In a statement to 9to5Mac, Apple has announced that it will soon halt sales of its flagship Apple Watch models in the United States.
The Apple Watch Series 9 and Apple Watch Ultra 2 will no longer be available to purchase from Apple starting later this week.
The move comes following an ITC ruling as part of a long-running patent dispute between Apple and medical technology company Masimo around the Apple Watch’s blood oxygen sensor technology.
The Apple Watch Ultra 2 and Apple Watch Series 9 will no longer be available to order from Apple’s website in the U.S. after 3 p.m. ET on Thursday, December 21. In-store inventory will no longer be available from Apple retail locations after December 24.
These kinds of patent disputes aren’t uncommon, but to get to the point that products are about to be pulled from shelves is surprising—usually they get nipped in the bud before then.
That said, it’s important to note that President Biden can override this order within a 60-day window that expires on December 25; after that point, Apple can appeal the decision. As Miller notes, this ban also won’t immediately apply to third-party resellers like Amazon, who have already purchased inventory from Apple, though if it does go into effect, those stores will presumably be depleted.
Doing this right at the culmination of the shopping season is kind of fascinating—on the one hand, it feels a bit as if Apple is playing chicken with the economy; even though most holiday shopping has probably been finished before Christmas Eve rolls around, it still means that anybody who gets an Apple gift card and wants to walk into the store after Christmas to get their Apple Watch is going to be out of luck. That’s not a great look for Apple, but it also doesn’t feel like something the administration particularly wants either, especially in the run-up to an election year.
The biggest question, to me, is whether Apple will choose to try and settle this matter with Masimo. Cupertino certainly has the money to make it go away, but it also doesn’t want to have to pay out if it doesn’t have to. The fact that the company hasn’t already settled suggests that it would rather pursue other routes if possible. (Unlike a lot of these patent disputes, which are often conducted by holding companies that have acquired large patent libraries purely for the purpose of suing big companies and getting payouts, Masimo is actually a health technology company that makes products related to pulse oximetry.)
Personally, I don’t think we’ve heard the last of this story for this week.
GM’s new software system better be a doozy after how it’s trash talked CarPlay. Apple beta tests a new set of security features for iPhones and you should be pre-warned that crying inside your Vision Pro may void the warranty.
Pull the other one
As you may recall, GM famously announced several month ago that it was ditching CarPlay, making the contention that it would build its own in-car entertainment and navigation system and it’d be better than CarPlay. Possibly it would have lasers and stuff. They were vague on the details.
But now GM says the reason it kicked CarPlay to the curb was as a—please make sure your mouth is devoid of liquids before continuing to read this sentence—safety feature.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
AI is a hot topic in lots of businesses, but most companies still haven’t come up
with policies to manage AI usage—and employees are potentially handing over all sorts of sensitive data to tools that may or may not be trustworthy.
Browser extensions that offer AI features, but steal user data, are everywhere. That’s why many companies—including Apple—have banned their employees from using large-language models. And that’s just one potential attack surface.
Kolide lets IT and security teams write checks that detect device compliance issues, and have started creating checks for malicious (or dubious) AI-based tools. Here’s a video about how Kolide can help companies enforce device compliance.
Last week, I walked myself through the process of realizing the power of macOS Defaults and how, over the two decades of modern macOS, Apple has addressed most of the basic needs of the average user. At the end of that process, I ended up discovering that the most glaring feature omission in all of macOS might just be its lack of a clipboard manager.
Response to that discovery has been… interesting. All the true nerds wrote in to agree vociferously about how they simply couldn’t live without one. Everyone else… has apparently spent the entire time they’ve been using a computer not using one and can’t really understand why they should care!
Let me walk you through the reasons why non-nerds should care, why Apple should consider making this a built-in macOS feature, and what apps you should try out if you decide to go for it. (If you prefer YouTube, you should probably just watch this excellent video from Stephen Robles from earlier this year.)
Breaking tradition
The clipboard’s weird, right? The Mac is credited with popularizing graphical user interfaces, but the clipboard is this invisible place where data lives, unseen but waiting to re-emerge at a later time. Rachel Greenham called it a liminal space stuff floats in the other day, and she’s not wrong. It’s like a little pocket universe.
But the clipboard exists at the heart of one of the greatest features of the Mac: the Cut, Copy, and Paste commands on the Mac’s Edit menu. It’s such a fundamental part of the computing experience that it’s kind of hard to conceive of what you’d do if you needed to get text from that web browser to that email window or from that word processor to that to-do app. (Drag and drop, maybe? So fiddly.)
