“Tour De Force” is a half-hour film about French motorcycle racer Johann Zarco competing for a historic win at the French Grand Prix at Le Mans. It was announced back in June and is the first film shot with Blackmagic’s new URSA Cine Immersive camera, which lets companies that aren’t Apple create films in Apple’s Immersive format.
I watched “Tour De Force” this afternoon and came away impressed. It certainly doesn’t seem like a step down from Apple’s production values, and CANAL+ obviously had access to multiple Blackmagic cameras, which gives the doc an expansiveness that some of Apple’s productions have lacked. (“Tour De Force” also has better luck in its subject than it did with its bull-riding short, which ended in about two seconds of failure. Zarco and his team have better luck!) I’m looking forward to many more Immersive projects now that the Blackmagic camera is out in the world.
This fall, Apple’s also releasing an Immersive and spatial presentation from the BBC Proms, letting viewers get up close with the hands of pianist Lukas Sternath as he performs Grieg’s Piano Concerto in A minor with the BBC Symphony Orchestry at the Royal Albert Hall. There’s also a documentary coming in October set in a rainforest in tropical Australia; a film called “Experience Paris” that celebrates French culture (also due this fall); a K-pop documentary about the band CORTIS; and a new episode of Apple’s adventure series Elevated.
Launching in December is a new series, World of Red Bull, that does not feature partying twentysomethings powering down a can on their way to the next club, but extreme athletes in extreme situations. The series begins with an episode about backcountry skiing in British Columbia and will be followed by an episode next year about big-wave surfing in Tahiti.
Also coming next year is a climate doc, due next spring, featuring CNN journalist Bill Weir on a scientific expedition to find emperor penguins in Antarctica.
To recap:
Today: “Tour de Force”
October: “Julaymba” (Australian rainforest documentary), Elevated: Maine (Oct. 3)
Fall: “A Night at the BBC Proms”, “Experience Paris”, “CORTIS”
December: World of Red Bull: “Backcountry Skiing”
2026: World of Red Bull: “Big-Wave Surfing”; “Journey to Antarctica to Find Emperor Penguins” (Spring)
It is perhaps not surprising that my spouse and I raised a Jeopardy! fan. Our older child, halfway through college, not only loves the show but has developed an encyclopedic knowledge of geography, transit systems, musical instruments, and much more. Or should I write encyclopaedic, as they are spending this current term in London on a study abroad program? That plays into the story.
If you have followed my career, you will know both that I won two episodes of Jeopardy! (just like Dan Moren) and that I have a nearly obsessive interest in ways to enable remote access to and control of your Mac and other devices when you are outside your local network. I have, in the past, even written an entire ebook on the topic.
London, Jeopardy!, and remote access and control all intersect when I received a text from said child late in the evening, their time. The system we use (and updated) is a good solution for any locally recorded or stored media files.
Reunited in Memphis, Jason and Myke discuss iPhone and AirPods Pro first impressions, phone transfer troubles, MacBook rumors, and St. Jude shenanigans.
E-reader accessibility is anything but consistent. You might find a font size adjustment, but no high-contrast or dark mode settings. And screen readers, where they exist, don’t rival those available for computers and smartphones. Even where devices offer these features, many books don’t fully take advantage of them.
Michael Kozlowski of Good e-Reader says Amazon is beefing up its accessible offerings, including accessibility information on book pages and software enhancements:
Kindle Assistive Reader is… fully available in the update that was released a couple of days ago. It will essentially convert any Kindle book into an audiobook, utilizing an advanced text-to-speech system that sounds natural.
Publishers, too, have accessibility on their minds:
Publishers have been prioritizing the submission of e-books to Amazon that include accessibility features. According to Publishers Weekly, “The move comes as publishers face increasing legal pressure to make digital content accessible, positioning accessible publishing as both a competitive advantage and a necessity as new laws such as the European Accessibility Act and expanded digital accessibility requirements under the Americans with Disabilities Act drive industry momentum toward universal accessibility.”
