Soccer writer Grant Wahl went to Qatar to report a story in advance of this year’s World Cup soccer tournament. Apparently everyone in Qatar needs to install an app that tracks your location at all times in order to do anything, citing Covid safety:
The way the Qatari government explains it, Ehteraz is a Covid-19 app that’s designed for public health. But as anyone who’s seen the app can tell you, Ehteraz is also a tool that the Qatari state can use to monitor your location at any time. And that’s more than a little scary…
On the morning after my second night in quarantine, someone knocked on my door, gave me a Covid rapid test and told me I’d be free to go in 15 minutes if it came up negative. Which it did. But I still couldn’t enter any public buildings in Qatar until my Ehteraz app was working and I could show a green QR code. (A green QR means you’re negative, a yellow one means you’re in quarantine, a red one means you’re positive and a grey one means you’re a suspected positive.)
All the international tourists who are planning on going to the World Cup at the end of the year should be prepared. For the rest of us, this is a good example about how an authoritarian government can use smartphone technology to track everyone’s movements—and make it essentially impossible to opt out.
In short, MaskerAid allows you to quickly and easily add emoji to images. Plus, thanks to the magic of machine learning, MaskerAid will automatically place emoji over any faces it detects.
I got to try this app during beta testing and it’s a lot of fun to use. If you want to deface photos with emojis, or cover up faces of people who didn’t consent to have their faces shared on the Internet, it does the trick in nifty fashion.
MaskerAid (get it?) is free on the App Store with just the 🙂 smiley emoji enabled; a $3 in-app purchase unlocks every single emoji, so you can place a Japanese Ogre on the faces of your loved ones instead.
As a so-called elder millennial, I remember our 19″ Zenith television, with an actual clicker, that sat in the oak armoire in the family room. It would display whatever happened to be broadcast, and that was it. You could buy a TV Guide from the grocery store, and it would have a printed listing of what would be on TV and when, so people would plan to watch a channel at a certain time or set their VCR to record something on tape.
Then we had cable, and eventually a cable channel that just showed a programming guide that slowly scrolled through all the channels. Eventually, we got an interactive programming guide, where you could click to move around in a grid of channels. Finally came the ability to set a DVR recording from the grid.1 The important thing is that we offloaded the burden of managing live TV viewing to computers.
We’ve lost some of that simplicity because of the innovations in on-demand TV. On-demand TV is great, and it lets us live our lives unencumbered by any viewing schedule. However, there are still live events, news, and other situations where I prefer to leave the decision-making up to network programmers while folding laundry.
“Live” TV is rarely live, but it is linear in that there are discrete blocks of programming, TV or movies, arranged sequentially. Think of it more like a playlist, and that playlist is linked to a specific point in time and can be compared with other playlists.2
But sometimes, the channels aren’t quite linear. Some let you restart a show that’s already in progress—making the linear channel more like a showcase for on-demand video content. You might also record an upcoming program or receive a notification that an event is happening live.
In the world of streaming TV, even “traditional” TV is complicated.
Live on Fire
The gateway to Amazon’s live TV interface.
Amazon recently revamped the Fire TV’s Live TV viewing. While this latest Fire TV update made a host of awful additions to the Fire TV home screen, Amazon’s live TV interface revision is interesting, and something Apple could learn from.
To access the new Live TV view on Amazon Fire TV, you go to the top row of the (very bad) home screen. Once you select Live, you’ll see a Guide button, a few recently watched or favorite programs, and some suggestions for live programming. The guide button opens a very traditional interactive guide view. The guide is populated based on which apps on the Fire TV offer live TV integration. (All recently updated Fire TVs will already have IMDb TV and Fire TV News synergistically integrated.)
The Menu button on the Fire TV remote will bring up options to add the currently selected channel to your Favorites, Add Channels, Manage Channels, and More Info. Previews are displayed of what’s on a channel if you hover over it. If you’re already watching something and looking through the guide, that channel’s content will appear in a picture-in-picture box. Add Channels isn’t really about adding channels—it’s a list of apps available on the Fire TV store that offer guide integration.
