.

Also, having a version of Siri that actually works would be a pretty big win.

Apple’s huge advantage here is that it’s the platform owner, so it can build tools that search through all the data on your personal devices without requiring that you expose that private data to some company’s systems. It’s using that revamped Spotlight to search through your own data, then handing snippets off to Private Cloud Compute for processing. I think it’s all very promising.

In terms of where it’ll go next, look to the Passwords feature that agentically changes your passwords for you in the background. Look at the tools that let you vibe code Safari extensions and create Shortcuts. I do not doubt that Apple would love to do more of this sort of stuff, which is much closer to the present-day of AI enthusiasm, but it really does need to walk before it can run.

More broadly, I’d like to see Apple ship these features this fall and then maybe introduce some new AI features early next year. The pace of AI is so much faster than Apple’s annual software cycle can accommodate. It needs to get used to phasing in new AI features across the entire cycle, so it can make quick adjustments as new trends in AI functionality emerge.

I want to note that this year Apple has redefined what Private Cloud Compute, a concept it introduced in 2024, means. Before, it meant Apple servers running on Apple hardware in Apple data centers. Now it means something a bit broader, since it can also include Apple-controlled servers running on non-Apple hardware in Google data centers. Apple took great pains this week to explain that Apple controls those servers and they’re built to the same privacy specifications as the other servers in the PCC cloud—in other words, they’re not generic Google servers that could compromise your private data—but it’s also a sign that Apple needed more cloud AI power than it was capable of providing on its own. Hence the redefinition.

And one final AI note: The segmentation of AI models has commenced. Apple now has two different on-device AI models, one of which has much higher hardware requirements. Right now, this higher-powered model is primarily used for improved dictation and speech synthesis, but undoubtedly over time, it’ll be used for other things. I do wonder if, in the long run, older Apple devices will just have to turn more to Private Cloud Compute to perform beefier tasks, or if they’ll be entirely barred from new features? But we’ve already seen that being a device “capable of running Apple Intelligence” is no longer sufficient for some features.

On the server side, there are also multiple models. More basic jobs are handed to a smaller model running on Apple’s servers. Heavier tasks are instead handed to the bigger models running on Apple-controlled servers in Google’s data centers. This is all transparent to the user, which is as it should be, but it’s interesting to watch Apple’s AI back-end increase in complexity.

Snow Leopard revisited

The moment the keynote used the phrases “sweating the details” and “attention to detail,” it was clear that beyond AI and Siri features, this year is about small fixes and improvements. In more private settings, Apple folks specifically referenced Snow Leopard and iOS 12, two updates that saw Apple take a pause from huge feature roll-outs and prioritize speed and bug fixes a bit more.

But to be clear, referencing Snow Leopard does not mean “no new features.” Like Apple’s 27 releases, Snow Leopard was full of dozens, if not hundreds, of new features—they were just scattered small improvements throughout the system. Updates like this are a challenge to communicate because there are no big features to grab on to.

This is the conundrum of operating-system releases. People say they want bug fixes and small quality-of-life improvements, but a roll-out without tentpole features feels kind of bland. In any case, Apple’s all-out mission to finally fix Siri and get AI integrated in their products the way it said that it would two years ago has allowed the rest of the people developing software at the company to check a bunch of items off their longstanding to-do lists, and I’m here for it.

At the top of my “why did it take them this long?” list of improvements is the change, mentioned in the keynote, that will allow iPhones to better handle that moment when they leave an area with Wi-Fi and have to switch to cellular. I always think of this as the “driveway problem,” but whatever you call it, too often I’m sitting in my driveway looking up directions in Apple Maps only to have all my searches fail because I’m apparently too far from my home Wi-Fi, but my iPhone hasn’t given up hope that it’ll come back soon.

My understanding is that in iOS 27, the iPhone will rely not just on measurements of signal strength (which is the primary method of choosing the wireless network today), but will also use throughput, latency, and signs of network congestion as signifiers. And it’s designed to do so quickly, so you don’t spend as much time frustrated because your iPhone feels it hasn’t sufficiently mourned the loss of its Wi-Fi signal.

Apple fixes stuff it needs to use

A lot of frustrating bugs sit, untouched, for years. Apple has its priorities, and shiny new features get the love while rickety old stuff never rises to the level of being important enough to fix.

Until, that is, Apple needs to have that feature work right in order to serve one of its priorities for the latest OS release. At that point, you’ll find that old, broken features suddenly get the attention and fixes they’ve needed for years. That’s why some of the seemingly random bug fixes and improvements scattered across the 27 releases aren’t actually random! They’re side effects of Apple’s larger feature pushes.

For example, imagine that you’re building a new Siri AI system that needs to lean on searching through a user’s local files in order to apply an important level of personal context. Perhaps when you’re building that system, you realize that you can’t actually rely on Spotlight to supply all of that context because it’s not nearly as stable or efficient as you need it to be.

If such a thing were to happen, well, perhaps Apple would find the time to rebuild all of Spotlight search to make it work faster and more reliably. Perhaps searching in Mail would float more relevant results up to the top. Perhaps Messages search would become less frustrating. And perhaps users who need to search for things will benefit, even if they’re not heavy users of Siri AI itself.

What I’m saying is, Spotlight’s going to be better in the 27 releases.

Long-suffering Shortcuts users will notice similar things happening there. It’s been incredibly frustrating to develop Shortcuts due to the lack of support for a proper If-Else statement, a cornerstone of programming. Scheduling Shortcuts has also been a pain, because you’ve got to tie a shortcut to a separate Automation step.

Well, guess what? Apple is introducing a cool new feature that lets you build Shortcuts entirely out of text prompts, using an AI model. It works pretty well, at least for basic tasks, and I’ll have a lot more to say about it this summer. But I have zero doubt that the people building that feature looked at Shortcuts and said, essentially, “What do you mean it doesn’t have If-Else or integrated scheduling? We need those things!” And so they’re now going to be there, for all Shortcuts users to take advantage of.

visionOS: Not dead

People are quick to bury the Vision Pro, which is and has always been a speculative and impractical device that’s more about the future than the present. It’ll be years before Apple is able to construct anything like the Vision Pro at a price and with a feature set that could possibly make it a mainstream product. In the meantime, it’s an experiment and exploration, and I’m okay with it. For all that to be true, though, visionOS needs to keep advancing. And it looks like it is.

This year, Apple’s adding the ability to convert panoramas into spatial scenes, which is just a wild idea. I’m dubious that my Sligachan panorama from the Isle of Skye is going to replace Bora Bora or Joshua Tree, but I love that Apple is still tinkering—and panoramas and spatial scenes are some of the best features in the Vision Pro. (That’s also a good sign, because it suggests Apple is learning what works well on visionOS and is leaning into those features.)

Also, if you believe the stories, Apple exec Mike Rockwell—who is the guy who was charged with shipping the Vision Pro—had originally planned for visionOS to be much more driven by Siri, only to be repeatedly let down by the Siri team. In visionOS 27, Siri AI seems to be pervasive. It feels like Rockwell, who is now in charge of Siri, is having his revenge—and fulfilling one of his dreams for how visionOS should work.

Of course, visionOS is also a playground for future features of other Apple devices. As Dan has pointed out, some of the visual-intelligence features of visionOS 27 sure feel like they might be applicable to other future wearable devices that Apple might be working on. Again, visionOS being a platform for experimentation is a good thing.

Photos improves, but it’s complicated

As someone who writes a book about the Photos app, I’m extremely invested in the changes Apple makes to that app from year to year. This year, it’s addressing one of its biggest limitations and adding a load of AI features that I’m ambivalent about.

First, the good news: Changes to Shared Albums! This feature has been compromised since it was launched, since it didn’t offer the ability to share full-resolution images from your library. 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.

As for the three AI-powered features in Photos, they’re a mixed bag. I have high hopes for a much improved Clean Up, which was already okay but could be a lot better. The new version appears to be much more adept at artfully clipping unwanted items out of an image and filling those areas with in-context imagery. This is where generative AI is really required, because if the fill-in algorithm isn’t smart, the results will look fake. So far as I know, Clean Up occurs on your device, using on-device models.

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. It’s also going to be great for straightening images, since Extend can fill in the slivers of unknown image that are exposed when you rotate, which otherwise require that your image be cropped as you rotate.

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. Judicious use would be my recommendation.

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.

The problem is that these results feel pretty generative, through and through. I saw some samples of people’s faces that, after being Spatially Reframed, didn’t really look like their faces anymore. Unlike Extend, Spatial Reframe changes the entire perspective of the picture, which requires everything that’s visible to be re-rendered at full quality. The result is an image that, at least based on my initial reactions, felt surprisingly artificial. I’ve got to use this feature a lot more over the summer, but my initial reaction is skepticism.

Apple’s annual software updates have implications throughout time. They reach back to older devices, some years making them more performant and usable or, alternatively, removing support for them altogether; they deal, obviously, with the products people are using and buying right now; and, perhaps most interestingly, they hint at what we might see from the company down the road.

This year’s updates, in what we’ll call the 27 model year, do all of this. Though, when combined with the pervading reports of significant new types of devices from Apple, it provides some of the most tantalizing hints about what’s to come.

Know when to fold them

Given that the annual updates see their release around the time that Apple puts out a new iPhone, people are always spelunking for interesting tidbits in the code to see if they can find anything that informs those next generation of devices.

It’s a poorly kept secret that Apple is working on its first foldable device. Look in the right places, you can see cases, purported leaked photos of its exterior, and even 3D-printed dummy units.

For all of that, it’s the details of the implementation that are still unknown for now, but iOS 27 gives us a few clues about how this might impact developers.

For example, there are a couple of features on Apple’s big wall of text that seem to point to the foldable phone being nigh: “iPhone app resizing in iPadOS” and “App resizing in iPhone Mirroring”, as well as a bit in the keynote where Craig Federighi demos the latest device simulator for developers allowing them to test said resizing.

iPhone apps have, of course, long been available in both landscape and portrait modes, obviously, and various sizes to support the different size displays that iPhones have had over the years. But allowing users to resize them is certainly a new feature, one that feels plucked from the recent iPad multitasking updates.

While this doesn’t definitively tell us how iPhone apps will behave on a larger, unfolded iPhone display, it certainly makes it clear that iPhone apps are going to have to deal with a new multi-size future.

Reach out and touch your Mac

Second only in speculation to the folding iPhone might be the reported MacBook Pro that will be Apple’s first Mac with a touchscreen.

Apple’s been more than happy to make the iPad more Mac-like, first with support for keyboard and pointing devices, more recently with Mac-like multitasking. This year, the iPad gets an option to keep the menu bar visible all the time—and it’s now pinned to the left. Look familiar?

Turnabout is, of course, only fair play. Not unlike with foldable phones, touchscreen laptops have been sold by Apple’s competitors for years. But Apple seemed intent on keeping the iPad and the Mac in separate lanes.

Until, it seems, now. A preponderance of drawing related features are specifically making their way to the Mac, including both in Notes and in Freeform. Those features have existed on Apple’s touch-first platforms for some time, but this is their first jump to the Mac. While nominally this will work with your trackpad or even using an iPad as input, it’s not hard to imagine a future where you might be able to draw right on your Mac’s screen.

Messages now has a Drawing app on all platforms.

Likewise, a new drawing app in Messages across all of Apple’s platforms, including the Mac, and some other touch-related improvements, such as the Mac’s Sidecar feature, which now has a full-fledged touch interface, instead of just being limited to certain two finger gestures. And Apple also called out the addition of “pull down to refresh” on apps like Mail, Calendar, Safari, and more. I mean, don’t get me wrong, that’s a perfectly fine feature on a multitouch trackpad, but as an interface convention, we all know where it comes from.

Apple’s willingness to adopt Mac interface conventions on the iPad’s touchscreen—including the iconic stoplight controls—shows that such an idea isn’t nearly as farfetched as some might have thought. And it certainly feels like the touch future of the Mac is just around the corner.

A vision of the future

Not every future Apple device is imminent, though. While a folding iPhone and touchscreen Mac might be in people’s hands before the end of the year, Apple’s got plenty of ideas for farther off devices up its sleeves. Or, I guess, on your face.

During its preview of visionOS 27, Apple showed off the implementation of its Visual Intelligence feature on the Apple Vision Pro, saying that you could get information by an object just by looking at it.

Which is cool, but the Vision Pro is a device that stays in the confines of my house—and even there, generally in my office. Frankly, there aren’t a lot of objects in my office that I really need to know more about.

But take a similar device—say, a smaller, lighter one—into the wilds of the outdoors and there are any number of things that you might want to learn more about, from plants and animals to cars or clothing.

Reports suggest Apple is working on wearable devices, both in the form of glasses and AirPods, with cameras that can tell you about the world around you. Don’t be surprised, if and when they arrive, if they have a Visual Intelligence implementation that draws upon what they’ve done here with visionOS.

Future proof

With Apple notoriously tightlipped about its future plans and product roadmap, you might wonder why exactly Apple continues to roll out features that seem to provide evidence of just such a future.

At the base level, of course, is that if there’s a cool feature that’s ready to go at the time of an update, then there’s no reason not to put it out. (And said speculation also builds buzz, which doesn’t particularly hurt them.)

But moreover, in the same way that Apple builds in APIs and features for developers to prepare their apps for future releases, putting these features in early helps lay groundwork. In part to be able to best show off those new devices when they arrive—”And if you want to draw in Notes, just use your finger on the screen!”—and in part to let users themselves prepare for all the cool things they might want to do in the future—whether on the devices they have right now, or the ones they might someday get.

It’s not a total surprise that watchOS 27 isn’t a huge release, but there are still some very welcome features. The first is Siri AI, which, thankfully, is heavily integrated into the Apple Watch. I had wondered how much the Apple Watch would support this new LLM-backed assistant, but it seems that many of its key abilities available on iOS are also accessible on watchOS. That’s great to see.

However, the downside for me is that my beloved blue Series 7 Apple Watch will not be supported by this update, which requires at least a Series 9. Here’s hoping Apple adds some more color options in this year’s models.

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Siri’s long-awaited overhaul made its public debut today during Apple’s WWDC 2026 keynote, as Apple outlined its vision for a more capable version of its virtual assistant that’s powered by a new generation of Apple Intelligence.

From now on, Apple’s foundation models are being blended with Google Gemini to create the new heart of Apple Intelligence. The result, Apple executives say, will be AI features that are aware of your context, including what’s on your screen, with a personal assistant in the form of the rebranded Siri AI that’s more responsive to your needs.

Developers will get the first crack at seeing what’s new with Siri and Apple Intelligence, as Apple releases developer betas of this year’s software updates — iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27 and tvOS 27 — starting today. Public betas will follow in July, with the full releases arriving in the fall as they usually do.

Of course, not every iPhone and iPad owner is going to have access to Siri AI right away. Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, announced during the keynote that the updated digital assistant won’t ship to EU countries with the rest of iPadOS 27 and iOS 27 in the fall, as EU regulators want other virtual assistants to have the same access to users’ private data that Siri gets. That’s a hard no for Apple, which insists that user data remain private. There’s no timeline on when Siri AI might hit the EU.

But that’s for Apple and the regulators to hash out. Here’s an overview of what Apple announced during the WWDC keynote and what it means for your iPhones, iPads, Macs and more.

Apple Intelligence and Siri AI

Apple says it rebuilt the architecture for its AI features using those new foundation models, with Apple Intelligence able to understand speech as well as text and images. It can draw on the personal context stored on your device, recognize what’s on your screen and pull from external information available on the web. As before, Apple Intelligence operates on your devices as well as servers via Private Cloud Compute, and all your AI interactions are kept private, even from Apple.

One note about on-device actions, though: only recent hardware will be powerful enough to run what Apple describes as its most advanced on-device model. That means the iPhones released last fall, any M4-powered iPad or M3-powered Mac with at least 12GB of unified memory and the M5-based Apple Vision Pro.

Siri is accessible from anywhere on your device, and you can summon the assistant with the usual “Hey Siri” vocal command. iPhone users will be able to activate Siri with the side button on the phone or with a swipe down from the Dynamic Island; another swipe can expand Siri’s answer to get a more detailed response. iPad and Mac users can interact with Siri AI from the Spotlight tool as well as systemwide context menus.

Siri AI will be available on the Apple Watch, too, letting users start a conversation with an assistant or continue one started on another Apple device via a new Smart Stack suggestion. In addition, the changes coming to Siri and Apple Intelligence will extend to CarPlay and AirPods.

A new Siri app will debut on Apple devices this fall, giving you a place to access past conversations with Siri; you can also start a conversation on your iPhone and continue it on your Mac.

Some of the examples Apple showed off during its WWDC keynote featured Apple executive Mike Rockwell asking Siri about an upcoming concert, with the assistant pulling the dates from the web. Follow-up questions let Rockwell ask Siri about the ticketing process, set a reminder to buy tickets at the appropriate time and play music from the artist. All of this was done in a conversational style, without the hassle of having to repeat the artist’s name.

