By Jason Snell

December 1, 2025 8:20 AM PT

Getting an iPhone back on the Wi-Fi network

I am amazed by how the pattern-matching, troubleshooting parts of our brains work.

A little while ago, my father-in-law texted me and said, “Jason, are you available for me to talk to you about a problem with my phone?” This was his problem:

My phone is connected to my Wi-Fi, but it doesn’t show the Wi-Fi symbol. It says LTE and shows cellular bars. But when I go to Settings and Wi-Fi, it says I’m connected and shows me full bars of the Wi-Fi signal.

My troubleshooting brain, trained on hundreds of similar quirks over years and years, swooped into action.

• Turn off Wi-Fi and then turn it back on. Nothing new.
• Turn cellular off and then turn it on again. Nothing.
• Use Wi-Fi settings to forget the home network, then reconnect. Nope.
• Turn the phone off and back on. No change.

It was clear that the phone was connected to the base station, and even being assigned an IP address, but for whatever reason, data just wasn’t being routed. Even though every other device at their home was on the Wi-Fi network and working fine, I still had him pull the plug on the router and then plug it back in, just in the hopes that it might shake something loose, some bad routing configuration that would vanish with the power cycle. No luck.

My goal at this point was to find some way to reset the relationship between the Wi-Fi access point and his iPhone, because that was clearly where the problem lay. But how? So frustrating.

At this point, all my instinctual, easy options had been exhausted. So it was time to pull out a classic network troubleshooter, one that’s been on the iPhone since time immemorial for just these sorts of cases. I had him open the Settings app and navigate to Transfer or Reset iPhone: Reset: Reset Network Settings.

Putting this command amid the ones that will erase your phone is a little scary, and your phone even asks you for your password and a second confirmation before proceeding, but it’s the ultimate way to force your iPhone to start its network connectivity completely fresh. (In a way that just forgetting the Wi-Fi network does not.) It’s the last step in Apple’s own advice about failing to properly connect to a Wi-Fi network.

When the reset finally happened, his phone rebooted. He unlocked it. LTE still showed. He connected to the Wi-Fi, and after a nervous moment… the Wi-Fi icon appeared.

Here’s the funny thing: The week after this happened, I ran this scenario past Dan Moren on the Six Colors Podcast. His own troubleshooting brain ran through the exact same steps that I went through, in the same order, until finally reaching Reset Network Settings.

There are other things to try first, but when your iPhone is out-and-out misbehaving when it comes to Wi-Fi, Reset Network Settings is worth a go. It seems scary, but it has very few serious side effects (you’ll lose saved Wi-fi passwords, but that seems like a fair trade for getting connected) and sometimes is all you need to do to get things back on an even keel.

By Jason Snell

November 27, 2025 8:30 AM PT

The Six Colors Podcast turns 10

Listener Jason M. wrote:

I just listened to your recent appearance on John Gruber’s The Talk Show. I was glad to hear more about the subscriber program you’ve begun at Six Colors, and I have a suggestion for a subscriber-only feature: a weekly podcast recapping the recent posts on the site.

He wrote that ten years ago this week. My initial response to Jason was that it was an “interesting idea” but that I was “hesitant to do more podcasts at this point.” And yet I immediately forwarded his email to Dan Moren and wrote, “I wonder if we just hopped on Skype once a week for 10 minutes as a part of a Six Colors meeting and recorded a recap podcast.”

Dan’s response: “I think doing a quick, informal podcast, might be interesting…. Plus if we could do it with minimal effort/editing, then it probably wouldn’t be too much overhead. At the very least, it’s probably worth trying! And podcasts are in our wheelhouse.”

A week later we posted the first episode of the “Six Colors Secret Subscriber Podcast.” (The RSS feed and episode URLs were entirely security-through-obscurity, hence the need for secrecy.)

A decade and 474 episodes later, thank you to listener Jason M. for the prod, and to all the Six Colors members who let us keep doing this thing. (We use Zoom now, and it’s more like half an hour, minimum, but it’s still quick, informal, and interesting!)

If you haven’t heard the podcast, there’s an unlocked sample episode as well as a delayed episode feed. Members at the higher More Colors and Backstage level get an extra post-show segment that’s sometimes as long as the actual show, and access to listen live when we record on our Discord.

