My thanks to Coherence X5 for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Turning websites into Mac apps isn’t a new idea, but for years it’s come with tradeoffs. Safari web apps are limited. Electron apps are heavy. And most “site-specific browser” tools stop short of feeling truly native.
Coherence X5 takes a different approach. It’s a Chrome-based app builder for macOS that turns any website into a clean, isolated Mac app—all while keeping the full power of Chrome extensions, profiles, and modern web compatibility. It supports Chrome, Brave, Edge, Chromium, and even Ungoogled Chromium, giving you flexibility without lock-in.
What makes Coherence X5 special is how native it feels. With a redesigned creation tool built for macOS 26 and Liquid Glass, creating apps is fast and intuitive. And the all-new Coherence Extension brings real Mac behavior to Chrome-powered apps: restoring windows from the Dock, intelligently blocking rogue popups, forwarding links to your default browser when appropriate, and remembering where you left off between launches.
If you want the flexibility of the modern web – without living in browser tabs or slow electron apps – Coherence X5 turns websites into Mac apps that finally feel like they belong on macOS.
Six Colors readers can get 20% off Coherence X5 this week with the code SIXCOLORS. Learn more and download at bzgapps.com/coherence
Bob Iger burnishes his legacy by… making a deal with OpenAI? Also, TV picks and a Listener Letter Challenge! (Downstream+ subscribers also get to hear us talk at length about the potential Netflix purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery.)
The worst Apple platform features of the year, the tech gifts we’re buying for our family, Bluetooth’s Auracast feature, and the emoji we desperately need.
Apple’s top design executive Alan Dye is leaving the iPhone maker to become the Chief Design Officer at Meta in a blockbuster coup for the social networking giant and big loss for Apple.
Did… Alan Dye ghost write that? I’m not sure if Gurman polled the Apple community about this but, despite this supposed “big loss”, people seem just short of giddy about it.
With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
And with the new App Ad Blocking feature in v5.0, it extends the powerful Safari and YouTube ad blocking protection to all apps including news apps, social media, games, and other browsers like Chrome and Firefox.
The revolving door at Apple Park isn’t done spinning yet. In the wake of the announcements this week of departures for both AI chief John Giannandrea and design leader Alan Dye, Apple said on Thursday that its general counsel, Katherine Adams, and vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives Lisa Jackson, would both be stepping down next year.
The two will be replaced by a single executive: Jennifer Newstead, who most recently served as Meta’s chief legal officer.1
Jackson will retire in late January, at which point Adams will become both general counsel and head of Government Affairs; that organization will transition to Newstead in March 2026.
Such a move isn’t unprecedented: for example, Deirdre O’Brien became the head of both Apple’s People group and the Retail division after the departure of Angela Ahrendts in 2019.
However, a couple of details do stand out to me. Prior to her stint at Meta, Newstead was the legal adviser to the U.S. Department of State during part of Trump’s first term in the White House. She also previously worked in the White House as Associate Counsel in the George W. Bush administration, and subsequently served as General Counsel of the Office of Management and Budget.
That’s quite a change from Jackson, who headed up the Environmental Protection Agency during President Obama’s time in office and was specifically brought in to handle the company’s environmental efforts. But given the relationship Apple has been navigating with the current president, it’s perhaps not entirely surprising that the wind has shifted.
Also, Newstead will not head up environmental and social initiatives—those will instead transfer to newly installed chief operating officer Sabih Khan, who also picked up some new responsibilities in Giannandrea’s departure. Safe to say he’s going to be very busy; it does suggest that Apple considers its environmental affairs part of its operations pipeline.
Over all this continues to hover uncertainty about Tim Cook’s future, with some recent reports suggesting that he might announce his retirement sometime next year, though it’s more than possible that he might simply transition into the company’s chairman role. If nothing else, a long era of stability amongst Apple’s leadership has seen a lot of changes recently, and it may not be over yet.
A previous version of this article suggested that environmental and social initiatives would be subsumed by Government Affairs; updated to clarify that they have moved instead to Khan.
Dye, of course, left to head up Meta’s design studio, which gives all this the feeling of a big name sports trade. ↩
[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.]
I’m going to let you in on a little secret: I mostly don’t link to Daring Fireball because I assume that anyone who reads Six Colors reads Daring Fireball. And if you don’t, you probably should.
The sentiment within the ranks at Apple is that today’s news is almost too good to be true. People had given up hope that Dye would ever get squeezed out, and no one expected that he’d just up and leave on his own. (If you care about design, there’s nowhere to go but down after leaving Apple. What people overlooked is the obvious: Alan Dye doesn’t actually care about design.)
It’s got brutal honesty, the true read on Dye from people inside Apple, and how in the end it’s an opportunity for change. I can’t help thinking that the possibility of change is the thing that’s really exciting a lot of people who closely follow Apple and its products.