Other demos of Siri AI showed how the assistant can now help you plan things, pulling a schedule of World Cup matches, formulating a menu of possible meals for a watch party centered around a specific match that also included recipes shared via Messages, and generating and sending out an invitation to the party. It’s worth noting that at each step, Siri has you confirm actions, and you can leap in and edit things should Siri get them wrong.

Siri AI also features improvements to the expressiveness of its voice — imagine the assistant emphasizing certain words or striking a more excited tone to reflect the message it’s reading to you. You have the ability to adjust that expressiveness as well as the pace of Siri’s voice.

Siri AI will be limited to English initially, but Apple plans to add support for other languages in short order.

Siri features in apps

There’s more to Siri AI than just a new app, though, as many features are being integrated and enhanced in other apps. Visual Intelligence is integrated directly into the Camera app, for example, with a Siri mode to show the assistant exactly what you’re seeing. Point your iPhone’s camera at a plate of food, and you can pull up nutritional information or capture an image of a bill to split it with friends, all while paying your share via Apple Pay. Those Visual Intelligence tools will be available on the Mac and iPad as well as the iPhone.

Writing tools are getting a boost with this Apple Intelligence revamp, as you can ask Siri to draft documents for you. Apple suggests that this is just a starting point for a draft that you would then elaborate on, and as a writer who balks at the idea that any AI feature can handle writing on my behalf, I should certainly hope so. I’m far more intrigued by a promised feature in which you can ask Siri to give you feedback on writing.

Additional writing tools coming to anywhere you can type include automatic proofreading — hope it proves more reliable than autocorrect — and the ability to recognize who you’re sending messages and texts to and adapt the tone to correspond to the recipient.

Photos gets a number of AI-powered image-editing tools, such as an enhanced Clean Up feature that promises better fill-ins when you remove distracting objects or people. An extend tool expands the background on shots, while a spatial reframing feature lets you change the perspective of the photo after you’ve taken it.

Safari now taps into Apple Intelligence to organize all those open tabs by topic, while a Notify Me feature uses your natural-language instructions to monitor changes in web pages — say an item going on sale — and alert you when it happens. Passwords can change passwords on your behalf, while Shortcuts taps into the vibe coding fad by letting you describe a shortcut to auto-generate it.

Apps like Messages, Calendar, Mail and Phone better understand context to offer up more useful one-tap suggestions. For instance, if you’re in a Message conversation where someone asks you for a specific photo, the Siri assistant should be smart enough to generate a suggestion that finds and sends the photo on your behalf.

You can also expect an update to Image Playground that will add support for more styles as well as new ways to modify and tweak anything created by Apple’s image generation tool. A welcome change will be the ability to create images in more formats, such as landscape. And the app figures to be better integrated with contact posters and wallpapers for your iPhone. Note that image generation will be among the Apple Intelligence features that come with a daily limit, as those capabilities are being offloaded to servers; you will be able to bolster your access through iCloud Plus subscription plans.

Platform improvements

Apple Intelligence dominated the WWDC keynote, but it’s not the only change Apple has planned for its software. Apple is promising a number of system improvements across its various operating systems. “Instead of just introducing a host of new features, we’re taking the features you’re already relying on and making them better,” Federighi said.

That includes system optimizations that speed up things like app launches, content loading and AirDrop transfers. Older iPhones can count on a new CPU scheduler to make sure tasks run more efficiently; as a result, iOS 27 will run on the same devices that support iOS 26.

The most anticipated changes, though, are likely to be promised enhancements for Liquid Glass, the new interface Apple rolled out across its platforms last year. Not everyone was a fan of the new look for the various OSes, and Apple took some of that feedback to heart. Liquid Glass changes promise more readable menus thanks to better diffusion for complex content, and there will now be a slider in Settings to adjust the look between fully clear and fully tinted.

Apple is also promising more uniform toolbars, with color returning to the icons in sidebars so that it’s easier to see which menu item is active. Icons are getting new layers that should make them look sharper and more defined.

Refined parental controls

Capturing the zeitgeist of society’s growing unease about how much access kids have to technology, Apple spent a chunk of the WWDC keynote reviewing trust and safety issues with its software, including new child safety tools formulated with feedback from experts.

To that end, Apple is expanding upon the Ask to Buy feature that lets parents approve App Store downloads with a new Ask to Browse tool. That lets parents view a website a child is trying to access and determine if it’s age-appropriate. A similar feature lets parents approve who their kids can connect with in Messages and other communication apps. The Communication Safety feature that already detects and blurs nudity in Messages and FaceTime will do the same when it detects gore or violent images.

Apple highlighted Time Allowances that manage when kids can access certain apps and for how long. Screen Time is getting a redesign to better highlight how kids are using their devices and what apps they’re accessing the most.

More to come

Part of the fun of WWDC keynotes is seeing what new features weren’t highlighted during Apple’s presentation. More of those details should come out in the coming days as people get their hands on the developer betas and have more of a chance to go over Apple’s supporting documents.

Both Jason Snell and Dan Moren are on the ground in Cupertino getting up-close looks at Apple’s planned software updates and Apple Intelligence changes. Expect more reports from them today and throughout WWDC, as we make sense of what Apple has in store for our devices the rest of this year.

During its discussion of platform improvements, Apple zoomed out on a small-text screen of many of the changes coming in its platforms this year—and there are a lot of them. Good news, now you can read at your own convenience—still in very small text.

I’ve been skimming through these items to pull out some of personal highlights. As I’ve said before, these quality of life improvements are among my favorites because I generally want to see the quality of my life improved. Who doesn’t?

At a glance, here are some particular favorites:

Else if support in Shortcuts – I’ve been requesting this for quite some time, and I’m glad to finally see it here. It seems likely that a lot of the improvements to Shortcuts are driven by the new “Describe a Shortcut” feature, which highlighted shortcomings in the app.

More consistent window positioning persistence across external displays — I’m a single display user, but I’ve heard this complaint for years from my friends and colleagues who use multiple monitors; here’s hoping it delivers for them.

Faster HomeKit accessory pairing — Honestly, it would be pretty hard for it to get slower, but this is definitely a place where a speed improvement is welcome.

Store data in Shortcut — Exactly what the mechanism for this is unclear, but having previously relied on third-party apps for this, a first-party solution is a good addition.

Improved Control Center in visionOS — I’m hopeful this allows for easier toggling between environments, especially now that you can create your own with panoramas.

Optional persistent menu bar on iPad — In case your iPad wasn’t Mac-like enough.

Expanded touch support in Sidecar — There’s always been a limit to using the standard touch interface in Sidecar; you could use two fingers to scroll or other gestures, or use the Apple Pencil, but you couldn’t just use a single finger. Interesting to see this improvement, along with the ability to draw in Notes and Freeform in macOS, right around the time we’re expecting to see the first Mac with a touchscreen.

Faster workout start in the Workout app — There were a lot of complaints about watchOS 26’s redesign of the Workout app, in particular making it harder to start workouts, so we’ll see if this addresses that.

Copy and paste as Markdown in Notes — Notes added Markdown export a while back, but now it’ll be even easier to work with the markup language.

Redesigned Shortcuts editor — 👀 Yeah. Vague, but again, it needs improvements, so I’ll take it.

React with any emoji in Shared Albums — I have a shared album of my pictures of my kid that my family can view, and while the thumbs up emoji is fine, it hardly covers every eventuality.

Updated menu bar icons — Another set of 👀 for that one.

Consolidated notifications for multiple Tapbacks in Messages — Thank god.

Screenshot and notification automations in Shortcuts — Automations are one of my favorite aspects of Shortcuts, and adding more potential triggers means even more options for how to kick them off.

As I said, there’s a ton more there—you can click through the screenshot above to see it at full size, but it certainly appears that Apple has spent a lot of time making these little improvements throughout all of its platforms this year.

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

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

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

Apple’s built-in screen sharing support for Mac-to-Mac connections has always been a help for those of us with remote setups: headless Macs acting as servers, an office and home Mac, or the laziness of having Macs in different parts of your house you want to access without standing up.¹

Under the hood, Apple relies on VNC (Virtual Network Computing), a fairly ancient standard at this point in time, and you probably get the sense of its creaking joints if you use the Screen Sharing app regularly.² But it’s possible you didn’t know that, starting in Sonoma, Apple added a “super excellent” mode to Screen Sharing as an option when you connect two Macs with M-series chips. Called High Performance, it can deliver on its name.

Let’s shift into overdrive

When you connect to another Mac using Screen Sharing, you’re given a choice of which mode to use. Let’s walk through the connection steps:

1. Either launch the Screen Sharing app and double-click the Mac’s name in a list, or, in the Finder, Control-click/right-click the Mac’s name and choose Screen Sharing. (There are still more ways to start, too.)
2. From the Select Screen Sharing Type options, you can select Standard, which is VNC-based, or High Performance, which adds Apple’s secret sauce on top.
3. Click Continue.
4. Enter your credentials.
5. The screen appears, and you may need to enter your macOS account password on the remote Mac to unlock it.

In that pathway, if you choose High Performance, you’re presented with different options. You can also click the info (i) button to the right of an existing connection in the Connections window in Screen Sharing, and choose High Performance from the Screen Sharing Type pop-up menu to save that option for the next connection.

With a Standard connection, you get a pixel-for-pixel remote view of the other Mac’s display or displays. It’s just like you’re sitting in front of it. In fact, if you use the same account as the currently logged-in user, the remote Mac shows what you’re doing to anyone who looks at it. (You can log in as another user, and a session starts in the background that doesn’t appear on the remote display screen.)

High Performance takes a different approach. You can opt to create one or two virtual displays on the remote Mac, each with independent resolution, high-dynamic-range (HDR) support, and other features. It’s like being a remote user of the computer rather than sharing. (This mode doesn’t change the remote display resolution or other settings.)

With a High Performance connection between Apple silicon Macs, you gain these advantages:

• You can choose one or two virtual displays, regardless of the number of displays connected to the shared computer.
• The Dynamic Resolution option lets you resize a virtual display to the native resolution of your local screen, up to 4K (3840×2160 pixels) or, with HiDPI, up to 1920×1080. You can click the Dynamic button on the Screen Sharing toolbar or choose View: Dynamic Resolution during a live session.
• Stereo audio passes over the connection, as does improved video. The connection supports HDR (for richer low-light and shadow tones), 4:4:4 chroma subsampling (uncompressed color data for improved fidelity), and high frame rates of 30 or 60 frames per second (for more stable video streaming, such as when watching a video or using video-editing software).

The downside of High Performance is that it imposes severe requirements for it to work well. You need 75 Mbps per 4K display and low network latency, which requires fast Wi-Fi with a gigabit-or-faster mesh or wired backbone if there are multiple network routers or base stations. However, that requirement also means that when you’re using High Performance, it feels very much like sitting in front of the other display rather than viewing it remotely.

If you want the depth of HDR Video, you have to enable it on the remote Mac via System Settings: Displays. The option for HDR Video appears in a Preset pop-up menu, but, of course, only if the display supports the right HDR signal. HDR can be enabled or disabled from the View menu and Screen Sharing toolbar, if it’s available.

Because the remote display is blacked out when using High Performance (even when connecting as the currently logged-in user), this can be seen as a privacy advantage if you have concerns about anyone else viewing the remote Mac’s screen. However, High Performance mode’s utility really lies in treating Screen Sharing like a high-speed display tunnel instead of a jerky remote view.

For further reading

If you’re looking for more detailed information about High Performance mode or any aspect of Mac-based file and screen sharing, you might consult my book, Take Control of Apple Screen and File Sharing.

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

It’s our last chance to read the tea leaves on Apple’s AI announcements next week, so let’s do this thing. Meanwhile, Apple bumps up production of the MacBook Neo and bumps down the number of Vision products it’s working on.

Now serving…

With only a few more days to speculate, let us do just that. What else would we do? Just wait until Monday? Waiting to see what Apple announces is for suckers.

The big thing on everyone’s mind for WWDC26 is enhanced Siri and Apple’s ability to finally deliver on some of the bounced Apple Intelligence checks its mouth wrote two years ago. If we’re looking for clues, we can start by studying Google’s AI capabilities, since Apple’s upcoming offering will be based on Google’s technology. According to The Verge’s Jay Peters, it’s fairly good.

“Gemini’s new AI agent is about as good as Google’s demo”

Peters says that while it’s good, you still have to check everything it does, lest it send a party invite to, say, creepy Meredith from accounting. [shudder] Remember when she brought that Jell-O salad and there was a finger in it and she said it wasn’t a finger, that we were all fingers and then she shoved her hand into the Jell-O and grabbed it and ran away? So weird.

Perhaps even more disturbing, you have to trust Google with all your data which, as Peters rightly notes at the top of the piece, is a questionable proposition.

Trusting Apple with all your data, on the other hand, is at least less problematic, something the company plans to bring up next week.

“Report: Apple Plans to Make On-Device AI a Key WWDC Focus”

As part of its agreement with Google, Apple is apparently set to use a large version of Google’s Gemini model to train a smaller, distilled version capable of running locally on Apple hardware.

Don’t get too excited about it, though, because the latest rumor is that not only will the enhanced Siri be in beta, but you might have to join a waitlist to use it. Ugh, but the waiting is the hardest part!

Wait, why are we even talking about this? Forget iOS 27. That’s so next week. What Apple customers want to hear about is what’s coming next year, and that is the hotness that will be iOS 28.

“Next year’s ’28’ releases are already shaping up to be far more significant than the ’27’ updates,” wrote [Bloomberg’s Mark] Gurman.

Well, that’s fine for Mark Gurman, but I plan to save all my enthusiasm for iOS 29. I hear that’s gonna be amaaazing.

Doubling down on doubling up

The MacBook Neo is turning into Apple’s little laptop that could. Could sell a lot of units, that is. And Apple is apparently loving it.

“MacBook Neo is So Popular That Apple Reportedly Doubled Production”

Doubled?! That’s almost twice as much!

On an earnings call in late April, Apple’s CEO Tim Cook said that customer response to the MacBook Neo was “off the charts,”…

That seems more like a problem with your accounting team because you should be able to and would really want to actually chart those numbers instead of just throwing your hands up and saying “NUMBERS TOO BIG! ME BRAIN HURT!” Not sure who Apple is employing in accounting, maybe John Ternus will want to have a look at that.

Apple is ramping up Neo production because it’s taking the market by storm.

“Apple’s MacBook Neo is winning over a new generation of buyers”

The Neo outsold both the M5-based MacBook Pro and the MacBook Air, Apple’s most popular laptop ever.

Not to be outdone (they are 100% being outdone), Dell is here to tell consumers that if they want to spend $100 more, they can get features the MacBook Neo doesn’t have!

You’re saying that if you pay more… you can get more. Fascinating concept. It will require further study.

Glasses 1/3 full

Remember the Vision Pro? It apparently remains a product in Apple’s lineup, but the work on the product line appears to have been trimmed back from six project to two by one John Ternus.

“John Ternus scaled back Apple’s Vision products roadmap: report”

Apple is now focused on delivering AI-enabled display-less glasses in 2027 and AR/XR glasses with a display in 2029. Most exciting is this news:

[Ming-Chi] Kuo says the glasses with a display are “powered by optical waveguides.”

Very cool. Waveguides will definitely help with the… opticals… of the device.

…

No, I don’t know what that means.

I was hoping you knew.

I’m an avid combiner of RSS and a user of read-it-later services. And I read widely — tech, politics, Texas news, accessibility, and movies. I also consume as many words as possible as audio, rather than text on a screen. That’s an accessibility story I’ll get to in a bit. But even in our little Six Colors family, where RSS is mighty popular, it still means very different things to different people.

The first step, it seems to me, is to know what kind of reading routine you want. Are you, like Jason, a fan of newsletters or newspapers, who wants a concentrated once-a-day digest? Or do you want to monitor feeds all day, allowing the river of news to wash over you as it arrives? Or maybe you’re like me — a scanner of feeds multiple times a day, who takes read-it-later at its word, putting most items aside for focused digesting in bunches?

Embracing my inner squirrel

So I gather and store the things I want to read. I like the two-pass approach: survey what’s available, mark the best, and read what I’ve curated when I have time. That can also include links folks send to me, or a look at Bluesky or Mastodon. These sources both do something RSS can’t quite replicate — they’re serendipitous, surfacing things my list of subscriptions doesn’t know I’m interested in.

Choosing a story I especially like from a long list — ideally with a single keystroke on the Mac, or a swipe on iOS — gives me a tiny dopamine hit, something like shopping does for some people. Oooh, a new Wired story on how AI will kill us all, or a review of an anticipated Broadway play from The New Yorker. Swipe!

Just me?

When I open Feedbin each morning, my Texas news folder often bulges with hundreds of articles. In the Tech category, I might need to process a dozen stories about electric vehicles, twice that many about Apple stuff, and whatever TechMeme has for me that day. I scroll the headlines and press 3 on my Mac keyboard to send an article to Instapaper — the best read-it-later service available directly in Feedbin, now that Pocket’s gone. From there, Instapaper syncs to an iOS text-to-speech app, which will turn my cullings into an audio playlist.