Unfortunately, everything in the guide’s grid view is categorized by what app it’s in, which makes it feel more like several guide views were glued together. It isn’t sorted based on content type (for example, all the news offerings from all the services in one spot)—for that you’d need to look at the main “Live” view of the home screen, not the guide view. Most importantly, it doesn’t do anything with duplicate channels offered by different apps.
(If you favorite America’s Test Kitchen on Pluto, it’s different from favoriting that channel under IMDb TV. Why? Because these are ad-supported offerings—so it matters very much which service your eyeballs are going to.)
Amazon’s guide mostly suffers because it lacks integration with cloud DVR services. You need to use the guide available inside of each of those discrete apps for those. The same goes for notifications about upcoming programs. There is no convenient way to jump between the Fire TV guide, or live view, to the streaming app’s version of that guide. So you need to back out and navigate to the thing you’re already looking at.
Apple, far from the tree
All those pros and cons for an integrated guide sure sound tough to manage, don’t they? Well, what if you didn’t do anything at all to manage that? Welcome to Apple’s TV app!
The TV app does offer a row of live news channels, it’s not filtered by what you’re subscribed to, drastically reducing its utility. Instead, the crown jewel of live TV in the Apple TV app is found in the Sports tab.
There are many sports.
The Sports tab lists upcoming events organized by sport. But no attempt is made to filter results based on compatible subscriptions. Presumably, the logic is that if you see a game you want to watch, click through on it, see that it requires ESPN+, then you’ll subscribe to ESPN+ and not just say, “Why the hell are you showing me something I can’t watch?”
Plenty of room for improvement
While Amazon could certainly do a better job of cleaning up their unified view to be more fully-featured and useful, it’s an impressive attempt all the same.
Apple, meanwhile, has really fallen behind. The TV app itself has done a decent job of presenting itself as a catalog of individual on-demand programs (except for Netflix!) and live sports. Still, the last few years have resulted in an explosion of apps offering live, linear TV channels—and Apple needs to react.
Certainly, if the Fire TV interface is any guide3, Apple has an opportunity to create a better, more unified experience for presenting all the live TV options a user currently has access to.
Sometimes you just need to put something on while you fold laundry.
To take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on ’em. “Give me five bees to a quarter,” you’d say. Now where were we…↩
Some services (like Sling, YouTube TV, and others) encapsulate the entirety of the linear cable TV experience into an app. But there are also many free streaming-only linear TV services supported by ads, like Pluto TV and Tubi. And some on-demand services (Peacock, Paramount+) also offer linear channels. ↩
Using a self-driving taxi service, common myths about livestreaming, our gaming habits, and how we value art created by machines and artificial intelligence.
It’s official — Apple’s doing a product launch event on Tuesday, March 8. The company sent out invitations bearing the phrase “Peek performance,” a Dad-Joke-level play on words that frustrated humorless editors and sticklers everywhere.
Now begins the reading of the tea leaves1. While I usually try not to give myself a pareidolia headache by staring at Apple artwork and asking “what does it all mean, maaaaan?”, in this case I think it’s worth mulling things over a little bit.
It’s all about that second word—performance. Ever since Apple started including its own chip designs in Macs, Apple has—rightfully—promoted the power and promise of those chips heavily. Since new iPhone-class processors only really appear in the fall, this has to be a reference to Macs running Apple silicon.
What’s the Apple silicon news likely to be? There are a couple of options. First, and less exciting, would be the arrival of M1 Max and M1 Pro chips in new Mac models—perhaps a larger iMac, a new Mac mini, and even an updated 13-inch MacBook Pro. I’m so ready for a new iMac that I want this to be the case.
It’s not really a new story, though. A new story would be the release of the M2 processor, 16 months after the original M1 ushered in the Apple silicon era. But, assuming the M2 was based on the same core technology as the A15 processor in the iPhone 13, we’d probably expect to see only a modest speed boost.
