Go to the podcast page.

Go to the podcast page.

There was big news from Apple’s boardroom last week. As you know, Tim Cook’s getting kicked upstairs and John Ternus is going to assume the mantle of Apple CEO. But that’s not the news I’m talking about. The other big news is that Johny Srouji is being named Chief Hardware Officer.

Nobody outside of those who follow Apple or the chip industry closely has ever heard of Srouji. (For that matter, they hadn’t heard of Ternus, either.) But this is not a minor executive promotion. The fact that Apple made the announcement simultaneously with Cook’s departure and Ternus’s elevation shows that. Srouji’s promotion—and more importantly, retention— is vitally important for Apple.

The importance of Apple silicon

Calling Srouji the “father of Apple silicon” doesn’t go quite far enough, but it’s a good start. Apple began using the phrase “Apple silicon” to refer to Macs running Apple-designed M-series processors, but the Apple silicon story goes all the way back to the 2010 launch of the first Apple-designed processor, the A4, which powered the iPhone 4 and the original iPad. Srouji led the team that designed the A4, and has led Apple’s chip efforts ever since.

Through the decade of the 2010s, it became clear that one of Apple’s enormous advantages in the smartphone market was that it designed its own processors. Because Apple creates its own chips for its own products, it’s able to make decisions about the specs and features of those chips that fit perfectly with the plan for the products they’re going to be used in. (Contrast this with companies that have to buy off-the-shelf chips from vendors like Intel and Qualcomm, where the chips are designed to appeal to a broad selection of clients. Every Apple chip is made for specific Apple products, and that’s it.)

Apple being able to dictate the features of its own chips might be an advantage enough, but it turns out that Apple’s chips were also faster than the competition. A lot faster. Every summer, Qualcomm would release a new chip that they would boast about, offering performance similar to iPhone chips. Then, in September, Apple would introduce a new iPhone powered by a chip that offered performance that would blow Qualcomm away. In the most dynamic and profitable tech market, the smartphone, Apple basically lapped the competition.

Next up, Apple used the iPad Pro as a testing ground to see if it could scale its phone-class processors to provide the kind of power that might drive a full-on computer. In 2018, Apple introduced an iPad Pro powered by the A12X processor, which scaled up the processor cores to create a much more powerful device—a hint of things to come. It followed that up with the 2020 introduction of an iPad Pro powered by the A12Z processor, which Apple explicitly boasted was more powerful than most PC laptops currently being sold.

In hindsight, that was one of Apple’s biggest tells ever. Are you getting it yet? Apple silicon is powerful enough to run full-on computers, not just iPads and iPhones! And with the release of the M1 later in 2020, the prophesy was fulfilled. Apple’s advantage on smartphones and tablets has become Apple’s advantage, well, everywhere. (Even in low-cost laptops, as it turns out.)

Keep Srouji happy!

This brings us back to the man in charge, Johny Srouji. Apple’s chip efforts have gotten a lot of notice in the industry. Key members of the team left Apple to create their own startup, which was in turn bought by archrival Qualcomm. Srouji is in his early 60s and may be considering one last big career move before retirement.

Amid all of that, Srouji’s longtime boss, Tim Cook, started planning his departure. One of Srouji’s peers at the Senior Vice President level, John Ternus, was going to be the new CEO—Srouji’s boss. I don’t know anything about the personal relationships between these people, but it’s human nature to react a bit negatively to the prospect of losing your longtime boss and having him replaced with someone you see as your peer. This transition, necessary though Cook feels it is, put Srouji’s standing at Apple at risk.

This is almost certainly the reason why Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reported in December that Srouji was considering leaving Apple. That report seemed like a real red alert, because—see above—Srouji is the leader of one of Apple’s strongest groups, providing it advantages across its entire product line.

Gurman’s report said that Srouji “recently told Cook that he is seriously considering leaving in the near future,” but it’s not hard to read between the lines and assume that, in a moment of change, Srouji was pondering how much Apple valued his contributions. Two days later, Srouji released a designed-to-leak memo to his staff, saying he didn’t plan on leaving anytime soon.

Here’s what obviously happened. Cook and Ternus, like everyone else, recognized Srouji’s importance to Apple and offered him a new role. And in this case, the role—becoming Apple’s Chief Hardware Officer—was one that seems to have satisfied Srouji. (He’s the first person to be in charge of that entire group since Bob Mansfield retired in 2012.) With Ternus becoming CEO, his entire hardware division has been handed to Srouji. It’s an enormous portion of the company, and it belongs to Srouji now.

Srouji now seems to have gotten what he wants. The next question is, how will Ternus’s former division respond to their new manager? Gurman reports that Srouji has a “hard-driving approach” and that the hardware division is in for a “cold shower.”

Look, different managers have different styles. Conflicts are inevitable. Srouji’s new division will need to adapt to him, and he’ll need to adapt to them. Ternus will no doubt be well aware of how the transition in his former division is going, and Srouji reports to Ternus. They’ll all need to work it out, and change can be difficult, but in the end, it can also be refreshing to be guided by some new perspectives.

The most important thing is that, in a moment of transition that could have had some brutal side effects, Apple has retained one of its top players. I’m looking forward to seeing what Johny Srouji will do with an even larger portion of Apple as his responsibility.

Go to the podcast page.

Monologue is for people who think faster than they type. It combines smart dictation with voice notes across Mac, iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch, so your spoken thoughts can become polished writing, meeting transcripts, summaries, tasks, and useful context for your tools.

For everyday writing, Monologue is a smart dictation app that works where you already write. On the Mac, it works anywhere you can type. On iPhone and iPad, it works as a keyboard inside the apps you already use. Speak naturally, and Monologue turns your voice into polished text for messages, emails, documents, notes, code, and more.

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Monologue Notes can connect to agents and tools through API, CLI, and MCP support, so a transcript can become the starting point for actual work. Ask your agent to pull your latest note and turn it into tasks, summarize a customer call, draft a follow-up email, or use a meeting transcript as context for a code change.

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When the AirTag first shipped five years ago, I glommed right onto writing about it. I already had a section in a book on security and privacy about using the Find My device feature, enabled for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches. I was keyed up to understand where AirTag fit in. Recently, surveying the field, I found a shocking number of Find My network-equipped products, from an inexpensive flashlight to a $3,500 ebike.

Within the Apple ecosystem, it’s worth looking at what’s now available for those of us trying not to lose our things by misplacing them, forgetting to take them with us, or having them stolen.¹ Because more hardware now has effectively unremovable Find My tracking technology, it may be a more effective theft deterrent or way to recover an absconded item. (I’ve got an extra suggestion about that, too.)

A distinct itemization

AirTag introduced a new category: items versus devices. A Find My device can reach the Internet and report its position, and can use a native app to see other stuff via Find My; a Find My item just broadcasts over Bluetooth to any nearby listening iPhone, iPad, or Mac.²

An AirTag lets you track whatever it is attached to or inside by relaying its signal through other Apple devices. This offers something akin to GPS-based tracking without the need for constant battery recharging, while also finding its location and updating it when indoors. GPS works anywhere with a clear line of sight outdoors, while Find My crowdsourcing requires at least one nearby Internet-connected Apple device to relay its current position.

The stuff we track is more likely to be lost inside than outside, I’d wager, with exceptions for stolen bicycles and cars. Or when you park your car in a vast lot and forget where it is. Find My items benefit from relaying through Apple hardware that uses a combination of Wi-Fi positioning, cell tower locations, and GPS and other satellite-positioning networks, as available.³

The short battery life for a GPS-based tracker hands an advantage to the Find My network. While GPS trackers have become progressively more efficient over the decades, they still need to be recharged frequently—every few days to a few weeks, depending on battery capacity and how often they report location. That’s because they typically have both satellite receivers and cellular modems: the GPS location is derived and then transmitted over the cellular network. Find My items typically last at least a year, after which their batteries need to be replaced or recharged.⁴

Apple announced Find My licensing to third parties alongside the AirTag release, and products appeared soon after. These were mostly trackers that cost less, had a slightly different form factor, weighed less, offered rechargeable batteries, or fit better in a wallet.

It took some time for more variety to enter the Find My item market, and I frankly lost track of the sheer diversity of what’s out there. With Find My now built into a wider array of products, you might want to stick a third-party item into something you own, or replace a device with one that has Find My support.

Getting lost in all the Find My items

I set out a few weeks ago to compile a list of all items with certified Find My. Friends, I thought it would number between 20 and 30 items. It started to become unmanageable, so I built a site—FindYourTag—both for my own reference and because why not share it? Reaching over 50 items, I started to get emails and social media replies asking, “Why didn’t you include product X?” Indeed! I didn’t know about product X, but now it’s in. The database now lists 73 devices,⁵ though some are close variations of a single product.⁶

Some of these products have the attribute of supporting two or three kinds of alarms or tracking: some let you pair to both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub; a few expensive items also have their own proprietary movement alarm, managed via an app.

Here’s what I’ve found.

If you want a wallet tracker, you have a lot of choices. Apple has chosen to offer a single AirTag model. Baffling, because why not tap into the wallet-sized market? Apple’s absence is good news for third parties, because 14 different companies make a total of 18 wallet-insertable cards.

They’re all thin, though some are thinner than others. About half are rechargeable, though most of those require a unique magnetically coupled adapter that you are sure to lose unless you have a special place you keep odd adapters. Other cards advertise long battery life (two to three years) and have a discount program on replacing after that point if you return the battery for recycling.

If you’d prefer a wallet with built-in tracking, instead of a card you insert—well, there are eight of those, including the Nomad Leather Mag Wallet (Jason has one) that can hold up to four credit cards, and attaches via MagSafe to your iPhone.

Apple does offer a MagSafe-attached wallet, the FineWoven Wallet with MagSafe (holds up to three cards), but it features a Find My “lite” variant Apple doesn’t license: it only reports the last known location relative to the paired iPhone using Bluetooth via Find My—it lacks the crucial crowdsourcing component.

Stuff you probably will leave behind accidentally. There’s a whole shaggy category of things that you have left behind and aren’t a Kindle that you wished you were alerted about leaving behind (a Find My feature) or could track later. This includes:

• Power adapter: Finding out that Twelve South has a line of four different PlugBug models with Find My built in made me wonder why Apple doesn’t include Find My as a default feature on its adapters? The matrix of the four models is you can choose 50 watts and two USB-C jacks or 120 W and four USB-C jacks; either wattage charger can be purchased in a travel edition, which comes with the full array of adapters for worldwide plugging in.

• Keys: The Ekster Finder Tag ($39) is a key-holding clip with the Find My item in the middle.

• Glasses case: Satechi has the right idea here with its FindAll Glasses Case ($50). I left my distance glasses somewhere in the greater Boston area in March, and, wow, is replacing your glasses with prescription, transition lenses expensive. Oof. Ouch. Get me a Satechi, and send it back through time! (Did I mention they’re vegan, too?)