My approach works extremely well with my tool of choice: Feedbin on the Mac as collector of RSS feeds and reader. I use the Feedbin Web site, though there is a Mac app with a very simlar interface. It’s been a challenge to replicate the experience on iOS, because so many RSS readers force me to swipe or tap twice (or more) to get an article into Instapaper – more to go directly to a speech app, which I’d rather do.

I’ve recently started using ReadKit on my phone and iPad, because it’s fast, offers a good internal browser, is accessible to VoiceOver and allows me to theme my screen just the way I want. Instapaper is a swipe and a tap away, which is one more tap than I had to make when I used Reeder, but I prefer the ReadKit’s look, so I’ve adjusted to the extra step.

Instapaper operates as middleware, syncing to speech app like Voice Dream or Speech Central in turn. What I get on the other end is a playlist of spoken articles that will read to me continuously. Links from friends or from social media, I can pop directly into a speech app via the iOS share sheet.

This triage/gather/read-later method isn’t specific to my speech-based consumption. If you have squirrelish tendencies, various apps will take your saved articles and give you a pretty interface from which to read them using your eyeballs. If not for speech, I might just read everything in ReadKit, but I’d have to start the things I wanted to save for later, which isn’t as appealing to me as syncing, then automating the deletion of things I’ve read.

No to the newsletter (mostly)

My friction point is newsletters. Like Jason, I’ve subscribed to a number through Feedbin and a dedicated email address. But my nut-gathering method runs into an obstacle when I’m forced to view a newsletter’s full body in Feedbin, or save the whole thing to Voice Dream. To read the way I want, I’d have to scan the newsletter in a browser window, and make my article choices there — adding steps I’d rather not.

RSS is so much simpler, and I use it whenever I possibly can. But as Jason points out, some content providers are ditching the standard to force readers into newsletters or apps. It’s made that ReadKit browsing experience more important to me, so I tend to read newsletter most often on my phone.

Audio for accessibility

I’m visually impaired, and text-to-speech isn’t a nice-to-have for me — it’s how I get through my reading list each day. I’ve appreciated sites that have added audio versions of their stories. If I happen to be alone, have earbuds in, and have time to read right away, I’ll press Play on a news site post. But that number of “ifs” makes it hard to integrate site-provided audio into my routine — which is exactly why having a dedicated pipeline from RSS to a speech app matters so much.

The happy squirrel

What I keep coming back to is this: the squirrel method works for me because it separates the act of finding from the act of reading. Those are two different cognitive modes, and collapsing them creates pressure that makes reading feel like a chore, or a distraction from taking in the amount of material I want to each day. It’s also what I’m used to. It’s aparently difficult to teach an old squirrel new tricks.

(Also this is episode 500 and we forgot!)

The app I want to highlight this time around is one I rely on constantly: Audio Hijack.

If you’ve ever wanted to record audio from a specific app on your Mac, Audio Hijack is the tool that makes it happen. Its session editor offers a visual canvas: drop in your source(s), apply optional effects, then add a way to record and listen to that audio. The app helpfully connects everything automatically, so the audio flows just the way you want.

Audio Hijack has a fully functional free trial, so you can try it out before committing. Download it today)!

And as a Six Colors reader, you can save 20% on Audio Hijack – and anything else from Rogue Amoeba’s lineup – through the end of June. Use coupon code SIXCOLORS2606 in their online store.

Parish sending me a link to the site led me to do some final tweaking on a project I’ve had brewing for a while: the much less fancy Apple Specs Database. I built this site to help me figure out which hardware appears on given Apple devices, and which features are present in operating systems across Apple’s platforms. It lets me answer questions like, “What’s the oldest iPhone that supports MagSafe?” This is almost the inverse of the long-running MacTracker, which is organized around devices.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

Next week is WWDC, which has always represented Apple’s connection to its community of third-party developers, and in recent years has also served as the official start of Apple’s annual operating-system cycle.

Recently, I’ve been thinking of the D in WWDC a lot more. Developers aren’t all programmers, but many of them are. The programmers have always created the code that runs the apps that run on our devices. And yet, this year, things have changed an awful lot.

These days, I’m getting emails pitching me for an endless stream of new Mac apps. It’s quite remarkable because there was a period five or ten years ago when it seemed like all app development on Apple’s platforms was focused on iOS. Even more interesting, these are all indie Mac apps that seem to be built using native Mac frameworks, not the product of big corporations that are just rolling their cross-platform development system out everywhere. These apps seem to have a point of view and are focused on the Mac.

Of course, it’s happening because of AI.

Not just AI for the emails I get, though to be clear, I am being inundated with emails that purport to be from humans but are very much the product of an AI agent trying to add a personal touch to media pitches. (It’s a shame, because I used to really be impressed when an actual human emailed me about their product. Those people are entirely invisible now, lost in the wash of the AI pitches. I couldn’t tell the difference if I tried, so good are the imitations.)

But it’s also clear that a decent percentage of these new apps is being generated, in whole or in part, by an AI code assistant. Mac users—some of them developers, some of them people who have never written software in their lives—are building apps that fulfill their imaginations.

We now live in an era where, if you can dream an app, you can probably build it. Especially Mac utilities. And who cares more about native Mac software than Mac users? Certainly not those companies that gave up on Mac development and focused all their energies on giant cross-platform code bases to attract venture investment and big payouts.

Focus on the vision

Federico Viticci of MacStories recently released a command-line app that uses all features of Reminders. He previously released Shortcuts Playground, which lets you generate shortcuts with AI coding assistants. My pal Lex Friedman just released Gnome, a vibe-coded GIF menu bar utility. On the Six Colors Podcast last week, Dan Moren mentioned that he’s been using AI to build himself a simple ePub ebook reader that fulfills his very specific needs as a writer.

And, yes, a couple of weeks ago, I made a Mac app of my own, using Claude Code. I can’t say that I wrote it, because I didn’t write a line of Swift code. It would be more accurate to say that I envisioned it, or produced it, or product-managed it. I knew what I wanted, described it in detail to an AI assistant, iterated a whole lot, and ultimately got something that basically does everything I imagined it would do.¹

It was an astounding experience. I have been using Mac apps for nearly 40 years, but I have never come close to writing one. AppleScript scripts and Automator actions are as close as I’ve ever come. But this week, I sat down at my desk with just an idea, and a couple of hours later, I had a completely functional (if ugly and incomplete) app that did exactly what I wanted it to do.

The process of building the app reinforced something I’ve been thinking about for quite a while: coding is a specific skill, but it’s only one part of a much larger process. Great developers aren’t necessarily great coders, though they can be. Apps must be envisioned, their specifications defined. The act of trying to describe an app to an AI coding engine is a clarifying one. The more you describe the app, the harder your brain has to work, because it’s always more complicated than you think it’s going to be. The decisions you make determine what the app comes to be. It’s authorship of a sort, but defined in a way that takes the writing of code out of the equation, which is weird, since the act of coding has usually been an inextricable part of the process of making software.

I guess it still is, but sometimes a human isn’t writing that code.

I have no illusions that the code AI code engines generate is flawless and beautiful, though it may yet improve. If I hired a developer to write my app for me, they might very well create cleaner code than Claude did. But I’d never hire someone to build such a minor app, and no human programmer could generate it in a few hours for the $30 cost of a Claude Pro subscription.

Whatever you call it, whether it’s being a producer or product manager or something else that isn’t a programmer, creating good software in the AI era still requires the power of a human brain: being creative, solving problems, and making decisions. Some people will be better at it than others. It’s a skill, and a bit of an art. I’m excited that modern coding tools have given people with vision and desire the ability to make software.

The next step for developers

Which brings me to a final point: Apple’s development tools, most notably Xcode, are nightmarish. My developer friends are used to them, but as someone who has never really used Xcode before, I was shocked at just how deeply unintuitive it is. As in, Claude would tell me to click on things, and I would have to reply, “I have no idea what that is or where it’s supposed to be.” And I’ve been a Mac user for a long time! I’ve gotten very good at intuiting where stuff is in a Mac interface.

Which is why one of the things Apple should be doing, as quickly as possible, is finding ways to make it easier for people to develop apps on its platforms. The Xcode learning curve is just too high. Either there needs to be a novice mode for Xcode, or Swift Playground needs to be given a boost, or a new tool needs to be built for the task.

While AI tools have made it more possible to build apps on Apple’s platforms, the developer tools themselves are still a formidable barrier. As the definition of “developer” changes, so, too, must the definition of developer tools.

The future product managers of some great Mac and iPhone apps thank you in advance.

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Microsoft has actually renewed the suite’s certificate, but the fix can only be delivered through a software update. That means users of Microsoft 365 and Office 2021 are in the clear – they’ll receive the update, so neither will be affected. However, Microsoft stopped offering support for Office 2019 on October 10, 2023, and the suite has received no updates since. As such, it won’t be updated to version 16.83, which is the release that includes the renewed certificate….

Some critics have argued that Microsoft’s deadline is effectively self-imposed because the company renewed the certificate but chose not to provide the update to Office 2019 users. For example, JimmyTech, the IT consultancy that spotted the change, has argued that using the expiry to retire older software rather than quietly renewing it “amounts to a choice.”

Microsoft’s messaging on the subject hasn’t done it any favors, either. Its end-of-support page for Office 2019 for Mac, originally posted in October 2023, once told owners to “Rest assured that all your Office 2019 apps will continue to function.” A revision now dated May 15, 2026 has dropped that line, replacing it with a note that their data “can be accessed in a supported Microsoft 365 or Office product.”

Old software becomes incompatible. It’s a fact of life. But to build it so that it just suddenly stops working one day, and to take no steps to ameliorate that situation, is pretty disgusting. Shame on Microsoft.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Have you ever really looked at your Photos, man? There’s much depth there—just keep looking. I’m not stoned; I’m just thinking about Apple’s two ways of demonstrating depth in Photos to simulate adding a sense of layers or dimensionality to images you took with one or more cameras on your iPhone.

Starting way back in iOS 16, Apple started analyzing images for your Lock Screen to offer a cool in-front/behind split against the clock. In iOS 26, Apple went further, with Spatial Scene photos. I’ve heard from readers and seen online that both ways of spatializing photos leave people confused: Which photos does iOS choose? How does the analysis work? And, importantly for some, how do I disable these effects on a per-photo or overall basis?

Depth Effect

Starting way back in iOS 16 and available on an iPhone XR or XS or later, Depth Effect provides a sense of layering in a photo when used on your Lock Screen when you are pulling images from your Photos library. To access it:

1. Touch and hold your Lock Screen.
2. Tap Customize.
3. Tap the More … button.
4. If Depth Effect is not checked, select it; if it’s grayed out, see below. Your photos in the current display will be analyzed, which may take a moment; during that time, you will see a progress circle fill clockwise.
5. Tap Done.

If you want to see how Depth Effect interacts with your images, a handy way is to choose On Tap from the More menu in step 3. When you tap, you can cycle through the current selection of images to see how they appear.

In doing so, you might notice that the Depth Effect doesn’t appear for every image. In fact, if you tap the more button and Depth Effect is grayed out, then the current image didn’t pass the depth analysis test.¹ You can still enable the feature, but you have to tap to find another candidate—most qualify for depthifying!

The analysis in step 4 identifies objects and animals (including people) and makes educated silhouette guesses to separate foreground and background images. The clock element may resize to better display foreground elements. The foreground element may also be set to the background if it would obscure too much of the clock display.

Starting in iOS 26, you can adjust the clock’s depth by dragging it to make it taller on the screen. Depth Effect takes advantage of this by resizing the clock as needed.

In controlling Depth Effect, you might have noticed an oddball icon on your Lock Screen: a hexagon, with one tip at zero degrees, with a moon rising over some mountains. That is Spatial Scene, up next.

Spatial Scene

I have mixed feelings about Spatial Scene, new in iOS 26, because it partly invents reality and sometimes makes me a little queasy. Fortunately, I don’t have the motion sickness some iOS 7 users experienced with the long-ago introduction of parallax on wallpapers. But there’s another dale between the uncanny valley and the cliffs of heebie-jeebies that Spatial Scene fits into.

Spatial Scenes were designed for Apple’s Vision Pro, and the feature relies on machine learning to pick apart the depth in a 2D image. When you move your phone around, iOS creates a parallax effect that makes your brain think it’s looking into a 3D scene: the foreground elements remain steady, while background elements move. Spatializing doesn’t require photos captured with a newer camera, nor do you need Apple Intelligence. Any iPhone starting with the iPhone 12 series can generate them.²

You can also view images in the Photos app with the spatialization applied. Make sure Settings: Apps: Photos: Spatial Photos and Videos is enabled. This label is awfully confusing because the name of the iPhone feature is Spatial Scene, while the Vision Pro 3D feature is “spatial photo” as well as “spatial video,” both lowercase. Those kinds of media can only be viewed on a Vision Pro in 3D (they look 2D on an iPhone) and can be captured with an iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, any model of iPhone 16 or iPhone 17, or Vision Pro.

Now, when you view a qualifying photo, a Spatial Scene hexagon button appears. Tap it, and you see a kind of scanner motion over the image as it’s analyzed. This resembles other scanning simulations in Photos, such as when it identifies plants, people, and buildings. A Spatial Scene version of the image appears, which you can view at simulated angles while moving your photo around. Tap the X to close the view. The analysis is not currently retained, so it’s regenerated each time you use the feature.

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

One of the disadvantages of adulthood is self-awareness, however. A Close Personal Friend whose encouragement and opinions I value messaged me in response to the morning blog post, and echoed (not for the first time) a thought that I’d been having all morning (also not for the first time): I really should just push the button, already. It’ll be fine…

In the meantime, enjoy the stuff I’ve been writing when I thought nobody was looking and it didn’t matter how frequently I posted. This is the end of a mighty long journey and if it were any more epic, Annie Lennox would be singing over the end credits and making everybody cry.

Andy is one of a kind and it’s a great read. Also, he’s posting annotated versions of the links he collects that form the basis for most of what we talk about on MacBreak Weekly every week, and that’s a pretty great Apple-related clipping service on its own.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

She meets in person with Richard McClintock, a publications director with a background in Latin, who first identified the text’s distorted origin in 1994. She also interviews and emails people who worked at Aldus and Letraset, buys a sheet of dry-transfer type on eBay, and pulls together a great story about graphic design, the classics, and history.

I found it riveting and hilarious, and exactly the kind of Rabbit Hole (her channel name) that I fall down with printing and type history myself.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

The app we want to highlight this time around is one Jason and Dan and most of their colleagues rely on regularly: Audio Hijack.

If you’ve ever wanted to record audio from a specific app on your Mac, Audio Hijack is the tool that makes it happen. Its session editor offers a visual canvas: drop in your source(s), apply optional effects, then add a way to record and listen to that audio. The app helpfully connects everything automatically, so the audio flows just the way you want.

Audio Hijack has a fully functional free trial, so you can try it out before committing. Download it today)!

And as a Six Colors reader, you can save 20% on Audio Hijack – and anything else from Rogue Amoeba’s lineup – through the end of June. Use coupon code SIXCOLORS2606 in our online store.

Today I’m incredibly excited to announce that Myke Hurley and I are launching a Kickstarter for a new podcast, Designed in California.

Myke and I have been discussing Apple in depth every week for more than a decade on the Upgrade podcast. For Apple’s 50th anniversary earlier this year, I researched many different accounts of that era and wrote a 90-minute special episode of Upgrade. The reception to that episode was phenomenal—and we loved doing it. So we want to fund an entire year of a new podcast that will tell more stories in that vein.

We’re using Kickstarter for this project because researching and writing these scripts is quite labor-intensive, and I was hesitant to make that time commitment in the hope we would eventually build up enough of an audience to justify the large workload. We’ve set a goal that would allow us to generate thirty 30-to-45-minute episodes over the course of a year, with our first stretch goal to raise that number to a full fifty episodes in a year. (Update: Stretch goal met! Fifty episodes it is! We’re on to new stretch goals that add more content to the cast for backers.)

Kickstarter backers will help make the podcast happen. And backers at the Founding Producer tier or higher will get access to a special backers-only podcast feed for the show’s first year. This includes:

• Ad-free episode
• All episodes on a topic will drop at once in the backer feed so that you can hear the whole story; in the public feed, those episodes will release weekly
• Access to the Relay podcast network membership plan, which includes access to a Discord community and an exclusive Relay members-only podcast
• Bonus content that will be created if we hit stretch goals

We’ve already planned more than enough topics to get through year one. It’s all subject to change, but right now these include:

• The earliest days of Apple, including the release of the Apple II, the fraying of the Jobs/Wozniak friendship, and the calamitous reign of Apple’s first CEO
• How Steve Jobs ended up being ejected from the company he founded and his time in the wilderness, including the founding of NeXT
• Apple’s Mac OS crisis of the late 1990s, which ultimately led to Apple’s buying NeXT, creating Mac OS X, and bringing back Steve Jobs
• A history of Apple’s TV commercials, good and bad
• The origins of the iPod and iTunes, and how they changed how we listen to music forever
• The secret project that ultimately led to the creation of the iPhone
• The story behind why Apple is obsessed with controlling its own destiny, what’s now commonly called the “Tim Cook doctrine”, but is firmly from the era of Steve Jobs
• The long and complicated relationship between Apple and its arch-frenemy, Microsoft

During June, we’ll also be releasing several preview episodes of Designed in California as Upgrade special installments, so you can get an even clearer sense of what this podcast will be like.