Here’s the longshot: What if the performance Apple is teasing is something even bigger than we’re expecting? Reports have suggested that the company is working on a new Mac Pro based on multiple M1 Max chips working in concert. Everyone has assumed that a new Mac Pro would likely not appear until the end of the year, but maybe it’s ready now—or maybe Apple’s willing to give everyone a peek at the performance to come when the product ships later this year.
It’s also possible that Apple will debut the concept of two M1 Max chips working in concert to drive extra performance in high-end iMac and Mac mini models, which would make the performance story of those systems a bit more exciting than if they were merely running the same chips that we’ve already seen in the MacBook Pro.
At least we only have a few days to wait to find out. But, as silly and dad-jokey as “peek performance” is as a concept, I have to admit that it’s increased my anticipation for the event. So… mission accomplished, I suppose. We’ll see if next week’s event can deliver on that slogan’s promise.
I usually call this “Apple Kremlinology,” but that’s just not a fun turn of phrase right now. ↩
Reaction to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been unprecedented, from financial sanctions to seized assets to the de-platforming of Russian state-funded media from social networks. One of the most interesting wrinkles happened Tuesday when Apple said in a statement that it had “paused all product sales in Russia” and removed RT News and Sputnik News from the App Store outside Russia. Mykhailo Fedorov, deputy prime minister of Ukraine, credited Tim Cook with the move.
I applaud Apple joining with many governments and companies to sever ties with Russia. But make no mistake: Apple can afford to do so. While the company certainly makes money in Russia, it can afford to walk away… permanently, if it needs to.
Apple can’t do that with China, should that country decide to act in a similar fashion as Russia.
On Tuesday Apple halted all sales in Russia and removed the RT and Sputnik apps from the App Store. Here’s the Apple statement:
We are deeply concerned about the Russian invasion of Ukraine and stand with all of the people who are suffering as a result of the violence… We have paused all product sales in Russia. Last week, we stopped all exports into our sales channel in the country. Apple Pay and other services have been limited. RT News and Sputnik News are no longer available for download from the App Store outside Russia. And we have disabled both traffic and live incidents in Apple Maps in Ukraine as a safety and precautionary measure for Ukrainian citizens.
According to Politico’s Alex Ward, the Vice Prime Minister of Ukraine made this statement: “Apple has stopped selling its equipment in the official online store in Russia, thanks to Tim Cook.”
Our most speculative draft yet! Jason and Myke refuse to wait for Apple. Instead, they predict what will happen at Apple’s next product launch—whenever it might happen. Will the M2 make its debut? Will there be an iPhone SE, and will it look any different? Are there other Mac and iPad offerings in the works? And most importantly, what fresh colors will be on offer for spring? We do our job—and now it’s time for Apple to do its.
In June 2020, when Apple unveiled its first Mac built around its own chip, the M1 processor, the company said it was planning for a two-year transition for its entire computer line. Here we are, just months away from the two-year anniversary of that announcement, and we’re poised to find out exactly what’s next in Apple’s processor jump—in more ways than one.
Recent reports suggest that Apple could be planning an event to take place around March 8, which might feature the introduction of one or more new Mac models. So, as we await news of whether such an event will indeed be happening next week, it’s worth it to take a moment and run down the state of this two-year plan and what exactly might be in the offing.
I use iZotope’s RX audio utilities constantly. They clean up background noise, remove buzzing and humming, and even remove the reverberations from echoey rooms. There was even that one time when someone played three hours of D&D with a sump pump beeping in the background every 30 seconds, and I used iZotope’s tools to isolate that frequency and eliminate the beeping entirely. It’s pretty great stuff.
What’s not so great has been the company’s slowness to embrace Apple silicon. While Rosetta has made the iZotope RX Audio Editor app usable on my M1 MacBook Air, it’s hard to use CPU-intensive audio utilities without feeling frustrated that they’re not living up to their potential because they’re being translated from Intel code.
iZotope finally released its Apple silicon upgrade—it’s RX 9 9.3.0, so if you’re using a previous version of iZotope RX you’ll be forced to buy an upgrade—and yes, of course, everything is faster. A lot faster:
In my brief tests, the native version of the Spectral Denoise tool I use to remove background noises took 60 percent of the time it did in Rosetta mode. The extremely processor-intensive Dialogue Dereverb tool, which uses fancy math to subtract room echo, executed in 75 percent of the time it took in Rosetta.
