Don’t be caught by the marketing hype in Apple’s long list of new features coming in macOS 15. Just as Sonoma’s biggest change came not in its emoji count, but in how iCloud works, something glossed over at the time, there will hardly be a mention of this year’s biggest change, with the arrival of Swift 6 and its deep concurrency.
Apple devices all have many, many processor cores, so threading and concurrency is key to optimum performance.
Charles Stross writes a refreshingly skeptical column about AI hype, how Apple has been ahead of the game for a while now, and why Microsoft seems to be courting disaster by enabling its Recall feature:
Recall is already attracting the attention of data protection regulators; I suspect in its current form it’s going to be dead on arrival, and those CoPilot+ PCs due to launch on June 18th are going to get a hurried overhaul. It’s also going to be interesting to see what Apple does, or more importantly doesn’t announce at WWDC next week, which is being trailed as the year when Apple goes all-in on AI.
As I wrote recently, Apple has an opportunity at WWDC to announce AI features that are useful and measured and promote themselves as a responsible entity that’s not rushing headlong into the latest tech industry hype cycle. I hope they take it.
WWDC 24 is almost here, and everyone expects it to be all about AI. As the eyes of the tech world turn back to Apple, there’s a lot of work to do. It’s got to establish that it’s been working on AI features for years, show off new features, catch up with AI features from competitors, and maybe even take the opportunity to show where it’s raising the bar.
But this isn’t just Apple’s chance to show it’s doing AI right. It’s also an opportunity to redefine the conversation about AI to make it more substantive and results-oriented—and, of course, to make Apple look better while doing it.
Tom Warren at the Verge has a nice summary of the security problems inherent in the new Windows feature Recall, which records everything you do (what could go wrong?) and is apparently quite hackable:
Microsoft may well find itself needing to rework Recall, or recall it, if you like. There are clearly some obvious holes in the way data is stored here that need to be addressed, and making this an opt-out experience has privacy campaigners concerned. Recall’s launch comes just weeks after Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella called on employees to make security Microsoft’s “top priority,” even if that means prioritizing it over new features.
For the amazingly ugly details, you can read Kevin Beaumont’s Medium post, which explains how having an easily cracked plain-text transcript of pretty much every screen on your PC, downloadable in seconds, is probably a bad idea.
Juli Clover of MacRumors reports that venerable Mac utility Bartender has apparently been sold by longtime developer Ben Surtees, and that the new owner recently re-signed the app but otherwise hasn’t notified customers about the change:
The transaction came to light after some Reddit users saw a warning from MacUpdater letting them know that the company behind Bartender had been silently replaced. MacUpdater warned users that updates to the app from version 5.0.52 could be potentially unsafe due to the lack of transparency surrounding the situation.
These things happen—no developer should be chained to their software forever—but it’s odd that (anonymous?) new owners could appear without any communication to existing Bartender customers beyond a note saying a certificate had been changed. It’s Apple’s rules around signing app binaries, and the attention of MacUpdater, that brought this out into the open at all.
A glance around the Bartender website does reveal that while Surtees celebrated 12 years of Bartender in a blog post announcing version 5, posts from 2024 read more like SEO spam, with “key takeaways” summaries at the top, followed by unrelated Mac tips, followed by a pitch for Bartender.
Software companies don’t owe their users complete transparency, and it’s possible that there were extenuating circumstances in the transaction (from either side) that led to the lack of communication. But the inverse is also true: customers don’t owe software companies their loyalty.
Considering the different models of iPad, and reviewing the new “What If…?” Vision Pro app. [More Colors and Backstage members get an extra 14 minutes, including Jason getting mad about System Settings on the Mac for one last(?) time.]
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide helps its customers keep their devices in compliance, which keeps their company data safe.
Kolide has seen a rise in cyber liability insurance issues recently. Companies are investing more in security insurance and less in actual security. The result has been a tidal wave of data breaches that have driven up the cost of premiums to the point that they are rapidly becoming unaffordable.
Kolide has seen its cyber insurance premiums go up by 40% in just the last two years. It turns out that insurance companies themselves can help get us out of this crisis, by mandating some (pretty basic) security requirements for their customers–things like MFA, endpoint security, and retiring end-of-life software. Read Kolide’s full blog post to learn more about their findings.