One of our inspirations for this project is The Rest Is History, one of our favorite podcasts and one that has proven that an enthusiasm for history and storytelling can make for a magical experience. We want to bring this sensibility and excitement to the incredible variety of stories connected to Apple, the people who have worked to bring Apple products to life, and all the aspects of our lives that have been touched by the technology that has emerged from a few square miles near the south end of San Francisco Bay.

I realized when writing about Apple’s 50th that I’ve covered the company for roughly two-thirds of its existence. I’m looking forward to digging deep into research on topics that were before my time, and getting the chance to bring my own personal experience to bear on events I witnessed personally. And I’m hoping to tap the knowledge of many of my friends and colleagues as the project rolls along.

This will be unlike your other tech podcasts. Myke and I have built a story list that can feed several years of the show, so we know we won’t run out of material. We’d love for you to take the journey with us.

Please check out the Kickstarter at designed.fm and consider helping us make it happen.

You know that thing where you see a black cat twice? It’s just like when you see the same iPhone foldable rumor twice. We’ll catch up on the latest AI shenanigans before Ferrari and Rivian try to take us for a ride.

Re-foldable

If you loved last week’s foldable iPhone production stall that was not expected to affect the fall launch then you’ll love this week’s foldable iPhone production stall that is not expected to affect the fall launch. It’s time to admit it! You have a fetish for foldable iPhone production stalls that aren’t expected to affect the launch!

“Foldable iPhone Reportedly Facing Mass Production Issues”

Tl;flyrtlw?¹ This one has to do with the surface-mount technology, whatever that is. We’ve had the hinge and the front, presumably next week’s will either be about the sides or the back.

Before you destroy yet another perfectly good Member’s Only jacket (that’s an oxymoron) in a fit of garment-rending over this:

The leaker framed the situation as somewhat concerning, stopping short of suggesting the fall launch is at risk.

OK, great. Glad we had this chat. See you next week.

Building a beta mouse trap

Hot on the heels of last week’s inability to parse out “disregard” as a search term instead of a command, Google’s search AI is back with another block-rocking hit: not knowing what year it is next year.

When asked “Is it 2027 next year?” Google replied:

It is 2026 right now, and will be 2028 next year, followed by 2027.

This happened on Monday. As of this writing (Thursday afternoon), it still has not been fixed. Hilariously, the source it links to for this response is a 5-months old Reddit post… about Google search not knowing what year it is next year.

Google’s AI was wrong in January and then in May cited a post about it being wrong as its source to be wrong again. I can’t wait to get medical advice from AI.

To be fair, the addition of integers is a dark subject that has baffled humans since time immemorial. I mean, it’s not like you know what year it is next year. If you did, why are you asking Google’s AI? Hmm?

And, to be fairerer, no one asked Google to suck up the entire internet, chew on it and then regurgitate it back to us in a nonsensical manner, but this is what you get when you do that.

Yeah, I know, neither of those is even attempting to so much as drive by the neighborhood that “being fair” lives in.

Surely in no way related to any of this:

“DuckDuckGo sees iPhone installs spike in the US following AI announcements at Google I/O”

The company says iOS installs in the U.S. were up 33% week over week on average, compared with 18.1% growth overall.

DuckDuckGo also has an AI search assistant but it goes to great lengths to inform users that it can easily be turned off. Just for fun, I asked it “Is next year 2027?” and it replied:

No, next year is 2027.

Thanks, jerk. I don’t know why it has to be so needlessly argumentative but at least it got the year right.

As Google’s AI models are the engine behind Apple’s upcoming AI updates, you can maybe understand why, when enhanced Siri launches in the fall, it’s expected to be described as a beta.

Apple has given the more personalized version of Siri a “beta” label on internal versions of iOS 27, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman.

You can’t complain! It’s a beta! Don’t even try! That’ll do it.

Car talk

I get where the Love is coming From but where am I supposed to get the money from to buy this car Jony Ive worked on?

“Ferrari Reveals $640,000 EV Co-Designed by Jony Ive”

As many have opined, the interior of the car looks great, while the exterior looks a bit like if Ferrari made an AMC Pacer. I don’t know about you, but when I pay $640,000 for a car I expect it to look a bit different than other EVs that cost less than a tenth the price.

Meanwhile, who else would you turn to for an opinion on CarPlay than a company that is famously eschewing CarPlay?

“Rivian Explains Why CarPlay Debate Will Become ‘Completely Obsolete’”

It’s not that they don’t have any skin in this game, it’s that they have anti-skin in this game. What does Rivian software chief Wassym Bensaid say will make people forget about CarPlay?

“deep AI integration into the car”

He’s right. I can’t wait to be driving down the road at 60 miles and hour and have my car tell me next year isn’t this year plus one. This is the experience people want, they just don’t know it yet.

Buckle up! Batten down the hatches! Hold on! Assorted other metaphors! WWDC, RIGHT AHEAD!

Yes, we’re about to crash headlong into the iceberg of Apple’s annual developer conference—or should I say, the AI-ceberg.

No? I shouldn’t? Well, tough. It’s been said.

Anyway, now is the time for all good developers to come to the aid of the party, and line up to hear what Apple’s going to announce. Or, I guess, you could just ask Mark Gurman.

Man, he really takes the fun out of these things.

Well, even if we know all the technical details, WWDC isn’t just a time for listing APIs and features. It’s a show. Some have gone so far as to call it the greatest show on Earth.¹

And while I may not have the deep sources that other reporters have when it comes to the actual substance of what Apple will discuss, I do have unparalleled and much envied access to information about how they will make those announcements.

And it will be spectacular.

The event will open with a bang. It may be Tim Cook’s last WWDC keynote, but that doesn’t mean he’s going quietly into that good night. Is there going to be a comedic skit? Of course there’s going to be a comedic skit. Tim, puttering along on one of those electric golf carts on his way to the keynote, gets overtaken by incoming CEO John Ternus, blowing by in a $650,000 Rosso Dino Ferrari Luce. In the passenger seat? A stoic Jony Ive.

That very car slides onto the stage outside Apple Park, and out leaps Ternus, throwing up the horns to a six-color pyrotechnic display. In an homage to Steve Jobs’s title of “iCEO”, Ternus then announces that he’ll be the company’s first “CE-whoa“.

He’ll then turn matters over to software chief Craig Federighi, who will greet developers while working hard to hide the sweat from the future of his job being tied to the success of Apple’s AI initiatives.

And then we launch into the hour and a half pre-taped video that features the introduction of iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS 27, watchOS 27, visionOS 27 and, uh, tvOS 26.7. (It’ll get there eventually.) The usual cavalcade of Apple personnel will get trotted out to make announcements in a variety of surprising locations: midfield at a World Cup match, fleeing from a well-fed coyote on Alcatraz, in the octagon on the White House lawn.

As for the content, well, we already know that one major thrust of these updates will be minor tweaks to Liquid Glass (not the ones you’re hoping for) and fixes to bugs (also not the ones you’re hoping for).

Plus, of course, Apple Intelligence everywhere. And we do mean everywhere. Attendees, look under your seats and you’ll find your very own Apple Intelligence! Just, uh, don’t get any on you, because that stuff does not wash out.

And finally, as the keynote draws to a close, attendees will be treated to a trademark one more thing as Tim Cook emerges to take a spot in a giant dunk tank, inviting any developer who has received an unjust App Store rejection to take a shot.

Before it all wraps up, Eddy Cue will come on stage, carrying his Cannes Lions Entertainment Person Of The Year trophy, and announce a brand new Apple TV adaptation of the hit supernatural detective novel All Souls Lo—

*sits bolt upright in bed*

Dammit, I always wake up at the best part.

A new set of iPhone 18 Pro dummy units is giving us our best look yet at the all-new colors Apple has planned for this year. The dummy units corroborate that the iPhone 18 Pro will be available in dark cherry, black, silver, and light blue.

This color information has been floating out there for a while. I point to this item in particular because I think these photos are the best illustration I’ve seen yet about why Apple would think they’re appealing. The Dark Cherry is really appealing, and Light Blue is a proper, nice blue.

Perhaps Apple’s aggressively monochrome era is over?

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

“Star City,” Apple TV’s “For All Mankind” spin-off, has just premiered. I’ve seen the first five episodes and really like it. It’s accessible even if you haven’t seen “For All Mankind” or if you’ve stopped watching that show.

“Star City” is set in the same world as “For All Mankind,” but it’s told from the perspective of the Soviet Union during the height of the space race in the late 1960s and early 1970s, just after the USSR has landed the first people on the moon. Rhys Ifans is great as the enigmatic Chief Designer who runs the space program, and Anna Maxwell Martin is menacing as Lyudmilla, the head of Star City’s security. (“For All Mankind” fans will notice much younger versions of a few familiar characters from the Soviet side, too.)

The whole show is about space, sure, but it’s also a cold war spy thriller set in a locked-down secret city in the heart of the Soviet Union. There are space heroics, bugged apartments, mysterious contacts, forbidden books, and even smuggled rock and roll records.

Dan Moren and I are covering each episode over at The Incomparable as a part of our NASA Vending Machine podcast. The first two episodes of “Star City” are available now, as are our podcasts covering those first two episodes.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Every year at WWDC, Apple kicks off a new cycle of operating system updates that will change the faces of the devices we use every day for the next year. On June 8, we’ll get our first glimpse at what the “27” operating systems will bring, which will lead to their arrival in the fall and numerous major updates all the way through next May, when the cycle will begin again.

I’ve been attending Apple’s WWDC since sometime in the 90s, which is… a long time. But this year’s event promises to be one of the most interesting ones yet, mostly because Apple really stepped in it in 2024, promising a bunch of features it didn’t deliver. Last year was a bit of an apology tour, but it didn’t directly address what had been promised the previous year.

Which means that Apple has really piled two years of promises on the agenda of WWDC 2026. The stakes couldn’t be higher. Here’s what I’ll be watching for at this year’s event, especially when it comes to its AI do-over.

Time to deliver

In 2025, Apple didn’t make a single promise at WWDC in June that it failed to deliver by the end of the year. That was by design, as a way to begin to repair the trust that was breached when it got out too far over its skis in 2024. It was a good start, but AI was also largely absent from the promise list last year.

This year, Apple needs to deliver on what it failed to deliver in 2024. It needs to deliver the coherent AI strategy it ended up punting two years ago. It’s time to renew the vows it made in 2024 and provide a comprehensive approach to AI features on Apple platforms that it can actually begin executing in 2026.

The tricky thing is that Apple will need to thread the needle between what’s possible and pragmatic and what goes a bit too far. If it gets too conservative with its promises, it risks seeming dowdy and behind the times. But if it goes too wild with promises, it risks a repeat of 2024, where it couldn’t execute at the level it had assumed it could.

What’s the right balance between those two extremes? Apple doesn’t want to be seen as being behind, but it also doesn’t want to seem desperate in trying to keep up with the cool kids—especially since the power and success of the iPhone means that it doesn’t have to. (All the major AI platforms are popular on iOS, which helps a lot.)

I think it’s more likely that Apple is still overcorrecting from 2024 and will be restrained in what it announces this year, which means I’m bracing for disappointment. What I hope will happen is that Apple will sketch out its broader vision for how AI fits in with its platforms—including some foundational technologies like App Intents and Siri—even if it has to admit that it’s going to take longer than six months to get there.

Apple hates giving road maps, hates talking about general directions rather than specific features that it can ship, but I think it’s required here. It should sell us on its vision for how AI fits in with what it’s doing, and then can give some near-term examples of how it’s starting to execute on that front. I don’t think anyone reasonable feels Apple needs to solve everything about AI in iOS 27.0—but feeling like the company knows where it’s going and knows how to get there would sure help.

Don’t let your standards slip

So much has been made of Apple’s broken promises in 2024, but there’s another sin of the past the company should not repeat: Lowering its own standards in order to get features out the door.

Forget about the AI features that didn’t ship in 2024. The ones that did were not very good! They showed all the signs of being slapped together in a rush in order to get something out the door.

Let me give you one example: Writing Tools. AI large-language models excel at writing and rewriting text—it’s how they got started. Integrating those text tools into Apple’s platforms seemed like basic table stakes. But what Apple shipped wasn’t integrated. Its operating systems have been checking your spelling and providing other editing tools for ages. Writing Tools wasn’t thoughtfully integrated into the larger text-editing package—it was like a sidecar bolted on to the side, completely separate, with a weird, off-putting interface.

What has always set Apple apart from the competition is a thoughtful application of high technology in ways that solve problems for users. Writing Tools does solve some problems, but I wouldn’t call its application thoughtful.

What I want to see in 2026 is a set of AI features that Apple has really thought through and that fit with the iOS and macOS experience. Features that carry the unmistakable smell of panic and fear are a red flag.

Focus on the practical

You can’t escape the marketing of AI features, but most of that marketing struggles to come up with good, realistic examples of why you’d use those features. (This is a side effect of the features coming first, and the use cases second, which is not how you should ever develop a product.)

Apple, to its credit, has proven very good at coming up with examples. All of those Apple Intelligence ads that it got sued over because the features never shipped? At least they were based on useful examples!

So during the WWDC keynote, what I want to see are practical demonstrations of Apple’s features. I don’t need Apple to prove that it’s chasing cutting-edge AI features; I want it to solve the problems of iPhone users. I want it to show AI tools fixing things that Apple’s customers want to have fixed.

And if I see another demo where someone points a camera at a refrigerator and asks for a recipe with the visible ingredients, someone is getting sent to the principal’s office.

New leaders with a new attitude

In the last two years, Apple has gotten rid of the people in charge of its AI strategy. There are new bosses now, and of course, John Ternus is about to become the new CEO.

New leadership gives organizations an opportunity to turn the page and do things differently. Even if the new leaders are longtime employees (which is almost always the case at Apple), they’re in new roles, and they have the opportunity to put their own stamp on things.

I want to see that. I want to get the sense that in the last two years, Apple has really rethought how it approaches AI. What does Siri mean now, compared to what it’s meant the last 14 years? Is it the core brand, or is that Apple Intelligence? How do apps function in an increasingly AI-driven world?

Sure, new hardware if you have it

The top rookie mistake of WWDC anticipation is expecting there to be hardware. This isn’t a hardware event; it’s an operating-system announcement and developer event. That said, sometimes hardware does appear at WWDC. It doesn’t have to, but it could.

The Mac Studio and Mac mini both have pretty favorable developer-related narratives, what with the high-end power of the Studio and the fact that the Mac mini has become a darling gadget of AI agent tinkering. Neither product has been updated to M5 yet. This would seem like a decent time, actually, to announce some hardware!

But given all the chip shortages out there, I get the feeling that Apple might not really want to create more demand for M5 chips and RAM when it doesn’t need to. Still, if you want to hold out hope for a hardware announcement, I’m not going to stomp on your dreams.

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Go to the podcast page.

I keep finding this old dog can learn new tricks—or, if not quite new, ones that were hiding in plain sight. The other night, using Messages on my iPhone to send a good-night text to my spouse and older child, off on a brief getaway to the coast, I noticed that orange highlighting had invaded my message!

I text a couple of friends: “Have you seen this before?” One had not; the other remembered it vaguely, but had no idea why it had occurred. Some googling later, I discovered that Apple had added the feature recently…on the geologic scale. This feature, which I’ll explain in greater depth, first appeared in iOS 10, released in fall 2016.

Well.

Here’s how it works:

1. Type any part of your message.
2. Tap the emoji icon at the lower-left corner of the keyboard on an iPhone or iPad.
3. If any text within the message matches emoji descriptions, a wash of orange glowing illumination passes over the text, leaving orange highlighting behind where you can tap.
4. Tap any orange text, and options for emojis appear.
5. Tap an emoji to have it replace the orange-highlighted text.

Slap me with a fish, and call me Terry, I had no idea. The “feature” isn’t available on the Mac, yet it can’t be disabled on your iPhone or iPad!

There are several other ways to insert emoji into conversations, if you’re so inclined. I used to be quite resistant, but I find that I use a dozen or more with some regularity. (Most emoji are rarely used.)

Use the emoji icon. The most obvious solution is often the best. Tap or click the emoji icon, then choose an emoji. That icon appears in the lower-left corner of the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch keyboard, switching the keyboard layout, and at the right edge of the message field in Messages on the Mac. Apple organizes these into tabs of what I’ve always felt are slightly arbitrary categories, but which conform to the Unicode Consortium’s ordering. The clock icon is what you tap or click to view your most recently used emoji. Tap or click in the search field to enter search terms or to shudder create a Genmoji.¹

Dictate. You can dictate emoji by name on all platforms, and it is kind of fun to say “pizza emoji” or “getting a haircut emoji” and have it pop into place. On an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, tap the microphone icon in the message field to start dictation. On a Mac, invoke dictation when your text focus is in the message field. (Check that Mac dictation is enabled in System Settings: Keyboard: Dictation.)

