It’s not dead yet! On Tuesday, Apple rolled out three new graphics card modules for the Intel-based Mac Pro, all based on AMD’s Radeon Pro W6000 series GPU. (Apple posted a Mac Pro performance white paper to celebrate.) The new modules (in Apple’s MPX format) come in three variants, with a Radeon Pro W6800X, two W6800X GPUs, and the W6900X. Each module also adds four Thunderbolt 3 ports and an HDMI 2 port to the Mac Pro.
The Mac Pro supports two MPX modules, so you could pop in two of the dual-GPU modules to max out performance. They can connect using AMD’s Infinity Fabric Link, which can connect up to four GPUs to communicate with one another via a super-fast connection with much more bandwidth than is available via the PCIe bus.
The new modules are replacing previous modules featuring AMD Vega II GPUs, and will be offered as configure-to-order options for new Mac Pros and as standalone kits. Get ready now: it’s $2800 for the Radeon Pro W6800X, $5000 for the W6800X duo, and $6000 for the W6900X. Each module also adds four Thunderbolt 3 ports and an HDMI 2 port to the Mac Pro. Apple’s also removing the Radeon Pro Vega II and Pro Vega II Duo MPX modules as configurable options with new systems, but will still sell them as standalone kits for $2200 and $4400, respectively.
For those who want the benefits of biometric authentication for their existing Mac, good news: the Magic Keyboard with Touch ID, recently introduced alongside the M1 iMac, is now available for individual purchase. The standard model will run $149; the version with a numeric keypad (and, more importantly, an inverted-T arrow key configuration), $179. Both include a Lightning-to-USB-C cable for pairing, charging, and wired usage.
One reminder: These keyboards are only compatible with Macs powered by Apple silicon running macOS 11.4 or later. (It’s possible that the keyboard functionality will still work with older Macs, but the Touch ID features will certainly not.)
Unfortunately, though the keyboards are available color-matched when sold with iMacs, the individual versions are in the classic silver/white scheme only. So if you want to go the two-tone route, you’ll need to find an iMac owner willing to part with theirs after the fact.
Starting Aug. 10, we will no longer support crossword play on Across Lite. This means we won’t provide downloadable .puz files for use on that platform. You can play the NYT crossword on our Crossword App and on desktop and mobile web.
This decision will limit crossword players to the Times’s own app and website. Previously, you could play it in various third-party apps, including Red Sweater’s Black Ink on Mac and iOS. This decision reduces the choices of paying subscribers and has some accessibility implications, too.
Tensor was built for how people use their phones today and how people will use them in the future. As more and more features are powered by AI and ML it’s not simply about adding more computing resources, it’s about using that ML to unlock specific experiences for our Pixel users.
The team that designed our silicon wanted to make Pixel even more capable. For example, with Tensor we thought about every piece of the chip and customized it to run Google’s computational photography models. For users, this means entirely new features, plus improvements to existing ones.
Tensor enables us to make the Google phones we’ve always envisioned — phones that keep getting better, while tapping the most powerful parts of Google, all in a highly personalized experience. And with Tensor’s new security core and Titan M2, Pixel 6 will have the most layers of hardware security in any phone.
This actually works as a concise summary of Apple’s chip design strategy for the last decade.
Whether Google will actually succeed at making a phone that sells well remains to be seen, but even if the latest Pixels don’t become runaway hits, I suspect the Tensor chip design will not be going away.
Myke’s headed off on vacation, but before he goes, he’s made time to discuss last week’s Apple financial results. Then Jason welcomes special guest Julia Alexander for a mega-Upstream about ScarJo v. Disney, the future of the movies, and the current state of affairs for streaming services.
You put something in the trash in macOS, you empty the trash, it’s gone. That’s how it’s supposed to work.
Sometimes, though, you run into an odd hiccup. Upon my recent updates to macOS Big Sur 11.5 and 11.5.1, I ended up with a folder called “Previously Relocated Items” on my Desktop. In it was another folder…inside that, another folder…and so on until it ended in what appeared to be an alias pointing towards a system folder elsewhere1. Fine, no problem. I tossed it in the trash and hit empty.
And that’s where I hit a snag.
The Finder graciously informed me that I could not empty the trash because the operation was not permitted. I tried restarting: no dice. Venturing into Terminal to delete the folder with the trusty rm -rf command fared no better. I tried the unlink option, which removes symbolic links (or symlinks, the command-line version of aliases), but that was similarly disallowed. Even superuser privileges conferred by sudo made no difference.