…batteries eventually need replacing on all devices. They are a consumable good with a finite — though not always predictable — lifespan, most often shorter than the actual lifetime usability of the product. The only reason I do not use my AirPods any more is because the battery in each bud lasts less than twenty minutes; everything else is functional. If there is any repair which should be straightforward and doable without replacing unrelated components or the entire device, it is the battery.
There are a lot of trade-offs when it comes to the design of mobile devices, but making it easy to replace a device’s battery should always be a high priority.
I loved the Brr blog, which was written by an IT expert during a year in Antarctica. The author is home now, but here’s a surprise bonus post, full of information about how slow the Internet is in Antarctica and why modern software is terrible at working over slow connections:
Downloads are possible at the South Pole, but they are subject to unique constraints. The biggest constraint is the lack of 24×7 Internet. While I was there, I knew we would lose Internet access at a certain time!
It’s a frustrating reality: with most apps that do their own downloads, we were powerless to do anything about this known break in connectivity. We just had to sit there and watch it fail, and often watch all our progress be lost.
The details in this post are fantastic, though they won’t be surprising to anyone who has tried to use conventional apps and websites on a very slow satellite link. Apple’s method of doing macOS updates comes in for some justified criticism, as does the caching server built into macOS. I was surprised at just how many ways Apple’s processes failed under the strain of the slow connections at the South Pole.
Review: “What If?” shows off the Vision Pro’s strengths
Marvel Studios and ILM’s “What If…? – An Immersive Story” for Vision Pro, launching Thursday as a free app, isn’t an immersive video or a game. It’s something in between—a mixed-media experiment, roughly an hour long, that tries to use every feature of the Vision Pro to make a compelling entertainment experience.
Based on the Disney+ animated series (and, more distantly, the Marvel comic), “What If?” is built around the premise of variant versions of famous Marvel characters. The “What If?” comic was doing multiverse stories decades before they were cool.
In the new “What If?” immersive story, you’re called by The Watcher (the narrator and main character of the TV series, filling Rod Serling’s shoes but with a bit more agency) to intervene in various multiversal crises, aided by Sorcerer Supreme Wong, who equips you with magic spells to use during your adventure.
The scenes with The Watcher and Wong don’t take place in a fantasy world—they’re augmented reality scenes set in wherever you’re using the Vision Pro. It’s pretty funny to see The Watcher towering above Wong, his head clearly too tall to fit in my house (but somehow doing it anyway). In addition to augmented reality, the app contains extended animated scenes (very much like segments from the TV show, but in 3-D and displayed via a sort of crystal shard floating in front of you) and quite a few immersive environments.
Watching TV on a crystal shard, as you do.
I really enjoyed the environments, which are cleverly designed to resemble the style of the animated “What If?” TV series, but upgraded a bit so that they make sense in a 3-D, 360-degree context. I was especially impressed by a few surprising easter eggs littered around, and the design of a see-through pod containing something very interesting.
The environments are interactive in the sense that you can look around and drink them in, but you don’t really interact with them directly beyond that. You don’t move around, and your only interaction that effects the scene is when you cast spells. (If you want to revisit those environments later, and just look around, you can—the app lets you revisit any of its “chapters” from the main menu.)
Spellcasting works well with Vision Pro’s hand tracking.
Oh, casting spells: The app makes the clever choice of building the entire interactive mechanic around magic, which makes sense because—like the Vision Pro itself—Marvel Universe magic is controlled via hand gestures. Wong will train you to shield yourself, fire power blasts, seal away dangerous objects, and collect others.
If this all sounds very much like a video game… it’s not. There’s a reason the app is subtitled An Immersive Story: Your actions (while very fun!) are really just there to make the story move along. There’s no way to lose. The story will wait for you to complete your task, and then it continues on. It’s all done in a very subtle way—the music plays, the action continues—but “What If?” is trying to be an engaging story that you’re present in, not a game. Consider that this app is from two Disney-owned companies, and consider it sort of like an interactive theme park ride. You can do stuff, but you can’t really change the ride.