Character Viewer (Mac). The Mac has a nifty Character Viewer that can be enabled in the same Keyboard system setting: enable “Show Input menu in menu bar” to get a wee rounded-corner icon that has a more button above a hamburger button (three horizontal lines) next to a Command icon (⌘). From that menu, choose Show Emoji & Symbols. The Emoji link in the left navigation bar reveals the usual subjects, and you can search here, too (with no Genmoji horrors).

You can also use keys or keyboard shortcuts:

• Mac: Press the Globe/fn key or type Command-Control-Space also brings up the viewer: it’s the same as Emoji & Symbols on a Mac.
• iPad or iPhone: On an iPhone or iPad with a physical keyboard attached, press Control-Space. You can also use the Mac key/keystroke when you use an iPad with a linked keyboard and mouse (System Settings: Display, select iPad). Whatever the method, an emoji-only pop-over picker appears.

Extra tip: Click the viewer icon in the upper-right corner to convert the viewer into an iPhone/iPad-like pop-over picker on your Mac! Dismiss the picker, then invoke it again, and click the viewer icon in its lower-right corner to turn it back into a floating palette.

Text Replacements. If there are frequent emoji you want to insert with the least effort on a Mac, iPhone, or iPad, use the Keyboard: Text Replacements view to map short text strings to an emoji. A convention for emoji shortcuts is to put a colon on either side to make it straightforward to invoke. You might use :shrug: to have 🤷 inserted. (There’s a similar Settings: General: Keyboard: Text Replacement in iOS and iPadOS, but at least in version 26, I was scolded by the operating system that “The shortcut cannot contain any Emoji”!)

Tapbacks. Tapbacks are another way you can insert emoji into a message. In Messages, press and hold on a message you’ve received on an iPhone or iPad, or Control-click/right-click or long-click on a message on a Mac, and you see the Tapback options. Several will appear; tap or click the emoji icon to then choose from the picker.

Third-party replacements. I use Launchbar to type a few characters of an emoji set that’s part of a built-in shortcut list in Index: Show Index: Emoji. You can configure macros/shortcuts apps, like TextExpander and Keyboard Maestro, to swap out emoji for things you type. If you are a serious keyboard emoji warrior, Rocket is a great way to invoke emoji without any clicking.

Contrary to the above, do you hate having emoji replace emoticons in Messages or elsewhere as you type on a Mac?² Apple used to have an option in the Keyboard preferences/settings that let you disable substitution. Starting in Tahoe (I believe), you can now toggle this in any app that supports it in Edit: Substitutions: Emoji Replacement.

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

Today, I’m pleased to introduce something I’ve been working on for the past six months: Shortcuts Playground, a plugin for Claude Code and Codex that can create any shortcut for Apple’s Shortcuts app using natural language. With Shortcuts Playground, you can simply prompt Claude Code or Codex with a sentence requesting a shortcut of any kind; a few minutes later, you’ll end up with a real shortcut in Finder, ready to be imported into the Shortcuts app. It’s as simple as that.

As you might expect, there is a lot of complexity behind this simplicity. Also, Viticci expects his approach to be eclipsed by Apple’s announcements at WWDC. This doesn’t make this any less of an accomplishment, and it’s especially exciting to consider that we are entering an era where building user automations now requires nothing more complex than a text-entry field.

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The foldable iPhone hits Schrödinger’s stall, Tim Cook gets some bad news, and Google can’t seem to read the room.

What is time, even?

Bad news on the phone you probably can’t afford anyway!

“Foldable iPhone Production Stalls Amid Hinge Issues”

HINKY HINGE MAKES FOLDABLE FLOUNDER! Oh, no!

…the foldable device's hinge is consistently failing to meet Apple's quality control standards under conditions of prolonged, high-frequency opening and closing.

According to the source:

…“progress will simply have to be stalled for the time being."

Guess that’s it for the iPhone Fold or Ultra or whatever! Guess it’s not coming until 2027! Guess we can all stand down and-

A follow-up post from the leaker suggested the hinge difficulties are unlikely to push back the device's expected release window somewhat, noting that there is still ample time remaining.

[blink]

[blink]

OK, what are we even doing here, people? If it’s not impacting the release date, it can’t be too bad now, can it?

The burgers. It’s like they make them out of nothing these days.

Executive functioning

Tim Cook isn’t even out of the CEO’s chair and already things are going to heck in a hand basket.

“Samsung Overtakes Apple for Top Smartphone Customer Satisfaction”

Apple CEO Tim Cook is just four months from retirement when a bitter enemy returns to take what’s his. This summer, Cook hits the streets one more time so he can go out on top. Can he pull it off? Find out in “Summer of Sat”.

Does he say “I’m gettin’ too old for this.”? What do you think?

Samsung scores 81 in the ACSI's cell phone rankings while Apple posts 80, breaking last year's tie between the two companies for satisfaction leadership.

You know that one point is bugging him like a pair of burlap underwear.

You know who’s sittin’ pretty, though?

“Eddy Cue named 2026 Cannes Lions Entertainment Person of the Year”

Presumably “Cannes Lions Entertainment Person of the Year” is less of a mouthful in French.

Cue has been instrumental in building Apple’s globally influential entertainment ecosystem…

He’s also a terrific dancer and a snappy dresser, neither of which Cannes Lions saw fit to mention. Rude.

AI-AI-I/O

As happens every year just weeks before WWDC, Google held its annual I/O conference and, boy, you gotta hand it to them because they are on top of the zeitgeist. After numerous instances of graduating students booingspeakers for praising AI and poll after poll showing people hate it, Google managed to only say AI like 10,000 TIMES in its keynote. Chief among these new AI AI AI features is a larger search field so you can put in AI-directed statements.

Is it still called a “search field” if it’s become patently obvious that it doesn’t want to give you search results, it just wants to keep you from going to all those annoying web sites and show you more Google ads?

Well, surely everyone will love this once they get to use it.

“You can no longer Google the word ‘disregard’”

NAILED IT.

Yes, because Google jammed AI into the search field at the request of literally no one, the AI now considers “disregard” a command instead of a search term. Maybe you just have to say “disregard disregard” and then you can Google for “disregard”.

I’m not sure who’s Googling “disregard” in the first place, honestly. Maybe it’s people Googling “disregard shown to graduation speakers praising AI”.

It is really more of a coincidence that this is the week I chose to sign up for a subscription to Kagi rather than any kind of result of Google’s announcements, but I did finally take the leap. I actually wasn’t even using Google, I was using DuckDuckGo.

It’s just that if this is where free search is headed in general, I think I’d rather pay.

I’ve been thinking a lot about soccer this week. My team won the Premier League for the first time since I became a fan, and they’ll play in the Champions League final later this month.

What better time to encounter Apple’s latest immersive film for Vision Pro? Spain’s Real Madrid is one of European soccer’s most decorated clubs, and it’s the subject of “Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness,” out Friday. According to Apple, the 20-minute-long documentary was filmed with more than 30 Blackmagic immersive cameras to capture the fan and player of experience of Real Madrid’s Champions League match with Juventus back in October.

Apple’s immersive productions are really benefiting from the larger selection of immersive cameras, now that Blackmagic is apparently cranking out its URSA Cine camera in volume. The doc has shots from a wirecam above the pitch, various angles around the pitch, and separate cameras observing fans in a bar, a 94-year-old fan at home, and even a taxi driver watching on his phone from inside his car.

I admit that I’m still hungry for real sporting events in immersive, not short edited highlight packages interspersed with training ground footage overlaid with inspirational music and sound bites about how it’s all one for all, all for one, supporting the legacy of the team, and all the usual stuff. “Real Madrid: The Weight of Greatness” has all of that.

But the soccer looks great. I really, really loved watching the shots from the “suspended above the pitch” view, which gave me a perspective (literally and figuratively) on strategy that I’ve never had before. And the near-the-goal shots really show off the incredible athleticism and technique of soccer players that does not come across on most TV broadcasts, even if they’re in 4K.

Alas, Real Madrid was eliminated in the quarterfinals of the Champions League this year, depriving it of its 16th title. I guess someone else will have to hoist that trophy in Budapest on May 30.

The latest version of Bare Bones Software’s venerable text editor, BBEdit, arrived on Thursday. Version 16, the first full-version update in more than two years, offers an array of new features including dramatic performance improvements, much greater Shortcuts support via App Intents, and even support for vi keybindings.

As you might expect for an app that’s several decades old, BBEdit benefits from occasional checks by its lead developer, Bare Bones founder and CEO Rich Siegel, to see if older areas of the code are performing as well as one might expect. In this cycle, he’s looked for areas to improve performance and found several, most impressively an improvement of an order of magnitude or greater when it comes to remote file transfers via SFTP.

With Apple heading toward an automation universe where many features of apps are broken out into App Intents, BBEdit 16 offers a load of new actions accessible straight from Shortcuts, including access to some of its best text utility functions, like Delete/Extract Lines Containing and Process Duplicate Lines.

Searches in projects will now find text in images, thanks to support for Apple’s VisionKit. There’s a new index in the side of Notebooks. The app now supports separate settings to deploy projects to both test and production environments. Emoji support is seriously improved, which is great news if you’ve ever pasted an emoji into BBEdit and stared into the Zero Width Joiner abyss as your emoji was blown into its component parts.

Other new features include support for the W3C’s online HTML checker, speed improvements for AI worksheets, and with some big changes to syntax coloring. Bare Bones counts more than 100 new feature additions, cataloged by its usual detailed release notes.

Perhaps most importantly, the app—which is probably the single most important one on my Mac—offers a great many of its features for free, and has for years. In my opinion, every Mac user should have a copy of BBEdit handy.

The release of 16.0 also resets the clock on the free trial mode that lets you use all of its features. The paid version of the app is $60, and users of older versions can update for $30 (version 15) or $40 (earlier). It’s also available on the Mac App Store for a $5/month or $50/year subscription.

Instead of attending this week’s Google I/O keynote — an event I’ve been covering for the past decade — I found myself in a physical therapist’s office getting work done on an arm I broke last year. While Sundar Pichai was outlining the latest developments in AI and how they’ll affect each and every one of Google’s products, a polite-yet-determined physical therapist was busy yanking my arm into all sorts of positions, with the hope of stretching it back into its regular shape.

I think I got the better end of the deal.

OK, that’s somewhat unfair to Google, which had plenty to announce at its annual developer conference, with a lot of it impacting software and services you likely use. To be sure, there was plenty for developers and coders to sink their teeth into — only at Google I/O are you going to get applause breaks when a speaker mentions the number of tokens Google is processing or the speed of tensor processing units. But Google made announcements of interest to civilians like you and me as well.

Don’t believe me? Well, if you’ve ever used Google’s search tool, the company has some big changes in store. And with 13 Google products having at least a billion users — and some like Gmail and YouTube pass the 3 billion user mark — there’s a good chance you’re a member of Google’s customer base, whether you want to admit it or not. Changes are coming there, too.

But will they be positive changes? That’s harder to discern at this point, though Google is certainly enthusiastic. “Let’s make something that matters,” a hype video kicking off the nearly 2-hour keynote intoned. Given the ambivalence that some of us feel toward the inclusion of AI in just about everything and the current direction of travel for the tech industry, the jury is still deliberating over whether Google succeeded in that goal.

For anyone who doesn’t live and breathe Google pronouncements, here’s a quick rundown of the Google I/O developments you should file away for later reference.

A new approach to search

If you’ve been on the web long enough, you likely think of Google Search results as a ranked list of clickable links that ideally point you toward whatever it is that you’re looking for. Don’t get too comfortable with that idea, though, as Google is changing the look of its search tool, and I’m not just talking about the updated search box which dynamically expands to fit larger queries and taps directly into Google’s latest AI tools.

In other words, the AI Mode currently available in Google Search sounds like it’s going to be more of the default view, with queries producing a detailed summary of what the search engine found, along with prompts to pose follow-up questions that drill down into the results. In theory, that makes search a more conversational process that better delves into the nuance of what you’re specifically looking for. In the coming months, agentic coding is going to adapt the look of search results to reflect their content, and Pro and Ultra subscribers will be able to put agents to work searching for things like vacation rentals and newly released sneakers.

But before all that, the problem remains that AI Mode searches can produce some laughable results. I ran an AI Mode search for myself just now and learned that I’m the managing editor at Tom’s Guide — surely, that’s going to surprise the people there who laid me off back in January. (Sorry, boys — Google says I’m back on the payroll!) On the bright side, Google, I do appreciate being described as a “prominent personal technology journalist” — now those are the kind of hallucinations I can get behind. A follow-up query for my social media profiles included my Twitter handle, which I deactivated and deleted more than a year ago; not to worry, though, as the link takes you to an entirely different dude named Philip Michael.

You can understand, then, why the news that Google is going to offer more of this makes me a little nervous. Summaries are nice, but they’re not very helpful time savers if I have to fact-check each piece of information. And with Google searches driving even less traffic to some sites, how long before publishers start moving more things behind a paywall, resulting in even more incomplete results?

We’re not going to find out the answer to that question until we have a chance to use Google’s revamped search tool, which is in the process of rolling out. Get ready for a summer of learning how to search all over again.

More conversations in more products

Gemini found its way into Google Maps back in March, when Google added an Ask Maps feature that let you perform more complex searches. (Think “I’ve got a meeting in half-an-hour and I need to eat; where’s a quick place to get a bite to eat that’s a short walk from here?“) A whole host of other Google Apps — we’re talking YouTube, Gmail and Google Docs — are now following suit, with AI-powered features on their own.

The new conversational search capability makes sense for YouTube, where you’ll be able to make more specific requests for the types of videos you’re looking for. Presumably, this feature will be especially handy if you’re looking for how-to videos for handling a very specific task.

I’m less convinced about Gmail Live, a voice-powered feature where you’ll be able to ask Gemini for specific information — drop-off details for school field trips, flight departure info, the details about a party you’ve been invited, too — and your assistant will find what you’re looking for and read it back to you. We’ll see how that works in practice, but anything that improves on Gmail’s frustrating search capabilities will be a welcome addition. (AI Inbox in Gmail is getting new capabilities, too, at least if you subscribe to Google AI Plus or Pro. Here, the updates promise to generate contextual drafts for emails that require a prompt reply as well as surface Docs, Sheets and Slides links that require your review.)

A new Docs Live feature, though, represents everything I hate about AI. Google bills this as a way to help you get started with writing projects — you just brainstorm ideas and Docs Live turns them into a draft for you to review and refine. A Docs Live demo video posted by Google has a software engineer putting the AI agent to work formulating talking points for a Career Day presentation, going so far as to task Docs Live with producing some funny analogies on his behalf.

Google is taking pains to frame this tool as a way for getting started on writing projects, but you and I both know that less scrupulous users are going to offload writing entirely on to Docs Live. You could argue that none of this is Google’s problem, as it’s just handing people a tool, and it’s up to them to use the tool responsibly. But that’s sort of like handing out booze and heavy machinery and expecting everyone to mind their Ps and Qs. Sometimes, you have to be more careful with the kind of work you’re enabling.

New creative tools

Google touted a few generative media tools — some new, some updates to existing features — and the most relevant one to our purposes is Google Pics, an image creation tool coming to the Google Workspace this summer. With Pics, you will be able to edit photos, create posters and flyers and whip up illustrations to share on social media, using text commands.

Pics tools that Google showed off during its I/O keynote include moving selected images around, resizing them, and getting unwanted distractions out of photos. You’re also able to integrate text into images, even changing around the text that’s already in a photo.

A lot of those image-editing tools will sound familiar to anyone who’s used similar features to play around with photos on a Pixel phone, and those have been pretty polished in my experience. A watermarking tool will let people know that the image has been manipulated to head off any funny stuff like deep fakes.

Gemini Spark and Gemini Omni

Two other Google I/O AI announcements deserve some attention. Gemini Spark is an AI agent coming to the Gemini app for business customers, though you imagine it will eventually roll out elsewhere. Spark integrates with Google’s products as well as some other third-party tools to handle tasks on your behalf, such as generate emails, pulling details from reports and monitoring changing information online.

Google built Spark so that it’s working 24/7 — it’s a cloud-based assistant — which means that it’s still monitoring things even when you’ve shut down your laptop or put your phone to sleep. I’d have to see it in action beyond an on-stage demo to get a sense for how it performs though Google stresses that Spark will seek your permission before it acts on anything.

Gemini Omni is the last bit of big software news to come out of Google I/O. According to Google, the ultimate goal with Omni is to be able to create anything from any input, which certainly sounds ambitious. At the moment, Omni’s focus appears to be on video, with Google promising that you’ll be able to generate a video from any text, image or audio. The first iteration of Gemini Omni — Gemini Omni Flash — is part of the Gemini app, Google Flow and YouTube shorts.