• Flashlight: Cheap flashlights are now absurdly bright—probably FAA-rules-violatingly bright if pointed upward—but how many flashlights have you lost? The $25 Footnote FlashFinder is compact, recharges via USB-C, and has Find My.

• Camera: Insta360 makes a lot of different camera models. On two of them, the GO 3S ($295) and GO Ultra ($450) are both tiny, making them prone to loss, and trackable.

The expensive stuff that you would highly regret having stolen and being untrackable. You can add a Find My tag in a lot of ways to a bike or scooter, but they typically have to be located in some external location that a thief could remove or cover with foil, blocking the signal. For instance, I have a Knog Scout ($65) which uses a special drive⁷ on the screws you use to attach it to the standard water-bottle mount holes found on most bikes.

But wouldn’t it be better if you had Find My as part of the vehicle, making it effectively unremovable without destroying the bike or scooter? Several manufacturers agree.⁸ You can find Apollo, Segway, Specialized, and Velotric models with just that.⁹ For those serious about measuring their performance, you can even get a 4iii powermeter (the Precision 3+ Powermeter, starts at $335, several models) with integral Find My.

For further reading

I am a big fan of Find My for the obvious reason that it’s let me keep track of my stuff over the last several years. That journey includes pupping part of a Take Control book about security and privacy that had swollen with tracking facts into separate volume: Take Control of Find My and AirTags. If you’ve ever had a question about setting up tracking of your own stuff, locating people, or using the Find My apps, I have so many answers for you.

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

In non-shocking news, Tim Cook and John Ternus are movin’ on up.

From Tim to Ternus

Well, as you surely already know, Apple announced on Monday that Tim Cook would be transitioning to the role of executive chairman and John Ternus would be taking over the CEO spot come September 1st. (Sorry, Tony Fadell!)

It’s now Friday, so naturally, all the good jokes about this have been taken. While Tim Cook is not at all an unattractive man, experts have estimated that this move increases Apple’s handsomeness quotient by at least 25%, giving it a strategic advantage against the competition that may help offset the company’s late response to AI.

I said all the good jokes were already taken. I already said that.

Seemingly still reeling from Steve Jobs’ early moves to cancel OpenDoc and the Newton thirty years ago, many in the Apple community have been wondering about Ternus’s views on such products as the Apple TV and Vision Pro. Short story, he wants to make the Apple TV better, and he thinks the Vision Pro is fun. Next, we’ll look at his turn-ons and turn-offs and what he considers “the perfect date.”

To fill the void left by Ternus’s promotion, the company announced that Johny Srouji would be taking over as chief hardware officer, thereby largely alleviating any concerns of him getting poached for an AI position in another company. To date, there have been no concerns that he would be poached in a white wine sauce with garlic, as delicious as that sounds.

Seems to be a lot of movement going on at Apple, which may continue when Ternus takes over in September. As Ternus is reportedly a big fan of the chicken Caesar wrap at Caffè Macs, people are eyeing Gary, the line chef in charge of wraps, for a possible big promotion as well.

I SAID ALL OF THE GOOD JOKES WERE TAKEN.

Action and reaction

Ah, it seems like only earlier this year that both Cook and Ternus were telling us how they both loved their current jobs and any discussion of an executive transition was, ha-ha, just sooo unnecessary at this point, I mean, c’mon, what are you even talking about, get out of here you kooks. Oh! It seems that way because it actually was just earlier this year.

In a testament to Apple’s ability to grease the skids, reaction to this change has been less one of surprise and concern than an outpouring of respect for the job that Tim Cook has done and excitement about what a Ternus tenure as CEO could bring. Plus, it’s not like Cook is leaving. If Ternus loses the Post-It note with the password for the massive checking account, he can just sheepishly walk down the hall to get it from Cook.

Reaction from Cook’s peers, investors and political figures was all congratulatory. And then, of course, one person made it all about himself. Three guesses who, and the first two don’t count. Sadly, it’s also likely that Apple’s relationship with that person will still remain just as cozy as it’s been for the last 16 months.

An exaggeration is a very poor way to say “hello.”

If you are keeping track of paraphrasings of slightly obscure Star Trek quotes in this column, please update your score sheet.

Apple would like to assure everyone that despite this executive change, big things are in the pipeline, and it’s gonna be smooth sailing for the company. I’m not sure exactly who was worried about it, but if you were, just relax, they got this.

Still, they didn’t need to go overboard.

“Apple Teases ‘Incredible Road Map Ahead'”

“I’m not exaggerating when I say this is the most exciting time to be building products and services at Apple in my entire career,” said Ternus.

OK. Easy, dude.

That is the kind of thing you say, sure. You don’t come in and go “I’m not really sure what we’re gonna do next. Maybe door locks or something? If you’ve got a good idea, maybe shoot me an email.” But is anything the company is working on right now going to be more important than the iPhone? The iPhone was a once-in-a-generation product, and Ternus was at Apple while it was developed. It’s possible the company’s got something more exciting, it’s just not very likely.

“AI is going to create almost unlimited potential,” said Ternus.

That is not helping.

Anyway, congrats to Tim Cook, who now gets to spend more time with his favorite president ever, and welcome to the CEO-ship, John Ternus. As they say in the funny books, hope you survive the experience.

Over the years we’ve added a bunch of new members-only features to the site. Our weekly podcast has proven to be very popular, so much so that it made me realize that a lot of members are perhaps a bit more inclined to consume podcasts than reading what we write with their eyeballs.

As a result, I’ve built a new “Six Colors Audio Newsletter” podcast feed. Using the same logic as our regular members-only email newsletter, it posts an episode any day there’s at least one full story on the site. Any day we’ve got stuff on the site, a new Audio Newsletter episode drops, complete with introduction and chapter markers per story. Here’s a link to a sample episode.

The Audio Newsletter uses a high-quality text-to-speech engine, so it’s not a human reader, but I’m surprised at how good it is. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking the script to make the output better, including alternating two different high-quality voices, using additional voices for lengthy quotes from other sources, calling out footnotes explicitly, and even switching to a “read every character” mode when stuff is posted in code font, which happens frequently in Help Me, Glenn! columns. And the refining of the script continues!

If you like reading our words with your eyes, thank you. But since I began quietly experimenting with this automated read-it-to-you podcast, I have heard from numerous members who say they just don’t have the time to read everything we write, but are happy to have integrated this podcast into their listening queue. I hope it’s useful for a subset of the audience.

If you’re a member, you can subscribe on your Memberful page.

And if you’re not yet a member, here’s a plug: when you join you don’t just support Six Colors, you get access to a weekly exclusive podcast with Dan and me, John Moltz’s This Week in Apple column, Dan’s monthly Back Page column, a full-content newsletter if you’d prefer to read the site that way, the new full-content Audio Newsletter, and access to a really good Discord community. It’s a lot!

And regardless of your membership status, thank you for reading this site. I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for eleven and a half years, but here we are.

Outside of friendly card games, I’m not a gambler and certainly not someone who wagers on sports. (If you take nothing else away from this article, “Never bet on anything that can talk” is a good piece of advice for anyone to live by.) I don’t begrudge your gambling fix if that’s where you find some joy in life’s slog, but I don’t want it consuming precious screen real estate when all I want to do is check a baseball score.

At some point, ESPN apparently updated its iPhone app, as the odds block no longer appears in the Scores tab, and there’s no mention of betting in the app’s preferences. If ESPN truly went in and fixed that part of the app, then kudos — but it hasn’t stopped me from exploring other alternatives to following my favorite sports, starting with Apple’s very own Sports app.

Apple released the Sports app a little more than two years ago, launching with the sports in season at the time and steadily adding more leagues and teams over time. These days, you can follow most of the same things in Apple Sports that you can via ESPN. Even better from my perspective, you can banish any betting info should you not wish to see it. In the settings of Apple’s app, there’s a toggle to hide betting odds.

I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks taking a second look at Apple Sports to see if the app’s improved any since its 2024 launch. And rather than kick ESPN to the curb, I’ve kept using this old, familiar score checker, comparing what it offers to Apple’s effort. My goal: find out which app is the better fit for my fandom and make it my permanent app of choice for staying on top of sports from my iPhone.

ESPN vs Apple Sports: Customization

Both the ESPN and Apple Sports apps place a premium on letting you follow your favorite teams and sports, though they take very different approaches to how those favorites are displayed. In ESPN’s case, your favorite teams appear at the top of the top of Scores tab, followed by the leagues those teams play in. The rest of the Scores tab includes other sports, with ESPN highlighting the biggest news of the day — or at least the news related to sports it has the broadcast rights to — in the app’s Home tab.

In contrast, Apple’s Sports app is all about your favorites. Nothing appears on the Home screen unless you put it there. That goes for teams as well as leagues, which can require a little extra work on your part.

Say your favorite team is the Detroit Tigers — and why not? Thomas Magnum rooted for them. Once you mark the Tigers as a favorite, all their games will wind up in your Sports feed… but if you want other Major League Baseball scores to show up, you’re going to have to designate MLB as a favorite, too. It seems like that should be self-evident — who follows a team in a vacuum? — but as far as hoops to jump through, it’s a relatively minimal one.

I’m torn as to which approach I prefer, though there’s a lot to be said for the stripped-back style of Apple Sports. If I’m just interested in finding out what the teams I follow are up to, Apple provides me with that. I think that gives Sports the edge over ESPN, even if it’s a slight one.

That said, sometimes it’s good to be aware of what’s happening beyond your silo of interest. If an NBA game broke out in my kitchen, I’d want to know why LeBron James wasn’t chipping in his share of the mortgage, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate seeing the NBA playoff results in the ESPN app, if for no other reason than to feel slightly more informed about the wider world. I can find those results in Apple Sports — just swipe right from the Home screen, tap on NBA and voila — but as with setting up favorites, it’s an extra step or two compared to ESPN.

I should also note that ESPN’s list of sports and leagues to track is a little more extensive than what Apple offers, even after two years of expansion on Apple’s part. I’m a fan of the Oakland Roots, a soccer team that plies its trade in the second-tier USL. I can include the Roots among my favorites in ESPN’s app, but not Apple’s. Similarly, the US Women’s National Team is MIA from Apple Sports, though presumably that changes when the 2027 World Cup gets closer. All of this is more of a Me Problem, but I’m the guy trying to find a sports app that best suits his needs.

ESPN vs Apple Sports: Information

Sometimes I want to know more than just the score — I want some sense of how the game went. Both ESPN and Apple Sports let you tap on a particular game to get the who, what and how much, though that information gets displayed in different ways.

