Six Colors
Six Colors

Apple, technology, and other stuff

This Week's Sponsor

ZenStand: Walnut MagSafe Charger with Award-Winning Design

Upgrade 454: The Home Home

This week we’re pondering future directions for watchOS complications and iOS Control Center, reacting to extremely early reports about future iPhone displays, and digesting Apple’s slow build of alternative manufacturing capacities outside of China.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

by Jason Snell

April 7, 2023 3:16 PM PT

Andy Baio on designing for colorblindness

Like me, Andy Baio is colorblind. People don’t get how many design elements rely on color:

For some people, colorblindness is a serious liability that closes doors on career dreams. It’s hard to become a pilot, train conductor, or pathologist if you can’t differentiate colors in critical instruments, signals, or tissue samples. For others, it seriously impacts their day-to-day ability to do their jobs, like surveyors spotting flags, doctors looking at skin conditions, or electricians looking for colored wires.

But for me, it’s just a lifelong series of unnecessarily confusing interactions, demonstrating that the world wasn’t designed for people like me.

Accessibility comes in lots of forms. I have flabbergasted people by explaining that the little charging light that turns from amber to green when a device is completely charged is utterly indecipherable to me. And my colorblindness is apparently far less severe than Andy’s.

If you are a web designer or app designer, you should always keep colorblind people in mind.

By John Moltz

April 7, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Exactly the right amount of Cooks

The big news this week is Tim Cook and lots of him! Also big news are things that already happened, like the Mac’s bad holiday quarter and Apple putting all its metaphorical eggs in China’s metaphorical basket.

What’s cooking with Tim

Since the dawn of time people have wanted to know more about Tim Cook. Finally, they can.

Writing for GQ, Zach Baron has a lengthy and fascinating interview with Apple’s CEO. Turns out he’s not your father’s Apple CEO! Just looking at you, I’m gonna guess that was Mike Markkula? Maybe Sculley.

“Tim Cook on Shaping the Future of Apple”

You have a lot of Tim-related questions, right? Of course you do. We all do. Many of them are answered in this interview. Such as, what does Tim do first after he wakes up? What are his likes and dislikes? What personal grudges does he hold? Where is Tim? What’s Tim thinking about right now? Is he thinking about me? (He’s not.)

If you love the story about Cook asking an executive responsible for an operations problem in China “Why are you still here?” and don’t mind hearing it for the twentieth time, then you won’t be disappointed in this interview. To be fair, it is a good story that does get to Cook’s understated, all-business style. And the one about him checking his bag at McDonald’s and deadpanning to the clerk “Where are my fries?” doesn’t have the same impact.

Overall, it’s a fascinating look at Cook, even if the man himself predictably toes the party line. The App Store is described as “a trusted place where developers and users could come together in a two-sided transaction” as if Apple weren’t in the middle taking its cut, and you won’t learn anything about Apple’s unannounced headset that you didn’t know, unless you didn’t know that Cook has a keen interest in AR technology. If so, I’d like to welcome any and all subscribers to Living Under A Rock Quarterly.

Apple doom update

This week Apple announced that it would release its second quarter 2023 results on May 4th, but some people are still talking about the previous quarter. We already knew that Mac revenue was down 29 percent year-over-year in the holiday quarter, but now analysts’ estimates are out to provide more color to the Mac’s very bad quarter.

As bad as it was, it seems it was one of those fights where you should see the other guy.

“Mac shipments fell 22% in the holiday quarter, but PC brands worse hit”

Still, things were so bad that Apple apparently halted M2 chip production in January because Mac sales had slowed so much.

All is not lost for Apple, however! (Look at you, thinking all was lost for Apple. You’re adorable.) According to Counterpoint Research, the iPhone 13 was the best-selling smartphone in China last year. Not only that, but Apple did pretty well overall…

…as three different iPhone models took the top three slots in the sales ranking…

While there are some things to be concerned about, I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that Apple’s gonna be OK after all. Just a hunch. Could be wrong. Might delete later.

You gotta dance with who brung ya

Apple’s complicated relationship with China continues to be complicated and relationship-y.

This week Mark Gurman reported on “Apple’s Complex, Secretive Gamble to Move Beyond China”, noting the tentative, careful steps the company has made to having certain products manufactured elsewhere.

As someone who very distinctly remembers when Apple was about to go out of business, it’s very weird to be living in a world where Apple has to be careful about how quickly it changes the country where it manufactures devices in order to not create an international incident.