The Omni demos shown off by Google took videos shot by people, using voice inputs to change things like the video’s style, environment and even viewing angles. In the hands of a creative pro, it could be quite a powerful part of an already advanced skill set; used by less skilled practitioners, it could increase the amount of AI slop we see out in the wild. But then, that warning could apply to a lot of the AI capabilities Google is adding over the next few months.

Google’s glasses (but not Google Glass)

Finally, we saw some hints of hardware at this year’s Google I/O. Specifically, Google showed off some new smart glasses built on its Android XR platform, with the likes of Gentle Monster and Warby Parker supply the designs. The glasses will come in audio-only versions, where a Gemini assistant talks in your ear to you (and only you), while a display version of the glasses will put info right in front of you.

During its keynote, Google touted the hands-free nature of the experience, with the on-board assistant able to give you directions, help you send texts and emails and identify whatever it is you’re looking at — all without having to take your phone out of your pocket. But you will need to be carrying a phone to pair with your glasses — Google says they’ll work with iPhones as well as Android devices — which makes me wonder what the point is.

Sure, we could all spend more time not staring at phone screens. But is that worth the extra money you’ll have to spend on glasses for an accessory to a phone that already costs hundreds of dollars on its own? (For what it’s worth, there’s no pricing information on these Google glasses yet, as they’re not arriving until later this fall.)

If you remember, the Apple Watch debuted with the same premise — it’s really just an extension of your phone. And while that selling point may have brought in a few early adopters, the Apple Watch itself didn’t take off as a product in its own right until the health and fitness tracking features really came to the fore. I think mixed reality glasses — whether it’s these Google-backed models or the pair that Apple is allegedly developing — are going to have to carve out their own space beyond just “smartphone stuff but the smartphone stays in your pocket.”

Maybe something to focus on for I/O next year.

Microsoft believes that the future of authentication is passwordless, secure, and user-friendly.

SMS-based authentication is now a leading source of fraud, and by moving to passwordless accounts, passkeys, and verified email, we’re helping you stay ahead of evolving threats while making account access simpler and more seamless.

Good. Hopefully this is a trend that more and more companies get onboard with, along with passkey adoption.

I’ve long appreciated Apple’s long-time feature to autofill (and auto-delete) codes via SMS has been a great stop-gap, but we should stop relying on SMS for these things altogether.

Apple itself largely does not use SMS as an authentication method, though I believe it’s still available as a fallback for your Apple account (there’s a trusted phone number listed that can be used to recover your account if needed.) By and large, though, the company has just sent codes to your various devices, though it also allows for the use of hardware security keys for iCloud. And, of course, the company has been at the forefront of passkey implementation.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Contrary to popular opinion, Jobs did not get fired from Apple—he got parked in a useless role until he quit out of frustration, as Cain recounts. Jobs was motivated to start NeXT Computer for two reasons: He saw a potential market for a high-end workstation in education and industry, and he knew that this was a market Apple wasn’t especially interested in, so he could avoid expensive and distracting lawsuits with the company he was being pushed out of. (That didn’t work.)

As depicted in the book, the same cycle seems to repeat again and again. Out of the gate, Jobs decides what his new company will focus on by cannily identifying a potential market—the demand for “3M” machines, workstations with a megabyte of memory, a million-pixel display, and a processor capable of handling a million instructions per second. Scientists and researchers, Cain recounts, said they would buy them in large numbers—assuming they cost no more than about $10,000 each.

Then the second cycle happens: Jobs ends up getting focused on all sorts of little details that matter to him, but don’t necessarily serve the original product goal, from the design of the factory that would build the workstations to the expensive physical design of the workstations themselves, made unlike any other computer in existence.

The end result was pretty much what you’d expect: The computer that NeXT ended up building didn’t satisfy the requirements of those original higher-ed buyers who were the target market. Jobs had followed his bliss, and his good taste, in interesting directions. NeXT made an interesting product. But the product failed at being a successful product, just as NeXT kept failing at business.

And it just keeps happening, as the book details. Early investor and Jobs believer H. Ross Perot (yes, the former independent presidential candidate!) had ties in the government that would’ve allowed NeXT to sell computers to America’s intelligence agencies, primarily for spy-satellite image analysis. Jobs refused the lifeline, saying he didn’t want to do business with the government.

A deal with IBM had the potential for NeXT’s operating system to take the ecological niche of Microsoft Windows before it had been firmly established on the world’s PCs. Jobs decided he was uncomfortable working with IBM.

Time and again in “Steve Jobs in Exile,” you see Jobs act like his company’s own worst enemy. He makes decisions for perfectly understandable personal reasons, but they go against the entire premise of the company he had established. (How does a guy with a fundamentally anti-establishment worldview end up building a company designed for elite institutions, industry, and the government?) The situation at NeXT becomes increasingly untenable, and to Jobs’s credit, he does seem to have learned that his mistakes are what led the company to the cliff.

When Jobs discovered that a small piece of the overall NeXT software picture, WebObjects, had a potential market in revolutionizing early web commerce, he recognized it, and the company benefited. But you get the sense that Jobs was not comfortable changing the world of selling things on the Internet, when he really still wanted to change the world.

In the end, NeXT’s investment in a forward-looking Unix-based operating system underpinned by the Mach microkernel made it an acquisition target for Apple, which was desperately looking for a replacement for the classic Mac OS. The rest is history, though Cain points out just how dramatic and fraught the merger of the NeXT staff with Apple’s late-90s engineers really was.

If you think Jobs’s years at NeXT were some sort of graduate education in which he grew older and wiser so he could emerge, fully formed, as Apple CEO, you’ve got it wrong. As Cain expertly points out, the NeXT era was one in which Jobs was humbled again and again, until he started to realize that his instincts were not infallible, his distortion field did not reflect reality, and that he had to modify his behavior to have any hope of success. (In fact, Jobs’s greatest success during the period came with Pixar—where he had a much more hands-off relationship with the company’s executives.)

The Jobs who sold his company to Apple was not tanned, rested, and ready for action. He was beaten, battered, bruised, and humbled. But he had learned enough lessons that he was able to give Apple a better version of himself, the second time around.

[Steve Jobs In Exile (Portfolio), available at Amazon, Bookshop, and everywhere else.]

Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple Sports got its World Cup update on Tuesday:

Apple Sports — the free app for iPhone that gives fans access to real-time scores, stats, and more — is now available to download on the App Store in more than 170 countries and regions around the world, including more than 90 newly added markets. Designed for speed and simplicity, the app delivers a personalized experience, putting fans’ favorite teams and leagues front and center with a simple, intuitive interface designed by Apple.

In addition to being available in 90 more regions, there are a bunch of nice soccer features, including a starting line-up, all geared toward this summer’s World Cup, which is less than a month away.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Joe’s covering a lot in this course, but you can distill it down to a few principles: how to ensure your private information remains under your control, what you can do (if you want) to migrate from Big Tech products and services to alternatives, and how to minimize or eliminate privacy risks. The course includes a discussion forum, downloadable PDFs, and optional homework and quizzes, which can be a useful way to ensure your understanding of material. I trust Joe’s insights and his teaching approach, not only because (disclosure) I’m the Executive Editor of Take Control Books, but because I’ve seen over that time how patient he is at explaining the frustrating things tech companies (including Apple) do to us, instead of for us.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

VoiceOver and Magnifier will gain AI-powered features that can provide enhanced image description, using the device camera. VoiceOver’s Image Explorer will use Apple Intelligence to give more detailed descriptions of what’s in photographs, scanned documents and labels, for example.

With updates to live recognition, VoiceOver users can press the iPhone action button to quickly ask a question about what’s in the camera viewfinder and get a detailed response. Users can also ask follow-up questions in their own words to get more visual information. These question features resemble what’s available to users of the Be My Eyes app’s Be My AI feature, but it’s unclear whether Apple’s offerings will go further.

Magnifier for iOS and Mac will include the same Apple Intelligence-powered options, which can be used with speech or high-contrast onscreen text. Magnifier users will also be able to speak to the app, to get more specific information about their surroundings, or to ask follow-up questions.

Voice Control is set to get an Apple Intelligence boost, giving users the ability to describe an element onscreen they want to act on, instead of using a numbered grid, or remembering an item’s label. The natural language support should also allow Voice Control users to navigate apps or elements that aren’t labeled for the feature.

Accessibility Reader, which renders onscreen text in ways that are visually more accessible, including larger fonts, high-contrast backgrounds, and clutter-free layouts, will provide AI-generated summaries on demand, and can translate text into the user’s chosen language.

AI-generated captions will be available alongside standard SDH and closed captions, and also in places where no captions are provided otherwise. They’ll be available on macOS, iOS, Apple TV and Vision Pro, and they can be styled to meet the viewer’s taste or needs.

Power wheelchair users looking for a reason to try Vision Pro might find one in this year’s accessibility announcements, especially if they use an alternative drive controls to steer the chair. Those who can’t use a standard joystick to navigate often employ sip-n-puff switches, head arrays or other devices. With this year’s updates, Vision Pro users will be able to use eye-tracking to control compatible alternative drive systems. At launch, Vision Pro will be compatible with TOLT and LUCI systems.

Other updates coming this year include motion cues for VisionOS, improved Apple device handoff for Made for iPhone hearing aids, larger text support in the tvOS interface and more.

Today’s preview marked the fifth straight year Apple has used GAAD week to preview accessibility features coming to its platforms in the fall. GAAD celebrates its fifteenth year.

Go to the podcast page.

If you’ve enabled FileVault before macOS 26 Tahoe and used the option to escrow your key in iCloud, as of 26.4, you’ll be forced to migrate to a new, better, more secure method. Jason Snell just noted this update in his post about refreshed security. I wrote last September about how Tahoe shifted to storing the last-ditch account Recovery Key in Passwords starting with macOS 26.

In that column, I explained, “Your previous choices are preserved. If you wrote the key down or used iCloud escrow, this remains in place.” This is no longer the case! That article remains accurate and provides all the background and insight you need on using FileVault and the role of the Recovery Key.

However, when faced with the upgrade, you may appreciate a few tips and some advice.

You may not need FileVault

FileVault is not necessary for everyone. Apple encourages it, but enabling FileVault increases the odds that you might be locked out of your Mac forever should something go wrong. What is that something? If I could predict that, I wouldn’t be any richer, but you’d all be happier, as would Apple.

The something arises from FileVault’s two-part boot process, which uses a thin layer that requires a Mac account password to unlock your drive. There’s an “opportunity,” shall we say, for that data to corrupt for whatever reason. The Recovery Key bypasses the password requirement, uses a long code stored securely to let you in, and then resets your password.

You might also somehow forget your login password! Unlikely, but I have had times in the past when I used only a memorized password, and my fingers kept the muscle knowledge, and my brain apparently did not. I lost the thread of it, and couldn’t remember what to enter anymore! I have taken measures to prevent this since, but it isn’t impossible.

Fail to have a password or access to your Recovery Key, and you’re locked out forever. Apple can’t recover this data.

If you don’t use FileVault, you don’t need to worry about that at all. Consider your risk profile—are you concerned that someone other than you (or an authorized person) might have physical access to your Mac, and be able to bypass macOS’s login to read the drive directly? That is a big lift for anything but motivated cryptocurrency thieves or a government. If so, FileVault is a valuable add-on, a good complement to Lockdown Mode: FileVault hardens your Mac against local attempts to get into its contents; Lockdown Mode resists many common remote methods of malicious intrusion and phishing.

If not, you can rely on built-in encryption and the physical security of someone having to get to your machine to try to crack it.

But if you like or need the protection of FileVault, perhaps because you travel with a laptop or work in a sensitive industry or carry sensitive data, read on.

Practical upgrading insight

The previous column covers all the basics and the, er, advanceds, but as you migrate, consider these items:

• Found in passwords: Recovery Key is now stored in Passwords. Search for “recovery key” or the model name listed in Settings: General: About in the Name field. (Changing the name doesn’t update the Passwords entry.) If you don’t see an entry in Passwords, try resetting FileVault (see below).

• Persistently available: The key is persistently available in the Mac interface, too, either by using Touch ID or entering your password in Settings: Privacy & Security: FileVault and clicking Show.

• Backup your backup: Because you can no longer store your key in iCloud, it is critical that you have some means of using Passwords on a 26 or later operating system version to regain access to your Mac account if your login fails. You may want to store the key in another password management system, like 1Password, if that would increase your odds of gaining access to it. If you can’t use your password to log in and you can’t access your Recovery Key, you will be locked out of that data forever.

• Older devices can’t see the key: Any of your iCloud-linked devices not yet running iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or macOS 26 will be unable to view the Recovery Key in Passwords (or equivalent in Safari in older versions of macOS).

Resetting FileVault

In my case, I’d upgraded to the new method back in 26.0, writing about it here and upgrading my book Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices. When I went to check just now—with 26.5 installed—the FileVault view said I had FileVault enabled. However, the Show button was grayed out, and Passwords didn’t show an entry for this computer.

I fixed it in this way:

1. Disable FileVault.
2. Click Turn Off Encryption. (You may be prompted to enter your password.)
3. Enable FileVault. (You may be prompted again, but probably not.)

The entry now appears in Passwords.

Note also that Apple continues to show outdated text in this section: “FileVault secures your data by encrypting the contents of your Mac and locking your screen with a password.” All M-series Macs and all Intel Macs with a T2 Security Chip encrypt the contents of the startup drive by default. FileVault layers startup protection on top of that. So Apple may require this mandatory security change, but it fails to explain it correctly.

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

Good people release good apps, OpenAI has complaints and Apple comes to the aid of some frenemies.

G as in Indigo

Remember when tech coverage was mostly just talking about cool new hardware and software and not about politics, AI, and the decline of civilization? Well, this week brought back a bit of that as two cool new apps were released.

Friend of the column Lex Friedman released Gnome, a delightful tool that makes it quicker and easier to find just the right GIF for any occasion. (Disclaimer: I am deep in the pocket of Big Lex.)

Meanwhile, Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy released Indigo, an app that unifies your Mastodon and Bluesky timelines, thus reducing the amount of madness in your life.

Check ‘em out.

Sometimes running to the press does nothing at all

A blockbuster report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman who talked to a kid whose uncle works at OpenAI and he says Apple is in biiig trouble.

“OpenAI preparing ‘legal action’ against Apple over Siri partnership: report”

Apparently OpenAI isn’t making as much as it thought it would from its deal with Apple so it’s going to… sue Apple?

OK. Well, good luck with that, OpenAI.

But John, you say to me, in our system of legal jurisprudence, suits such as this are based not on luck, but rather on a clear demonstration of established contractual obligations and a reasonable determination of culpability in failure to satisfy said obligations as determined by a judge in a court of law.

And that is why I say, “Good luck with that, OpenAI.”

Indeed, this report itself is a bit of a joke, as the primary source is an unnamed executive at OpenAI. “According to OpenAI, OpenAI is super cool and Apple sucks and Apple will soon be paying OpenAI to say it’s sorry for sucking so bad.”

sure jan dot gif

(If only I had some kind of app that pulled up gifs.)

Maybe OpenAI should have talked to Goldman Sachs about what it’s like to go into business with Apple. Or maybe it should have realized that not owning the platform means you’re dependent on someone else and you’re not the big shot you thought you were.

One aspect of the OpenAI integration into iOS is the ability to sign up for a paid ChatGPT subscription via the Settings app on iPhone. OpenAI reportedly believed this “could generate billions of dollars per year in subscriptions,” which apparently “hasn’t come close to happening.”

Billions a year! And that didn’t happen?! Really?! Who could have possibly foreseen that?

Could be there’s a reason for people not forking over their hard-earned cash for chatbots that may or may not have any idea what they’re talking about that doesn’t have anything to do with laziness on Apple’s part.

“Few Smartphone Owners Care About Foldables or AI, Survey Suggests”

… just 12% cited AI integrations as an upgrade motivator.

Were 12% of the respondents AIs?

As the AI emperor is increasingly revealed to have no clothes, expect more of this finger-pointing.

OpenAI’s lawyers might be excused for their hamfistedness. They just witnessed the abject buffoonery of Elon Musk throughout the Musk v. Altman trial and may just be realizing that you can sue people over feelings.

Strange bedfellows

This week brought some unexpected alliances. Who had Apple coming to Google’s defense in their bracket? If so, please see Todd because you’ve won a Philly Phanatic bobblehead doll and a $5 off coupon to any fluid exchange at Jiffy Lube.

You heard me. Any fluid exchange.

“Apple Defends Google Against EU Proposal to Give AI Rivals Access to Services”

As it turns out, it’s not that surprising as the EU’s proposal would allow any AI to “interact with Android apps to perform actions such as sending emails, ordering food, or sharing photos.” Clearly Apple feels if the EU mandates this for Android, iOS won’t be far behind and, yeah, no thank you.

After reports last week that Apple was considering using Intel to manufacture chips in order to decrease its reliance on TSMC, it seems this relationship might be heating up.