Using copy/cut and paste feels like second nature, even to people who don’t consider themselves particularly sophisticated computer users. You pull it from here and put it over there. Even though it’s kind of esoteric—you have to use a keyboard shortcut or a menu item—I feel like regular users get it, internalize it, and use it pretty quickly. (Full credit to the Lisa group at Apple, who invented it in 1980.)
For all this time, the macOS Clipboard has been capable of holding one thing. It could be an enormous image file or a couple of characters of plain text—but if you copy something new, the old one goes away. One in, one out. (On classic macOS, the included Scrapbook desk accessory was a clever workaround since you could load it up with as much junk as you liked and then take it out later.)
Apple’s keeping the clipboard relatively untouched1 for decades suggests its perfection as a concept and Apple’s implicit satisfaction with it. And yet… surely there’s more that could be done with it? For years, third-party apps have extended the clipboard in numerous ways, while Apple has done almost nothing.
Why a clipboard manager?
If I’m going to suggest that Apple add clipboard management to macOS, I need to make a case that it’s going to be valued by regular people and not get in the way of normal use. Cluttering up the Mac interface with gewgaws is bad for the user experience.
What works to my advantage here is the clipboard’s invisibility. Even when you’re using a clipboard manager, that liminal space is still invisible, and so far as you and your Mac and all your apps know, it contains one single item. Copy in, paste out. Nothing changes!
But here’s the beauty of it: With a clipboard manager, that liminal space no longer holds a single item. Behind the single item, there’s a big stack of previous items—a bit like how a browser tab only holds a single page, but the browser history remembers every previous page you’ve visited. Imagine if you took the back button and history away from a web browser. (It would be bad.)
The magic moment of using a clipboard manager comes when you realize you need to access something that’s not the One True Item on the clipboard. If you’re using the standard Mac clipboard and you copy something priceless and then, a minute later, copy something useless—welp, too bad, the priceless thing is gone, and it’s never coming back. A good clipboard manager lets you use a keyboard shortcut or a menu item to view your previous clipboards, choose the item you want to fish out and bring it back.
And that’s my pitch for why macOS should have its own clipboard manager: Because it adds undo to the clipboard via a discoverable mechanism like a keyboard shortcut and an item in the Edit menu right next to Cut, Copy, and Paste. For me, it’s become part of my Mac muscle memory: command-backslash brings up a long list of clipboard history, from which I can retrieve what I want.
It gets better. Once you know that copying something to your clipboard doesn’t destroy what’s there, your use of the clipboard can become far more extensive. You lose the fear of wiping out something important, replaced with confidence that you can grab something in case you want it later and stash it away in the clipboard history.
Using a clipboard manager also reduces a lot of annoying clicking back and forth between different apps. If you need to copy five items from a document and paste them into five different web form boxes, you don’t need to tab back and forth and copy them one at a time. Just copy all five, then move to the web form and paste them from history. It’s so much less annoying!
Beyond the basics
Paste’s clipboard shelf.
That’s my regular user case. Of course, there are power-user features that Apple could choose to implement—but in my opinion, they shouldn’t bother. Apple features are generally crowd-pleasers that leave a lot of the nitpicky details to be addressed by third-party apps. It should leave something for the third-party apps that I’m suggesting get Sherlocked.
Those power-user features can include things like semi-permanent “shelves” for commonly copied and pasted items or powerful filters that can convert clipboard content on the fly to different formats. (It’s pretty great to copy styled text and paste Markdown, for example.) Third-party clipboard managers let you add keystrokes for all sorts of items, including pasting two or three or more layers deep in the history. I’ve been using a clipboard manager for two decades, and even I don’t use most of these features, but they will absolutely fit perfectly into some workflows.
LaunchBar’s history window.
If you don’t have a clipboard manager, where can you get one? First off, you might already be using one! I use LaunchBar, which has one, and Keyboard Maestro, which also has one. If you use the launcher apps Alfred or Raycast, you’ve already got a clipboard manager installed.
When my friend Todd Vaziri surveyed social media asking for suggestions for a clipboard manager, two apps were the most common standalone suggestions2: the $13 Pastebot, which Dan Moren uses, and the $30/year Paste, which is also available as part of the SetApp bundle.
I’d need to use both of those apps for a long time in order to write a deeply nuanced comparison. They’re different, each with its advantages, and you should be able to try both for free via one means or another so you know what you’re getting yourself into. Paste has a very visual “shelf” interface that some people will love (and which struck me as overkill), while PasteBot strikes me as being pretty much the platonic ideal of a third-party clipboard app. (Still, I’m sticking with LaunchBar. Muscle memory is powerful.)