Let’s look at an in-progress event using a Tigers-Brewers game as our point of comparison. Both apps give you the basics — the score, the inning, who’s pitching and who’s batting, plus an inning-by-inning line score. But even that info comes across in different ways.

Apple Sports seems to take a backward approach, putting the name of the batter and pitcher above the logos for their respective teams; in ESPN’s view, the logo appears next to the scores, making it much easier to see who’s winning and losing at a glance.

ESPN also offers a more expansive view when presenting a lot of the same information you see in Apple’s app. The pitcher and batter appear, but you also get images, including a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of balls and strikes in ESPN’s default view. You can also see who’s on base in the ESPN app.

Weirdly, Apple believes that team stats showing the number of hits, strikeouts, walks and more should be the key data you see first. If you want team box scores, you’ve got to scroll down. That information is easier to access with ESPN.

Apple’s approach to including details about baseball games makes no sense to me as someone who’s followed the sport for most of my life. It gives the impression that no one employed by Apple has spent much time poring over box scores in the morning paper, and that Apple decided to shoehorn baseball into a template designed for a different sport.

Apple continues to shortchange fans once the game ends, at least when it comes to baseball finals. If you want to find out who the winning and losing pitchers were, you’ll have to scroll down to the box scores in the Sports app. That information appears prominently in ESPN’s end-of-game report.

In fairness to Apple Sports, other end-of-game reports are a little better organized. A soccer box score at least shows me who scored, whether I’m looking in Apple’s app or on ESPN. With ESPN, I do get a written match report, though.

ESPN vs. Apple Sports: Extras

As you might expect, ESPN’s app offers a lot more than just scores, with news articles, video highlights and direct access to anything streaming through ESPN. That’s simply a non-starter for Apple, just as you wouldn’t be able to buy an iPhone or a MacBook Neo directly from Stephen A. Smith.

ESPN does a better job listing the channels where you can find broadcasts of games. Checking ESPN’s Premier League scoreboard, for example, I can see which matches are streaming on Peacock compared to which ones are on cable TV. If you want to find that info on Apple’s Sports app, you’ve got to drill down into the actual entry for the game.

However, in Apple Sports, you can jump to other apps that are streaming those games — something ESPN doesn’t offer for non-ESPN telecasts. So with Apple Sports, it’s ultimately easier to tune in on the action — unless, of course, we’re talking about the live sports Netflix is starting to feature more prominently.

ESPN vs. Apple Sports: Verdict

The ESPN vs. Apple Sports debate may be one of those instances where you wish you could pick and choose the best elements from either app to produce the ultimate score checker. Take the depth of ESPN’s information and the more sensible box scores and combine that with Apple’s customization features, and you’d really be on to something.

After giving both apps a try, I’m not sure I’m ready to abandon the Worldwide Leader in Sports, especially now that the ill-considered betting features that had me ready to dump ESPN seem to have been scrapped. But I’m keeping Apple Sports on my iPhone just in case, because in an age where sports gambling is everywhere, I know the value of hedging my bets.

Go to the podcast page.

As a part of the process of reviewing macOS Tahoe, I stopped using my longtime launcher LaunchBar and forced myself to use Apple’s new and improved version of Spotlight.

The surprising thing is, I never went back to LaunchBar. Spotlight in Tahoe was responsive, well integrated, and finally supplied me with the OS-native clipboard history feature I’ve wanted for years. While there were a few features from LaunchBar I missed—most notably, the ability to bring up an app in the launcher window and then drag a file onto it from the Finder—I was able to adapt quickly.

My friend Dr. Drang gave Spotlight in Tahoe a go recently and had a much worse experience, most notably reporting that it was terribly slow. He quickly retreated to LaunchBar (and, for clipboard history, Keyboard Maestro).

I have to agree with Dr. Drang here: I don’t know when, and I don’t know why, but over the last few months, as macOS Tahoe has gone from 26.3 to 26.4 to 26.5 beta, Spotlight has gotten progressively worse. It’s sometimes incredibly slow, making me wait to launch an app. Sometimes it misses entire categories of items. (I frequently launch items saved in my Safari favorites, and on several occasions, Spotlight just refused to show any of them.)

Also, my months of using Spotlight revealed another weakness: It’s just not as good as LaunchBar is at intuiting which items are more important to me. In Spotlight, if I type home and accidentally select an app like HomeControl or HomeBot instead of the regular old Home app, I am then prompted to launch that other app, seemingly forever. In LaunchBar, not only does it seem to recognize that the app I’ve launched hundreds of times is more likely to be my choice than the app I’ve launched once or twice, but LaunchBar will also let the user define a text shortcut that is hardwired to a particular item.

Spotlight in Tahoe will let you define text shortcuts, which it calls “Quick Keys”—but only for Actions, one particular class of item. Why that functionality isn’t available for all items is completely beyond me. But the result is that I end up launching the wrong thing, and I have no real recourse except to try to remember to launch the right thing again and again until it figures it out.

(A sad admission: On several occasions, I have renamed bookmarks and even deleted some installed apps just to stop Spotlight from recommending the wrong thing.)

In any event, Dr. Drang reminded me that there’s an easy solution to my quibbles about Spotlight: Just go back to LaunchBar.

One reason I had been willing to stop using LaunchBar was that it had been increasingly unstable for me, indexing files slowly after startup, failing to find recent changes, and throwing indexing errors. It also hadn’t been updated very much recently, making me wonder if the developer was more interested in its app Little Snitch and had put LaunchBar in maintenance mode. Fortunately, there was a substantial update in March, so maybe there’s life left in the ol’ girl after all.

So, for now, my dalliance with Spotlight is over, and I’ve returned to the familiar floating launcher window of LaunchBar. However, I’m going to keep an eye on Spotlight. If Apple can make it faster, more reliable, and a bit more customizable in macOS 27, it might be on to something.

Go to the podcast page.

While I love dogs and seek permission to pet from the owner of nearly every dog I encounter, I have gone cold on new email apps after decades of losing my greatest loves.

I can’t remember which horrible mainframe program I used first, in the 1980s, but pine—developed at nearby University of Washington—was a standby in my early Unix-plus-Internet days. I adopted Eudora as soon as I found it and used it for many, many years because it only offered text-based email—no HTML! When it petered out around 2002, Mailsmith arose from Bare Bones, with the same text-only front end. Despite friend Rich Siegel and other developers keeping it alive long after its commercial utility had ended, I eventually shifted to Postbox in 2019. Guess what happened in 2024.²

Thus did I approach the relatively newly released MailMaven version 1 with some fear, even as I smoothed its fur, patted its back, and said, “Good mail app! Good mail app!” I’m happy to say that MailMaven gave me the puppy experience: I’m so excited to meet it and get to know it, and I’ll be even more so as it calms down and matures, and I get to live alongside it for what I hope is a long time.

MailMaven can be a good pal to a casual user, someone who wants something better than a Web app, like Gmail, and might have multiple email accounts. It’s friendlier and easier in its default setup than Apple’s Mail—less frustrating and more customizable, but you don’t have to make any substantial tweaks to start using it.

For the true mail nerd, of which I number myself, MailMaven could become your best friend. It has a cornucopia of options that let you wrap MailMaven around your particular needs. And we’re only at version 1.0.

It’s here I should note that I have no financial interest in MailMaven’s success, but I did edit the Take Control of MailMaven book, written by publisher Joe Kissell, who has advised SmallCubed, the developer, and also wrote the regular user manual.³ This was in my paid capacity as executive editor at Take Control Books.

During the late development process and early 1.0 bug-fixing release schedule, I worked with the app quite a lot, reported a number of issues (which were fixed), and had planned to transition to MailMaven last fall. I wound up holding off—part of that was on me, and part on them. I’m glad I waited, because I can give the app a clean look after solving my problems and after the developers have given themselves a good shake and reached release 1.0.14.

Think outside the mailbox

MailMaven emerged, like V’ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, from what was originally SmallCubed’s MailSuite, a series of components to improve Apple’s Mail for macOS.⁴ When Apple changed its plug-in architecture, the folks at Small Cubed set out to build the mail client they were trying to tweak Mail to be.

You can tell! So many of the frustrations and non-configurable parts of Mail are easily dealt with in MailMaven. And they’ve added sophisticated rule-based processing and a host of other features that came over in part or in whole from their previous add-ons.

This isn’t a copy of Mail, though—neither for copyright nor look-and-feel purposes. MailMaven has its own nature, which I would describe as colorful. It’s not garish, but you wouldn’t accuse the developers of working with a bland palette. They use color as ably and extensively as they do interface design elements. You can change nearly everything related to color, so you’re not limited to the defaults. This is true in many ways throughout the interface.

Like nearly all email clients, MailMaven structures itself around accounts, mailboxes, messages, and threads. Since this is how you set up, store, and read email, that makes sense. By default, the accounts sidebar shows your email accounts, with mailboxes organized beneath each. With a mailbox selected, you see messages in the main view. It uses some elaborate arcs to show you the connections among threaded messages, a step up (if not a step too far for some potential users) from the low-key or hard-to-follow threading in many other apps.

From there, however, I feel like we move into new territory. That account/mailbox view is just one option. The sidebar has four others:

• Favorites: You can favorite an account or individual mailboxes. You can then rename the entry within favorites without renaming the account or mailbox!
• Smart Mailboxes: Familiar from Mail and many other kinds of apps, smart mailboxes show the results of search criteria you set up.

• Tag Mailboxes: Perhaps unique to MailMaven, you can apply tags in many kinds of ways, and then show matches. It’s like a subcategory of a smart mailbox, but one derived from how you have tagged messages. (You can also skip this entirely.)
• Review Mailboxes: This, to me, is a winning feature if it fits how you work. It’s kind of the ultimate way to mark messages you don’t want to file but don’t want clogging up your inbox. You can mark a message as something you want to review tomorrow, on a particular date, or that you expect a reply to, among other variants.

Tags deserve even more explanation, even though I haven’t started using them yet! A number of non-email apps offer forms of tagging that let you cut across other kinds of organization. MailMaven might have the most sophisticated version available. Tags aren’t just metadata—they’re almost supradata? Data that sits above metadata as an organizational scheme.

Without turning this review into a book, I’ll note three important aspects about tags:

• You can set them manually.
• Tags can be keywords, projects (another grouping mechanism), an importance ranking (lowest to highest, 1 to 5), a review date, a background color (see above), freeform notes, an alternative subject line that overrides the original subject, or flag icons.
• They can be used in rules and set by rules. So you can have a rule that says, “Every time I send email to unsubscribe—check the email address, the contents of the message, and so on—tag this message with the ‘unsubscribed’ keyword.” Or, “Every message that has the text ‘Six Colors’ in it should be tagged as high importance, assigned to my ‘Six Colors’ project [another grouping mechanism!], and marked for review.”

