As of April 15, 2022, Apple has quietly added cycling directions for the parts of the Midwest covered in Expansion #6, including Chicago (pictured below), Detroit, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, and Charleston…
Indeed, O’Beirne notes that this was the second expansion this month; on April 1, the northeast region was also updated with cycling directions.
A quick check shows, yes: my hometown of Boston does finally have cycling directions. As an infrequent cyclist who is constantly trying to to do more biking, this is a welcome addition.
However, the feature is not without its issues. For example, we have a great bike path nearby, and though Maps’s cycling directions do let you prioritize avoiding hills or busy roads, it’d be nice if we could also put a premium on separated cycling routes; there are lots of cases where I will gladly spend the extra five minutes getting to the bike path to enjoy a safer and more leisurely remainder of my trip. (That bike path is also scheduled to be extended later this year, and I’ll be interested to see how long it takes Apple Maps to take that into account.)
Overall, I’m glad that cycling directions are available in more places; the feature was added back in iOS 14, but had been relatively sparsely rolled out in the last year—a fact I noted on Twitter last fall at iOS 15’s release.
For as long as the Mac has had overlapping windows, it’s come up with ways to manage them. Everything from zoom controls to window shades to turning folders into tabs at the edge of your windows1—seems like the Mac’s tried it all.
But I’m going to take this opportunity to call out a window management feature that’s still chugging away but that I believe is under-appreciated in modern macOS: Spaces.
Spaces has a long history, stretching back to Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard, released in 2006. But it wasn’t really a new idea in computing: the concept of virtual desktops had existed more or less since the advent of the graphical interface in the 1980s popping up in a variety of other operating systems, though perhaps most prominently in the classic X Window System that ran on top of Unix and other similar OSes.2
Though other features related to Spaces, such as Dashboard and Exposé, have died or “evolved” over the years, Spaces has stuck around, though you could argue that it’s actually become less capable in the interim. For example, the earliest version of Spaces on the Mac let you arrange up to 16 virtual desktops in a grid of columns and rows. The modern implementation, which along with Exposé has been bundled into Mission Control since 2011’s Mac OS X 10.7, only lets you have a single long row of virtual desktops, which is not only less practical at times, effectively making it harder to access a large number of desktops, but let’s face it: less cool.
In truth, Spaces has languished on the Mac, and as it’s a feature I use pretty much every day, I find that a shame. Spaces is, to me, an indispensable an organizational tool, as it’s an easy, ad-hoc way to break out specific tasks that might involve a variety of apps.
For example, if I’m recording a podcast, I’ll open a new space with the specific apps I need for that show, such as Audio Hijack, Zoom, Notes, and a Safari window. That helps me avoid distraction from other apps that might want my attention, much in the same way that Apple’s newer Focus mode does, but it also helps get me into the correct headspace for the task at hand. (Another Spaces-related feature, full-screen mode, is handy for writing tasks when I don’t want to be distracted by anything else at all, especially when combined with a Focus mode.)
One benefit of Spaces is the ease of switching back and forth between desktops, which can be done either with simple keyboard shortcuts—control-right-arrow or control-left-arrow—or via three-finger swipe gestures to the left or right. (The addition of those gestures is probably one reason Apple decided to get rid of the grid layout, since the three-finger up and down swipes are used for other Mission Control features.)
Apps can be assigned to a specific desktop, all desktops, or no desktop via a context menu on that app in the dock.3 And it’s even possible to move a window to a space by simply dragging the window to the appropriate edge of the screen or, my favorite, clicking and holding on the title bar and then using the aforementioned keyboard shortcuts to move the whole desktop around it, then plopping the window down in its new home.
But one significant issue with Spaces is that some of the interface choices for managing them are, well, terrible. The only way to create a new Space is to activate Mission Control, mouse up to the top of the screen, and click the Plus button wayyyy over on the right-hand edge of the screen.4 To call that “discoverable” is an insult to credit cards, Star Trek shows, and TV networks everywhere. You will never see a Spaces-related item in any menu in macOS, and there are no keyboard shortcuts to create or remove spaces either.
Moreover, this leads to my biggest frustration in regards to Spaces—perhaps unsurprising to regular readers of this site—automation. Not only are there zero Spaces-related actions available in Shortcuts, but even creating new spaces using AppleScript is a complicated kludge, at best.
This has stymied some of my attempts to automate my work habits, since the best solution I’ve found has been to actually automate control of the pointing device to trigger Mission Control and click that New Space button, which is absolutely inane. As a result, I’ve just ended up sticking with my tried and true manual management of Spaces; it’s less finicky.