So, what’s a user to do? I didn’t want to be stuck with that item in my Trash bin for the rest of my days (or until a subsequent update came along to iron things out), so I poked about a bit until I found some other folks who’d encountered the same issue, and located a solution.
That answer ended up being restarting my Mac in Recovery mode—by holding down command-R at boot—and launching the Terminal utility there to remove the offending file, which works because in Recovery the Terminal session is logged in as root.
A few caveats before you attempt this yourself: First, some suggested solutions said that in order to do this, you need to disable Apple’s System Integrity Protection (SIP), a security feature that prevents you from making certain low-level changes that could damage the operating system. This is not required, and I wouldn’t recommend turning off SIP—those protections are there for a reason.
Second, whenever you’re interacting with your machine as root, be extra careful. That’s a lot of power to wield, and a simple typo can really mess your day up. Be sure you’re deleting only the files you mean to delete, and be as specific as possible. (For example, I first used unlink to remove the problematic symlink, then removed folders one at a time, starting with the deepest and moving up.)
Finally, one issue I encountered was that—thanks to the recent changes of Apple’s file system—the new APFS protocol separates the system and your data into separate volumes. Before you can access your files via the Terminal in Recovery, you’ll need to first launch Disk Utility and mount the Data volume of your drive, which will in turn require you authenticate with your user password. Then you can use Terminal to navigate to the correct volume and remove the files.
Hopefully this helps folks who find themselves besieged by these undeleteable files. Maybe in a future update, Apple will work this issue out for itself.
[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.]
During Apple’s recent Q3 financial results call last week, one analyst posed an interesting question to Tim Cook: how does Apple decide which technologies it wants to build itself, as opposed to simply buying off the shelf?
Apple’s fixation on control is legendary. From the earliest days, the company prided itself on building the whole widget, hardware, and software, in an age where those two were becoming increasingly decoupled. Even today, it remains arguably the defining characteristic of the company. Just compare it to its main rivals in the smartphone or PC market.
As Apple has become larger and more successful, that focus on control over the whole widget has gotten even broader. The company’s been building its own processors for mobile devices for more than a decade, and those advancements have finally jumped to the Mac. On the other end, Apple has introduced more and more services that help provide the glue between those traditional hardware and software components. This trend isn’t about to stop any time soon; there are plenty of places where the company has decided to move its core technologies in-house.
Once every three months, I have the self-inflicted privilege of producing a complete text transcript of Apple’s post-results conference call with a gaggle of financial analysts. I used to type it all out by hand, but these days I use an automated transcription service and just edit that so that it makes sense.
But this week, something strange happened. A whole portion of the call, which I never heard with my own ears, somehow ended up in the transcript. Did it happen after the rest of the world dropped off the line? Was a microphone left on? Did the automated transcription pick up words that were inaudible to human ears? I don’t know how it happened, but the results are downright unbelievable:
Operator: All righty, here’s Carol Manalist from Research Group.
Carol Manalist: Tim, Luca, congratulations on the big quarter. I was wondering, could you give any more detail on which iPhone models are the most popular? How are the more expensive Pro phones selling compared to the regular iPhone 12 models? And does it vary across region?
Tim: Carol, this is Tim. We’re really bullish on the iPhone. The iPhone 12 is selling really well. In the U.S., we have the top three selling models. In the UK we have four out of the top five. In Australia we have the top two. It goes on like that. Name a country.
Manalist: I’m sorry?
Tim: Name a country and I’ll tell you how we’re doing.
Manalist: Uh. Okay. China?
Tim: We’ve got the top two phones in urban China! Boom. We’re doing great.
Manalist: Right, but that’s not what I asked. I was wondering about which models are doing the best and where.
Tim: That’s not a follow-up. Can we have the next question?
Operator: Okay, let’s go to Dom Minbari from Fingerling Capital.
Minbari: Thanks, and congratulations on another record quarter.
Luca Maestri: Thanks Dom. What’s your question?
Minbari: Also, Tim, congratulations on all the Macs you sold. That’s great.
Tim: This is Tim. Thanks, Dom. We’re bullish on the Mac. What’s your question?
Minbari: Yes, sorry. I’m looking at your guidance for the next quarter, and how you predict that you’ll be supply constrained on the iPhone. Can you give me some color on the feature set of the iPhone 13?
[long pause]
Tim: Well, Dom, as you know, we don’t comment on future products.