Gadgets we wish we owned, our favorite tech or software of the year, our best tips for helping aging relatives with tech, and our thoughts on John Giannandrea’s retirement from Apple.
Maybe it’s because my eyes are getting old or maybe it’s because the contrast between windows on macOS keeps getting worse. Either way, I built a tiny Mac app last night that draws a border around the active window. I named it “Alan”.
I learned a long time ago not to make it personal when it comes to criticizing Apple.
As someone on the outside looking in, I can (and do) judge what Apple does, but it’s hard to ever know the inner workings of a company if you’re not on the inside. You could blame one executive for a misstep, only to later discover that they argued against the move and were overruled. It’s a mug’s game, and what’s the point, really? Better to spend your Two Minutes Hate on a product or feature than burn an effigy of an Apple employee who might or might not have had anything to do with what you’re angry about.
There are times, however, when Apple elevates certain people and they become more than just faceless employees—they become representatives of the products and features they discuss, appearing in Apple’s own promotional videos, in interviews, and even speaking on tour around the world. It is hard not to start to make connections between those people and the things they represent, even if it’s a carefully crafted PR image and still may not reflect the reality of the situation.
The facts: Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has continued his series of scoops about Meta hiring Apple employees by reporting that Alan Dye is leaving Apple for Meta. Dye was Apple’s VP of Interface and the figurehead of numerous Apple product announcements, most notably this summer’s rollout of the fairly divisive new “Liquid Glass” interface appearance.
Apple also confirmed to Bloomberg that his replacement is Stephen Lemay, who has been at Apple since 1999 and is a software designer by trade. The people I know at Apple speak of Lemay highly.
Here’s Gurman:
For Apple, the departure extends an exodus of talent suffered by the design team since the exit of visionary executive Jony Ive in 2019.
Dye had taken on a more significant role at Apple after Ive left, helping define how the company’s latest operating systems, apps and devices look and feel. The executive informed Apple this week that he’d decided to leave, though top management had already been bracing for his departure, the people said.
Gurman also spins this as a “major coup” for Meta and a “major loss for Apple.”
So. In the spirit of not making it personal, I think it’s hard to pile all of Apple’s software design missteps over the last few years at the feet of Alan Dye. He had support from other executives. He led a whole team of designers. Corporate initiatives and priorities can lead even the most well-meaning of people into places they end up regretting.
That said, Alan Dye has represented Apple’s design team in the same way that Jony Ive did ever since Jony took over software design. He was the public face of Liquid Glass. He has been a frequent target of criticism, some of it quite personal, all coming from the perspective that Apple’s design output, especially on the software side, has been seriously lacking for a while now.
I have definitely been critical of Jony Ive, especially in the post-Steve Jobs era, for many design missteps made by Apple. My personal theory is that Ive was largely burned out around the time that Jobs died, and that Apple made sure to elevate him and spotlight him in the wake of Jobs’s death as a way to reassure the world that Apple wasn’t just Steve and would be able to soldier on without him.
The firing of Scott Forstall in 2012 handed human interface design to Jony Ive. Again, I can’t say for sure, but it certainly feels like a man who had a brilliant run designing hardware might not have been the best choice functionally to lead that part of the operation. But in a time of crisis, it was a good time for Apple to say that its world-famous design chief was on it and everything would be fine.
After a few years had passed, that was no longer necessary, and it seems like Ive was pretty checked out. When he departed, he had lived long enough to see himself become the villain.
It occurs to me that Apple’s design group, led by Ive, accomplished some amazing things between 1997 and 2010. The post-Jobs era, however, was one of consolidation, growth, efficiency—basically mirroring the attributes we all ascribe to CEO Tim Cook. Apple was growing rapidly thanks to the iPhone. But keen observers of Apple’s products felt that something was off with design. The Trash Can Mac Pro. The Butterfly Keyboard. The Touch Bar. An aggressive MacBook Pro redesign that pushed USB-C to users too soon. And on the software side, a general feeling that Apple was not living up to its own standards in terms of interface design.
It sounds to me like a sort of malaise. Sir Jony Ive, with no worlds left to conquer, designed a gold Apple Watch and probably insisted on a lot of unnecessary features of the Vision Pro and envisioned a self-driving car Apple would never build, and eventually just gave up and moved on. (Maybe his new venture with OpenAI will be a thing, but I seriously doubt it.)
The same can probably be said of the team. Many senior designers have recently left Apple, including Evans Hankey and now Billy Sorrentino, another of Dye’s lieutenants, who is going with him to Meta. Others remain.
Without making it personal, it feels like any turnover in that group is a good thing. As much as I admire what Ive and his team accomplished in the first decade of the century, the last 15 years have been a lot rougher, hardware and software. Maybe everyone is better off if some new people step up and a new team is given the opportunity to build their own reputations?