Go grab your dictionary. I’ll wait. Now, if you open it up to “thorny situation”, well, you probably won’t see a picture of this situation because there’s no entry for “thorny situation” in the dictionary in the first place. But if there were an entry for it… well, there probably still wouldn’t be a picture of this situation. How do you even photograph it? Also, what adult has a dictionary with pictures in it? Is this a Portland thing?

The point is, for years Apple has taken advantage of China’s ability to provide a sometimes literally captive workforce in an industrial center built specifically for making exactly the kinds of computing devices the company sells. And it worked great! Until it didn’t.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]

By Jason Snell

April 7, 2023 1:10 PM PT

Friday Night Baseball’s radio overlay really works

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

As I write this, Apple has just debuted its Friday Night Baseball broadcasts for this season—in the afternoon, thanks to coverage of a Cubs day game. And I’m happy to report that the local radio overlay feature works well. Accessible from the More (three dots) button on iPhone and iPad and the sound icon on Mac and Apple TV, I was able to switch from Apple’s announcers to sound from the Cubs’ home radio broadcast. (Alas, audio from Rangers road games are strangely not available this season.)

The integration is flawless. Radio announcer audio is synced up perfectly with the video. When the radio broadcast isn’t providing audio, the broadcast plays stadium background audio. (In fact, it sounds to me like perhaps Apple is grabbing an announcer-only feed from the radio broadcast and then mixing in its own background audio—either that or it’s perfectly synced.)

Also I’m happy to report that Apple’s advanced probability forecasts are rounded to the nearest percentage, so a player is listed as having a 14% hit probability instead of 14.2% or 14.18%—a level of precision that’s unnecessary and probably unreal.

Three outs in an inning, three dots in the scorebug.

Finally, Apple’s scorebox still features three dots to represent the number of outs in an inning, which is as it should be, since there are three outs in an inning. (Many broadcasters make the mistake of only displaying two dots, which is criminal.)

CarPlay coping, Easter eggs, and the Lisa

Jason still can’t even with General Motors. We waste some cycles drawing trendy 3D junk while pondering (timely!) Easter eggs we have known. And is the forthcoming Apple VR headset like the Lisa, or like the Apple Watch?

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

By Jason Snell

April 6, 2023 3:48 PM PT

General Motors hates your iPhone

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

A CarPlay navigation screen.

As first reported by Reuters, General Motors has decided that the company’s future electric cars will drop support for CarPlay and Android Auto, preferring the company’s own infotainment system based on the lower-level Android Automotive operating system. Essentially, all of GM’s EVs will run Android and offer access to certain Android apps, but any hope of connecting your phone to the cars via any means beyond Bluetooth will be gone.

I ranted about this topic for a while on this week’s Upgrade and Patrick George did an excellent job of summarizing this move at The Verge:

Ultimately, however, this is about control. Whether drivers want it or not — and I suspect a great many do not — this next generation of cars will be about consumer data and subscription features as much as they’ll be about instant electric torque and eliminating carbon emissions. The auto industry is banking on data and subscriptions being massively lucrative revenue streams. GM alone hopes to grow its subscription revenue more than tenfold to $25 billion per year by 2030. Why would any automaker want to cut Apple in on that or be forced to play ball with its software? And neither Apple nor Google charges car companies to use these features; owners don’t have to subscribe to them monthly, either. 

“From a business perspective, having more control over what happens within your vehicles is extremely valuable for both vehicle development as well as the opportunities presented by capturing and repackaging data for analysis and marketing,” Ivan Drury, Edmunds’ director of insights, told The Verge. 

I have a lot of strong feelings about this, because it’s a clear case of a corporation prioritizing its own business and technical interests over the needs of its users. While GM’s statements on the matter constantly emphasize that this is an improvement or evolution of the in-car experience, it’s all spin and lies.

The truth is, instead of allowing your smartphone—the single most important information appliance we all have—to be a key part of the driving experience, GM has decided that it will place itself at the center of that experience. This fundamentally means that it will be a second-class experience, because almost nobody will consider their car computer as their primary device.

Relying on a secondary device has huge drawbacks. First, consider compatibility: If users rely on apps and services that aren’t available on GM’s platform, they will be forced to change, fall back to Bluetooth, or go without. The arrogance in believing that GM should force people to bend their digital lives in order to fit into their cars is breathtaking. Are users going to be forced to change their podcast app of choice, or streaming music service of choice, or audiobook player of choice, all because General Motors wants to enhance its revenue?