Will it happen?
Sometimes, Apple surprises us and releases new macOS features that are legitimately macOS features, not just spin-off features from iOS and iPadOS. But most of the work Apple does these days is building cross-device features. So, while I’d love to discover a future version of macOS with a basic clipboard history built in, I’d like to make a pitch that’s more extensive but might be a better sell inside Apple.
What if… clipboard history for all Apple devices? That’s right, iPad and iPhone too. The interface would be a bit more awkward there, but it’s already awkward and involves meaningful taps and floating menus… so would it be any worse? And then, to wrap it all together, your devices all use iCloud to sync your clipboard histories together so they’re accessible everywhere.
Of course, there are security and privacy issues here—but a lot of those issues were already addressed by Continuity Clipboard. I think they can be overcome if Apple’s sufficiently motivated, and the idea of being able to fish out a link I copied on my Mac a few hours ago on my iPad…. seems pretty great?
Anyway, enough dreaming. If you’re a Mac user, you can benefit from this feature now via a third-party utility, and it might even be one you’re already running! I can’t recommend using a clipboard manager highly enough. Even if all it ever does is spare you from accidentally copying over something important, it’ll be worth it.
In 2016 Apple added Continuity Clipboard to iOS 10 and macOS Sierra. It shares that single clipboard across your devices… when it works. ↩
Many others are also available. Far too many to list here. ↩
It’s finally happened: Netflix has made its viewing data public… via an Excel spreadsheet? Also: Disney+ and Hulu get connected in the U.S., it might be the endgame for Paramount Global, and your letters!
We’re just a couple weeks away from putting 2023 in our rearview mirror, so it’s time—as the natural order of things dictates—to cast our eyes back over the last twelve months and attempt to shape the events into some semblance of narrative.
The past year in Apple has certainly been eventful, ranging from big updates on the Mac line to totally absent iPads to a brand new product category to challenges from rivals and governments alike. Even if the company hasn’t had its most blockbuster financial results of all time, you’d be hard-pressed to say it hasn’t had its nose to the grindstone.
Of course, the big moves aren’t always the ones that are obvious from the outside; sometimes there are trends that really only become apparent when you have the chance to look at them in retrospect.
The other week, I noticed that the amount of free disk space on my MacBook Air had dropped rather precipitously to under a few gigabytes. As I usually don’t store that many files on that machine—much less large ones—I went poking around to figure out what was eating up all my disk space1.
The culprit, as I reported on Mastodon, turned out to be a Mail log for my iCloud account2 that had ballooned to an astonishing 28GB—a not insignificant percentage of my 256GB drive. Popping it open, I scrolled through to see, yes, it was just as I expected, a text file logging data from my mail account. I figured something odd must have happened, deleted the file, and thought nothing more of it.
Fast forward to yesterday, when I went to download the latest macOS Sonoma update on that same machine and discovered that I didn’t have enough space. The straits were not quite as dire as before—I still had 20GB or so available, but not enough for the update to install itself. Despite that, the number seemed low, so I once again went in search of the reason.
And, once again, found that the same Mail log was up to almost 9GB. One time might be a mistake, but two, well, two meant it was time to locate the underlying issue. I popped open the file and took a closer look only to realize that this was logging all of my mail, explaining how the size had gone up so rapidly.
Doctor, doctor, Mr. MD—can you tell me please, what files are ailing me?
Fortunately, it didn’t take long to uncover the source: an Apple discussion thread led me to the Mail app’s Connection Doctor (Window > Connection Doctor), an otherwise handy tool for troubleshooting mail issues. At the bottom of that window is a little check box “Log Connection Activity.” When that’s active (as I perhaps did at some point a few months back while troubleshooting my iCloud problems)3, Mail will start keeping extremely detailed logs, which can quickly reach very large file sizes.
I deactivated the setting and am pleased to report that the logs have been banished, and my disk space is once again my own. But let this be a warning to any who find themselves low on disk space: check those Mail logs, just in case!
There are many great apps that can automate this process, of course, such as DaisyDisk and Grand Perspective, but I used the time-honored practice of sorting my folders by largest size and just drilling down until I found the biggest files. ↩
~/Library/Containers/com.apple.mail/Data/Library/Logs/Mail, should you be so intrigued. ↩
That said, I thought I’d done most of the troubleshooting for that issue on my Mac mini, not my MacBook Air—but who knows! ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
John Siracusa joins Jason to discuss Beeper, this week’s Apple OS updates, next year’s expected Apple hardware (including iPads, Macs, and Vision Pro), and the power of the defaults on macOS. Also: How to eat cereal.