Now, it’s quite likely that Apple doesn’t get a lot of feedback on Spaces these days, and thus hasn’t really prioritized its development. But it’s equally possible that people aren’t using it because Apple has buried the feature and made it difficult to automate. I get it, Spaces is kind of weird: you end up with all these desktops that have different windows and sometimes disparate apps, even though there’s always the same desktop hanging out back there. But Apple hasn’t shied away from these kinds of complexities before: both Sidecar and even Universal Control have a kind of weird feeling to them, and the company has jumped on those bandwagons wholeheartedly.5
Looking for Spaces in Shortcuts? Alas, there’s nothing.
What worries me is that this attitude of “good enough” might bleed over to other Apple organizational features, which will suffer the same fate as Spaces. For example, Safari’s Tab Groups, introduced last year, also can’t be controlled in Shortcuts nor, as far as I know, in Apple Script. Not only is that a feature that’s much more prominent, and might get used by more people, but it’s brand spanking new.
I won’t say I’m hopeful that Apple will add Shortcuts access to Tab Groups in this year’s updates, but if they do, would it be too much to ask to lavish a little love on Spaces too? There’s at least one person who would appreciate it.
One indicator of the lack of attention paid to this feature is that the terminology used to refer to it is inconsistent. In the contextual menus on the dock, you’ll see references to “desktops” but in the Mission Control pane of System Preferences, they’re still referred to as “Spaces.” 🤷 ↩
Not only is it hard to see, but most users probably wouldn’t even realize what it’s for until they mouse over it and a little desktop peeks in there. Such a weird choice. ↩
Well, maybe part-heartedly in the case of Sidecar. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
The date is set! With the announcement last week that Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference is kicking off in just a little under two months, the ramp-up to the biggest event of the company’s year has officially begun.
While we don’t yet know how much—if any—hardware will feature at the June to-do, one thing is pretty certain: that Apple will be using the opportunity to roll out the latest changes to its major software platforms, including macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS.
As ever, expectations are high for Apple to bring all the new features and enhancements, not to mention fixing every single bug or missed opportunity for its software. Will that happen? Of course not. This big endeavor always means picking and choosing your battles, but as long as we’re trying to figure out how Apple might direct its energy, I’m going to use this opportunity to make a few humble suggestions about some features that could use a little love.
Apple today announced it will host its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in an online format from June 6 through 10, free for all developers to attend.
However, it’s not entirely online:
In addition to the online conference, Apple will host a special day for developers and students at Apple Park on June 6 to watch the keynote and State of the Union videos together, along with the online community. Space will be limited, and details about how to apply to attend will be provided on the Apple Developer site and app soon.
This makes sense, but it’s also a template for how Apple could manage the future of the conference even once the pandemic has actually subsided. It’s hard to imagine that it would return to what it once was: the online version is much cheaper and almost certainly easier to produce than wrangling thousands of people in a single location. (There’s a strong suggestion that even this in-person event will be outdoors—and hey, there is a big open space right in the middle of that donut.)
Plus, one of the great advantages of an online conference is ease of access and an asynchronous experience, but it does mean that there is something lost in not having people gather in a single place. I know plenty of folks who would be willing to enter a lottery for a chance at attending an in-person event. (And I hope Apple will also continue to make that accessible for people who can’t easily afford it, as they have with scholarships in the past.)
Either way, it’s just two months until the biggest event of the Apple year. Get those predictions and wishlists in now.
Apple’s conflicts with government regulators can often seem like a classic case of an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object. Thanks to its dominance in the tech market, the company has increasingly found itself in the crosshairs of countries from around the world, who are concerned with everything from alternative payments in the App Store to interoperability with other messaging platforms.
The problem is that even when regulators seem to win, the results they end up with are often very different from what they probably intended, even if Apple’s concessions meet the letter of the law. As recently as last week, the Cupertino-based company made changes to the way that it handles some areas where regulators had intervened, but in true corporate fashion, those alterations are minimized to the extent that they will hardly have the impact that regulators would likely have preferred.
The Back Page: Five reasons the Apple Studio Display ended up with an A13 processor
Ever since earlier this month, when Apple broke the minds—and bank accounts—of its devoted power users by delivering the unexpected announcement of a new and long-awaited Apple consumer display, the internet has been awash in rumors over one particular quirk of the monitor: Why does the Apple Studio Display contain an A13 processor, complete with 64GB of flash storage?
It’s a good question and one that we here at Six Colors couldn’t simply wave off under the guise of “managing the display’s ‘studio-quality’ sound and Center Stage.” That’s just what Apple wants you to think.