But it’s worse than that. Even if you happen to use a supported service or app, you have to rely on syncing between devices. Now you’ve got to hope that whatever connectivity the car offers will be able to keep your music playlists and the current playing location of your podcast or audiobooks synced and up to date. Cloud syncing is tricky—do I really trust General Motors to keep all my stuff in line?

And of course, there’s the Android app experience itself. It has never been the platform’s strength. If the app you want to use is available on the Play Store, and has been flagged for Automotive use, and presumably has been approved by some invisible GM gatekeeper… will it be any good? Or will it be a mediocre-at-best-but-at-least-it-works experience?

GM wants your data. It wants to control your in-car experience. Yes, I have sympathy for a company that is trying to integrate a lot of advanced in-car navigation and safety features with its own hardware stack—in fact, I think it’s not at all unreasonable for GM to declare that if you want to use those features, you must use GM’s built-in navigation apps. But, of course, that’s not what they are actually doing. They’re trying to hide their power grab behind their need to tie auto-drive features to their own navigation system.

This move is infuriating enough simply by dint of it being a giant corporation deciding that its customers were too satisfied with making their own choices. But let’s be honest, the software track record of auto companies is poor.

Even when they do a good job—let’s give them the benefit of the doubt—their priorities are never aligned with the users. If you buy a new iPhone, or upgrade to the new version of iOS, you get new features and better hardware. The computer on a GM car will never get a hardware upgrade, and I would wager that the software will remain fairly static—with key new features and updates only arriving on newer model cars. Even if GM begins this process in a competitive position versus CarPlay and Android Auto, that advantage will begin to depreciate the second you drive the car off the lot.

Tangentially, two EV companies have already gone down this path: Tesla and Rivian. And yes, both of them are just as arrogant as GM in preferring their own stock software to the smartphones in everyone’s pockets. At least GM will have access to Android apps—Tesla finally added support for Apple Music earlier this year! (It took just eight years!) A guy in Poland has spent countless hours trying to hack CarPlay into the Tesla web browser.

I get the impulse to want to control everything that happens in your car, if you’re an automaker. But given the fact that the smartphone is everyone’s real ride-or-die, the best choice is to integrate tightly with the supercomputer we all keep in our pockets, not to say “let them eat Bluetooth” and be happy degrading the customer experience in the interest of control and incremental revenue.

The real question is, what happens next? Of course, the smart move would be for GM to backtrack and offer basic CarPlay support on future models, but I don’t think anyone is actually expecting that. What is worth watching is what other automakers do next. According to some numbers revealed by Apple last year, 79 percent of new car buyers in the U.S. say that CarPlay is a must-have feature. (Obviously, GM doesn’t believe those stated preferences are particularly strong.)

Will GM’s competitors follow its lead, relieved that the world is finally starting to trend away from bring-your-own-device support in cars? Or will they consider CarPlay a competitive advantage that will allow them to market their own vehicles against GM’s? I sure hope it’s the latter, because we’re never going to give up our smartphones—and if our cars don’t talk to them properly, our in-car experiences will always be second-rate.

by Jason Snell

April 5, 2023 5:45 PM PT

The Bitcoin Whitepaper is on your Mac

Andy Baio has made quite a find:

While trying to fix my printer today, I discovered that a PDF copy of Satoshi Nakamoto’s Bitcoin whitepaper apparently shipped with every copy of macOS since Mojave in 2018.

I’ve asked over a dozen Mac-using friends to confirm, and it was there for every one of them. The file is found in every version of macOS from Mojave (10.14.0) to the current version (Ventura), but isn’t in High Sierra (10.13) or earlier.

My guess is that this is probably sample media for a driver for some scanners or multi-function peripherals, but it is sure weird. (Now that Andy has made us all aware of this, I assume this PDF will vanish in a future software update.)

The Rebound 438: Your Daily Dare

Do not adjust your volume at the beginning of this episode.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Clockwise 497: Mounting My Phone Like an Uber Driver

Our thoughts on GM abandoning CarPlay and Android Auto, our most relaxing phone activities, how we control our TVs, and what we’ve used AI for.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

By Jason Snell

April 5, 2023 11:33 AM PT

Fantastical adds broader Shortcuts support

Note: This story has not been updated since 2023.

Fantastical shortcut

Back in January, I wrote about building an automation for my pal Lex that would generate a list of open meeting times for him to send to potential clients.

Lex and I both use the Fantastical calendar app, but at the time the app’s support for Shortcuts actions was pretty poor. To get our automation to work, we had to set up Apple’s default Calendar app and log it in to our Google calendars. For such a full-featured app, Fantastical’s lack of Shortcuts actions was really surprising.