“Report: Intel is Testing Production of Some iPhone, iPad, and Mac Chips”

Apple supply chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo today said that Intel has “kicked off” small-scale testing of lower-end iPhone, iPad, and Mac chip fabrication…

Presumably this means non-Pro, Max, and Ultra processors, rather than Intel having patented an exciting new process called “Oops, All Binned”.

With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best ad and tracker blocker for your iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV.

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• News apps
• Social media
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So, join the community of over 400,000 users and download Magic Lasso Adblock today from the App Store, Mac App Store or via the Magic Lasso website.

One of the big differences between the Mac and Apple’s other platforms is that, by design, it’s an old-school “general computing” platform—you can install and run whatever software you want, from any source.

That’s a good thing. It’s what makes the Mac the Mac. But it also makes the Mac more vulnerable than Apple’s other platforms, where the company can strictly limit what software is allowed to run on the device behind layers of developer memberships, code signing, scanning, and App Store approval.

For the last decade or more, as the Mac has become more popular, Apple has been trying to ratchet up Mac security. But because the Mac is open, securing it brings some unique challenges, as I found out when I got a chance to discuss these issues with some members of Apple’s security team recently.

Back in 2018, the company introduced notarization for apps, a system that used developer code signing and automated scans to provide a slightly increased level of scrutiny and security. While you can run apps that aren’t notarized on your Mac, it’s become increasingly difficult to do so—on purpose.

That’s because as Apple gradually ratchets up its Mac security approach, it’s increasingly playing a game of Whac-a-Mole with malware makers and scammers who are trying to take advantage of Mac users. Adding notarization made it harder for users to install malware without taking additional steps, so scammers switched to social engineering, talking users through the process of bypassing the warnings for non-notarized software. Apple eventually made bypassing the warnings so onerous that most scammers moved on.

They generally moved on… to the Terminal, which is why macOS 26.4 introduced warnings about code being pasted into Terminal. Scammers were giving users long strings of mostly unreadable code to paste into Terminal to “fix” problems—and this code would, when entered, grant permission and download software. In 26.4, Apple looks for specific strings on the clipboard and blocks them with a warning—while also looking for the presence of various developer tools on the system as an indicator that the user is more sophisticated and therefore the blocking should be a bit more lenient. It’s a clever approach to spare confused novice users without getting in the way of more expert ones. (Malicious AppleScript scripts are also being checked these days. You can’t be too careful.)

Apple has also, over the years, increased Mac security by structuring the way macOS is stored on disk. Much of the operating system is stored on sealed volumes that are cryptographically signed, meaning they can’t be tampered with. System Integrity Protection prevents tampered OS versions from booting. Drivers have been moved into limited-access user areas, out of full-access admin areas. Admin users, who used to have ultimate power (without ultimate responsibility), are now more limited in what they can do.

A few years ago, I complained that Apple’s warning dialogs were out of control, especially when migrating to a new system. Since then, Apple has made a bunch of improvements, including honoring many older permissions choices when migrating. The security team seems to have also acknowledged that there are certain circumstances where installing a lot of software might not be as big a security threat. That’s why during the first 24 hours of setting up a new machine, Apple’s security warnings are now throttled.

Among other recent changes in macOS 26 updates are new background security improvements that allow Apple to install small updates in the background between normal system updates.

And as our own Glenn Fleishman reported last year, Apple began syncing FileVault keys via iCloud. What began as a gentle roll-out is now mandatory in macOS 26.4, where all users who are syncing FileVault keys will have them stored via this method.

The Mac is never going to be as secure as iOS, and that’s okay. That extra insecurity is the trade-off for the Mac being an open system, and that’s what makes the Mac special. In 2018, at WWDC, I watched as a representative of Apple’s security team stood on stage and promised that Apple would never prevent Mac users from running any code they wanted. He never promised it would always be easy, and it’s not—but that promise has been kept, and I get no sense that Apple envisions a world where it will ever be broken.

In the meantime, the good news: When you consider that the game of Whac-a-Mole has reached the “paste long strings of text into the Terminal” phase, it makes you wonder how desperate those scammers have gotten. Maybe after years of ratcheting up security, Apple’s made it just too hard to talk users into installing malware on their Macs. That has required a lot of extra effort that’s not necessary on the iOS side—and I’m glad Apple is making that effort to keep the Mac as safe as possible while it still remains open.

Indigo makes it easy to cross-post to the services, which is unsurprising given its pedigree—its creators, Aaron Vegh and Ben Rice McCarthy, made the cross-posting app Croissant before they made this. Since the services offer different character limits, Indigo shows you countdowns for both in one place. The app offers some other cross-service niceties, like identifying very similar posts on both services and de-duping them—though I still see not-quite-identical posts from time to time.

Indigo excels at scrolling through a timeline. Get too far beyond that, though, and you’ll find that it’s still definitely a 1.0 product. There’s no way to search within your timeline, tapping to expose an entire thread can be very slow, there’s no support for Bluesky lists, mute filters aren’t applied immediately to all items in a timeline, and occasionally I found that it just wouldn’t let me interact with some posts until I quit and re-launched the app. I also found the app’s choice of colors—blue for Bluesky, purple for Mastodon—to be impossible for me to differentiate as a colorblind person. (Fortunately you can add a badge on each account’s avatar, but it would sure be nice to pick a better color scheme.)

While I prefer Indigo because I want to scroll a timeline once and only once, it’s not yet at the level of a dedicated app like Tapbots’s Ivory for Mastodon. But this is a brand-new app, so I accept that it’s got room to grow. Ben Rice McCarthy has a nice blog post about how the project came to be, and another about how its design evolved.

Indigo is available for free on the App Store. For the Ultraviolet level, which allows interaction with posts, you can pay $5/month, $35/year, or $120 for a one-time purchase.

Go to the podcast page.

A lot of Mac users don’t remember a time before Mac OS X (or macOS, or OS X, depending on the era), but before OS X arrived on the scene, the Mac ran on an entirely different operating system, the classic Mac OS, which was with us from the Mac’s launch in 1984 through the funeral Steve Jobs held for Mac OS 9 in 2002.

The original Mac OS evolved a lot across those 18 years. And perhaps its single most important update, System 7, arrived 35 years ago this month, in May of 1991.

It seems like a footnote now, but so much of what we take for granted on the Mac today was introduced in System 7. Take it from someone who was there—I wanted System 7 so badly, I downloaded a load of floppy disk images across my college computer network so I could install it. And I wasn’t disappointed by what I got. System 7 really did show the way to the future of the Mac.

Seven-year itch

As amazing as the original Mac operating system was, it was largely conceived of in the early 1980s and designed for extremely limited hardware. Even seven years after the first Mac shipped, it had only evolved in some limited ways. By the early 90s, support for color displays had arrived, though the Mac was hardly what you’d call a colorful interface. Multitasking of a sort arrived, thanks to software called Switcher and later MultiFinder, but it was a severely constrained add-on.

And then came System 7.

Let’s start with multitasking. Early Macs had so little memory that it was a miracle they could run one program (plus the Finder), let alone more than one at a time. Some clever hacks let you run more than one app on some Macs with a lot of memory, but it wasn’t until System 7 that the Mac embraced the concept that you could run as many apps as would fit in your Mac’s RAM.

Apple added an Application menu to the menu bar, which indicated the currently open app, the forerunner of the modern macOS menu item that does the same thing. System 7 also introduced virtual memory, which allowed the system to use some disk space to save out memory and also dynamically allocate memory to the programs that really needed it.

I can’t underscore how much of a productivity boost this was. Before multitasking, copying data between multiple apps really was often an exercise of copying, saving, quitting, opening the next app, and pasting. If that seems archaic, let me assure you that you’re also imagining every step of that process happening at least ten times faster than it actually did.

With more programs running, there were also more problems. Now you didn’t need to worry about a bug in one program, but in any of the programs you were running. Fortunately, System 7 also introduced the Force Quit command, activated by pressing Command-Option-Shift-Escape. (Today, we use the more modern Command-Option-Escape.) However, since the Mac wouldn’t get true memory protection until OS X arrived, Apple strongly encouraged you to immediately close all apps and reboot your Mac if you ever had to force quit an app.

Find it in Finder, finally

One of the jokes of the early Mac era was that the one thing the Finder app couldn’t do was find anything. While Spotlight was years away, System 7 did introduce a proper Find command, which let you search for files on your hard drive by name. This was an enormous productivity boost at the time, and charted a course that would eventually lead to Spotlight itself.

To this day, Finder windows in list view display folders with an indicator to the left that, when clicked, rotates and exposes the contents of that folder. That’s another System 7 innovation. We also still have the ability, introduced in System 7, to create an alias of a file in a different location.

In previous versions of Mac OS, copying a file was entirely modal. You had to sit and watch as the files were copied. In System 7, you could switch to other apps and continue to work while the copy concluded. macOS Tahoe introduced the ability to tag individual files with custom colors—or should I say reintroduced, since that feature was also part of System 7.

A trash can that sits there, full of stuff that you can fish out if need be, until you finally choose to empty it? System 7. And how about the ability to share some or all of your hard drive over the network, to other Macs? The fundamental concept of file sharing was also introduced in System 7, bringing an end to a bunch of very weird hacks that let Macs send files to one another over local networks.

AppleScript feels close to retirement these days, and actually didn’t premiere in System 7.0—it arrived a little later, in 7.1.1. But the infrastructure that works to this day to let apps communicate with one another, Apple Events, was introduced in System 7.

Basically, every Mac app has a Help menu at the very end of the menu bar; that was a System 7 innovation, along with a concept called Balloon Help, which was basically floating “tool tips” that could be turned off at a system level.

Finally, here’s a simple bit of Mac body language that so many of us have internalized, but just wasn’t there until 1991: If you drag a file on top of an app icon, that file opens in that app. Yep, something that simple wasn’t a part of the original Mac OS—it was a System 7 innovation.

What we left behind

It’s not all groundbreaking features, of course. A bunch of System 7 stuff died on the vine or gave way to very different ways of approaching computer interfaces in the years to come.

In the early days, the Apple menu was a place for a very specific, regimented set of menu items. Today, it’s similarly locked down. But in the System 7 era, the Apple Menu was literally just the contents of a folder, located inside the System Folder, called Apple Menu Items. You could put pretty much anything in there, and it would be easily accessible from the Apple Menu.

Similarly, the Mac’s original Control Panel was an app full of little tiles that let you do things like adjust the volume. Today’s System Settings app (and its OS X predecessor, System Preferences) is similarly a single app that offers every setting in a series of sub-sections. System 7 went the other way, exploding that original Control Panel into a folder that was full of individual Control Panel items that opened more or less like apps.

System 7 also introduced Extensions, which were the next generation of “INITs,” or software patches that loaded when you booted your Mac and modified the system in some way. I remember being really excited about Extensions, but they added enormous instability to the system. One of the first Extensions was Extensions Manager, which let you choose which Extensions to load in order to help troubleshoot which ones might be crashing your Mac. Eventually, an extremely popular program called Conflict Catcher would help users do the same.

Suffice it to say that Apple doesn’t put up with that level of hacking of the system anymore. And for good reason.

End of an era

System 7 was really amazing, but it was also a symptom of a growing disease that would plague 1990s Apple. The project was created by a software group nicknamed the Blue Meanies, a reference to the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine.” They got that name because when Apple engineers were figuring out what features to build for the future of Mac OS, they wrote down more achievable jobs on blue index cards, and long-term goals on pink and red index cards.

The team in charge of implementing the near-term features on the blue cards became the Blue Meanies, and System 7 was the result. The long-term stuff was so far out there that ultimately, the Pink group got spun out of Apple into a next-gen operating system company called Taligent, a joint venture with IBM. It never shipped.

The Yellow stuff included some vital stuff, like protected memory and pre-emptive multitasking, that would eventually become a part of a project called Copland, which was destined to be Mac OS 8 up until the moment when it failed to ship and was literally broken up into parts, some of which shipped, most of which didn’t. The failure of Copland led, eventually, to Apple’s purchase of NeXT, and the arrival of both Steve Jobs and the future Mac OS X at Apple.

So yes, Classic Mac OS was showing its age. But System 7 helped breathe life into it, long enough for it to get to the point where it was worth replacing with something new. 35 years later, it’s clear that Mac users still owe a lot to the Blue Meanies.

Go to the podcast page.

My friend Lex Friedman wrote an app, Gnome, that makes it easy to post GIFs:

Gnome lives in your Mac’s menubar. You hit a hotkey. A little search window appears. You type what you’re looking for — weird al, shrug, nailed it, that’s a paddlin’ — and a grid of GIFs appears. Click the one you want. It’s now on your clipboard. Paste it wherever you were typing. Joke saved. World improved.

My favorite bit: You can also add in a local folder of GIFs, so your own go-tos are always at the ready, in addition to stuff from the wider Internet.

Maybe my second favorite bit:

Wait, why is the app called Gnome? Because that’s how I pronounce the “G” in “GIF.”

The app costs $7, one time, to unlock everything. Otherwise, after five minutes you’ll be limited to “Weird Al” and Rick Astley GIFs. I’m not kidding.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

ZenStand is a charger that doesn’t feel like a tech product. It sits on a desk or nightstand the way normal stuff does, without announcing itself. It’s made from real wood, solid dark walnut that looks nice in a way that molded plastic never will. It’s got a weighted and adhesive base, so your phone lifts off cleanly with one hand. There are no LEDs, on purpose. A charger doesn’t need to show off that it’s a charger.

What you end up with is a MagSafe stand that does its job properly and then gets out of the way. Which, in ZenStand’s view, is what good objects are supposed to do.

Shop the ZenStand. Use code SixColors2026 for 15% off.

I could hardly remember writing it. But write it I did, at a time when we were deep in a news-aggregation desert. It seemed like RSS had experienced a conceptual death, through neglect and intent. Google first hijacked usage by creating Google Reader during RSS’s heyday in 2005, which sank the market for paid RSS apps and led to near hegemony for Google.

Then, typical of fickle Google, the company killed off Google Reader in 2013. Because Google Reader was web-based, its loss revealed a barren marketplace. Small developers tried to fill the gap, but the pattern of usage for many people had ended.

Couple that with the emergence, by that time, of the expectation of very low prices for single-purpose apps, and little chance yet of convincing people to pay for a recurring subscription. RSS readers persisted, but it seemed like their time had come and gone.

But I was too pessimistic! Today, I’m back to daily—or multiple-times-per-day—use of a newsreader, the same one that got me addicted back in the early 2000s. Hurray, I’m an RSS news junkie again!?

Rather straightforward standard, when you think about it

For those of you too young to remember RSS (Really Simple Syndication), or who have buried the memory of what we lost, it’s an open syndication standard.¹ Any Web-reachable resource, whether a website or a service endpoint that could deliver a file in the RSS format over a web connection, could publish items that RSS newsreaders could parse and display, like articles or entries. RSS became—and remains—the basis for podcast distribution.

RSS embodies what was once the primary ethos of the Internet. No, not “information wants to be free.”² Rather, wherever possible, produce protocols that allow decentralized use of the same kind of thing: HTML, web servers, email, and so forth. Nobody owned RSS; no central RSS system dispensed RSS; nobody could get tired of running RSS and turn it off for everyone.

The joy of RSS was that you could subscribe to tens or thousands of feeds, and get a chronological view, like an inbox, of the latest “news.” News could include blog entries, stories from major newspapers, price updates for a retail item, podcasts, service alerts, “diffs” when something is updated (such as changes to the text of a New York Times article or a Wikipedia entry), search results that changed over time, and much more. Back then, I even offered an RSS feed for any book by its ISBN through my price-comparison service, isbn.nu.³ Yahoo’s Pipes service, of the mid-oughties, let you combine and filter webpages, RSS feeds, and other sources, and then output the results as another RSS feed.

For some people, a second inbox was a nightmare: more unread things that piled up like the unblinking eye of unwatched Netflix DVDs sitting on their red envelopes! I, however, liked to scan through the latest headlines or results, and then mark everything as read. Using RSS like this gave me a snapshot of what was happening. When I was actively writing regular columns and pitching articles for several publications, RSS was a way to get leads on breaking news, obscure topics, and product updates.

My favorite newsreader for the Mac, NetNewsWire, went through a couple of owners, and updates were delayed significantly, making it less appealing to use. I switched to another RSS reader. Meanwhile, after spending more time on Twitter, I found it to be a better source of up-to-date information.

In that 2015 article, I wrote:

I haven’t checked RSS for more than a few minutes here and there in the last year, and I don’t think I’ve looked at the aggregator I use at all in a couple of months. It’s not intentional; the need seems to be gone. It’s been replaced by a change in my needs and a combination of other sources.

I made this claim, too:

In the meantime, despite the amount of time I spend on Twitter, I enjoy the feeling of less pressure to keep up with what’s going on. I can walk away for hours or days, and put my toes in and get a read on what the world and my friends and colleagues are saying without the tick-tock tick-tock of hundreds of headlines dropping hourly upon me.

That didn’t last.