This has, of course, also made it more painful to compare my $999 M1 MacBook Air to my beloved $5000 (in 2017 dollars) iMac Pro. Yes, it’s four years old, but it’s quite a thing to watch as Apple’s bargain laptop absolutely crushes my iMac Pro at removing reverb and almost matches it at removing noise.
This means that, for my purposes, my MacBook Air is officially a more powerful tool than my iMac Pro. The next-generation big iMac can not come soon enough.
Ooooh, Apple, you’ve done it this time. You’ve gone and gotten a European country mad—and not just any European country, but the Netherlands, a country which in the context of an epic fantasy novel would surely be a shadowy realm inhabited by demons who enjoy inflicting eternal torment, feasting upon your soul, biking, and growing tulips, but in this world they’re just into three out of the four.
The point of contention is the insistence by Dutch regulators that Apple must allow dating apps in the country the ability to use alternative payment systems, rather than being forced to use only the App Store. And because the regulators don’t consider Apple’s current “solution”—an onerous process that involves jumping through a bevy of hoops, including submitting a separate binary only for the Netherlands—to be sufficient, the country’s government is now fining Cupertino the baronly sum of €5 million per week, to a maximum of €50 million.
Which in turn has led the European Union’s head of digital policy, Executive Vice President Margrethe Vestager, to comment, “As we understand it, Apple essentially prefers paying periodic fines, rather than comply with a decision of the Dutch Competition Authority.”
And, simply put, yes. Yes it does.
To put it in perspective, that €5 million per week is about $5.6 million. Do I want to pay $5.6 million a week for 10 weeks? No, I do not. But that is because I make only a mere $5.7 million per week as a freelance journalist and podcaster, and really, what am I going to live on then?
But Apple? Yes, Apple, in the words of a succinct headline from 9to5Mac, “doesn’t care.” Because $5.6 million per week is not even pocket change for Apple; it’s not even money found in its couch cushions; it’s not even money that it accidentally leaves in its jeans when it puts them in the dryer, causing them to clink and rattle like the bones of the dead. It’s money that, I have it on good authority, Eddy Cue once ran through a shredder just to see if he could.
If that’s not enough for you, I present a non-comprehensive list of the things that Apple has spent $56 million on without even really thinking about it:
$56 million covers replacement earbuds for crackling AirPods Pro.
$56 million is what Apple spends to polish every single iPhone, iPad, MacBook, and Apple Watch in every single Apple Store in the world. (Not the Apple TVs, though, those things are dusty as hell.)
$56 million is Craig Federighi’s salon bill.
$56 million is what Apple pays Jon Hamm to not be in any of its Apple TV+ shows.
$56 million is what it cost to set all those AirPower charging units on fire. All of them. Not just the ones that were catching fire on their own.
$56 million is the cost of stocking Apple Park’s cafeteria with gourmet meals provided three times a day to employees, only there are just seven people working there right now, and let me tell you, they are eating like royalty.
$56 million is what Apple pays for tires on its self-driving car that will never come to market.
Apple once mislaid $56 million. It later turned out it had forgotten to cancel its gym membership for John Sculley. In 1993.
Look, Apple’s net income—its profit, not its total sales—just in its most recent quarter was $34.6 billion. If the Dutch government continued to charge $5.6 million per week until that was depleted, it would take until July 26. Five months!
Oh wait, in the year 2140.
Ho ho, won’t Apple look silly then?
[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’ve spent a lot of time with different pieces of smart home tech over the last several years, but having finally made the jump from an apartment to a house that I actually own has opened up possibilities that weren’t available to me before.
Thus: a foray into smart locks.