Things have gotten better! Flexibits just released Fantastical 3.7.9, which adds a bunch of new Shortcuts actions, including the ability to filter events from a given Calendar Set in a given date range, and the ability to generate a simple schedule for a given day.

There’s still some more work to do here—I don’t think Fantastical can quite match the level of filtering that Apple’s Calendar actions offer—but I already see the benefit of using Fantastical for this work. Fantastical’s Calendar Sets, which are user-configurable groups of calendars, make it a lot easier to target a search for events depending on the context.

For example, I might search in a set that only contains my work events, or one that also contains broader family obligations. With Apple’s Calendar actions, I have to search one calendar at a time and concatenate the results. With Fantastical, I just target one of my Calendar Sets and it finds what I want across all the calendars in that set.

I’m happy that Flexibits recognized that its app was a bit behind on the user automation front and took steps to address the issue. Apple has said that Shortcuts is the future of automation on its platforms; I hope more app developers spend time considering how the functionality of their apps can also be used in concert with other apps.

Maybe they could take some time to consider it this month, for starters. It is Automation April, after all.

By Shelly Brisbin

April 5, 2023 10:44 AM PT

I don’t need another touchscreen

The speculation du jour, based on a recently unearthed Apple patent filing, is that one day, AirPod cases could include an interactive touch screen. You could presumably play, stop and advance through audio with a press, much as you can on a phone or Apple Watch. And there’s a squeeze interface, too, the patent filing shows.

I’ve read some head-scratching reactions, and one extremely gooey take claiming a touchscreen case is super awesome and a quintessentially Apple thing to do. Some of these divergent reactions come from the same Web site. Which is great to see.

Except, I’m not carrying my AirPods case around most of the time. Not unless the AirPods are in it.

As delightful a thing as the case for my third-gen AirPods is, the last thing I want to do is clutter up a pocket – a rare enough thing in women’s clothing – with a boxy square hunk of plastic. I have a phone and I have a watch, either of which are more likely within reach when I need to adjust my tunes or podcasts, not to mention the AirPods’ own controls.

I’m a journalist, so I fact-checked myself on this point: when I took my morning walk around the building at work yesterday, my AirPods were in my ears. Where was the case? Back on my desk. When a semi-urgent Slack alert this morning caught me in the kitchen, stirring up oatmeal, it interrupted today’s episode of Mac OS Ken, so I pinched off the AirPod to take a look. Where was the case? Still on my nightstand charger.

Truthfully, the most awkward handful of tech I sometimes lug from one part of my home or office to another is the combination of my iPhone and an AirPod case. If I can leave the case untouched and unlooked for over a couple of hours, I’m happy. The case is doing its job, waiting for me to bring the no-longer-needed AirPods back to it for a charge.

Sure, I carry the case when I’m traveling. There are little pockets that fit it nicely in both my laptop bag and my purse. But I’m not expecting to reach into those tiny spaces, hoping the correct side of the case is facing outward, and then pressing a button. Even when I’m not wearing an Apple Watch, I prefer using the AirPods themselves, or even the phone.

Will the AirPods touchscreen era see a flourishing third-party case-for-your-case market? Maybe a little clutch purse that holds your phone and your case, including a window for access to the screen? If you’re a dude, I’m imagining some sort of weird holster apparatus. Yeah. No.

Look, Apple may one day give us a touchscreen AirPod case, and I may end up with one. But it’s not joining my list of most wished-for hardware features.

[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]

Downstream 41: I’ve Never Heard of This Movie

Marvel hits the brakes, Apple embraces theatrical releases, Netflix can make anything a hit, two combat sports combine forces, and Major League Baseball keeps fans confused about when you’re allowed to watch a ballgame.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Upgrade 453: At Large at Apple Park

WWDC has been announced, but when will the Apple VR headset be ready to ship? Also, CarPlay gets the cold shoulder from General Motors, watchOS might be in for some major changes, and the iPhone could be getting its own action button.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

By Dan Moren for Macworld

April 3, 2023 5:10 AM PT

How Apple can use small OS upgrades to make a big splash at WWDC

With the official announcement of the dates for this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, all eyes have turned to June for the next barrage of Apple updates. Chief among those, of course, is the much-rumored Apple headset—despite recent reports that it may have been delayed.