It’s important to note that this feature is an on-device accessibility system, which differentiates it from approaches that generate audiobooks for sale using artificial voices.
iPhone 17s begin to arrive as fresh rumors hit the mill and one iPhone’s sales performance seems a little thin.
Out for delivery
Happy delivery day to all who celebrate! Just know that at any minute I may step away from writing this column if I hear a knock at t-
…
…
Sorry, that was just some kid selling cookies. I shooed her away. NOT NOW, ADORABLE MUNCHKINS, OLD MAN MOLTZ HAS BUSINESS WITH UPS.
Anyway, where was I? Oh! New iPhones are here today and if you’re getting one you’re getting Liquid Glass whether you like it or not. And many seemingly don’t.
My thanks to ListenLater.net for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
ListenLater.net is a clever idea—it turns your reading list into a podcast playlist. I collect longer articles throughout the week that I just don’t have time to dive into at the moment—and they often get lost in the shuffle. But I never lose track of my podcast queue. This is where ListenLater.net makes it easy: It turns articles into episodes of a podcast, so your reading list can be automatically transformed into a podcast in your queue. It all works via email, so you just share any article you want via your browser’s share sheet to your ListenLater.net email address. (This means you can also forward any email to Listen Later, even ones with attachments, and it will translate the whole thing into spoken audio.)
Listen Later uses some really high quality AI voices to read your audio. They’re really excellent narrators, and you can choose from numerous voice options. You can also have Listen Later auto-translate articles in other languages into your chosen language.
Head over to ListenLater.net and start your free trial today.
Relay’s seventh annual live telethon for St. Jude took place on Friday from noon to midnight Eastern time. I was one of six co-hosts(!) this year. You can watch some or all of the archived stream!
The possibility of David Ellison buying Warner Bros. Discovery to add to his collection, the threat and promise of spread-out sports rights, sponsorships that might become forbidden fruit, Netflix live boxing success, TV picks, and your letters!
In macOS 26 Tahoe, Apple has updated how it manages encryption keys in FileVault, the feature that protects your Mac’s data volume by encrypting it. Users with existing choices won’t be immediately impacted, but eventually everyone will need to use the new approach—which I think is an improvement. But if you rely on Apple to hold on to your Recovery Key for you, it’s time to start considering a new strategy.
The modern version of FileVault first appeared way back in Mac OS X 10.7 Lion. (The first version of FileVault only encrypted your Home directory.) Today’s FileVault provides both boot protection and disk protection: you have to enter an account password before the operating system loads, and passing that stage unlocks an encryption key that provides access to the otherwise fully locked-down startup volume’s contents.
When you set up FileVault, macOS generates a Recovery Key for you. Normally, you decrypt the disk by logging in with your password, but if the portion of your drive containing login data becomes corrupted, the Recovery Key is the only alternate path to decrypting your data. This is a really rare failure, but if it happens, there needs to be an alternate path to recovery. That’s the Recovery Key.
Previously, you had two choices for how to store that key: You could view it once, ever, and be sure to write it down (or more properly, stick it in a password manager). Or you could opt to use iCloud escrow, where the key was stored as part of your data on Apple’s servers without strong security—anyone with Apple Account access could retrieve it from a locked Mac. Apple has changed the iCloud option in Tahoe, boosting security and changing how it’s accessed, which I am sure it did for better overall security and privacy.
However, this change means you are much more responsible for managing a critical recovery component with FileVault active. There’s some nuance to this, as I discuss ahead.
Encrypt the whole thing
People used to be paranoid about someone stealing the contents of their hard disk drive. Maybe it was a fear of actual theft—someone stealing a computer from a business or home—but the big bugbear was you leaving a laptop behind or having it stolen from you while out and about. Only truly endangered or overworried people thought a criminal or government agent would enter their home and try to siphon their data—and, sometimes, that did occur!