So we’ve been tirelessly chasing down leads to uncover what exactly the point is of building an iPhone-level processor that, as recently as two years and a half years ago was the company’s state of the art, into a glorified TV.
Although we have not yet been able to conclusively prove the purpose of this seemingly overpowered piece of hardware, we have narrowed down the field to the most likely rationales behind its inclusion, which we present to you now in order of their relative likelihood, from least to most.
The Studio Display is simply a stretched-out iPhone 11: It’s not the most reasonable answer, naturally. That’s why it’s at this end of the list. But we can’t discount the possibility that Apple has created some sort of physics-defying robot capable of stretching a 6.1-inch display into a 27-inch display. After all, they’ve already got a robot that takes apart old devices for recycling, and they’ve reportedly been working on foldable displays for years, so maybe they just stumbled into something.
The Studio Display is secretly a touchscreen device running iOS: Okay, a little more plausible. We’ve tried touching a Studio Display and so far all we’ve ended up with are fingerprints all over our brand new screen. But look, maybe Apple just hasn’t activated the secret features that will make the touchscreen spring to life, instantly eating the Surface Studio’s1 lunch.
Apple is using Studio Display’s processing power to improve machine learning: All those extra cycles, potentially going to waste. Surely there must be something useful to do with them? Well, there is, and its name is Siri. Clearly Apple’s voice assistant could use a little assistance of its own when it comes to understanding complex queries like “set a timer for fifteen minutes, no I didn’t say fifty minutes, I said fifteen, one-five, oh never mind.”
It was cheaper than giving everybody more iCloud Storage: You want to put your files somewhere? Great! Stick ’em in your display. By all accounts, the A13 only uses 2GB of that 64GB of storage, space—that’s 62GB of storage left over for all your pictures of brunch.
Just a ton of A13 chips left over: Tim Cook’s love of legacy nodes is well attested. Turns out he overcorrected a bit on his last order for processors, and ended up with a few gross of A13 chips dumped onto the loading dock at Apple Park. And you can’t just glue two of these suckers together to make an A13 Ultra, all right? But Cook wasn’t about to let those bad boys go to waste, so into the very next Apple product they go. You’re welcome.
Of course we may never know which of these very carefully researched and explanations is the correct one. That’s just how good Apple’s secrecy is. Don’t forget to tune in next week when we reveal the purpose of the M1 inside the next Apple TV Remote.
Why is everything in a studio suddenly? Do this many people really have studios? In this economy? ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
There’s a good chance that you’ve already seen that viral video making the rounds over the past week, in which a self-described former Apple employee is blown away by picking up a photo from one iOS device and dropping it on the other. If not, check it out below.
Yep, that does indeed work as shown, and it’s a very cool feature.
I’m sure there are some readers of this site who will dismiss this as “obvious”, just as there are others who will have been totally unaware of the possibility.
But here’s what I find fascinating about it: this is actually two different features, introduced years apart in different OS releases, working in delightful harmony.
The first is Universal Clipboard, a feature introduced in iOS 10 and macOS Sierra back in 2016 as part of Continuity, a whole set of enhancements to make it easier to move back and forth between Apple devices. With Universal Clipboard, if you’re logged into multiple Apple devices—iPhones, iPads, Macs—using the same iCloud account, anything you copy to the clipboard on one is immediately and invisibly1 transferred to the clipboard of all your other devices.
This is exceptionally handy when moving text and images between devices, because it avoids having to retype things or mess with files. It’s also one of those innumerable Apple features that is awesome when it works, but also just sometimes doesn’t, and there aren’t really any specific settings for it anywhere in iOS or macOS. (It’s falls under the umbrella of the Handoff settings that also control a bunch of other Continuity features.)
The second feature working along with Universal Clipboard are the three-finger copy/paste gestures that were added to iOS and iPadOS 13 in 2019. These let you “pick up” text or images and then paste them elsewhere—they’re basically just gesture equivalents of keyboard shortcuts command-C and command-V on your Mac. (There are similar three-finger gestures for undo and redo if you swipe left and right, respectively.)
The thing about those gestures are that they’re not particularly discoverable. I admit, I’ve rarely thought of the copy/paste gestures since iOS 13 came out, and even the Undo/Redo gestures—which are often the only way to perform those actions—are often critical, every time I try to undo something I generally end up swiping the wrong way first.