I’ve always been a little bit skittish at the idea of smart locks. The idea of being able to gain access to my home via a security vulnerability or hack seemed like a worrying prospect. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized those fears are largely unfounded. It’s not as if picking a lock or smashing a window is particularly difficult. Nor does it seem likely that your average thief is going to spend time reading up on security exploits for your particular brand of smart lock.1
Moreover, I wasn’t sure about the styling of some of the smart locks on the market, many of which stand out like a sore thumb thanks to complex keypads or glowing lights. Personally, I was interested in something a little more understated.
The Bolt keeps its battery inside the bolt itself, and it’s easily replaceable.
The Bolt is unlike most other smart locks in that it doesn’t replace your existing deadbolt. Instead, it fits inside your door, basically sandwiched in between the exterior keyway and the interior thumb turn. Inside sits a small motor with a Bluetooth chip, which can turn to shoot the bolt itself.
The engineering and design of this device is extremely clever. From the outside, the Bolt is completely invisible. The only place you can even see the device is the bolt itself, where Level’s logo is embossed on the end. (In another particularly ingenious piece of engineering, the bolt also contains a replaceable CR2 battery that powers the whole assembly. Swapping it out just requires unscrewing the end cap.) Another plus: the existing key and thumb turn for the deadbolt work exactly as before, and don’t interfere with the smart lock, or vice versa.
In addition to its invisibility, the other feature that drew me to the Level Bolt was its compatibility with HomeKit—not a given in the smart lock market right now.
For all of that, the Bolt isn’t cheap: it ordinarily retails for $199, though I managed to snag it while on sale from Amazon for around $150.
ViacomCBS changes its name, Peacock weathers the Super Bowl storm, the Disney brand continues to evolve, the culture of binge-dropping begins to fade away, Netflix is Doing Just Fine, and your letters!
Oh, tax season. Admittedly, the annual ritual has gotten a lot easier for me since getting a) an accountant and b) getting most forms delivered electronically as PDFs.
But I ended up with a wrinkle this year when I was processing a few of the tax forms provided by my clients. Several of them used a handy service that emails tax forms, which also thoughtfully encrypts and password protects those files. However, when uploading these for my accountant, I find it convenient to strip out the protection, so that I don’t have to provide a bunch of passwords as well.
In the past, I’ve simply used the loophole of opening a PDF in Preview, entering the password, and then using the File > Export as PDF… command or the old trick of printing to a PDF. That generates a version of the file without the password protection.
However, in macOS Monterey I was surprised to discover that these loopholes have been plugged. Exporting as a PDF simply maintained the password protection, and trying to save as as PDF from the Print menu wasn’t even an option: the system now grays it out.
In theory, this is a good security practice to avoid having password protected files easily stripped of those protections.1 But when it comes to my personal usage, it’s decidedly inconvenient.
But it turns out, whoops, Apple didn’t implement these security features across the board. Making an end-run around these restrictions is as easy as firing up your web browser. I used Chrome for my first foray, but I then tested the same process in Safari, and it works just as well.
Just open the password-protected PDF in your browser of choice, enter the password, and then print to PDF just as you would have in Preview (or even just open an unencrypted copy right in Preview). I was then able to save a password-free version.
All of this is a bit silly: there’s really no point in locking down Preview if all you need to do is use another app. Then again maybe this loophole will itself get plugged in another five years or so.
Of course, you still need the password, so just how much this is actually a security loophole is questionable. ↩
[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.]
Upon arriving at our tropical resort for a week on vacation, my wife and daughter sat out on the deck doing crossword puzzles and I broke out my iPad with Magic Keyboard and tried to solve a puzzle of my own—namely, debugging a Python script. (This is how this family rolls.)
Literally minutes after leaving our house to go to the airport, I got an alert indicating that our home network might be down. Perfect timing, as always. Just before I left I had noticed a notification on my phone that our eero base station had restarted overnight. Given a five-hour flight to Hawaii to stew on that one, and a frantic text message from our housesitter who couldn’t watch anything on our TV, I took a shot in the dark and tried to remotely restart the eero.
The good news is, that totally worked. Within a minute, the network came back and our housesitter was happily binging the HBO Max shows she only gets to see at our house. I checked the weather page on my home server to verify that everything was up and running—and discovered that all of my precious charts and graphs were seriously messed up.