I’ve never really been someone who journals. At various points, I’ve tried: on and off throughout high-school and college, while I studied abroad, during a cross-country roadtrip, but these always seemed to peter out eventually. It’s led me to the conclusion that you’re either someone who can stick with keeping a journal or you’re not.
Though Apple may have great hopes for its new Journal app, I think it unlikely that it will transform the average person into an avid journal-keeper if they aren’t already. And, frankly, if they already are, I’m not sure Apple’s Journal app is going to sway those folks from their current journal of choice.
The Journal app was one of the big marquee announcements of iOS 17 at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference, but like an increasing number of features announced as part of the company’s big annual software updates, it didn’t arrive with the initial release, instead getting pushed off to a subsequent update: iOS 17.2, which arrives today.
Like so many of Apple’s apps, Journal isn’t a wholly new idea: there are plenty of popular pre-existing journal apps for Apple’s platforms. But to set itself apart, Apple is applying the secret sauce—the fact that it is the platform owner and can leverage data that no third-party developer would ever have access to. That comes in the form of Journaling Suggestions, a machine learning-based feature that can gather all the data your iPhone has about you and try to synthesize it into a prompt for you to write about.
It’s a clever idea, and one that’s clearly meant to ease people into the habit of journaling by answering the age-old question “What do I write about?” But I’m not convinced it’s enough.
Journalist, not journal-er
I’ve been using the Journal app on the iOS 17.2 beta for several weeks now, and despite my best intentions—including not just turning on the notifications that gently remind you to journal, but even keeping the Journal app on my Home Screen—I’ve racked up a grand total of nine journal entries.
As I looked back over the entries that I’d made, I came to the conclusion that Apple has kind of done this feature already—and arguably better—in the Photos app. Journaling Suggestions seem to use the same algorithm that Photo’s Memories do, looking at pictures and videos taken within a certain time period or at a certain location, and grouping them together with a theme. (And, indeed, Memories are even surfaced within the app’s suggestions at times.) But Photos does this automatically1, presenting memories as a fait accompli for you to revisit, rather than waiting for users to actively go in and manually create them.
Where Journal aims to differentiate itself from Memories is from the ability to bring in other data, such as music or podcasts you listened to, your workouts, and so on. I’m not sure that makes sense to me: Personally, I don’t find those to be things that I’m particularly interested in journaling about, much less revisiting later. Do I really care that on October 30 my wife started listening to Christmas music?2
I did find myself wondering if allowing for more information to be imported might perhaps make the app more compelling. I’m surprised that there’s no integration with HealthKit data beyond the meager ability to see workouts you’ve done, which it summarizes with a static screenshot. Apple’s recent mood-tracking features would seem perfect for a journaling app, but they’re absent here. And, of course, info from third-party apps—say you listen to podcasts in Overcast and not Apple Podcasts—are a non-starter.
A simple journal for a more elegant age
What I do appreciate with Journal purely from a design perspective is its focus on simplicity. There aren’t a lot of bells and whistles or hidden features here: when you launch the app, it shows you a reverse chronological list of your journal entries, provides a filter menu so you can see those entries only containing specific types of data (photos, videos, music & podcasts, activity, places, etc.) or those you’ve bookmarked, and has a big honking + button for creating a new entry. That’s about it.
The list view is pretty basic: You can’t really tap on entries, which is a little odd; instead, you tap on items within the entry. That’ll display the item and a little metadata, but there’s not much to do with it at that point. Again, I found myself wondering why I’d choose to go back and view a photo or video in the Journal app rather than in Photos.
Creating a new entry will both recommend events for you to journal about, or show you a list of your most recent events. In some cases this even brings in memories from Photos. There are also what Apple calls “Reflection” prompts that suggest ideas to journal about, but I honestly never found myself inspired to write more. (No small part of which was my reluctance to spend a long time typing out an entry with my thumbs, because I am old and I find that uncomfortable.) However, Apple says that other apps will be able to take advantage of this suggestions framework, which is perhaps the unusual best part of this whole feature: third-party journaling apps, the ones that people have actively bought or downloaded because they’re passionate about journaling, stand to get better.
When you’re composing a journal entry, you can bring in pictures from photos, add your location, take a picture with the camera, or even record an audio clip. There’s also access to journaling suggestions here too, so you can easily get to recent locations you’ve been to or media you’ve consumed.