But none of this should take away from the coolness or enthusiasm over this trick. What I love about this particular application finding its way into the cultural zeitgeist is that the combination of these disparate features feels magical, in the best Apple tradition. (It certainly helps that the TikTok is shot in a way to emphasize it being mind-blowing.) None of these features may truly be “discoverable” in the usual sense of the word, but it’s still fun and exciting when someone does stumble across them: not only does it open it up to a new audience, but it may encourage us old-hands to revisit something that we’d forgotten about.
Usually invisibly. With large items, such as images, you’ll often get a little dialog box with a progress bar. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Okay, I’m only sort of kidding. But it’s true that there’s long been an internal conflict within the company that reaches into its very soul.
On the one side is that intrinsic philosophy, trotted out at many a keynote presentation, about how the company loves to surprise and delight its users. That’s embodied in way that Apple creates solutions to problems that users didn’t even know they had. And when it works, it’s truly incredible: Apple’s best products, like the iPhone and the original Mac, are direct end results of this kind of creativity.
But there’s a dark flip-side to this ideal for which Apple is no less well-known: the “Apple knows best” dogma. It’s often compounded with the company’s fixation on form over function, or with its practice of providing only one way to do something. It’s the side of Apple that seems to think that its products would be perfect, if only it didn’t have to deal with those pesky users all the time.
These two things exist on a continuum and Apple’s behavior over the years has often been pendulum-like, swinging back and forth between the extremes, while never totally abandoning either side. In recent years, there have been definite indications that the company has swung towards that platonic ideal of a product extreme, but if Apple’s latest products are any indication, the pendulum is now firmly heading in the opposite direction, once again bringing the surprise and delight.
Matter, the new smart home interoperability standard being developed by Google, Apple, Amazon, Samsung, and others, has been delayed. Again. Expected this summer, the launch has been rescheduled for fall of 2022, Michelle Mindala-Freeman of the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA) which oversees Matter, told The Verge.
CSA claims that the delay is because a lot more platforms than expected are planning on building in Matter support, which certainly makes it sound like a good problem to have, although given that the second part of the explanation is that the software development kit (SDK) needs more time makes me wonder which one of those is truly responsible. That said, they are promising a complete SDK in the second quarter of the year, with a spec to manufacturers by the end of June.
So we’ll need to wait a bit longer for our interoperable smart home tech, which is a bummer on one hand, but on the other, seems totally predictable. These things never launch on time.
There comes a time in one’s life when, no matter how long one puts it off, one must buy a new iPad. For me, that day came immediately following last week’s Apple event, at which the company unveiled the fifth-generation iPad Air.
But, before you ask: no, I didn’t buy an iPad Air.
I was tempted, I must admit. Given that the previous generation of iPad Air already had many of the great features of the iPad Pro (as Jason has pointed out), but at a lower price, it seems like an obvious choice.
What ended up tipping me over the edge, however, was the one thing that Apple didn’t change. Like its predecessor, the base $599 model of the new iPad Air comes with just 64GB of storage.
As I was weighing my options, I took a look at my current iPad Pro, the 10.5-inch model from 2017. Despite having a spacious 256GB of storage, I was using only around 60GB. Which, yes, is less than 64, but not enough so that I wouldn’t have to constantly police how much stuff I had on it. (I’d already enabled a bunch of space-saving measures, like letting iPadOS offload apps that I don’t launch regularly.)
So, I was clearly going to need more than 64GB. Unfortunately, upgrading to a 256GB iPad Air raises the price to a decidedly less cheap $749. More to the point, that’s just $50 short of the 11-inch iPad Pro with 128GB of storage.
At that point, I had to ask myself some hard questions. For $50 more than that 256GB iPad Air, I could not only get a probably sufficient 128GB of storage, but also pick up all those extra features that the Air lacks: Face ID, a ProMotion display, better rear-facing cameras, Thunderbolt, and so on. Were those features worth $50, especially compared to storage space that I wasn’t likely to use?
The answer, for me, was an unequivocal yes. Don’t get me wrong, the new iPad Air’s a great device. But as someone who enjoys the finer tech in life, I couldn’t resist the lure of all those step-up features. If I end up keeping this iPad as long as I did my last one, I don’t want to feel like my technology is falling behind.
So far, in the day that I’ve had it1, I haven’t been disappointed. As with any piece of technology, there’s a delight to upgrading to a many years’ newer device, giving you several models’ worth of new features. Though I am still retraining myself not to look for the Home button, and not to accidentally cover the camera when I want to use Face ID.
If there’s anything that I’m missing from the Air, it’s really down to a matter of aesthetics: honestly, I like the colors, and it’s a disappointment that the iPad Pro doesn’t offer more than staid old silver and space gray. (I’m sure Apple will release a version of the Pro with colors within the next year, just to shame me for not waiting longer.)