Minbari: Of course. I’m just asking, if your iPhone shipments are going to be constrained, what phone exactly will be the one that’s constrained? What processor will it have? What are the camera specs?
[It sounds like Cook turns away from his microphone as he attempts to stifle a laugh.]
Luca: Can we have the next question please?
Operator: We’ll go to Aldon Cashmoney from Bank of America.
Cashmoney: Tim, you talked about your installed base. I was curious if you could help us understand how old that installed base is and how phone upgrades are happening.
Cook: This is Tim. First of all, it’s difficult to answer your question precisely. But what I would tell you is on both switchers and upgraders, we did extremely well. And so we’re really pleased with it. And so the net is, very strong switchers, very strong upgraders, best upgrade quarter for the June quarter that we’ve seen. And we feel really great about the momentum.
Cashmoney: Fair enough. Uh, if you were an iPhone 13, what features would you have and when would you be announced?
Luca: I’ll take this one. If I were an iPhone I wouldn’t be answering ridiculous questions like that.
Tim: That was Luca, by the way. Could we have the next question?
Operator: This is Bob A. Bouie, of the First National Bank of Your Mom.
Bob: Hi Tim, Luca, congratulations on the big quarter. Aneyefonethurtensezwhat?
Tim: Bob, this is Tim. I’m sorry, we didn’t hear that. Can you repeat the question?
Bob: An iPhone 13 says what?
Tim: Okay, we’re done here. This was Tim.
Operator: A podcast of today’s call will be available for 90 days on Apple Podcasts. A transcript of today’s call will be available in about ten minutes at Six Colors. A dramatic re-enactment of today’s call will be premiering on Apple TV+ at midnight eastern on Friday, August 20.
[Your regular Back Page columnist is on assignment. He will return next month, hopefully.]
After several years of very slowly inching my way toward the precipice, it all happened in a hurry this summer: A discovery that I preferred to watch shows via Apple TV apps, even if they were also available on my TiVo. The realization that other than “Jeopardy!” and live sports, everything I watched was streaming. Wanting to simplify my TV (and remote control) setup when a TiVo was stuck in the middle of it all.
Finally, I broke down and did the math: I could replace my Xfinity cable TV and internet with AT&T gigabit fiber internet and an over-the-top TV service. And, after swapping a few streaming service freebies (Comcast gave me Peacock, AT&T gives me HBO Max), I’d get faster internet and everything running on the Apple TV—for $65 less every month.
For TV—because, yes, I’m not giving up live sports—I went with Fubo TV. I’ve already got a long, long, long list of ways the Fubo TV app could be improved—and I am going to test drive YouTube TV, which lacks a single channel that would’ve made it my choice over Fubo—but it will serve my baseball and football and “Jeopardy!” needs just fine.
In truth, even after consulting the excellent site Suppose, which lets you compare over-the-top TV services, I was disappointed to find that essentially no service offered all the channels I wanted.1 However, Fubo offered everything but TBS, which broadcasts baseball playoff games in October. So for one month, I’ll also subscribe to Sling Blue, just to get TBS, and then I’ll turn it off when the playoffs are over. Annoying, but also sort of freeing.
After years of dreaming about fiber being available in my neighborhood, the installation itself was easy. The hard part was adapting my home network to the new fiber gateway. While AT&T’s included Arris router is nifty—the optical terminal is built in, so it’s a single box—it is like every other cable box in wanting to provide firewall, routing, and wi-fi. There was no way the AT&T router’s wi-fi was going to cover my whole house the way that my two Eero boxes do, so I didn’t need its wi-fi. But I was willing to give it a try as my router.
So I switched my Eero into bridge mode, and used the AT&T box’s web interface to set up port forwarding to my server. It all worked pretty well, with one fatal exception: lack of support for an esoteric feature called “hairpin NAT.” I run a server at my house, and want it to be accessible both inside and outside my network. Hairpin NAT is a feature that realizes when you are trying to connect to an internet server (let’s call it snell.zone) that’s inside your network, and routes your outbound request back to the right place. With it, my scripts and widgets that reference snell.zone work everywhere. Without it, they only work outside my home network.
So I decided to go back to the network setup I was using with Comcast’s router—no wi-fi, no routing, just a dumb pass-through to the Eero, which would do all the routing. I set it up using the AT&T router’s clever Passthrough mode, and… everything failed. Couldn’t load a single thing inside the house.