That is, except for one point in the story, where you’re offered a choice. It’s a real, legitimate “final choice” that results in different endings depending on what you choose. It’s the lightest dollop of branching on a story that otherwise goes in a straight line—clearly the budget of this project was not high enough to create numerous scenes that will only be seen by the fraction of the viewers who make those specific choices—but it’s a fun moment nonetheless.
It’s hard to judge “What If?” overall, because it really does seem like a sampler platter of ways this sort of entertainment could evolve in the future. Is there room for something that’s more interactive than watching TV, but less interactive than a full-on video game? I have no idea. But I do know that the hour I spent with “What If?” was maybe the best hour I’ve spent on the device since I got it. If Apple is looking for a single app that demonstrates all the features of the Vision Pro at its best, “What If?” may be the answer.
The making of “What If…?”
I got a chance to briefly talk to two people involved in making the app — Indira Guerrieri, technical art director, and Joe Ching, lead experience designer.
Guerrieri on translating the animated series to full environments: “At the beginning, it was all, ‘we’ve got this gorgeous artwork and these gorgeous characters, and we got to make them right.’ And then all sorts of discussion started happening around how much do we actually make it a little more realistic so that it feels like you’re in a 3D space? I remember the discussions were, do we want to make it more sort of toonish, do we want to add marks of a pencil from a toon-rendered drawing, or do you want to leave it? So we went somewhere in between.”
Ching on the level of interactivity in the app: “It was actually a very conscious decision that we made… we did not want any kind of a health bar where you say, ‘Oh, I died, and now I have to start this thing over.’ We really wanted it to be where the player could just do whatever they wanted in this world and not really have any sort of consequence to either not engaging or engaging. So that way, anybody at any skill level could really get through and sort of get the entire storyline.
“There are going to be particular players who are going to be focused on the narrative and going to want to sit there and watch everything that happens in front of them, and then there are going to be people who just want to, you know, take the time to look around. And that goes back to the no-consequences of, ‘If I don’t do anything, I’m not going to die.’ So that if a player only has 10 minutes and they just want to take a look at the environments, they can do that. There are some Easter eggs here and there. So, it’s really how the player wants to go through there, if they want to engage, and also the idea of replayability. You can play through the storyline the first time and then just go through and just appreciate everything that Indira and the art team have done. So, it’s sort of a play as you like.”
Guerrieri on targeting the Vision Pro: “We designed the project for a device that has so much range, that was the beauty of it. It’s like, you can go, ‘Yeah, I can do color. I can do, you know, nuance in the way things look.’ It’s pretty cool. That was a joy, to work with that range.”
Kobo Libra Colour Review: Color, but at what cost?
All my computing devices, save one, have color displays. The last time I regularly used a computer without a color display was probably in the mid-1990s. The only exception is my e-reader, which—since the very first Kindle I bought—has been a black-and-white E Ink screen that excelled at the boring job of displaying text. But… what if an e-reader added color?
We’ve reached the point where E Ink technology—which is unlike normal display technology found in our phones and computers, but allows low-power reflective displays that work more like actual ink on paper—can actually display color decently and affordably. And so now I’ve spend the last few weeks with my first color e-reader, the $219 Kobo Libra Colour.
In theory, color adds a new dimension to the e-reader. Highlights can be color coded, and book covers finally appear in full color. This is especially fun when I turn off the reader and a boldly colored book cover, designed for maximum marketing appeal, appears on the device’s screen. Unfortunately, a moment later the device’s backlight turns off and the colors become muted unless the screen is in bright light.
I love e-readers, and for the last few years my e-reader of choice has been the Kobo Libra 2. It’s a small (7-inch diagonal) device that’s easy to hold, with physical page turn buttons. It’s a winner. And now, there’s one in color!
But the truth is, most of what I use an e-reader for is text on a page. Color isn’t really part of the equation. I spent some time reading a color comic book using the Libra Colour, and it worked—but it wasn’t fun. The screen is just too small to read comfortably, and the colors were muted, feeling more like I was reading on newsprint (or a very old comic book) than on a bright, modern iPad display.
You can read comics on the Kobo Libra Colour, but I wouldn’t recommend it.