Despite the added expense of the Pro, I did cut my costs in a few ways. For one thing, I stuck with the Wi-Fi-only model: Convenient as cellular may be, I rarely go some place with my iPad where I need Wi-Fi but there isn’t any.2, and in those few cases, it’s just as easy for me to tether to my iPhone. I also decided not to immediately buy a second-generation Apple Pencil or Magic Keyboard, given that they actually go on sale not infrequently these days, and I don’t need them right away. Instead, I bought an inexpensive cover to protect it until I probably end up upgrading to the Magic Keyboard. But hey, at least it comes in green.
Interestingly, I put my order for the iPad in directly after last week’s Apple event, and it told me it would ship between March 16th and March 23rd. When the 15th rolled around and it still hadn’t moved from the “Processing” stage, I decided to pull a Snell and check my local Apple Store inventory. Sure enough, they had the exact model I wanted in stock—128GB Wi-Fi in Space Gray—so I canceled my online order and made a new one for pickup. A couple hours later, I’d returned with my new iPad. ↩
These days, if I’m going somewhere without Wi-Fi, it’s because there’s no Wi-Fi. That’s a feature, not a bug. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Last week’s “Peek Performance” event saw the company launch its latest low-cost iPhone, a revamped iPad Air, an external display and, oh yeah, the first brand new Mac model in years. Those announcements picked off a bunch of the low-hanging fruit and rumored hardware introductions, with about three months to go until the next likely gathering, Apple’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference.
Of course, the company could take a load off and put up its feet until the iPhone launch in September, leaving June for dealing with the many updates to its software platforms, but that doesn’t seem likely. This past week’s announcements may have answered some questions about the future of Apple’s product roadmap, but it definitely raised some new ones as well.
By Dan Moren
March 11, 2022 11:45 AM PT
What’s in my office, 2022 edition
Late in 2021, my wife and I moved to a new house, which meant packing up everything in my office of more than a decade and then setting it up all over again in my new (but somewhat smaller) office.
In some ways this was a good opportunity to revisit my setup, try to simplify some aspects of it—perhaps discovering some items I could do without, or maybe enhancing my current setup with new devices to help me do different types of things.
I’ll let you guess which one of those impulses largely won out.
Six months later, there are still some parts of my office that remain in disarray (some pesky piles of old papers that I can never quite seem to get rid of), but my work setup has at least been pretty stable for my most common tasks: writing, recording and editing podcasts, and the occasional bit of video streaming.
With that said, here’s what I’ve got powering my home office these days.
One takeaway from Apple’s Peek Performance event this week: the Mac is increasingly a platform for pros.
After years of pros feeling ignored by the company, that’s a heck of an about-face. But Apple’s delivered a slew of impressively powerful Macs: the iMac Pro, the new Mac Pro, redesigned MacBook Pros, and so on.
But when the dust from this week’s event cleared, I found myself wondering about the space between the low-end consumer offerings and those computers aimed at professionals1—or rather, the lack thereof, especially on the desktop.
If you’re someone looking to pick up an affordable desktop Mac just for some basic tasks—browsing, email, light media creation—you’ve got two pretty solid options: the M1-powered Mac mini, which starts at $699, and the M1-powered iMac starting at $1299 (or, to get one with a comparable GPU as the mini, the $1499 model).
Meanwhile, those looking for more power now have the option of the $1999 or $3999 Mac Studio models, or the $5999 Intel Mac Pro—none of which, of course, include a display. The Mac Studio packs a punch with the M1 Max chip that was, until this week, the most powerful chip ever put in a Mac. (Not to mention the 13-inch, 14-inch, and 16-inch MacBook Pros on the laptop side.)
But what if you’re someone who falls in the middle, what once was called the “prosumer” market? There’s actually a surprising dearth of options on the desktop side. The Mac mini and iMac offer only the 8-core CPU/8-core GPU M1 processor—even in the top of the line iMac, starting at $1699. To get anything more than that, you’d have to jump to a $1999 Mac Studio, and then add a display like Apple’s new $1599 Studio Display.2 That’s $2000 more than that top of the line iMac.
Moreover, because of the limitations of the M1 chip, the iMac and the Mac mini offer only a maximum of 16GB of RAM and two Thunderbolt ports—the same as an M1 MacBook Air.
As someone who falls squarely in that gap—and I’ve talked to more than a few other people in the same situation over the past 24 hours—I’ve been scratching my head. What exactly is the option for someone who needs more power than an M1 Mac mini or 24-inch iMac—or for that matter, a larger display—but doesn’t have an extra couple grand in the budget?