The once and future RSS king

The founder of Friendster launched a beta of a news aggregator, Nuzzel, that pulled from your Twitter and Facebook social graphs—the people you followed, specifically—to rank stories people were talking about. Jason Snell inserted into the article an aside as an editor’s note, that he was using Nuzzel, and I soon followed. While it lacked the breadth and coverage of an RSS reader, it scratched most of my itches and reduced that feeling of “less pressure.” (I think we were all delusional in the maximum Twitter period.)

Of course, all good tools are acquired and die, and Nuzzel was no exception. A company called Scroll bought it in 2018, and then Twitter purchased Scroll. Instead of using it to increase engagement and stickiness, and offer a premium flavor, they shut it down on its acquisition in May 2021, during a high-demand period by us pandemic-constrained people dying for news, nearly a year before Elon Musk’s purchase bid.

In a tweet—later deleted—I wrote (and was quoted via the above link by John Gruber):⁴

Nuzzel has been since it launched nearly the only app I’ve ever let put notifications on my lock screen, and something I consult 20 to 50 times a day. I don’t blame Twitter, though: the model didn’t pan out (though I would have paid $25–$50 a year as a service!).

Fortunately, a few years after my article, NetNewsWire’s creator, and first and fourth owner of the name, revived the app.⁵ In 2018, Brent gave us new hope with version 5.0d1, which was an open-source RSS reader he was developing. He was able to rename this fresh take as NetNewsWire. Brent has since released versions 6 and, recently, 7 for macOS and 7 for iOS.⁶

I started playing with NetNewsWire again following the 5.0 release. I discovered that my old file of feeds still existed, and I was reading many of the same blogs and news sources. I started trying to add sites I wanted to read and services that seemed useful—most turned out to have a straightforward RSS option or a way to acquire it.

You can also track most webpages using tools or services dating back to the early 2000s: feed extractors or converters. For instance, Boston University, where my older child attends college, has a so-called BU Today news page with no RSS feed. I dug around and wound up at Fetch RSS, which has a nice free tier and several paid upgrade options. Several other sites offer similar services, which can fill gaps for websites that aren’t up to date with 25-year-old standards.

Gotta get my RSS hit

I don’t know if RSS is good or bad for my mental health. I believe it prevents me from obsessively visiting lots of sites and scanning them for changes, reduces the number of notifications in my inbox, and gives me a good sense of what’s happening in the world. It’s also let me tune into new blogs—yes, new blogs in the 2020s—like Nick Heer’s excellent Pixel Envy.

Jason recently went through an RSS re-examination and came away with a different conclusion: maybe some of his feeds he should stop viewing in a newsreader and instead read as email newsletters, and maybe some feeds should aggregate their multiple items into a newsletter. He’s done this with Six Colors, offering members a newsletter that’s derived from the site’s posts.

I’m trending the opposite way from Jason, I think. Anything that I don’t need to know about on a timely basis, I want to have appear as an item in NetNewsWire, where I can approach it as something I might scan and then read and skip over.

As the number of apps and controls in the menu bar have continued to proliferate, users have had to constantly find ways to keep them in check. For years, the de facto solution was the Mac app Bartender, but after an awkwardly managed ownership transition in 2024, a slew of alternatives sprouted up to take on the venerable utility and vie for the crown.

The team behind Bartender has continued to plug away, however, and the latest release is Bartender 6, which not only continues the app’s legacy of menu bar management, but also extends into an interesting new area: the omnipresent notch of the MacBook.

The menu bar management options haven’t changed much from Bartender 5 to 6; you’ll find all your usual options, including the ability to customize layout, behavior, and look and feel.

There’s also beta feature called Widgets, which lets you make your own menu bar items with a plug-and-play interface that feels like a combination of Shortcuts and Yahoo Pipes. It’s interesting but feels more than a little underbaked at present; I had a hard time getting it do anything that it was supposed to do, including simply showing the current CPU usage. With some more work, it might be more competitive with the likes of SwiftBar, but right now, it’s a beta in the classical sense.

Bartender 6 is available as a four-week trial; after that time you’ll need to buy a full license for $20, though generous upgrade pricing is available for owners of previous versions. If you purchased Bartender 5 in 2025, you can even upgrade for free. Note that Bartender 6 does require macOS Sonoma or later and that if you do update from 5 to 6, your settings won’t transfer—the developers say this is because of changes in Tahoe, but it’s a shame they didn’t provide an export/import option.

If that were the whole story, it might make Bartender 6 an unremarkable update. However, in addition to all of those features, there’s also Bartender Pro, a $15/year subscription that promises not only all future Bartender updates, but also advanced features, starting with what it dubs Top Shelf.

Shelf awareness

Top Shelf is part Dynamic Island, part clipboard manager, part file utility. Frankly, much of it also feels like the kind of feature Apple should building itself, because my experience over the last year or two with the notch in the MacBook displays continually makes me annoyed at just how user-unfriendly it is.

To trigger Top Shelf, you bring the cursor up to the notch; the interface expands outward from there, just like the Dynamic Island on the iPhone. By default, the first screen contains a pair of customizable widgets for common features like Calendar, Weather, and Music. There’s also a second media-playing widget called Vinyl, though I’m had-pressed to tell you what the difference between the two is beyond aesthetics.

The media playing controls can work with Apple Music or Spotify directly, once you give them permission, but they’re also compatible with any other media-playing app on your system, including web browsers. I did occasionally find it a bit aggressive about controlling playback from those, including times when it wouldn’t “let go” of, say, a YouTube clip even after I’d closed the tab.

Top Shelf offers two other panes, which you can switch to using icons in its top left when it’s expanded: Files and Clipboard.

Files allows you to temporarily store, yes, files that you might want to move between apps. Drag and drop a file in there and then you can drag it back out of Top Shelf into another app. That pane also has an AirDrop section; drop a file there, and it will trigger the system’s AirDrop feature, with the file already pre-populated.

Files can store up to six items, and you can clear them all from Top Shelf’s settings, as well as choose how long items stay in the Files palette, define a keyboard shortcut that brings you directly to this section, and decide whether the AirDrop option is present or not.

Clipboard, as you might expect, is a clipboard manager, showing you thumbnails of text or images that you’ve copied. You can choose the max number of items, how long they’re kept for, whether they’re deleted when you drag them out, and even if it will filter out sensitive info like copied passwords. If that’s not enough security for you, Top Shelf’s settings let you pick apps for the clipboard manager to explicitly ignore.

And, in another example of a feature that Apple bafflingly does not currently offer, you can use a single user-definable keyboard shortcut to summon a floating window to search through the Clipboard shortcut and move the selected item to the clipboard. (Alas, however, it does not automatically paste the result when select it—you still have to hit command-v.)

While Top Shelf would seem to make most sense on a notched display, it doesn’t require one. When not in use on my Apple Studio Display, for example, it simply sits in the center of the menu bar as a little capsule-shaped blob, not unlike on the iPhone. If you run a multiple monitor setup, you can choose where it appears with more granularity, including only on screens with a notch.

I don’t find it generally obtrusive, though I will note that on my Studio Display it doesn’t always play well with my use of multiple desktops in Mission Control—really, it should hide itself when you trigger that feature, otherwise it risks colliding with UI elements there and just generally doesn’t look great.

I also ran into some issues on my Studio Display where Bartender would get confused about whether I was trying to hover over the menu bar and bring up my hidden menu bar items or trigger Top Shelf. Some refinement there could be helpful.

Going dynamic

With Top Shelf, however, Bartender also attempts to mimic a lot of the behaviors of the Dynamic Island on iPhones. For example, when you adjust the volume or brightness of your Mac, the capsule expands slightly and shows your changes; it can do the same for battery notifications when you’re charging or the battery hits a specific level.

But more than that, it also works as an area to show what else is happening on your Mac. For example, if you’re playing music, the notch gets expanded just slightly to show a thumbnail of the album art and a waveform animation. If you hover over the album art, it’ll expand to show playback controls.

If you have the calendar widget available, you’ll get meeting alerts at a specified amount of time before, as well as the ability to click and join a remote meeting (assuming you’ve got a corresponding URL in the event). The Weather widget taps into Apple’s own system and can show precipitation alerts.

A lot of these options are, of course, reduplicative of features available elsewhere in the system. But they are less obtrusive here, in this space that is frankly not being used for anything else, than with, say, your typical Mac notifications. That’s a benefit in the same way as the Dynamic Island in iOS takes the pressure off notifications there.

In some ways Top Shelf feels like a whole new app injected into Bartender—that’s not bad, per se, but I can see why the developers found this a solid way to set their menu bar manager apart from the slew of competitors that have emerged in the past couple years.

Do I use all of Top Shelf’s features? I do not. But that’s okay, because I don’t use all of Bartender’s features either. I appreciate that, in either case, there’s a broad level of customization available, so you can really just use the features that you want.

Notch your best work, Apple

The first MacBook with a notched display came out in 2022 and four years later, the company’s approach seems to remain just pretending it doesn’t exist. Menus that run into the notch simply get shoved to the other side. Menu bar items that don’t fit on the right hand side often just seem to vanish. Apple may be trying to improve matters with its new menu control API in macOS Tahoe, but the result has been lackluster thus far, to say the least.

To the Bartender team’s credit, its Top Shelf feature does what Apple already does on the iPhone and, more importantly, should have done all along on the Mac: embrace the notch. Turn it from a weakness into a strength.

There’s an element of Top Shelf that feels like the old adage about skating to where the puck will be. Even if Apple does end up building a Dynamic Island like feature into macOS—and that’s no guarantee—it will surely not offer everything that Top Shelf does; in that way, it feels a bit like the team behind Bartender is trying to Sherlock-proof themselves. And if Apple never goes there, well, then Top Shelf can claim that island all to itself.

Go to the podcast page.

Your Mac doesn’t have one kind of sleep—it has several. That fact is generally uninteresting until you find you can’t easily put your Mac into display sleep or system (idle) sleep automatically when you walk away from it or close a laptop’s lid. Let me help you help your Mac drift into the arms of Morpheus by digging beneath the surface.

Scattered sleep settings

Recently, I got frustrated with this recurrent problem on the Mac in my studio. Generally, I want this Mac’s displays to sleep and the system to lock, but to remain active, since I access it remotely and it handles networked Time Machine backups. I thought I’d correctly configured the various System Settings, scattered across different panes, several releases ago.

There are three settings to be aware of:

• Lock Screen: In the System Settings app, select Lock Screen, note the “Turn display off… when inactive” setting or settings: “on battery” and “on power adapter” appear on a laptop; nothing on a desktop.¹ You can choose an interval here. Never is an option, and could be your problem.

• Battery: On a laptop, go to the System Settings app and select Battery and click Options. There, you can enable “Wake for network access,” which is set to “Only on Power Adapter” by default, to wake your Mac as needed for certain incoming network traffic. Your Mac will wake up—and sometimes your display will, too. If set to Always, this can wake your laptop while it’s on battery power, and potentially leave its display active, which could drain your battery.

• Automatic sleeping: Apple enables a setting by default that keeps your Mac active when the display goes to sleep. The location and phrasing are slightly different between laptops and desktops. On a laptop, the setting is in Battery’s Options dialog, as above, and reads “Prevent automatic sleeping on power adapter when the display is off.” On a desktop, find it in the Energy preferences, where it’s called “Prevent automatic sleeping when the display is off.” Disable this switch if you want your Mac to sleep when the display powers down.

Conversely, if you’d like a quick, manual way to put your display to sleep, you’ve got two options:

• In the System Settings app, go to Desktop & Dock, click Hot Corners (found at the bottom), and choose Sleep as an action for one corner.

• Press Control-Command-Q to activate Lock Screen, or choose Lock Screen from the Apple menu. I don’t love this keystroke, to be honest, because it’s perilously easy to type Command-Shift-Q, which logs you out of your account, shutting down all the apps.²

Unfortunately, tweaking these settings didn’t help my situation. The answer lay in Terminal, where I ran commands to reveal low-level information about what was keeping my Mac from display sleep.

Power management shows who’s keeping you awake

Apple does provide an excellent tool that shows what’s affecting power management and lets you control it: pmset.³ Even better, you can paste in the following to use that command to extract just sleep-related assertions, or activities that have an impact on sleep:

pmset -g assertions | grep -i sleep

When I typed this just now, I had a modest list, preceded by a summary:

PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep    0
PreventSystemSleep             1
PreventUserIdleSystemSleep     1
pid 507(coreaudiod): [0x00022a4d00018492] 00:36:44 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep"  
pid 507(coreaudiod): [0x0001fc3c0001a751] 03:53:17 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep"  
pid 64802(Music): [0x00022a4c00018a52] 00:36:45 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "com.apple.Music.playback"  
pid 35328(QuickTime Player): [0x000200bb0001894d] 03:34:06 NoIdleSleepAssertion named: "com.apple.QuickTimePlayerX - disable system sleep"  
pid 68171(screensharingd): [0x00022c1e00078cbd] 00:28:59 PreventSystemSleep named: "Remote user is connected"  
pid 437(powerd): [0x00022b5900018bb7] 00:32:16 PreventUserIdleSystemSleep named: "Powerd - Prevent sleep while display is on"

The first three lines tell me the off/on status as a 0 (off) or a count (1 per set of connected items) about whether any application or other process affects those categories:

• PreventUserIdleDisplaySleep: When showing 0, as it is for me, there’s nothing that will block the display from sleeping on your Lock Screen delay choice. If this is 1 or higher, the display will not go to sleep.
• PreventSystemSleep: A non-zero value, as in my case, means something is actively preventing the system from sleeping at all, even if I tried to put it to sleep manually.
• PreventUserIdleSystemSleep: With a value of 1 or more, a process prevents your Mac, when idle, from engaging system sleep. If you perform an action, like choosing Sleep from the Apple Menu or closing the lid on a laptop, it will sleep.

You can see that I have several typical items in the filtered list below. The three lines listing com.apple.audio.BuiltInHeadphoneOutputDevice.context.preventuseridlesleep (twice) and com.apple.Music.playback relate to my current situation: I’m listening to the Music app via my Mac’s headphone jack, which is connected to speakers.

I have no idea why QuickTime Player, shown next, would prevent idle sleep—that seems strange, as it was inactive and had no open files. Quitting it removed that assertion. (Apparently, the specific language it uses is a legacy assertion, so it isn’t properly counted in the summary.)

Screen Sharing (screensharingd) is also an odd duck. Normally, if you have a Screen Sharing session connected to your Mac, its display can go to sleep, but the system stays active. In this case, this is a transient state: I use Bartender, which has to use Screen & System Audio Recording, which appears as a form of screen sharing when active, to determine which system menu items are currently visible.

The final item, powerd, is the setting noted earlier: “Prevent sleep while display is on.”

When previously looking through this list, I came across an online reference to a Mac utility called caffeinate. Folks, I’ve said before I have to keep humble despite being a technology writer for what is now nearly 30 years: I had never seen this command-line tool before, to my knowledge, and, according to Google, I have never mentioned it in my archived writing.

caffeinate was introduced 13 years ago by Apple as a cutely named option you can use to keep the display awake. For instance, to keep the display forced awake for an hour, overriding other settings, enter:

caffeinate -d -t 3600

Now, I was aware of Amphetamine (free from the Mac App Store). But I didn’t quite understand—or, let me be honest, maybe have forgotten—that it performed the same function, relying on the same system hooks caffeinate employs, and putting a friendly menu bar wrapper around it.

Finding the caffeinate reference led me to look for Amphetamine, which in turn revealed the problem. Perhaps due to some errant menu bar clicking, I had activated Amphetamine, thus locking my display on. My confusion might stem from three factors. First, I forgot I had it installed. Second, I used Bartender to put the icon in its Hidden list, so it wasn’t displayed in the active bar. Third, I used the icon selection option to change the menu bar picture from a pill to a tea kettle—you know, drinking tea might keep you awake? I regret my decision, as I didn’t recognize what it was when I made that decision, seemingly years ago.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t just turn it off in the app—I had to quit the app, then toggle the active state to turn it off. Sadly, we humans can’t turn off our caffeinated mode to go to sleep.

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

Starting today, end-to-end encrypted RCS messaging begins rolling out in beta for iPhone users running iOS 26.5 with supported carriers and Android users on the latest version of Google Messages. When RCS messages are end-to-end encrypted, they can’t be read while they’re sent between devices. Users will know that a conversation is end-to-end encrypted when they see a new lock icon in their RCS chats. Encryption is on by default and will be automatically enabled over time for new and existing RCS conversations.

Apple first talked about adding this feature more than a year ago, and first beta tested it in a previous version of iOS. With today’s release of iOS 26.5, it’s now available—pending carrier support, of course.

I’m glad to see the company implementing this: while iMessages have always been encrypted, which Apple points out in its press release, security of our messages should be table stakes.

This news does mean encrypted RCS messaging will functionally be available in Messages on macOS as well, since texts and RCS messaging are already facilitated by your iPhone, as long as your phone is running 26.5 and it’s supported by your carrier and your account.

Updated at 2:51pm Eastern.

Go to the linked site.

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