And the ugly truth is that as miraculous as it is that E Ink displays can do color, the Libra Colour’s screen is actually inferior to the screen on the Libra 2. Up close, it’s clear that there’s some sort of visible background texture on the Libra Colour (sort of a yellowish-gray wash) that reduces contrast. And when I cranked the brightness up to 100% to read in bright sunlight, it was clear that the Libra 2 was brighter and clearer than the Libra Colour.
It’s hard to see, but the Kobo Libra 2 screen (left) is brighter and offers higher contrast, while the screen of the Kobo Libra Colour (right) has a patterned background that reduces contrast.
Physically, the Libra Colour is almost identical to the Libra 2. It’s a little thicker at the grip edge and there’s a different plastic texture on the back of the case (which I found more pleasant) and it’s a few grams lighter than the previous model. Unfortunately, it’s still got a recessed screen, meaning dust and hair can collect around the edges of the bezel. That’s a negative, but it makes it easy to find the edge of the display to slide your finger up and down to adjust brightness without fiddling with a more complex user interface. I’d still rather have a flush screen, though.
In terms of software, Kobo has seen fit to enable Dropbox support on the Libra Colour—it was previously only available on higher-end Kobos, not the Libra—and added support for Google Drive as well. This means it’s a lot easier to sideload books, comics, and random PDFs from your collection without having to attach the Kobo via USB-C. In practice, though, I found myself still using the Calibre app to sideload files to my Kobo unless I was really in a pinch, because Kobo’s own Dropbox import doesn’t “dress up” ePub files in any way, while Calibre has some nice plug-ins that convert generic ePubs to use some Kobo-specific extensions that improve the presentation of the books.
Color book covers are fine (when they’re in bright light), but is that enough? (Pictured: Sarah’s Kobo Clara Colour.)
The Libra Colour is not a bad e-reader, but it feels like a misstep by Kobo. Color isn’t really very necessary for reading text, and the color display offers a warmer color temperature and worse contrast. All for a $40 higher list price—though at least cloud syncing isn’t being withheld from the Libra line anymore. I wouldn’t mind the move so much—I’m sure some people want to view color comics and PDFs and would be willing to put up with the small screen, and users of the optional Kobo Stylus 2 might enjoy having different ink colors for their markup—if Kobo kept a non-color model around at a lower price. But as I write this, the Libra 2 is not available from Kobo.
If you’re a casual reader of eBooks and are barely motivated to buy a dedicated e-reader at all, the $120 base-level Kindle ($20 less if you let Amazon stick ads on it) is probably good enough, though it doesn’t have a flush screen, isn’t waterproof, and has no page-turn buttons, which I consider essential for pleasurable reading. The $130 Kobo Clara BW is similar, and has similar drawbacks. (My friend Sarah Hendrica Bickerton upgraded to the $150 Kobo Clara Colour, which was released at the same time—and she had the same issues with the screen being dimmer and off-color that I saw.) The Kindle Paperwhite also doesn’t have buttons, but it’s got a flush screen and is slightly cheaper than the Libra—$150 with ads, $170 without.
(Reader, I am filled with despair at the current state of e-reader options. More on this soon.)
In the end: I don’t mind the Kobo Libra Colour. It definitely fills a niche. But adding $40 to the price and degrading the screen quality a bit, all in the name of nice-but-not-necessary color is really frustrating. The Libra 2 was my go-to recommendation for the discerning eBook reader; the Libra Colour might still take that crown, but it’s an all-around worse value than its predecessor, and that’s really a shame.
One bug teaches us a lot about Apple’s unnecessary opacity, media dynamics, and taking Internet claims at face value. [More Colors & Backstage: 15 minutes more, including not getting your hopes up for WWDC AI announcements.]
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
None of us are as good at clocking deepfakes as we think we are. Even your mom, or your boss, or anyone in your IT department might not be able to tell the difference. We all think we’re clever enough to spot a fake, but in real life, people only catch voice clones about 50% of the time.
But the good news is that we can be trained to look past our vulnerabilities and recognize a suspicious phone call, even if the voice sounds just like someone we trust. Kolide has a blog post all about it. It’s a frank and thorough exploration of what we should be worried about when it comes to audio deepfakes.
There’s been a lot of buzz lately involving a bug in Photos that caused some deleted items to reappear in libraries, including some (apparent) misinformation that blew the entire story out of proportion. Is Apple’s “Secure Erase” feature truly insecure?