Note just above that I mentioned a rule for your outbox: that’s right—you can trigger rules before and after sending messages. You can write a rule that prompts you to make sure you attached a file promised in the email! Or ones that file outgone messages in folders corresponding to the same topics in which you file inbound ones—or that delete certain messages after sending.

You can see that MailMaven has a lot of automation, processing, grouping, and review concepts at its heart. I would argue that if none of that sounds appealing, like you had an “oh, thank goodness!” reaction to the above, I’m not sure MailMaven’s general functionality will overwhelm you enough compared to email apps already out on the market—not Mail, particularly, but others.

However, you might still give it a spin just because it’s fun and easy to use.

My smart path to becoming a maven on mail

Apparently, I have 700,000 stored emails. Do I need all these? Certainly not. Am I going to spend a sizable amount of time pruning these by hand? Can an algorithm help? It already did, dropping 100,000s of duplicates and old automated messages of no value.

When I first attempted to switchover to MailMaven, I was stymied. I don’t need that much email actively online, but I don’t want to lose access to it or the ability to search my archives. MailMaven offers effective import options, so it wasn’t hard to start importing mailboxes. The app can import the standard mbox format, as well as individual email messages in the also standard eml and emlx formats. But it looked like we might be talking several days, if not weeks, of uninterrupted import action. Seemed apt to fail due to entropy, and then I’d have to figure out what was left to do.

So I put this off for a while.⁵ A couple of weeks ago, I strategized: what if I dumped old email into a searchable database that wasn’t part of an email app? With a little heavy lifting, I imported everything, with a lot of parsing, from the early 1990s to the present.⁶ I have this database update nightly with the last 24 hours of filed email.

I then trimmed the email to import into MailMaven to just a year’s worth and imported only the folder structure from that period—about 18,000 emails—which was ready to go in minutes. MailMaven can’t import folders of mailboxes, but it can import the contents of multiple mailboxes at once. I re-created folders, then imported the mailboxes for them.⁷

Because I’d either used a series of modestly featured email apps or I’d used a modicum of features in more heavily built-out programs, the rest of my migration involved just two things:

• Replicating a filtering rule, so that sales receipts from book sales don’t clog my inbox, but are properly filed. That took a minute or so.
• Figuring out which favorites I wanted to put in the Favorites sidebar. That took longer.

With only a few dozen mailboxes organized thematically, I quickly figured out which dozen or so I had manually filed emails into. I am absolutely sure I could make better use over time of keystrokes and keystroke rules. The former requires learning and training my muscle memory; the latter means figuring out what I do repetitively, writing a rule, and then assigning a keystroke. Am I reading an email from Jason Snell, then always filing it in my Six Colors mailbox? I could assign a keystroke! Rules can be just as complex as those for incoming and outgoing email.

Yo, dog, what’s the bottom line?

I like MailMaven quite a lot. And each day I use it, I tweak something that makes me like it more. The developers fixed a synchronization bug that seemed entirely to affect my workflow just after I installed 1.0.12. They suggested I get on the beta track—which you can enable in the app—and the next release, 1.0.13, solved the problem. (In brief: I read email on two Macs, but only filed on one. An automated rule, mentioned above, redirects book receipts. However, it failed to mark messages as synchronized, so my “reading” Mac removed them from its inbox after retrieval. Receipts would still pile up even though they had already been deleted from the server inbox. It works great now.)

SmallCubed offers MailMaven for a flat fee of $75 for perpetual use of the version you purchase, including a year of updates and tech support. After a year, you can pay $75 (at current pricing) to renew the license to receive further updates and support, or you can continue indefinitely to use the latest version included in your original year of updates.

Is $75 a year too much? (Or $75 for the first year, and then when you are annoyed enough to pay for another year?) Given how much I use email, and how much of an improvement MailMaven is over Mail, not to me.⁸ You can try MailMaven free for 15 days.

The bigger question is the issue I mentioned at the outset. How long will MailMaven abide? It’s a small, scrappy company that persisted past Apple pulling the rug out from under plug-ins. It’s not a startup, and they invested years to get to this point.

But the market is cruel. Will MailMaven be around in six months, a year, five years—dare I hope for 10 or 20? Having developed a better pathway for migration for my archives, it might be that I have to think of MailMaven as a foster dog, rather than me providing a forever home.

Nonetheless, I open my heart as I do to all household animals, and recommend MailMaven as something you try to see if it fits you now, and hope that it grows with us all.

Tim Cook didn’t get to be a part of a “thoughtful, long-term succession plan” in 2011. After stepping in for Steve Jobs multiple times during the Apple co-founder’s fight with cancer, Cook became CEO, and Jobs became executive chairman just 43 days before Jobs died. Apple didn’t dictate the executive transition. Jobs’s cancer did.

I get the sense that Cook wanted to give his own successor the thoughtful, long-term plan that Jobs couldn’t give to him. Nearly two years ago, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggested that Ternus could be Cook’s planned successor. By the time the Financial Times reported that Ternus was likely to succeed Cook last November, it was clear things were already headed in that direction. I doubt there was a single person at the March unveiling of the MacBook Neo who didn’t know that John Ternus, who spoke to the crowd, was likely to be Apple’s next CEO.

Tim Cook knows he can’t stay at Apple forever. The longer he lengthened his tenure as CEO, the shorter he risked making the transitional period. I’d actually be surprised if Cook isn’t in the executive chairmanship for a lot longer than people expect. I don’t think he’s ready to put Apple in the rearview—but I do think he’s trying to get the timing on this exactly right.

And here it is: Cook will give Ternus the CEO job in a little over four months. (Wall Street has ten days to digest that news before Apple reports its latest financial results.) Then Cook will become Apple’s executive chairman, able to provide advice and support to his successor while presumably allowing him to forge his own path. Ternus gets a runway, mentorship, and a trusted adviser at a particularly stressful moment. I’m sure Cook wishes he’d been able to talk to Steve Jobs during his first year as CEO.

Oh, and Cook will apparently be taking one very specific job with him to the boardroom, according to the press release:

Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.

It doesn’t take a magnifying glass to read between those lines. Cook is keeping one of the stickiest jobs he’s had to do the last decade for himself, for now: connecting with the representatives of various governments in ways that advantage Apple, whether that’s easing China’s worries about Apple’s focus on diversifying its supply chain, or convincing the Trump administration that Apple is investing in the U.S. while also needing tariff relief. Not only does Cook have the personal connections there, but it’s a messy business that perhaps Ternus is best insulated from—for now.

Tim Cook’s legacy

There’s going to be ample time to ponder the highs and lows of the Tim Cook era at Apple. The company is impossibly larger than the one Cook took over from Jobs. The explosive growth of the iPhone, especially from 2014 on, has changed the fundamentals of the company. When iPhone growth finally slowed, Cook swapped in a growing wearables business (led by what I assume is the product Cook is most proud of, the Apple Watch) and a dramatically growing set of subscription services. Those growth lines keep Wall Street happy.

When you’re the CEO, you’re the CEO of the whole company—but I do believe that CEOs come to the job with their own strengths, which reflect on their priorities as CEO. Cook’s focus on efficiency, owing to his background in operations, also served Apple well during this period. Realizing that product margins increase over time, he allowed Apple to sell iPhones at lower prices by keeping older models on sale for much longer.

Cook’s priorities helped make Apple a manufacturing powerhouse, capable of building products nobody else could—at least, until Apple showed the way. But as Patrick McGee so capably showed in his book Apple in China, Apple was also training up China on being a tech manufacturing powerhouse. Between that and Cook’s policy of engaging with the Chinese in order to gain access to the lucrative and growing Chinese market, Cook reaped benefits with the side effect of empowering a global competitor and not engaging with a government whose core principles do not fit with Apple’s.

The same goes for the United States, where Cook has managed to reduce the impact of tariffs by playing nice with the administration ¹, making some made-in-the-USA servers and boasting about its investments in American manufacturing while downplaying its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

John Ternus’s opportunity

For John Ternus, who’s been working at Apple for half his life, to say that this is a huge opportunity is an understatement. Congratulations, dude, here’s the keys to one of the world’s most important and valuable corporations. Don’t break it.

But Ternus’s arrival in the CEO’s office isn’t just an opportunity for him. It’s an opportunity for Apple. Every time a new person takes over, whether it’s in the role of CEO or even just a middle manager, there’s an opportunity for change. Even if you worked for the old boss, once you’re the new boss, you have the opportunity to turn the page. It’s a lot harder for someone to reverse themselves on a decision they made than it is for someone new to come in and see the opportunity to move forward. (Cook re-instituted an employee donation-matching program when he took over from Jobs, just as one small example.)

In spite of its success, or perhaps because of it, Apple has been a company in stasis for 15 or 20 years. When everything’s going great, and all the executives just stick around no matter how rich they get on stock options, it’s really hard to make changes. The arrival of any new person in charge, not just John Ternus in particular, is an opportunity to shake things up. New leaders have the freedom to make their mark. That could be good for Apple.

I’m also struck by the fact that John Ternus comes from a product-focused background. All in all, it was probably for the best that Tim Cook was as different in skill set from Steve Jobs as possible, because that was an impossibly hard act to follow. Cook, as an operations guy, got to put his faith in the product teams that were executing and guided them at a very high level. I think it would’ve been a disaster if Apple’s first post-Jobs CEO had been trying to cosplay as Steve. Cook couldn’t pull off wearing that turtleneck.

But it’s been 15 years, and maybe it’s a good thing for Apple to get a CEO who’s closer to the metal? Ternus knows the ins and outs of product development at a different level than Cook ever could. Given that Apple is, at its heart, a company that makes physical products and sells them, having someone who has spent decades at Apple working on those products feels like an opportunity for a positive change.

The importance of keeping Johny Srouji

As a part of Monday’s moves, Johny Srouji has been named Chief Hardware Officer, reporting to Ternus. This is a new C-suite position for Srouji, previously the senior VP of hardware technologies.

It’s hard to see this move and not consider Bloomberg’s report back in December that Srouji “recently told Cook that he is seriously considering leaving in the near future,” a report defused by Srouji two days later.

Srouji is the father of Apple silicon, and Apple’s chip efforts are one of the company’s greatest assets. When word of Srouji’s potential exit broke, it only underscored to me just how vital Srouji and his team are to Apple. It also struck me that perhaps this was evidence that Apple was negotiating with Srouji in order to retain him, during a period when one of his peers—Ternus—was about to be made his boss.

The moment your boss of more than a decade decides to hang it up seems like a pretty good time to take stock and consider what your own next move might be. If you’re Srouji, you undoubtedly have all sorts of different opportunities out there. Having a fellow SVP like Ternus be promoted over you also has to sting a little bit, even if you didn’t especially want the top job.