Previously, that gap was filled by the 27-inch iMac, but as that’s now been discontinued, there’s now a gaping hole in Apple’s line-up.
It sure feels like there’s another shoe to drop here. The most obvious option would be to offer better chips in the iMac and Mac mini, and fortunately, Apple’s already got a template for that over on the laptop side: namely, the M1 Pro.
Currently, the M1 Pro exists in only two products: the 14- and 16-inch MacBook Pro. That’s a little peculiar when you think about it. The M1 has been spread through a variety of computers, the M1 Max exists on both the laptop and desktop, and the new M1 Ultra is bound to the desktop mainly because the included thermal system would be way too big and heavy for laptops.
But there doesn’t seem to be any reason that the M1 Pro, with its 10-core CPU, 16-core GPU, support for 32GB of memory, and more than two Thunderbolt ports, couldn’t make an appearance in the iMac and Mac mini. That would provide some desktop options comfortably in the $2500 range (including an M1 Pro mini paired with a Studio Display), which is a price point that Apple’s desktops don’t really hit at the moment.
I’d be shocked if those chips weren’t available as a build-to-order option3 at some point, perhaps even around WWDC, though it’s also possible that Apple is waiting to skip those models directly to the M2.
As someone who is personally looking to replace a 2017 27-inch Intel iMac, I’m a little at loose ends right now. I’ve got an M1 Air, so an M1 mini or M1 iMac is mostly just a lateral move from that. And buying a Studio Display to pair with that Air means both getting everything off of my iMac, as well as locking myself in to probably a Mac mini.
Apple’s focus on the pro markets is definitely commendable: with the Mac Studio, MacBook Pro, and forthcoming Mac Pro, it’s clear that they take that audience seriously. But I’m hoping the prosumer story has more to it than just “M1 or bust.”
On the Mac, anyway, “pro” seems to have a bit more meaning behind it than on the iOS/iPadOS side. ↩
And while, sure, you could connect a lower-cost monitor, there’s a reason Apple fans have been clamoring for a display that’s comparable to the one found in the iMac line. ↩
Not that I’d say no to an M1 Max option either, though on the mini side, that has the potential to cannibalize Studio sales. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Peek Performance: A few details Apple didn’t discuss onstage
Note: This story has not been updated since 2022.
As always, the facts come fast and furious at an Apple event, so some details about its latest products fall through the cracks. Others, the company chooses not to dish out, leaving instead for its press releases and product pages.
Here are a few things that you might not have caught in the initial barrage.
“Friday Night Baseball” will be available on Apple TV+ — and, for a limited time, without the need for a subscription.1
However, Friday Night Baseball won’t be the only baseball content Apple’s providing. There’s also a live show airing every weeknight, “MLB Big Inning”, featuring highlights and glimpses of games. Plus, there’s a 24/7 livestream with replays, classic games, and more, as well as on-demand content.
Can’t stand it
Apple’s new Studio Display looks impressive, but depending on how you want to mount it, it could cost a little bit more.
Either the standard tilt stand or a VESA mount option will be included in that base $1599 price, but if you want the fancier height-adjustable stand, it’ll boost the price $400 to $1999. (Still a fraction of the cost of the $999 Pro Stand for the Pro Display XDR, so I guess Apple’s been improving the cost-efficiency of its stand technology.)
Oh, and the nano-texture option on the glass to reduce glare will cost an additional $300 over the display’s base price.
Your Studio, your way
$1999 isn’t a bad intro-level price for the Mac Studio: for that, you get an M1 Max processor with a 10-core CPU and 24-core GPU.
Jumping to a 32-core GPU will cost you $200, and from there you’ll have to make the move to the M1 Ultra, with a 20-core CPU and 48-core GPU for $1400. The higher powered 64-core GPU M1 Ultra will really ratchet up the cost, by $2400.
RAM options aren’t for the faint of heart either. The base model has 32GB of unified memory, with an option to pay $400 for 64GB.
Going higher than that, to 128GB, requires the M1 Ultra chip and will set you back $1200 from the base model. (Obviously, it’s a little cheaper if you start with the M1 Ultra model.)
The base model also comes with a 512GB SSD, with options to upgrade to 1TB for $200, 2TB for $600, 4TB for $1200, or $2400 for 8TB.
The only other key difference between M1 Max and M1 Ultra models are that the former has only USB-C ports on the front, as opposed to the latter which features Thunderbolt 4 ports.