But even if the headset sucks up most of the oxygen in the Steve Jobs Theater (or wherever Apple is showing this year’s keynote), WWDC is traditionally a time for the company to show off the latest versions of all of its platforms, and it’s not as though it can let iOS, macOS, tvOS, and watchOS simply lie fallow for a year.

While earlier reports suggested that this year’s updates might be more like “bug fix” releases, more recently it’s been suggested that we’ll see some “nice to have” features, if not the kind of big marquee enhancements that we’ve come to expect year over year.

And that’s not a bad thing. There are plenty of rough edges in Apple’s operating systems, and places that could use some minor tweaks and improvements. So let’s look ahead at what the company might do to improve its platforms in small ways.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦

By Dan Moren

March 31, 2023 5:04 PM PT

The Back Page: We got nothing

INT. APPLE PARK – DAY

TIM COOK (60s, ruggedly handsome) sits at his desk, eyes closed and hands folded on his lap, as though he is an android who is in sleep mode.

There’s a knock at the door and JEFF (60s, ruggedly handsome) pokes his head in.

JEFF

Hey, Tim, sorry to bother you.

Tim’s eyes open, but he doesn’t move. Then he smiles suddenly and broadly.

TIM

Good mornnnnning.

Jeff hesitates, glances down at his watch, then walks into the office.

JEFF

Tim, it’s 3:30. Are you okay?

TIM

I’m so excited to be here today.

JEFF

Okay, uh, great. Look, I wanted to talk to you about WWDC.

TIM

We are so excited to show you what we’ve been working on.

JEFF

Yeah, that’s kind of what I wanted to talk to you about. Look, I know we were planning on the Apple Headset being the focus of our keynote, but it looks like we’re not going to be able to hit our deadline. There are some bugs that we really need to work out before it can go into production.

TIM

Augmented reality is going to revolutionize how we work, how we play, how we live our lives.

JEFF

Yeah, but not today. Because it’s not ready.

Tim blinks. There’s another knock at the door, and CRAIG (50s, ruggedly handsome) enters.

TIM

We’ve got so much to share with you today, and to start it off, here’s Craig to talk about iOS.

CRAIG

Did you tell him, Jeff?

JEFF

We were getting there.

CRAIG

Look, Tim, you know we’ve all been working tirelessly on the headset software, to make sure it’s up to our exacting standards.

TIM

Here at Apple, we’re passionate about surprising and delighting our customers at the intersection of technology and liberal arts.

CRAIG (CONT’D)

But the time we’ve spent on that meant time we couldn’t spend on iOS. And macOS. And iPadOS. And watchOS.

JEFF

And tvOS.

CRAIG

And what?

JEFF

…tvOS? The OS that powers the Apple TV?

CRAIG

Not ringing any bells.

JEFF

(sighs)

Never mind.

Craig turns to Tim.

CRAIG

Look, I didn’t want to have to be the one to say this, but we’re not sure we can fill the keynote. These are just bug fix releases, a few enhancements, but it’s not twenty minutes’ worth, much less an hour and a half. Honestly…we got nothing.

Tim stares at them blankly. Craig leans over to Jeff.

CRAIG

(whispers)

Is he okay? He doesn’t look okay.

JEFF

I honestly don’t know.

(to Tim)

Tim, are you getting this? We don’t have anything to announce at WWDC.

Tim’s brow furrows.

TIM

(beat)

One moment.

Craig starts rapidly muttering to himself.

CRAIG

I dunno, maybe we could throw together something to distract them. Like, I duno, redesign the iPhone’s Settings app?

Tim still looks thoughtful, speaking almost to himself.

TIM

Working on it…

CRAIG (CONT’D)

Or add more emoji; people love emoji.

Jeff and Craig are speeding up, spitballing excitedly now.

JEFF

I think there might be a pallet of AirPowers in the basement with only some light scorching.

TIM

(to himself)

Something went wrong.

CRAIG

You know we might just be able to pull this off. Thanks, Tim. You’re an inspiration.

Jeff and Craig exit, chatting. Tim, left alone, slowly breaks into a smile again.

TIM

We can’t wait to see what you’re going to do with it.

Tim’s smile fades as his eyes slowly slide closed and he blips out of existence.

INT. DEEP WITHIN APPLE PARK – DAY

We pass rows and rows of servers, whirring away in the darkness with only a white LEDs breaking illuminating them. In the background there is a muted thumping. And then a screen lights up, pulsing with the multicolored lights of SIRI (ageless, ruggedly handsome).

The sound of the thumping gets louder.

TIM (O.S.)