You need to retain key employees, and there aren’t many people more key at Apple than Johny Srouji. No matter how it went down, here’s the result: Srouji gets a C-suite title, and he takes over Ternus’s hardware role. Ternus’s lieutenant Tom Marieb is reportedly taking his slot and reporting to Srouji. This is textbook retention, and Apple has to be relieved that Srouji is staying on.

Still, these won’t be the last changes. With Cook on his way upstairs to the boardroom, I would expect many other long-tenured Apple executives to redefine their positions or even depart entirely. Keep in mind, most of these people have been working intensely for decades and have made enough money to retire in style. I have no doubt they do it because they love it, but once the boss changes and some of your old colleagues step away, it’s not the same, is it? It’s a cascading wave of change that is probably going to continue at Apple for some time.

Managing that change, and making it for the better, will be one of John Ternus’s first jobs. At least he’ll have Tim Cook to lean on for advice.

Go to the podcast page.

Apple announced that Tim Cook will become executive chairman of Apple’s board of directors and John Ternus, senior vice president of Hardware Engineering, will become Apple’s next chief executive officer effective on September 1, 2026. The transition, which was approved unanimously by the Board of Directors, follows a thoughtful, long-term succession planning process.

Like so much with Apple these days, the details of this “thoughtful, long-term succession planning process” have been broken by the press, primarily Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, so when the actual event occurs it’s not a surprise. Well, dropping it on April 20, ten days before Apple’s next quarterly results, is a bit of a surprise—but really, just the timing. Not the details, all of which were widely anticipated.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Every Apple device has opinions about when it should make noise. Some of those opinions are reasonable; others will surprise you at 2 a.m.! If you’ve ever wondered why your iPhone alarm blared right through Silent mode, or why your Mac doesn’t have a Silent mode at all, here’s the breakdown.

Everything that makes noise

Before telling you how to suppress, silence, or control audio output, let’s first look at what might provoke a sound and which settings control whether it’s produced. Then I’ll dig into Silent mode and other volume-control options.

Here’s what can trigger audible alerts across your Apple devices, and what controls each:

• Notification sounds: Sounds associated with notifications are governed by both Focus modes and Silent mode. You configure which apps can use sound in Settings: Notifications, either globally or on a per-app basis. Settings: Focus: Focus mode lets you choose when to suppress these sounds when that mode is active.
• Sound effects: System feedback sounds are subject to Focus mode choices on an iPhone or iPad, and to the Alert volume slider on a Mac. Silent mode applies to them on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch.
• Ringtones: For phone and FaceTime calls, both Focus modes and Silent mode will suppress ringtones.
• Alarms: Alarms are a wild card. On an iPhone or iPad, you can’t silence them with suppression settings—neither Silent mode nor a Focus mode mutes an alarm. On an Apple Watch, however, Silent mode keeps alarms, well, silent unless you’ve enabled the breakthrough option, discussed below. On a Mac, the alarm sound is controlled by the Alert volume.
• Timers: Timers respect Silent mode on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch. On Mac, they follow Alert volume.
• Emergency alerts (iPhone only): Government-originating messages, like AMBER Alerts and public safety notifications, ignore both Focus modes and Silent mode on an iPhone. Apple also offers “Enhanced Safety Alerts” for things like imminent earthquakes, though Apple’s documentation is conspicuously silent on whether these override your audio settings. (Educated guess: yes.)
• Find My’s Play Sound: If you or someone else triggers Play Sound in Find My for a device, that device always plays the Find My sound. It’s designed to help you find a lost device, so Apple bypasses all silencing. It can also help you find a device taken from you, or freak out the taker.

What the so-called Silent mode actually does

Silent mode is available on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. When you enable it, Silent mode suppresses ringtones, alerts, and system sounds.¹ Silent mode doesn’t disable the audio alarms, timers, music, or video audio—they all play right through it. So do Find My’s Play Sound, emergency SOS sounds, fall and crash detection alerts, and government emergency alerts. Apple’s logic is that these are sounds you either explicitly requested or urgently need to hear.

Your device may also still vibrate, as haptics are controlled separately in Settings: Sounds & Haptics.

Despite this seeming clarity, you will find device-based exceptions:

• On an iPhone or iPad, a Clock alarm ignores Silent mode entirely—it will always make noise.
• On an Apple Watch, though, Silent mode does suppress alarms unless you specifically enable Break Through Silent Mode for that alarm.
• If your Apple Watch is off your wrist and charging, Silent mode is ignored, and alarms always play—the assumption being, I infer, that if you’re not wearing your Apple Watch, you’d want to know when an alarm went off!

How to enable Silent Mode

Each type and some generations of hardware have different pathways or options to manage Silent mode:

• On an iPhone 15 Pro or later (and iPhone Air): Go to Settings: Sounds & Haptics and toggle Silent Mode on.
• Older iPhones through the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus: These models have the physical Ring/Silent switch on the side.
• On any iPad: Go to Settings: Sounds: Silent Mode.
• On any Apple Watch: Go to Settings: Sounds & Haptics: Silent Mode.

On all of these devices, you can also toggle Silent mode from Control Center: just tap the Silent Mode icon. If you don’t see it there, you’ll need to add it by customizing Control Center.²

Macs: No Silent mode for you

Macs don’t offer a Silent mode. Apple apparently assumes that if your Mac is awake and making noise, you’re sitting in front of it and can deal with it!

Instead, Macs split audio into two buckets. “Sound effects”—Apple’s long-standing term for system feedback sounds, alerts, error bonks, and the like—are controlled in Settings: Sound under the Sound Effects section. You can route them to a different audio output device, and there’s an “Alert volume” slider you can drag all the way to zero to mute them.

Everything else—music, video, app audio—is controlled by the main Output volume, adjustable via the keyboard volume keys or a Control Center slider.

Pump down the volume

One more piece of the sound output puzzle worth putting in place: on an iPhone or iPad, the hardware volume buttons normally control media volume, but there’s a setting in Sounds & Haptics called Change with Buttons that lets them also control the separate Ringtones and Alerts volume. If that’s off, you need to adjust the ringtone and alert volume with the slider in Settings.

On an Apple Watch, which has no volume buttons, you adjust volume in Settings: Sounds & Haptics: Tap the speaker icons, or rotate the Digital Crown when the volume slider is visible.

For further reading

I suffered to understand all the interactions of Silent mode and Focus modes, so you didn’t have to, when I researched Take Control of Focus. This book explains everything you need to know about what produces banners, sounds, vibrations, and more, and how to tune, tweak, and otherwise customize Focus modes to preserve your peace of mind while getting a piece of work done—or even reading a book!

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

Go to the podcast page.

Call the foldable iPhone whatever you want, just don’t call it late for dinner. Also, Apple puts its pinkie down and Microsoft has a great plan to fight the MacBook Neo.

A rose by any other name

The rumor mill continues to work overtime on the foldable iPhone. It almost makes one wonder if they know they don’t get time and a half. Last week brought rumors it wouldn’t arrive until 2027 that were quickly squashed by Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. This week people are still speculating that production is running into some problems.

9to5Mac’s Chance Miller says “It might be really hard to get an iPhone Fold at launch” because of constraints on quantity.

In addition to these rumored production problems, it might also be really hard to get a foldable iPhone because it’ll cost more than $2,000. And I hate to be the one to break it to you, Chad, but you don’t have $2,000. You’re still paying off your student loans. I told you majoring in “NFT Art History” was a mistake. Now look at you. You had ketchup packets for dinner again last night. Generic ones. And on top of it all, you’re over-invested in Hallmark collectible Christmas ornaments. You need to diversify your portfolio!

Another reason it might be hard is because it probably won’t be called “iPhone Fold”. You’ll walk into the Apple Store and say “Give me an iPhone Fold!” and they’ll say “Sorry, we do not sell a device called ‘iPhone Fold’.” and you will leave, saddened and frustrated, your face still smeared with ketchup.

The smart money right now seems to be on the name “iPhone Ultra”. Apple is rumored to be rolling out the “Ultra” suffix to other products as well this year. Like many people who opined this week, I prefer the name iPhone Duo, a name which references a classic Macintosh and correctly implies the need to be “duo income, no kids” in order to afford one.

The jokes about it being an expensive phone will continue at least until the phone is released. I’m terribly sorry but that’s just the way it’s going to be.

Have you considered fig leaves?

As you may have heard, the Apple App Store is the place to go if you’re looking for apps like Grok and X that create non-consensual sexual material. And, yeah, you probably heard it from me because I’ve been going on and on about it, but c’mon.

Come to find out, however, Apple was not merely sitting on its butt about the issue this whole time. As a matter of fact, the company took decisive action against these apps.

It quietly sent a letter.

“Grok’s sexual deepfakes almost got it banned from Apple’s App Store. Almost.”

Am I the only one who caves to Apple’s threats?!

Apple quietly threatened to kick Elon Musk’s AI app, Grok, from its App Store in January over its failure to curb the surge of nonconsensual sexual deepfakes flooding X…

So xAI “fixed” the problem by providing changes that:

…included limiting Grok on X to paying subscribers and attempting to stop Grok from undressing women. Our investigations revealed that neither were particularly effective beyond making the tool a bit harder to access.

Can you make it just a bit harder to access the non-consensual sexual material-making feature? Oh, and make it so we also profit off of it? That’d be great.

Well, at least apps that create non-consensual sexual material aren’t the only App Store problem.

“Apple pulls fake Ledger app and Freecash in rough day for App Store review”

Oh, wait, that’s not better. Why did I say that?

Take that!

The MacBook Neo has the competition quaking in their loafers, but don’t worry: Microsoft has a sure-fire way to keep the kids down on the Windows farm.

“Microsoft reveals major price increases for all Surface PCs as RAM crisis continues: Flagships now $500 more expensive than at launch”

Uhhh… how is that… I’m not sure… what?

The Surface Pro 12-inch, which was previously Microsoft’s cheapest modern Surface PC at $799, now starts at $1,049.

For that price you could have one and three-quarters MacBook Neos! It’s lucky for Microsoft that Apple doesn’t sell them in one-quarter increments.

This is also likely bad news for Microsoft’s upcoming wave of refreshed Surface PCs…

Would you say Microsoft is… beleaguered?

Microsoft does have an actual plan for keeping the young’uns on Windows: free Office! For a year.

“Microsoft counters the MacBook Neo with freebies for students”

Yes, buy a select crappy Windows machine and get a free year of Office (whoooo hoooo) and Xbox Game Pass Ultimate. Um, new subscribers only on that Game Pass.

At least everyone loves Windows.

“This is Microsoft’s plan to fix Windows 11”

The list of problems with Windows 11 makes even Tahoe sound good.

Zzzing.

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

And with the new Apple TV Ad Blocking feature in v5.1, it extends the powerful Safari, YouTube and App ad blocking protection to your Apple TV; allowing you to:

• Block ads in your favourite streaming apps
• Stop hidden in-app trackers
• Speed up your internet
• See what has been blocked

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.