So is this a major loss for Apple and a major coup for Meta, as Mark Gurman editorializes? I don’t see it. Maybe those top executives who were “bracing” for his departure feel that way, though my gut feeling is that if Apple really wanted Alan Dye to stay at Apple, they would’ve kept him. I think it’s more likely that in the wake of Jeff Williams retiring as COO, other changes are afoot at Apple, and perhaps Dye felt it was the right time to leave. Certainly, being offered what must be a truckload of money by Mark Zuckerberg couldn’t hurt things.
What I’m saying is, sometimes when you’re “bracing” for a departure of a senior employee, you’re doing it because they think they’re more valuable than you think they are. I don’t know if that happened in this case. Change is hard, and it’s natural for people (including Apple executives) to want to keep the band together as long as possible. But in the end, I think Alan Dye’s departure is a major coup for Apple.
Apple has once again made a film focusing on people with disabilities, and how they use the company’s products. The new film celebrates International Day of Persons with Disabilities, which is December 3. This time, the focus is on college students at both work and play, using Macs, iPhone and iPads, all while a music video-style soundtrack plays.
While some past films featuring people with disabilities have focused on heartwarming relationships, the new, unnamed film offers a bit more attitude, and a message that people with disabilities have often struggled to pass along – we’re not remarkable, or special, or inspiring. Just like everyone else, we’re happy, we’re sad, we’re frustrated, we’re joyous. And of course, we use Apple products and their built-in accessibility features.
The film was directed by Kim Gehrig, whose previous Apple film, The Greatest, earned an Emmy in 2022. It features performances from a wide range of deaf and disabled students from around the world, with songwriting and musical production from Tony award-winning composer Tim Minchin.
Accessibility tools featured in the film include magnifier for Mac, Braille access, accessibility reader, sound recognition, live captions and assistive touch.
By now you’ve probably heard that Apple’s AI chief John Giannandrea is stepping down from his current role before his retirement early next year. Much has been written about Apple’s lagging in the AI arena over the past several years, as well as how much of that lies at Giannandrea’s own feet. But what I found particularly interesting is not Giannandrea’s departure—for which the writing has seemed to be on the wall for some months now—but the details of his replacement:
Apple also announced that renowned AI researcher Amar Subramanya has joined Apple as vice president of AI, reporting to Craig Federighi. Subramanya will be leading critical areas, including Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation. The balance of Giannandrea’s organization will shift to Sabih Khan and Eddy Cue to align closer with similar organizations.
Back in 2018, Giannandrea joined Apple from Google, where he was the head of not only Google’s artificial intelligence, but also of search. At the time, it was widely seen as a coup for Apple, even though the company’s outside hires don’t always have the best track record.1
Subramanya is himself a former Google employee, where he headed up engineering for Gemini, before he moved to Microsoft in July of this year—less than six months ago. I have a hard time believing he’d been courted by Apple for any length of time, else why take the job at Microsoft? Maybe, as John Gruber points out, he really didn’t like Microsoft, or Apple offered him an amazing deal.
Still, the most salient fact would seem to be that Giannandrea’s replacement is from outside of Apple, which strongly suggests that there wasn’t anybody inside of Apple considered the right fit for the role. That’s not surprising, for two reasons: first, that Apple simply isn’t the hot AI company that all the AI experts want to work at. And second—and relatedly—the company has been hemorrhagingitsAIteam to other companies, especially Meta, over the past several months.
It’s also worth noting that Subramanya’s remit is narrower than his predecessor’s: he’s focusing on “Apple Foundation Models, ML research, and AI Safety and Evaluation” whereas Giannandrea’s current responsibilities include “Apple Foundation Models, Search and Knowledge, Machine Learning Research, and AI Infrastructure.” Apple says other parts of the team will be moved to newly installed chief operating officer Sabih Khan (presumably the infrastructure part, if that involves data centers and the like) and services chief Eddy Cue (presumably Search and Knowledge). He’ll also report to Craig Federighi, rather than Tim Cook directly, as Giannandrea did.
All of this reorganization comes just months before the company is said to be finally launching several Apple Intelligence features that it promised back in 2024. I can’t say whether Subramanya taking the reins bodes well or ill for the future of Apple Intelligence, but it’s clear that he has work cut out for him—the first step in which is probably rebuilding the company’s AI team.
If you want to take a trip down memory lane for some spectacular examples, look up John Browett and Mark Papermaster. ↩
[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 late 1980s and early to mid 1990s were Apple’s weirdest and wildest era. Wedged between the triumph of the original Macintosh and the return of Steve Jobs were a sort of Wilderness Years where the company flailed all over the place, ultimately flaming out and requiring the now-famous rescue by its co-founder.
To be sure, 1990s Apple was a company with a load of problems, from out-of-control research labs building unsellable products to fruitless quests for software stacks that would reinvent documents and replace Mac OS itself. But that era of calamity and excess was also the source of some real gems, including the product that debuted 34 years ago, on Dec. 2, 1991: QuickTime.