The solution to this, in part, is full-disk encryption (FDE), where your entire drive is encrypted. This requires cleverness: some kind of post-boot but pre-full-operating-session mode had to be developed where a disk could be mounted and encrypted the first time, and then prompt for a key and be decrypted on subsequent boots and restarts.1
Encrypting an entire drive could be incredibly slow. However, this tedious operation typically happened once. After the entire drive’s contents were first encrypted, reading and decrypting or writing and encrypting provided a speed hit, but not much. (Spinning hard drives were already so slow that it was hard to notice the difference.) Some drive manufacturers even built FDE into their hardware, which sped things up until chip makers built encryption circuits into their CPUs, at which point operating systems could handle the whole thing speedily. Add the shift to SSDs into the mix, and fully encrypted drives read and write nearly as fast as fully exposed ones.
Ultimately, Apple decided to encrypt its computers’ startup drives all the time, first with the T2 Security Chip for later Intel models, and then as part of all M-series Apple silicon Macs. FileVault for those models is a boot-protection system; the encryption comes free and cannot be disabled.2
A Potemkin Village of a startup screen
On Apple silicon Macs, FileVault offers operating-system-based FDE with a clever twist. With FileVault enabled, you no longer start up into macOS—it might seem that way, but that’s not what happens! Instead, the low-level boot process presents a screen that looks exactly like the login window—the macOS startup screen. When you enter your account password, the boot program validates it against a special data store, then unlocks your user data volume and boots the system seamlessly.3
Here’s how it works:
In Sequoia, you can turn FileVault on or off, but the key is unavailable after it’s displayed once.
When setting up FileVault at System Settings > Privacy & Security > FileVault, you might be asked to deem which accounts are available when starting up, and be prompted to enter the password. For each account, that password is used to wrap the encryption key for the volume, and then the cryptographically protected version of the password is cached in the recovery partition. (You may still be asked this today; it has to do with a very tweaky secure token issue.)
The next time you restart, now with FileVault enabled, you can only log in with an account that was set up with FileVault—those are the only ones that will be listed—though that might be all of your accounts. Once you choose an account and enter its password, the next stage takes place.
The boot process’s FileVault component validates the password against its cache. It uses that to unlock the encryption key for the startup volume, passing that along with authentication for the macOS account to the primary macOS system.
This hidden and mildly complicated handoff just works—until it doesn’t. The data that the boot partition accesses can be erased or its data corrupted. Who knows why! Or, more improbably, you have forgotten the password for any account that would let you log in—perhaps you hadn’t used that Mac for a while and failed to make a note in a password manager of the account’s password. But then you would find yourself without a way to unlock your startup volume.4
Apple prepared for that by creating something called the FileVault Recovery Key. This special key can unlock the drive’s encryption key when all else fails. But how can you ensure you always have that Recovery Key?
When setting up FileVault, you used to be presented with two choices:5
View the Recovery Key, write it down, and keep it safe. It’s never presented again.6 (But as long as you can log in, you can toggle FileVault and get a new key.)7
Use your iCloud account to store the key in escrow. However, the key is not end-to-end encrypted, so there was always the slight potential that the key could be recovered by anyone who gains access to your Apple Account and unlocks that escrow.
Neither choice was great; I always opted for the first. Apple apparently now agrees, perhaps because we are in a time of heightened government and criminal exfiltration of private data, often without warrants or judicial oversight, even in democratic nations. The company hasn’t said this, but I can read the writing on the wall.
Now the key can be shown after it’s first created, which makes it easier to retrieve it without cycling FileVault off and on to regenerate the Recovery Key. And, instead of using basic Apple Account encryption, protected just by a password, the Recovery Key is now stored in your end-to-end encrypted iCloud Keychain and accessible via the Passwords app.
The loss of Apple Account-based iCloud escrow means that you have to pay more attention to where the Recovery Key is stored. If your password can’t unlock your Mac, you can’t just log into your Apple Account: you need access to another trusted device, if using iCloud Keychain; or you need to have written down or stored the Recovery Key in a password manager that you can reach.