Especially in the realm of music production, Pro Tools on the Mac remains the industry standard. Andy Slater told me, “I’ve never seen a PC in a recording studio, and I’ve been in a lot of recording studios.” Michelle Guadalupe Felix Garcia, a blind audio engineer based in Sonora, Mexico, co-founded the Audio Accessibility Alliance last year to advocate for inclusion in audio production (and live sound). “A Pro Tools user who’s blind is exactly as capable as a Pro Tools user who’s sighted,” she told me, echoing sentiments from numerous other blind professional producers and engineers I spoke to.

He also heard about how switching from PC to Mac is different for blind users:

After months of false starts, KALW eventually connected Rachel Longan with Felix Garcia, the blind engineer, who wanted to teach her Pro Tools, but Longan didn’t have access to or experience with a Mac. The differences in screen-reading metaphors on Mac vs. PC are significant, and require far more adjustment than that switch does for a sighted user.

Leland’s article gets real when it comes to problem-solving and challenges for blind producers, and he reminds us just how much of the process involves creatively hacking solutions to meet very specific needs. It’s a long, detailed piece with a ton of resources and tips.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

The MacBook Neo is apparently a big hit. So big that Apple is reportedly ramping up production.

Now the bad news: Since the MacBook Neo is powered by the A18 Pro chip from 2024’s iPhone 16 Pro, a product that’s been discontinued, there is likely a finite number of chips available for MacBook Neo production. Which is why, as reported by Tim Culpan, Apple faces a dilemma, namely: What happens when it runs out of chips to use in the MacBook Neo?

This is a really juicy question. If Apple’s hottest new Mac is limited by the number of A18 Pro chips available, there are only so many MacBook Neos that Apple can possibly sell. And if the chip isn’t being made anymore, what can the company do?

While we are all left puzzling this one, I don’t believe that this is as much of a dilemma for Apple. Even if Neo sales are higher than forecast, I do not believe that Apple simply never imagined that it might have a hit product on its hands! If there’s any company that believes in its own greatness, it’s Apple, which is why I’m pretty confident that Apple’s MacBook Neo strategy always came with a contingency plan for runaway success.

What we don’t know is what that contingency plan is. One possibility is that it would go back to its chipmaker, TSMC, and beg to get some space to build some fresh A18 Pro chips. This doesn’t make sense for a few reasons. Apple’s not using this particular TSMC chip process anymore, and TSMC’s capacity is likely sold out with business from other partners. Beyond that, the profit margins built into the MacBook Neo are based on odds and sods from the high-volume iPhone 16 Pro, not fresh new chips baked just for the MacBook Neo. If Apple asks TSMC to fire up the A18 Pro forge again, one of the main methods of making the Neo affordable disappears.

Short of there being a Mystery Chip out there that we don’t know about, I have to assume that the most obvious solution is the right one: Apple has probably always intended to replace the A18 Pro MacBook Neo with an A19 Pro model as soon as it begins scraping the bottom of the A18 bin.

Another part of Apple’s Neo strategy is a reusable design. I have to believe that the MacBook Neo was specifically designed to be updated to a new chip at very little extra cost, because every time you do major product redesigns, margins go down. That MacBook Neo was designed to last four or five years, at least, with different chips sliding in, probably once a year.

Putting a newer chip in the MacBook Neo is the obvious solution. Now, if MacBook Neo sales really are wildly beyond Apple’s greatest dreams, perhaps the company is scrambling to get an A19 Pro model ready to go. But it’s a matter of advancing an anticipated time-frame, not inventing a strategy out of nowhere. (And again, it’s a good problem to have!)

I’ve seen various arguments against this approach, but I don’t think they hold water. Will people who bought an A18 Pro MacBook Neo be bent out of shape if a newer, faster model gets released six or nine months later? I’d guess that most of them wouldn’t notice and wouldn’t care, and there are always people who are put out when new computers eclipse the one you just bought—that’s life. Would Apple risk losing the momentum of its new, hit product because a few people had their feelings hurt because Apple released a newer version of the MacBook Neo? That’s a hard no.

Another argument is that, essentially, Apple can’t release a new generation of MacBook Neo just six or nine months after it released the last one! Apple has repeatedly shown that it’s willing to ship two versions of the same product in the same calendar year—and may be about to do it again this year with the M5 and M6 MacBook Pro. Yes, it’s unorthodox, but the MacBook Neo is also a really weird new kind of Mac, and maybe the rules are different for a computer like this.

Would Apple even make a big deal out of such a move? Updating some or all MacBook Neo models to a new chip would probably amount to nothing more than a press release. Sites like this one would certainly notice and cover it in detail, but I’m not sure anyone else would notice or care.

I do wonder if Apple might extend the life of the A18 Pro model by splitting the MacBook Neo product line in two. Before the bin is entirely empty, perhaps it could upgrade the $699 model to the A19 Pro while continuing to sell the remaining A18 Pro chips in the $599 model. Then, once there are no more A18 Pros to be sold, the A19 Pro could move down on the price list. These are spec changes that we’d notice, of course, but they probably wouldn’t affect the trajectory of the MacBook Neo in the slightest.

What I don’t expect Apple to do is allow the Neo to lose its momentum by making it unavailable for some period of time while it works on its chip shortage. If that means eating into margins, it’ll do that. If that means making a quick chip change, it’ll do that. But Apple strikes me as a company with a killer instinct, and it knows it’s taking the entire cheap PC laptop market to the woodshed right now. I don’t think it’s going to pause for a moment.

Well, maybe for a moment. It should pause just long enough to ensure that the bin of A19 Pro chips is nice and full, so it doesn’t get into this situation again next year.

Go to the podcast page.

Quick—what’s the most important iPhone ever? The original started it all. The iPhone 6 Plus brought in large sizes for the first time. The iPhone X redefined the phone for a new decade.

But there’s also a strong argument to be made for the iPhone 4, which debuted in spectacular and infamous fashion, generated one of Apple’s most remarkable controversies, and also ended up being one of the most influential iPhones in terms of design.

Most important? Well, maybe. But there’s no doubt that the iPhone 4 is the most interesting iPhone ever.

Found in a bar

The iPhone 4 story starts with a bang exactly 16 years ago, as an Apple engineer accidentally left one in a German restaurant in Redwood City, California, where it was found by someone who sold it to the tech blog Gizmodo.

It was less than two months before the new iPhone’s debut, which was scheduled for Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer Conference in June. Gizmodo thoroughly documented every aspect of the device, spoiling what had traditionally been one of Steve Jobs’s greatest marketing tricks, the dramatic new-product reveal.

It seems obvious now, but back in the day, the idea that a new product announcement could be theater was revolutionary. Technology product announcements were boring litanies of specs. Industry standard practice was to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt by pre-announcing products long before they even existed. Jobs kept Apple’s stuff in a black box, under a dropcloth, to reveal when the time was right, like a magician. It made it feel like you were watching technology being invented in real-time. It was a brilliant bit of showmanship.

The Gizmodo leak blew all of that up. There were police raids and criminal investigations, most of which went nowhere. But Apple lost its ability to publicize the iPhone 4—we all knew about it, in detail, way in advance.

You’re holding it wrong

Another milestone in the weird life of the iPhone 4 happened soon after the device was announced. All of a sudden, media reports began emerging that you could drop the phone’s cellular connection to no bars and end phone calls by placing your fingers on exactly the right spot on the device’s outside.

Antennagate wasn’t the first iPhone “gate,” but it might have been the biggest one. The storm of attention got so strong that Steve Jobs had to cut a family vacation short and fly back to Cupertino for a hastily-called press conference. After playing a viral music video by Jonathan Mann, Apple’s CEO appared on stage and sure didn’t seem happy to be there.

Jobs pointed out that lots of phones had places on them where if you touched right you could lose signal. He also admitted that Apple’s algorithm that displayed “cellular bars” was not really accurate and was misrepresenting weaker signals as stronger. He also seemed frustrated that a seemingly tiny number of user complaints were overshadowing the fact that more than 99% of iPhone 4 buyers seemed perfectly happy with their devices. But, admitting that a “bumper” case around the phone’s metal edges tended to mitigate the problem, Jobs offered a free bumper case to every iPhone 4 buyer.

Jobs also famously gave every iPhone 4 user a little advice, if they found themselves holding the device in a way that reduced the cellular signal: “Just don’t hold it that way then.”

There’s also a less-well-known scandal involving the iPhone 4, which Jobs referenced in the “Antennagate” press conference by apologizing for the fact that the white version of the iPhone 4 was late, but would be out later in July. That’s right—Apple sold the iPhone 4 in two colors, black and white, but the white one didn’t ship. Not in June, not in July, and not even in 2010. Apple’s white whale, er, iPhone didn’t ship until April 2011, a full 10 months after it was announced. Can you imagine?

Does it look familiar?

But enough about the bad. Thanks to 16 years of hindsight, it’s also important to point out all the things about the iPhone 4 that make it a notable phone—in a good way.

The iPhone 4 was the first model to break AT&T’s exclusivity deal in the United States. For the first 3-1/2 years of the iPhone’s existence, AT&T was Apple’s exclusive wireless partner. Then, in early 2011, Apple announced a special Verizon-only version of the iPhone 4 that brought the phone to America’s biggest carrier. It was a huge step for both Verizon and Apple, bringing the iPhone to a huge new set of customers who just weren’t willing to switch carriers to get the phone they wanted.

Perhaps most important, though, is the design of the iPhone 4. After the rounded original iPhone and the curvy plastic of the iPhone 3G and iPhone 3GS, the iPhone 4 was a real statement: Flat sides all around, clad in a band silvery aluminum, with a flat front and back. The iPhone 4’s design persisted through the iPhone 5 and 5S, and then returned with a vengeance with the iPhone 12 series. Even today’s iPhone 17 Pro carries most of the shape with it, though it’s replaced the metal band for an entire metal backshell.

For my money, it’s this design that has stood the test of time and is the definitive iPhone look. Despite being unveiled accidentally in a German restaurant by an Apple engineer via a tech blog, then re-unveiled at WWDC, then apologized for, and with a white color variant that almost never appeared, the iPhone 4 is a huge part of iPhone history. Especially if you don’t hold it wrong.

Today Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add direct-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite network and extend cellular coverage to customers beyond the reach of terrestrial networks. In addition, Amazon and Apple announced an agreement for Amazon Leo to power satellite services for iPhone and Apple Watch, including Emergency SOS via satellite.

This deal had been recently rumored. Amazon acquiring Globalstar gives it a leg up in its attempt to take on Starlink, which is the biggest player in this space. But Apple previously sank a billion-dollar-plus investment into Globalstar, whose system underpins its satellite features.