All by myself
Ultimately, I found myself struck by the solitude of the Journal app. I get it, this is an introspective practice that one is supposed to do for oneself. There’s a reason that the Journal app is locked behind a biometric or passcode authentication. For me, personally, though, a big part of the joy of memories (and the capital ‘m’ Memories from Photos) is sharing them with other people. There’s no export options at all in Journal, no way to share them with anyone else other than to huddle around the same iPhone together. But that’s clearly the result of a deliberate choice Apple has made, and I can respect that decision, even if it’s not for me.
In the end, Journal feels a bit like Apple applied its trademark fixation on privacy to social networking: it’s a social network of one person, for one person. Which is perhaps admirable (and yes, oh-so-very Apple) in an age where we may spend way too much time broadcasting every thought we have. Can the Journal app steal time, attention, mindshare from the routine dopamine hits of the endless scroll? It might not be a bad thing if it did, but I think that the company has an uphill climb ahead of it. We’ll see if it can stay the course or if the Journal app finds itself a casualty of a world that’s moved online.
Admittedly, with often mixed results, as our colleague Joe Rosensteel is fond of recounting. ↩
Well, I mean, yes, I obviously do care, because that is way too early for any reasonable human to listen to Christmas music, but that’s not a fact I’m interested in either revisiting or saving for posterity. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
Apple’s got big plans for next March, Android users are muddying the waters and, sure, she’s got an award-winning podcast and I don’t, but have you seen her dance? Terrible.
March Madness
According To Mark Gurman™, this March will be a big one for Apple, possibly because they will have an extra day to prepare for it.
Tim Cook: “I don’t know how we’re going to get this all done for a March event.”
Jeff Williams [rushes in breathless]: “February has an extra day next year!”
Tim Cook: “Oh, cool, we’re good, then.”
Gurman says Apple will ship new iPad Pros, the rumored larger-screen iPad Air, another new Apple Pencil, and M3-based MacBook Airs.
My thanks to Rogue Amoeba for sponsoring Six Colors this week regarding its indispensable audio utility Audio Hijack. It is one of my very favorite Mac utilities.
Audio Hijack lets you record and route any audio on your Mac, from individual applications like Safari or Zoom, hardware audio devices like microphones and mixers, or even the audio output of the entire system. If you can hear it, you can record it or move it or alter it. Whatever you need to do with audio on your Mac, Audio Hijack can help:
Record conversations from Zoom, FaceTime, and other VoIP apps
Save streaming audio from the web
Create podcasts, both remote and in-studio
Digitize vinyl
And so much more
Earlier this month, Rogue Amoeba shipped Audio Hijack 4.3, with a brand-new Transcribe block to turn any spoken audio into text. So in addition to all those bullet points above, and a half-dozen more I can think of, now it also lets you transcribe unlimited amounts of audio with no ongoing charges. You can transcribe from a microphone, an app, a file—whatever. Use it for meetings, or podcasts. It’s so clever. Read all about it in the Audio Hijack 4.3 blog post.
Through the end of December, Six Colors readers can save 20% by purchasing with coupon code 6C20AH. Visit the Audio Hijack site to download the free trial.
Apple has since confirmed in a statement provided to Ars that the US federal government “prohibited” the company “from sharing any information,” but now that Wyden has outed the feds, Apple has updated its transparency reporting and will “detail these kinds of requests” in a separate section on push notifications in its next report. Ars verified that Apple’s law enforcement guidelines now notes that push notification records “may be obtained with a subpoena or greater legal process.”
Push notifications aren’t run on an app-by-app basis; rather, they all travel through servers controlled by Apple and Google. These requests can give up a surprising amount of information, perhaps the least of which is the actual content of the notification. For example, it could reveal which app or device the notification was sent to, as well as presumably timestamp data. Even in cases where it didn’t reveal sensitive content, information could be gleaned from seemingly innocuous information. (I have no trouble believing that a sufficiently clever intelligence apparatus could, for example, use something like Apple or CARROT Weather’s live precipitation notifications to derive location information based on where it was raining at the time.)
Stopping these requests, which were issued by foreign governments, is difficult if not impossible. But allowing Apple to acknowledge them in its transparency reports is a step in the right direction; at the very least, it encourages developers to be more careful about any unencrypted information shared in those notifications.
This is the classic cat-and-mouse game of intelligence: governments and their agencies will always look for new information to exploit, while companies (hopefully) try to increasingly protect their information from snooping.