After an hour of pulling my hair out and trying any number of different network configurations, I finally realized what the problem was: While my Eero router was running my entire network and piping it through the AT&T router, it was relying on the AT&T router for a bunch of its network information, including DNS server addresses. While Comcast’s router was happy to tell Eero the addresses of Comcast’s servers, AT&T’s router prefers to list itself as the DNS server of record. The result: all the devices on my network tried to connect to a server that they couldn’t actually see, because the Eero stood in the way. Once I realized this, I entered AT&T’s actual DNS server addresses in Eero’s settings and rebooted, and everything fell into place.
What I’m saying is, networking is dumb.
In any event, now everything is working, our entertainment flows only out of apps on our Apple TV, and things are good. While I’m going to keep my eye on the over-the-top competition, Fubo TV gets the job done—at least well enough to make me confident in calling Comcast today and canceling my account. It’s the end—I’ll miss you most of all, TiVo!—but the moment has been prepared for. I’m ready for the future.
Locals, NBC Sports Bay Area, NFL Red Zone, and Pac-12 Networks were the big ones. ↩
What services we’ve added (or subtracted) during the pandemic, our Twitter bits that deserve to be shows, what companies we would de-IPO, and the travel tech we find indispensable.
Among the things Wall Street likes are growth—always growth—and certainty. This past year has provided a lot of uncertainty, both in life and in business. And while Apple has done well over the last year—its latest financial results included $81 billion in revenue, the best third quarter in the company’s history—it’s also been uncertain about its future.
Once again, Apple’s executives have declined to forecast the company’s results for the next quarter. However, they were willing to predict that it would see “very strong double-digit year-over-year revenue growth” that will be lower than this quarter’s year-over-year growth rate of 36 percent. (That’s actually some guidance, albeit of the broad variety; it means next quarter’s revenue will be between $71B and $88B.) But overall uncertainty remains, about the progression of the COVID pandemic, about foreign exchange headwinds, about increased shipping costs, and most notably about whether Apple will be able to get enough component parts to make iPhones as iPhone season approaches.
Here are some of the more interesting things that I noted in Tuesday’s results and the post-results conference call that Apple CEO Tim Cook and Apple CFO Luca Maestri hold with a bunch of Wall Street analyst types.
Selecting and dragging some live text from an image on macOS Monterey.
In a surprise twist, a macOS Monterey feature previously advertised as being available only on M1 Macs will now be available on Intel Macs as well.
The feature, Live Text, uses the Neural Engine on Apple-designed processors to convert text in images into text you can select and copy. But in the just-released fourth beta of macOS Monterey, Live Text has also been enabled on Intel Macs.
My understanding is that on Intel Macs, Apple is using GPU-based processing power to do the analysis of the images. Unlike iPhones and iPads, which are commonly used to take pictures which might immediately need to be analyzed for Live Text, on the Mac there’s a little more leeway for slightly less-than-instantaneous processing of text.
That said, my understanding is that Live Text—on M1 or Intel—is never intended to present any sign that you need to wait while text is being processed. The feature should be identical on both architectures.
It seems likely that this feature was original targeted for both architectures, and then disabled on Intel Macs in early betas because it just wasn’t good enough to release. Its appearance in this beta is perhaps a positive sign that Apple isn’t rushing Intel Macs into obsolescense.
(Live Text also gets my vote for this OS update cycle’s best stealth feature. It doesn’t seem like much when it’s described, but when you use a device with Live Text enabled, it changes how you see and interact with images. It’s instantly useful in numerous contexts.)
This week Myke and Jason join Netflix in pretending to be gamers while cable TV channels pretend to be streaming services. We also ponder a smarter Apple display, and Apple has designs on fancy Hollywood real estate. And Myke goes to the Streaming Services as we discuss “Loki” and the first episode of “Ted Lasso.”
Messages is likely the most used app on Apple’s platforms—especially iOS—and with our inability over the past year and a half to meet up with people in person, it’s probably become more popular.
iMessage, the Apple-created system that powers the modern day Messages app, is coming up on its tenth birthday this fall and it’s had quite the decade. In 2016, Apple said users sent roughly 200,000 iMessages per second; it’s not hard to imagine that, five years later, in a world more technologically connected than ever, that number has grown immensely.
But for all of the popularity of iMessage, and the company’s repeated addition of new features and capabilities, there are some places where Apple’s messaging system remains somewhat frustrating or even lackluster. For obvious reasons, Apple has a lot of vested interest in keeping the program stable and simple, and it can’t implement every possible feature, but a few pop out as things that can be improved, or even just more useful.