That stake seems to have bought Apple some assurances, including support for not only current but future devices. The ongoing question for Apple’s satellite features is whether users will ever end up paying for them, something that the company has been happy to continually kick down the road. It’s possible the deal is structured in such a way that Apple doesn’t have to pass on the cost to its users, at least for some period of time, but we’ll see what happens this year when the latest round of iPhones comes out.

As for Apple getting in bed with one of its competitors, Amazon is hardly the only other major tech company that Apple now has a close tie to: we know it’s using Google’s Gemini for its forthcoming AI models and, of course, it’s long depended on components made by Samsung. As tech companies get larger and larger, it’s harder and harder for them not to be collaborators.

Go to the linked site.

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Time Machine used to be a mess. I would try it with each new macOS release, get frustrated, and give up. My incoming email from readers was sometimes dominated by Time Machine problems, particularly when Apple transitioned from HFS+ to APFS as the Mac’s default startup volume file system. At one point, Time Machine volumes had to be formatted as HFS+ even after APFS became the default startup volume format.

Which is why I’m so pleased that Time Machine generally—generally, mind you—now performs as I would expect as part of my backup-and-archive systems.¹ I use Backblaze for encrypted Internet-hosted backups, Carbon Copy Cloner for nightly local clones, and Time Machine for continuous archiving and backups. I also use Dropbox and iCloud Drive for nearly all of my documents.

Often, however, I want to exclude something—or a lot of somethings—from Time Machine. A file or folder is too big (like Parallels virtual machines), a volume contains a clone of another volume (and thus should be ignored), or some data changes so frequently that it’s not ideal to archive using Time Machine.

Here’s how you can control what Time Machine archives.

Via the main System Settings interface

Open System Settings and go to General: Time Machine. Click Options. The Exclude from Backups list shows everything you’ve added, and anything Apple has included. You can drag items in or click the + (plus) icon to open a file or folder (or volume) selector. Select an item and click – (minus) to remove it.

As you can see from my list, I have many external volumes, and all of them are excluded from Time Machine—all external volumes are added to this list by default, and I’ve left it that way. After many, many hard disk drive failures, including a mirrored RAID, I no longer own enough local capacity to back up all my volumes. I put less-critical files on external volumes and rely on Backblaze.

You may also note that a couple of external volumes have Time Machine icons. Those are included in Time Machine by default, and if you select one, the – (minus) icon is grayed out. Typically, the only entry besides those volumes Apple automatically includes is /Users/Shared/adi, which is related to Apple’s digital commerce—that folder can be removed from exclusions, but I don’t know any good reason to.

Dial in your Time Machine exclusions

If you’re comfortable with the command line, you can also get to know tmutil, which provides text-based control over the same features presented in the Time Machine settings, plus quite a lot else. (In all of these examples, replace /path/to/item or similar with the actual path, of course!)

For instance, if you want to exclude a file or folder, but also may want to move that item later, use:

tmutil addexclusion /path/to/item

Wherever you relocate that item to, the exclusion follows. Or, if you want to use a fixed path and make sure it is invariant, same as the Exclude from Backups, use:

sudo tmutil addexclusion -p /absolute/path/to/item

The sudo command will prompt you to enter an administrative password because it requires elevated system privileges. The -p flag forces the time machine to excluse a path rather than a file.

A neat tip, if you didn’t know it: you can use the Finder to copy absolute paths for items:

1. In the Finder, select a file or folder.
2. Hold down the Option key and choose Edit.
3. Note the Copy “name” as Pathname option: choose it. You can also press Command-Option-C.

The Clipboard stores a path that can be quite short for a local volume, or verge on the absurd for files or folders on iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or other cloud-accessible systems. For instance, take a gander at:

/Users/glenn/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Aperiodical\ Projects\ \(iCloud\)/Flong\ Time\ No\ See\ Book/Figures/01\ Flong\ Time/flongs-per-year-chart.png

If you’d like to use the command line to check on items that are excluded or included, you can use:

tmutil isexcluded /path/to/item

You can use shell-based wildcard expansion, too, so if you did a lot of fussing with inclusion and exclusion in nested folders, you can enter the first part of the path, like ~glenn then use ./* to get a list with [Excluded] or [Included] before each directory at that level of the path, like tmutil isexcluded ~glenn/*.²

For further reading

Joe Kissell has written loads about Time Machine in Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, including strategies, complements, and alternatives.

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

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This week we’ll see all there isn’t to know about the foldable iPhone, how success is an issue for the MacBook Neo, and then look at some stupid Mac tricks.

CONFIRMED (disclaimer: not confirmed)

Absolutely huge news on the foldable iPhone front this week.

“iPhone Ultra’s Price Range Revealed”

In a stunning turn of events, the foldable iPhone WILL cost somewhere between a lot of money and a ton of money! Who knew?

In a report this week, Gurman said the foldable iPhone is expected to “cross the $2,000 threshold” in the U.S….

Tell me something I don’t know.

If the foldable iPhone does start at $1,999, the device might cost as much as $2,799 with 2TB of storage…

I SAID “DON’T KNOW”.

OK, well, how about this: it might not come until 2027!

“Foldable iPhone Engineering Delays Could Push Launch Into 2027”

Whoops, wait, never mind, it’s pretty much going to be on time.

“iPhone Fold Expected to Launch on Time in September Despite Delay Rumors”

It’s almost enough to make one think these Apple rumors are crazy.

Almost.

Do we at least have a name for this phone yet?

“‘iPhone Ultra’ is the likely name of Apple’s foldable, says leaker”

This would seem to confirm another rumor that the foldable iPhone has less carbohydrates than other iPhones.

As an aside, the fact that Michelob Ultra was the most popular beer in the U.S. as of the end of last year is all you need to know about the state of moral depravity in this country.

One bad core don’t spoil the whole chip, girl

There is a bit in the 1988 film “Tucker: The Man and His Dream” where Martin Landau tells Jeff Bridges the reason he has problems is because he “made the car too good.” Apple may be wondering that about the MacBook Neo right about now.

Tim Culpan says:

“Apple in Talks to Boost Mac Neo Production as Sales Exceed Expectations”

This was supposed to be a computer the company could slap together with parts that fell on the floor during the construction of iPhones. The A18 Pro in the Neo boasts only five cores, as opposed to the six cores in the iPhone. When one of the workers yells “Hey, Jerry! I got a lousy core ovah heah!”, Jerry (Jerry is the floor manager) yells back “Just drop it in dah bin! Mistah Cook wants for tah put ‘em in the MacBook Neo!”

(This is all loosely translated from the original Chinese.)

Point is, these are free chips! It’s like Apple sat down in a Mexican restaurant and is waiting for its enchilada plate and can’t stop stuffing itself with tortilla chips and salsa!

No, I haven’t had lunch yet! I’m very hungry!

Problem is, the Neo is so popular that the chips are running out, and the next basket isn’t free. And getting more aluminum and RAM is like asking for a side of guacamole. All this puts pressure on the Neo’s margins which in this analogy is maybe Apple’s waistline? I don’t know, I’m losing the thread here.

The low price of Neo makes it a viable stocking stuffer.

Oh, what, I’m supposed to switch to a Christmas metaphor now?! C’mon, Tim, I’m almost done with this section!

At any rate, the Neo selling like hotcakes is not a bad problem to have.

Tacos! I mean tacos!

One metaphor, Moltz! How hard it is to pick just one?! Ugh.

Because it’s there

Finally, in these troubling times, it is nice to see that at least someone knows why we were put on God’s green Earth and that is to do the weirdest and most niche things possible with computers.

“Porting Mac OS X to the Nintendo Wii”

Kudos to developer Bryan Keller who got Mac OS 10.0 Cheetah running on a Nintendo Wii entertainment system. “Why?”, you might ask. Why not is the answer.

In the end, I learned (and accomplished) far more than I ever expected – and perhaps more importantly, I was reminded that the projects that seem just out of reach are exactly the ones worth pursuing.

At last there’s a system that I can run as a Mac and play Mario Kart on. That’s really all I’ve ever wanted.

[Note: an earlier version of this column suggested the A18 Pro was made in Vietnam when it is the Neo that is assembled in Vietnam and China. I regret the error and, in a totally unrelated incident, reader Mihir is now banned.]

Clic for Sonos offers deep integration with native Apple technologies, with support for Widgets, Live Activities, Shortcuts, a Mac Menu Bar app, and support for Control Center. It works with your Sonos library, Apple Music, Spotify, Plex, Tidal, and TuneIn, and supports lossless and Dolby Atmos.

Try it for yourself and you’ll see. Six Colors readers can get one year for just $9.99 (30% off) or lifetime updates for $30 (50% off). Go to clic.dance/sixcolors for all the details.

Go to the podcast page.

Every morning, I start my day with breakfast, a cup of tea, and my iPad. This is the latest version of a ritual that began years ago with an actual newspaper that an actual human being left in my driveway. For the last five years, it’s all been mediated by my RSS reader, but it’s an experience that integrates newsletters and RSS feeds together in one place.

Still, I can’t help but feel that the whole experience is not quite as good as it should be. It’s a feeling that was stoked further by Terry Godier, whose essay Phantom Obligation served as an explanation for what motivated Godier to create Current, a newsreader app that tries to escape the tyranny of unread counts and reading debt and other pressures that turn reading from a pleasure into a chore.

Godier’s approach lets you treat different media sources in different ways, which is very clever. A breaking-news firehose might fade away after a few hours; a site devoted to thoughtful longform articles a few times a week or month would have more staying power.

It all makes sense to me, which is why I was surprised that when I tried Current, I bounced right off of it. I realized that the premise of Current is that it’s providing a gentle way to fade out the noise and allow users to focus on what’s important, whether it’s based on time or voice. It’s an app that seems meant for people who check their RSS readers several times a day, perhaps on their phone whenever they’ve got downtime. Makes sense to me—but that’s not me.

I’ve been so proud of my reading workflow, using Feedbin as a repository for all the newsletters I get, that I missed the other important part of that workflow: I open ReadKit once a day, read the items in my story list that interest me, and then close the iPad and go about my day. I am not looking for updates throughout the day, or using the app as a read-later service—in fact, my default view only shows me items from the past 48 hours—but as the true successor of that old morning newspaper.

This makes me realize that, rather than being frustrated that so many of my news sources these days offer newsletters but not RSS feeds, I might actually be better off subscribing to more newsletters, and unsubscribing from the equivalent RSS feeds of those sources. Yes, I’m frustrated that the San Francisco Chronicle doesn’t offer RSS, but it offers several daily newsletters that pop up in my newsreader in the morning, featuring links I can tap on to read stories in its app or on its website. Maybe that’s… better?