The $3999 model, by comparison, starts with an M1 Ultra, 64GB of memory, and 1TB SSD.
And in case you’re wondering what the most expensive model would be, maxing out the high-end model will take you to $7999—and that’s without keyboard, pointing device, or display.
27 ways to say goodbye
At the end of the event, Apple senior vice president of hardware, John Ternus, made an interesting pronouncement:
They join the rest of our incredible Mac lineup with Apple silicon, making our transition nearly complete, with just one more product to go: Mac Pro. But that is for another day.
It’s an interesting statement, given that many had expected a replacement for the 27-inch iMac to appear at some point. And Ternus’s statement doesn’t preclude it—there’s every possibility Apple could roll one out in the coming months, treating it as nothing more than an expansion of the existing iMac line. (Though it would be harder to imagine it being branded as an “iMac Pro” then, as many have predicted.)
However, as the dust of the event cleared, the existing 27-inch iMac was nowhere to be found: it’s no longer displayed on the Mac section, nor is it obviously available for purchase on Apple’s website. Putting it in the Compare tool shows no price, nor Buy button.
So is there a replacement on the way? We’ll probably have to wait until June—at least—to find out.
Updated at 4:37pm Eastern to clarify the status of Friday Night Baseball.
One has to wonder if the current contract dispute that led to a delayed season start played any part in this. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
This is it: Apple’s 2022 is kicking off in earnest on Tueaday at the company’s “Peek Performance” event. It’s likely to feature the first of its major product announcements for a year that, based on rumors, is jam-packed with new developments out of Cupertino.
Unlike the immense spectacle that is the company’s June Worldwide Developers Conference—in which the company rolls out its software road map for the year ahead—or the flashy iPhone-centric announcements of the fall, Apple’s spring events tend to be more of a hodgepodge, featuring whatever the company has ready to go. In the past, that’s ranged from iPads to Macs to the occasional iPhone, with plenty of other wildcards thrown in the mix.
As we look ahead to the spring event, let’s run down the most likely culprits that Apple may indeed let us peek at.
In June 2020, when Apple unveiled its first Mac built around its own chip, the M1 processor, the company said it was planning for a two-year transition for its entire computer line. Here we are, just months away from the two-year anniversary of that announcement, and we’re poised to find out exactly what’s next in Apple’s processor jump—in more ways than one.
Recent reports suggest that Apple could be planning an event to take place around March 8, which might feature the introduction of one or more new Mac models. So, as we await news of whether such an event will indeed be happening next week, it’s worth it to take a moment and run down the state of this two-year plan and what exactly might be in the offing.
The Back Page: A non-comprehensive list of things Apple has spent 50 million euros on without blinking
Ooooh, Apple, you’ve done it this time. You’ve gone and gotten a European country mad—and not just any European country, but the Netherlands, a country which in the context of an epic fantasy novel would surely be a shadowy realm inhabited by demons who enjoy inflicting eternal torment, feasting upon your soul, biking, and growing tulips, but in this world they’re just into three out of the four.
The point of contention is the insistence by Dutch regulators that Apple must allow dating apps in the country the ability to use alternative payment systems, rather than being forced to use only the App Store. And because the regulators don’t consider Apple’s current “solution”—an onerous process that involves jumping through a bevy of hoops, including submitting a separate binary only for the Netherlands—to be sufficient, the country’s government is now fining Cupertino the baronly sum of €5 million per week, to a maximum of €50 million.
Which in turn has led the European Union’s head of digital policy, Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, to comment, “As we understand it, Apple essentially prefers paying periodic fines, rather than comply with a decision of the Dutch Competition Authority.”
And, simply put, yes. Yes it does.
To put it in perspective, that €5 million per week is about $5.6 million. Do I want to pay $5.6 million a week for 10 weeks? No, I do not. But that is because I make only a mere $5.7 million per week as a freelance journalist and podcaster, and really, what am I going to live on then?
But Apple? Yes, Apple, in the words of a succinct headline from 9to5Mac, “doesn’t care.” Because $5.6 million per week is not even pocket change for Apple; it’s not even money found in its couch cushions; it’s not even money that it accidentally leaves in its jeans when it puts them in the dryer, causing them to clink and rattle like the bones of the dead. It’s money that, I have it on good authority, Eddy Cue once ran through a shredder just to see if he could.
If that’s not enough for you, I present a non-comprehensive list of the things that Apple has spent $56 million on without even really thinking about it:
$56 million covers replacement earbuds for crackling AirPods Pro.
$56 million is what Apple spends to polish every single iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and Apple Watch in every single Apple Store in the world. (Not the Apple TVs, though, those things are dusty as hell.)