Keep it secret, keep it safe
In Tahoe, click Show to display the Recovery Key at will.
I was surprised in updating Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices for Tahoe (see below) to find FileVault’s interface had changed! It had been static for years. Once I scratched at the surface, I saw what Apple had done:
Your previous choices are preserved. If you wrote the key down or used iCloud escrow, this remains in place.
If you are setting up a new Mac, reinstalling macOS, or disabling and re-enabling FileVault, you must use the new method.
Tahoe lets you display your FileVault Recovery Key at any time after creation. I can show you this key because I’ve changed it since.
In Tahoe, when the key is generated, it’s not shown and then discarded. Rather, it remains permanently available. Just click the Show button and use Touch ID or enter your account password, and it’s displayed again.
You can also find the Recovery Key in Passwords. With iCloud Keychain enabled, you can access it from other devices. At this writing, Passwords in macOS shows a complete entry with details including the Mac’s serial number (blurred for privacy in figure), while Passwords in iOS and iPadOS has a rudimentary entry that identifies it as a new Recovery Key password type but lacks identifying details—it contains only the Recovery Key.
If you have iCloud Keychain enabled, your Mac creates a fleshed-out entry for the Recovery Key that is synced securely among your devices.
I don’t believe this new approach provides any less security. If someone approached your unlocked Mac or another of your devices, they would still require your fingerprint for Touch ID, face for Face ID, or knowledge of the password used to start up the computer or device in the first place. Sheer proximity doesn’t let them magically extract your FileVault Recovery Key.
I appreciate that you can now recover the key without turning FileVault off and on, as well as access it from other devices with the protection of end-to-end encryption. This makes the whole approach friendlier, if boot protection could be described that way.
But it also puts key retention more fully in your court. If you formerly used iCloud escrow storage and turn FileVault off and back on, or are required to after a reinstallation, take special care that the Recovery Key is either in iCloud Keychain, in another pasword manager, or even written down securely and in a safe or other secure area. In any case, ensure you can access the key if your Mac won’t let you start up into your account.
For further reading
My book Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices explains FileVault in great depth, along with a lot of other highly useful information for keeping your iPhones, iPads, and Macs secure when in your possession or not, as well as protecting your passcode and passwords. A new edition came out just days ago with updates for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26!
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
Update: I discovered through a post by software developer Jeff Johnson after this column was published that Apple had added iCloud Keychain syncing! This isn’t noted in documentation, nor did I (nor colleagues I consulted) see the startup screenshot Jeff did. This column now incorporates that information. Thanks, Jeff!
Of course, when you make backups, those are created from the unencrypted files, so your backups have to be protected separately. This can include setting an encryption key, something you can easily do with Time Machine—but then store that encryption key somewhere secure. ↩
Look, I am sure there is some horrible deep-dive way to turn off decryption, but let’s pretend there isn’t, as there’s no reason for a regular user to ever do that. ↩
When Apple split the system files and data files from a startup volume into two separate partitions several versions ago, it made the system files immutable and cryptographically protected. It no longer needed to protect those files further with FileVault. So only your data volume needs to be—and is—encrypted, including any account-related information. ↩
If you have FileVault disabled, when your Mac starts up, it unlocks the startup volume without any additional account protection. (It’s still encrypted, but only via a key based on your Mac’s hardware identifier—helpful if your SSD chip is separated from your Mac, but only then.) The login window you see then is just the normal macOS session starter. ↩
Many forms of encryption that rely on a key have a system generate the key but then store a cryptographically transformed—or “hashed”—version of it, so that the original key isn’t retained with the encrypted data. To unlock the encryption, the original key must be presented, which is then transformed and matches the stored hash. Apple used to throw away the Recovery Key for that reason. ↩
You can check whether the Recovery Key you have stored for your Mac is valid by entering sudo fdesetup validaterecovery at the command line, pressing Return, entering your account password, and pasting in the key. If it’s accurately stored, you see true; otherwise, false. ↩
Apple’s new operating systems have arrived and we’ve got thoughts about iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS Tahoe, and more. We also catch up on what we’ve learned since last week’s Apple Event.