Similarly, I’ve started to look at some of the RSS feeds I subscribe to and realize that they’re just not important enough to drop multiple items in my feed over the course of a day. I’d actually rather have their posts collected into a bundle, whether that’s via a newsletter, my reader app, or some sort of script I write that turns the source’s new posts into a list of links.

That’s not quite the same thing as what Godier is trying to do, but it’s similar, because it suggests that the big-list-of-posts interface for RSS readers might not be quite right. If my RSS reader offered me the ability to select certain RSS feeds and display them as a single summary item with links to the stories, that would probably fit better into my reading approach. (And again, I can probably code up a simple script that generates these newsletter-like summaries and sends them to Feedbin.)

While I didn’t end up clicking with Current, I really like how Godier is challenging the entire idea of the “email inbox” RSS interface that’s been predominant forever. My insertion of newsletters into my Feedbin interface was the first clue that what I want to do is not actually read RSS, I want to read what I want using an app that makes that easy.

What is that app? What would we even call it? If it’s all email newsletters, should I just be reading in my mail client every morning? Mail clients are nice and all, but I wouldn’t call them optimized for longer-form reading. Read-later apps like Instapaper are sort of similar, but focused more on long-term storage. News apps tend to be siloed or impossible to personalize. (I am not visiting Apple News in the morning.)

I don’t have an answer here, but I’m enjoying the uncertainty. After five years of a system that has served me pretty well, I’m realizing that it’s got more rough edges than I had really noticed before. It’s okay, but it should be a lot better.

Maybe we should all revisit the assumptions we make about when and how we read. That was really Terry Godier’s point, and it’s a good one.

Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot.

The whole story is wild (albeit technical). Photon says they’re working on a fix, but really, this is something Apple should be working on.

As someone who keeps a Mac mini running in my closet, I guarantee you that I have been affected by this bug. But who remembers that it’s been 50 days since the last time your Mac server became entirely unresponsive other than pings? Unless I’m traveling, I just shrug, reboot the Mac, and go on with my life. Not great.

Update: I’ve heard from some people who report very long uptimes on Mac servers running older versions of macOS. I guess the bigger question is, what OS versions does this actually impact? Tough thing to test, given that the bug appears only after 49+ days.

Go to the linked site.

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Like millions of people around the world, I have a mixed marriage: I’ve long used Macs, but my wife Kat’s personal computer is a Windows PC.

That categorization isn’t entirely fair, though—because Kat also uses an iPhone and wears an Apple Watch every single day. We have an Apple TV in the living room and a HomePod mini in the kitchen. She’s certainly no stranger to the world of Apple devices. If anything, the Lenovo laptop that largely lives underneath our TV is the odd one out in the house.

When we bought her that laptop for personal use a year or so back, price was one of the primary drivers—until the MacBook Neo, the $500-ish computer range was a market in which Apple simply didn’t compete. But when the Neo arrived last month, I thought this seemed like an ideal time to see what would happen if we took advantage of Apple’s two-week return period and tried to replace her personal PC with a Mac. So, I ran down to our Apple Store one Sunday and picked up an Indigo MacBook Neo with 512GB of storage for her to put through its paces.

This wasn’t just an opportunity for her, though—it was also a chance for me to see what it was like for someone who has largely only used a Mac in passing to switch up their habits and use it full time. The result was, honestly, illuminating. In addition to jotting down some thoughts about our experiment, we’ve also recorded a podcast in which Kat and I discussed her experience, including what won her over and what areas didn’t quite work for her.

Making the jump

One thing that jumped out at me when I was first helping her set up the MacBook Neo was the acclimation process. There are plenty of things that we long-time Mac users take for granted as the way things work, but if you’re switching from another platform, they can seem not only unobvious, but downright hostile.

For example, I noticed she ran into a lot of problems with two-finger clicking. Apple’s trackpads are often considered best of breed, but they can be jarring to somebody who’s not used to them. She would frequently bring up context menus by accident, because she’s used to resting her second finger on or near the trackpad while clicking. This is one of those habits that simply takes time and muscle memory to adapt to, but it can definitely get in the way when all you’re trying to do is click a button.

Sometimes there are larger differences that just need to be re-learned. For example, Windows has long featured a very keyboard-driven interface in which you can access most of the drop-down menus without resorting to using a pointing device. While this is technically possible in macOS, it’s not quite the same: either you have to use some specific workaround like using the Command-? shortcut to access the Help menu and then search or use the arrow keys, or you have to enable macOS’s Full Keyboard Access, which is an extreme option that can really disrupt the user interface.

We also ran into some idiosyncrasies that seemed particular to this experience. For example, this version of the MacBook Neo shipped with the previous version of the iWork apps, before their inclusion in the Creator Suite. Not only did this lead to some weirdness where you opened an app and were immediately told to download a different version of that app, but there was some sort of bug upon first run that really degraded the performance: in Numbers, for example, we dealt with repeated spinning beachballs as we tried to do anything as simple as enter data into a cell. It’s the kind of experience that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, even if subsequent uses later in the week were fine.

It’s the ecosystem

As for the positives, they tended to fall into two categories. The first I’ll call “quality of life” advantages. The build of the MacBook did not go unnoticed, with the solidity of its aluminum chassis and a keyboard that she deemed excellent. (She remarked several times on how much she enjoyed its clicky-clacky nature.) The Neo also runs far cooler than her Lenovo laptop, despite its lack of fan, and has a vastly superior battery life.

She, did, however knock the MacBook Neo on one hardware feature—or lack thereof. And no, it wasn’t the two USB-C ports or that one is slower than the other. It’s the lack of a touchscreen. That’s a feature that even budget PC laptops have had for a long time, and Apple—arguably the king of touchscreens!—has refused to bring to its computer platform. Coming from the Windows side, I can understand how weird that is—at least for now.

But the biggest win were what I’d call the ecosystem advantages. Since Kat already uses an iPhone and an Apple Watch, having all her passwords synced and at her fingertips—literally, since I sprang for the model with the Touch ID sensor—was deemed life-changing. Likewise, the ability to use apps like Messages on her Mac and have it seamlessly integrate with her phone was a real plus. However, we did run into one small hiccup there: at first, Messages wasn’t showing names of contacts; we discovered that was because Contacts had only synced about a dozen address records. After some further poking around, it turned out that most of her contacts were stored not in iCloud, but in her Google account. Once we set that up to sync, things worked fine, but it was another hoop to jump through to get everything working properly.

Similarly, she really appreciated the integration with Apple Pay and Touch ID. That’s a workflow she’s gotten very used to on her iPhone and Apple Watch, and its ease and simplicity is familiar—and equally good—on the Mac.

Where the Mac doesn’t always Excel

However, despite her generally positive reception to the MacBook Neo—which I think surprised even her—Kat was equally adamant that one place she’d never be able to use the machine is in her work. The main reason: Excel.

Kat spends a lot of her professional life in Excel, doing work like finance or advanced modeling—tasks that I cannot even pretend to understand. Now, Microsoft does of course make a version of Excel for the Mac. However, while it shares most of the same features as its Windows counterpart, most is not all. One key feature that she relies on in her work is a slew of powerful keyboard shortcuts that simply have no Mac equivalent.

I couldn’t believe this was the case in the year 2026, but sure enough. I even uncovered a Reddit post detailing this discrepancy, which itself links to a very lengthy Microsoft support document on all the keyboard shortcuts.

While you could laboriously remap many of these options to a Mac keyboard, the question simply becomes: why? In the strange eventuality where she was forced to use a Mac for her work, it would probably be far more expedient to simply run a Windows version of Excel in an emulation environment than create bespoke equivalents. But retraining all her muscle memory and skills? That’s a non-starter.

Goodbye, MacBook Neo

After two weeks, I’m sad to say the MacBook Neo was packed back in its box and returned to the Apple Store to spend more time with its family. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the poor Windows users.

Honestly, this wasn’t a slight on the Neo itself—the simple truth is that Kat just doesn’t use her personal laptop for much. In fact, the biggest competition to the Neo was not the Lenovo, but her iPhone, which is where she does most of her everyday computing tasks. Like many of us, she’s gotten used to a life that’s phone-first and only turns to a computer when she really needs something like a keyboard.

Ultimately, were that Lenovo to break tomorrow¹, Kat deemed that she would be tempted—perhaps even likely—to replace it with a MacBook Neo. But as it stands today, that PC is still alive and kicking, and thus we don’t have the need to buy a replacement that will, itself, barely get used.

Despite the Neo’s return, I consider the experiment to be an overall success. For someone who has long been frustrated with her experience using a Mac whenever she had to sit down at my desk², Kat ended up surprisingly pleased with the Neo. Were she to end up using a Mac more, I believe she might even find herself delighted with all the other features she has yet to discover. It gives me hope that our house may still someday be united in platform harmony.

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

One who steals my iPhone, steals my Apple Account

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

The scenarios are very straightforward:

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

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

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

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

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

Manage Stolen Device Protection

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For further reading

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

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

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

Apple at 50

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(No apologies to Dell for that joke.)

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

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

OK, not really. There are rules against that.

Pick one

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

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

Here’s to 50 more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

And I loved it.

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

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

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

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

Hey! I could write this stuff!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And I said…

(this is what I said)….

“Only if I get desperate!”

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

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

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

[via Allison Sheridan on Mastodon]

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Staying foolish

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

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

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

Always in motion is the future

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the olden days…

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

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

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

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

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

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

The whole widget

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My Most Awkward Encounter with Apple

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

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

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

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

At least until Apple asked us to return the iPod.

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

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

The part of the Apple campus I’ve never seen

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

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

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

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

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

My favorite Apple launch event

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

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

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

My favorite Apple-inspired road trip

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

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

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

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

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

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

My least favorite Apple keynote

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

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

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

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

Apple event celebrity sightings

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

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

(Glances at Charlie Rose’s Wikipedia page.)

Oh. Um. Scratch that.

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

Most awkward encounter with an Apple executive

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

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

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

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

My favorite portrayal of Apple in a movie

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

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

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

Goofiest Apple product of the last-half century

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

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

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

Most symbolic photo of my time covering Apple

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[static sounds]

Earth 0101010-λ

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

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

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

[static sounds]

Earth Performis-18173U

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

[static sounds]

Earth 1293857L-Γ

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

[static sounds]

Earth #000000-Δ

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

[click]

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

Continue reading on The Verge ↦

Let me tell you how the Mac changed my life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy birthday, Apple.

Go to the podcast page.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Continue reading on The Verge ↦

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

Whenever God closes a Sora, he opens a Siri

Bad news for fans of slop.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That’s how that saying goes, right?

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

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

Very surprising announcements

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

Also, it announced ads for Maps. Yayyyy.

Ugh.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rest is history!

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI cut below the rest

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

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

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

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

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

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

AI rising tide lifts all boats

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

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

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

Go to the podcast page.