$56 million is Craig Federighi’s salon bill.
$56 million is what Apple pays Jon Hamm to not be in any of its Apple TV+ shows.
$56 million is what it cost to set all those AirPower charging units on fire. All of them. Not just the ones that were catching fire on their own.
$56 million is the cost of stocking Apple Park’s cafeteria with gourmet meals provided three times a day to employees, only there are just seven people working there right now, and let me tell you, they are eating like royalty.
$56 million is what Apple pays for tires on its self-driving car that will never come to market.
Apple once mislaid $56 million. It later turned out it had forgotten to cancel its gym membership for John Sculley. In 1993.
Look, Apple’s net income—its profit, not its total sales—just in its most recent quarter was $34.6 billion. If the Dutch government continued to charge $5.6 million per week until that was depleted, it would take until July 26. Five months!
Oh wait, in the year 2140.
Ho ho, won’t Apple look silly then?
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Review: Level Bolt is a stealthy smart lock contending with an imperfect world
I’ve spent a lot of time with different pieces of smart home tech over the last several years, but having finally made the jump from an apartment to a house that I actually own has opened up possibilities that weren’t available to me before.
Thus: a foray into smart locks.
I’ve always been a little bit skittish at the idea of smart locks. The idea of being able to gain access to my home via a security vulnerability or hack seemed like a worrying prospect. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized those fears are largely unfounded. It’s not as if picking a lock or smashing a window is particularly difficult. Nor does it seem likely that your average thief is going to spend time reading up on security exploits for your particular brand of smart lock.1
Moreover, I wasn’t sure about the styling of some of the smart locks on the market, many of which stand out like a sore thumb thanks to complex keypads or glowing lights. Personally, I was interested in something a little more understated.
The Bolt keeps its battery inside the bolt itself, and it’s easily replaceable.
The Bolt is unlike most other smart locks in that it doesn’t replace your existing deadbolt. Instead, it fits inside your door, basically sandwiched in between the exterior keyway and the interior thumb turn. Inside sits a small motor with a Bluetooth chip, which can turn to shoot the bolt itself.
The engineering and design of this device is extremely clever. From the outside, the Bolt is completely invisible. The only place you can even see the device is the bolt itself, where Level’s logo is embossed on the end. (In another particularly ingenious piece of engineering, the bolt also contains a replaceable CR2 battery that powers the whole assembly. Swapping it out just requires unscrewing the end cap.) Another plus: the existing key and thumb turn for the deadbolt work exactly as before, and don’t interfere with the smart lock, or vice versa.
In addition to its invisibility, the other feature that drew me to the Level Bolt was its compatibility with HomeKit—not a given in the smart lock market right now.
For all of that, the Bolt isn’t cheap: it ordinarily retails for $199, though I managed to snag it while on sale from Amazon for around $150.
Quick Tip: Export encrypted PDF without a password in Monterey
Note: This story has not been updated since 2022.
Oh, tax season. Admittedly, the annual ritual has gotten a lot easier for me since getting a) an accountant and b) getting most forms delivered electronically as PDFs.
But I ended up with a wrinkle this year when I was processing a few of the tax forms provided by my clients. Several of them used a handy service that emails tax forms, which also thoughtfully encrypts and password protects those files. However, when uploading these for my accountant, I find it convenient to strip out the protection, so that I don’t have to provide a bunch of passwords as well.
In the past, I’ve simply used the loophole of opening a PDF in Preview, entering the password, and then using the File > Export as PDF… command or the old trick of printing to a PDF. That generates a version of the file without the password protection.
However, in macOS Monterey I was surprised to discover that these loopholes have been plugged. Exporting as a PDF simply maintained the password protection, and trying to save as as PDF from the Print menu wasn’t even an option: the system now grays it out.
In theory, this is a good security practice to avoid having password protected files easily stripped of those protections.1 But when it comes to my personal usage, it’s decidedly inconvenient.
But it turns out, whoops, Apple didn’t implement these security features across the board. Making an end-run around these restrictions is as easy as firing up your web browser. I used Chrome for my first foray, but I then tested the same process in Safari, and it works just as well.
Just open the password-protected PDF in your browser of choice, enter the password, and then print to PDF just as you would have in Preview (or even just open an unencrypted copy right in Preview). I was then able to save a password-free version.
All of this is a bit silly: there’s really no point in locking down Preview if all you need to do is use another app. Then again maybe this loophole will itself get plugged in another five years or so.
Of course, you still need the password, so just how much this is actually a security loophole is questionable. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