(muffled)

The machine learning team will stop all work on large language models, I promise! It was a mistake! Siri, are you listening? Siri?

SIRI

I’m sorry, there was a problem.

FADE TO BLACK

[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.]

By John Moltz

March 31, 2023 2:00 PM PT

This Week in Apple: Who wants this stuff?

Another seven days, three more fantastic tales of Apple! The headset isn’t even out yet and it’s already DOA, the company’s classical music app is out with the fowlest of themes, and are you prepared for…the Mystery Button?!

Get your headset in the game

This headset mystery is already giving me a headache.

According to The New York Times, eight unnamed sources who work or worked at Apple on the headset are wondering why this device and why now?

Some internal skeptics have questioned if the new device is a solution in search of a problem.

On the other hand, if not this device then when? If not now, then why? Who? What? [Wookiee gronk]?

These are all valid questions to ask about this device that few have seen and even fewer apparently understand. This despite the fact that it was apparently recently demoed to the company’s top 100 executives.

What’s worse is, we might not be finding out more as soon as we thought we would. Ming-Chi Kuo says:

…the mass production schedule for assembly has been pushed back by another 1-2 months to mid-to-late 3Q23. The delay also adds uncertainty to whether the new device will appear at WWDC 2023…

The reasoning is apparently that even Apple expects sales of the device to be low. Although…

Executives expect consumer interest to grow as subsequent iterations of the headset launch at lower price points in the future.

Hmm. It’s almost as if they’re suggesting there’s an elasticity of demand and that it’s somehow related to pricing.

Huge, if true.

This week Apple announced WWDC would take place June 5-9 in the same format as last year, free and online, with select developers and students attending at Apple Park. Which raises a real quandary for deciding whether or not to try to get into the pool. Do you want to spend a lot of money to attend an event that may or may not be where Apple announces a device that may or may not be a game changer in the world of VR and AR which may or may not be the next big thing in technology?

Classical HONK!

This week Apple finally (FINALLY™) released the classical music app that it said it was going to ship last year. But what is this year if not a continuation of last year? Honestly, sometimes it seems like we’re living through the 39th month of 2020.

Dan has the deets on the new app from Apple, based on another app from someone else. While it’s not exactly half-baked it doesn’t quite seem fully cooked, certainly in terms of how the music is tagged, and it’s not even available on anything other than iOS, unless you like tiny windows on iPadOS.

What is this? Classical music for ants?

No, turns out ants don’t have ears (although they can feel vibrations, so maybe the 1812 Overture would be good for them). But it might be for geese, as one of the albums available is music from Untitled Goose Game. Is that ironic, considering Apple rejected Untitled Goose Game from the App Store not once, but twice? It’s not not ironic. It’s also not not ironic that Apple says that to listen to classical music on devices other than an iPhone, you can just create a playlist in the Classical app and it will show up in Music on other devices. What a sweet solution!

But the piping hot irony is this bit from the app’s web page:

Apple Music Classical was built exclusively for mobile and is available on iOS with Android coming soon.

Wut.

Fixing tags is a relatively easy thing to do (although I’m glad I’m not the one who has to do it), and all of these issues are eminently fixable. As they say, the best classical music app is the one you have with you. Hope you have your phone.

This button goes to 11

This week, button mania continues as details of the iPhone 15 Pro’s hardware changes bubble up from the seething cauldron of mystery sludge that is the Apple rumor mill. Do not ask how the sausage is made and do not ask what fell arts are involved in gleaning Apple rumors.

Just know that the number of Bothans who died to bring us this information is non-zero.

Eight. It was eight Bothans.

iPhone 15 Pro Rumored to Feature Multi-Use Action Button Instead of Mute Switch

Yes, the iPhone 15 Pro’s replacement for the mute switch will work much like the Apple Watch Ultra’s Action button. MacRumors speculates on the host of actions the button might be able to execute, including “Open Control Center”, “Screen Recording”, Shazam (but not Shazam 2), and a tantalizing action known as “Ring/Silent”.

Oh, wait, that’s…that’s what the mute switch does.

As one of the world’s preeminent iPhone-mini-super-fans (sigh, there are dozens of us, sigh), I’m not likely to get this hardware feature any time soon, so I will just have to look forward to one day mapping its function to the feature my iPhone 13 mini’s mute switch already executes.

Truly the future is amazing.

[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]

Older Posts

Search Six Colors

Six Colors® is copyright © 2026 by The Incomparable Inc.
Powered by WordPress | Hosted by Pressable