As far as I can tell, claims made about securely erased devices recovering old images originate from a single post on Reddit, since deleted by the person who posted it. Although that brought a series of cogent responses pointing out how that isn’t possible, it was picked up and amplified elsewhere, under the title iOS 17.5 Bug May Also Resurface Deleted Photos on Wiped, Sold Devices, which is manifestly incorrect. Sadly, even those who should know better have piled in and reported that single, retracted claim as established fact.
Good information and a useful lesson about not believing everything you read on the Internet.
It’s kind of hard to believe today, given how wildly successful the iPhone has been, but in the product’s early days there was only a single iPhone model for sale. It wasn’t until ten years ago, in 2014, that Apple introduced two different iPhone models, the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. But that opened the floodgates, and Apple has spent the last ten years trying to find the right combination of new iPhone models to maximize the money it makes from its most important product.
If reports are true, next year Apple’s going to be switching things up again, dropping the iPhone Plus for a dramatic new model. After the discontinuation if the iPhone Mini after two years and the (apparent) death of the iPhone Plus after three, what does Apple have up its sleeve for 2025?
Today Marvel and ILM dropped the trailer for the forthcoming “What If?” immersive story, which was just announced a couple of weeks ago, and (surprise!) is launching next Wednesday in the visionOS App Store as a free app.
Marvel and ILM say the immersive story is about an hour long, and is directly connected to the “What If?” animated series on Disney+, which itself is a multiversal riff on various Marvel Cinematic Universe movies. (Lest you think that this multiverse stuff is new, “What If?” is based on a comic that I absolutely devoured when I was a kid. I still have my issue #1 in a box—what if Spider-Man joined the Fantastic Four?—not too far from where I’m typing this.)
The story will feature the cosmic being The Watcher asking you, the Vision Pro user, for help in facing off with dangerous “variants,” alternate-universe versions of various Marvel characters. Sorcerer Supreme Wong will instruct players on how to cast spells (presumably with the Vision Pro’s hand tracking features) and use the Infinity Stones. Versions of characters such as Thanos, Hela, the Collector, and Red Guardian will appear.
Marvel and ILM describe the app as including both full virtual environments as well as mixed-reality scenarios which involve the real world around players. It sounds very much like an interesting mash-up of interactive and animated elements. I’m very much looking forward to seeing how the “What If?” animation style translates into 3-D. I guess my wait will be over in a week!
Jason’s been using the iPad Pro as his primary computer for a week, Dan’s writing on his iPad in cafés again, and we wonder what will happen to the Web (bad… and maybe good?) given the rise of AI in search engines. [More Colors and Backstage members get 13 minutes of extra Home Improvement topics.]
The dominant narrative has been that a single phone call hacked MGM, but that help desk worker was set up to fail by MGM’s weak ID verification protocols. And there’s another factor that could have stopped the hackers in their tracks: it’s all about the device you’re reading this on.
To read more of what Kolide learned when they researched the MGM hack (like how hacker groups get their names, the worrying gaps in MGM’s security, and why device trust is the real core of the story), check out the Kolide Blog.
Wow. Someone was selling Apple Employee #10’s employee badge?! What an incredible piece of Apple history! Sure, it’s not Steve Jobs’ badge (despite the auction title), but there are only so many of these in the world — especially from one of the first ten employees.
How do you cover for a forged document? More forged documents!
I linked to this in my iPad Pro review, but in case you missed that, Federico Viticci has done everyone who writes about iPadOS a service and written a detailed account of what we mean when we say “the iPad hardware is let down by its software”:
In our community, we often hear about the issues of iPadOS and the obstacles people like me run into when working on the platform, but I’ve been guilty in the past of taking context for granted and assuming that you, dear reader, also know precisely what I’m talking about.
Today, I will rectify that. Instead of reviewing the new iPad Pro, I took the time to put together a list of all the common problems I’ve run into over the past…checks notes…12 years of working on the iPad, before its operating system was even called iPadOS.
I’ve been stunned to see some reactions to our criticism of iPadOS this past week suggest that, somehow, people like Federico and myself just don’t “get” the iPad. We’ve spent years using the iPad and pushing what it can do. We get it all too well.