After a pretty big overhaul a few years back with watchOS 10 and a more modest update in watchOS 11, I’d describe this year’s update—now numbered 26, after the upcoming year, like the rest of Apple’s platforms—as more focused.
Sure, there’s a new Liquid Glass design that aligns with the rest of the company’s platforms, but the vast majority of big new features focus on a single app—Workout—which gets not only its own UI overhaul, but also a big new Apple Intelligence feature, Workout Buddy.
watchOS 26 isn’t without its tweaks and enhancements, though how much they help you may depend more on which Apple Watch you’ve got, as well as the ins and outs of how you use your watch every day. And, of course, there are a few features debuting across Apple’s platforms this year that show up on the Apple Watch too.
iPadOS 26 is one of the biggest updates in iPad history. There’s a new design that changes the look and feel of the whole interface, yes, but also the introduction of a whole raft of productivity features that lift the iPad closer to the Mac—for those who want to use it that way.
It’s like a weight has been lifted from the soul of the iPad. It remains a very nice device to use in full-screen mode with all the simplicity attendant to that mode. But via a single tap, it can also transform into a multi-window, multitasking device that’s appropriate for the Mac-class hardware underpinning today’s iPads.
The iPad no longer feels like it’s trying to live up to the promise of being the Future of Computing; with iPadOS 26, it’s more comfortable being itself.
macOS 26 Tahoe is two things at once: It’s the broadest and most productivity-focused update for macOS in years, while also taking collateral damage from Apple’s broader design ambitions on its other platforms.
It features the biggest update to Spotlight ever, including direct access to app actions and Apple’s first-ever built-in clipboard manager. Shortcuts adds deep automation support and direct access to AI models, changing the game for many aspects of Mac automation productivity. These are features that will delight Mac users and help them work better.
Unfortunately, they’ll be productive while using a tweaked design that’s not nearly as prominent as it is on the iPhone and iPad, but still has to be labeled as a net loss for the Mac.
iOS 26! It feels like just last year we were here discussing iOS 18. How time flies.
After a year that saw the debut of Apple Intelligence and the subsequent controversy over the features that it didn’t manage to ship, Apple seems to have taken a different tack with iOS 26. In addition to the expansive new Liquid Glass design that spans all of its platforms, Apple has largely focused on smaller, “quality of life” improvements rather than marquee new features.
That’s not a bad thing, either—these are often the types of things that Apple does best, and which actually make a meaningful impact on the lives of their customers: saving them time waiting on hold on the phone, helping them avoid dealing with spam, and improving their driving experience.
It’s also worth noting that almost all of the iOS 26 features that Apple demoed during its WWDC keynote this year are available in this initial version. (The exception seems to be the Digital ID feature that lets you use your U.S. Passport to make an ID in the Wallet app, which Apple says is still forthcoming in a future update.) Most of it has been there since the earliest beta builds this summer, showing that Apple really is trying not to get over its own skis.
While this update is probably going to be most remembered for its Liquid Glass overhaul—a redesign that feels more than a little ill-conceived—there are definitely things to like in iOS 26. Let’s dive in.
We made it, folks. It’s the end of iPhone announcement week. On Tuesday, we climbed to the top of the highest mountain range, only to find a large, flat area waiting for us.
Living in an iPhone world
There’s too much to cover in a week like this, but my favorite story probably came out of the video Lance Ulanoff of TechRadar and Mark Spoonauer of Tom’s Guide made with Greg Joswiak and John Ternus of Apple, in which Joswiak dared them to bend the iPhone Air. (You won’t be surprised to hear that it didn’t work, but it wasn’t for some lack of trying by two of my fellow middle-aged tech editors.)
Some other videos of note, if you’re preparing to go on a YouTube jag:
Dallas Taylor, who has pretty good ears for this sort of thing, had a really nice first take on AirPods Pro 3.