When we launched the Six Colors membership plan, we had no idea how it would go. I think literally nothing from that initial membership benefits plan survives other than the general idea that by giving us money, you are manifesting more of our work into the world on this site. Our old “magazine” is now a regular newsletter of site content, we’ve added a member-exclusive weekly post from John Moltz, and most notably, we added a podcast we had never, ever intended to do—and based on all my surveys, most members consider it the biggest attraction in the membership!

Dan and I both do a lot of podcasts. This one is different, right down to the complete lack of notes and the occasional sound of my laundry running. Thanks again to Jason M. for suggesting it and to everyone else for making it worth doing almost every week for 10 years.

That said, we’re taking this week off! Our next new episode will be December 5.

By Joe Rosensteel

November 26, 2025 8:30 AM PT

Pick a car, any car: Adventures with CarPlay

A lot of car stuff happened this month, where we needed to go from a one-car household to two. We bought a new car, but it wasn’t going to be delivered in time, so I’d need to rent a couple of cars in the meantime.

The thing that made the rentals tolerable was knowing I could rely on Apple CarPlay.

CarPlay is one of the best pieces of software Apple has ever made. It’s a little magic trick where a car’s infotainment system gets a projection of a virtual display generated by your iPhone with all of your audio and navigation apps filled with your data. You don’t download music files to the car or sync location data; it’s just instantly available to you.

It also lives separately from the software your vehicle needs to function safely on the road. The partition of what’s the automaker’s responsibility and what’s Apple’s responsibility is crystal clear because the software from the automaker looks and behaves differently. That’s a feature, not a bug.

When I picked up the 2025 Nissan Altima that smelled like hamburger grease, I was relieved that I didn’t need to use any of its much-older-than-2025 software stack for navigation or media. If anything, that 2018-era display became a window to the best of present-day technology.

The 2026 Chevrolet Trax hasn’t fallen victim to GM CEO Mary Barra’s long-term, anti-CarPlay plans. I couldn’t get wireless Apple CarPlay to work (Mary, is that you?), but the USB cable did just fine, and the screen was more than decent. The way CarPlay reflows and expands to fill a larger screen has greatly improved over the years. iOS 26 has a few issues with button edges getting trimmed by their container, but it generally makes good use of the space.

At no point did I need to create an account with each automaker for each rental car, or log in with credentials for other services. I didn’t need to use Bluetooth for rudimentary media playback for unsupported apps. I didn’t need to read addresses off my iPhone and manually type them into the car’s navigation system.

I did really need those services, too, as I was commuting to an office three days a week and had no idea what traffic patterns would coagulate in the roadways of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. I needed routing, and importantly, a routing system that I knew the ins and outs of. I wasn’t going to learn the quirks and features of software that was only temporarily in my possession.

I also needed a voice assistant, one that was absolutely terrible, but absolutely terrible in a predictable way for the limited types of requests I had while driving and not relearning what commands I needed for assistants. Sharing my ETA to time dinner, or to figure out if I needed to stop on the way home. Not fiddling with some other voice-to-text system that needs to sync my contacts.

Why can’t we all get along?

Some automakers want to reset the relationship they have with customers for services. They will never be able to match CarPlay for personal choice, or data portability—and especially not for context, like what directions were you just looking at on your iPhone before you got in your car.

On a recent episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast Nilay Patel talked to Mary Barra about CarPlay, and she said CarPlay was confusing to customers. Then her Chief Product Officer, Sterling Anderson, cited Steve Jobs as the reason for their move away from CarPlay, and talked about the possibility of federated IDs for logging into your car.

These are not people interested in replacing CarPlay with a better solution for motorists, just a better solution for GM.

Oddly enough, there’s a rumor that Tesla might add CarPlay support. Men would rather add CarPlay support than go to therapy.

I don’t begrudge Tesla adding CarPlay support merely because I don’t like the company, and especially its CEO. The whole point is that every automaker should have it, so the power and personalization are in the consumer’s hands.¹

Ultra, shmultra

That same empowerment of consumers doesn’t extend to CarPlay Ultra. With CarPlay Ultra, Apple is also misunderstanding the balance of the relationship all three parties are in between automakers, consumers, and itself.

People might have forgotten it, but there were a few years where Apple marketed this as “next generation CarPlay” and stalled out development on regular CarPlay. It was the Apple /// successor to the Apple ][‘s CarPlay.²

CarPlay Ultra is a priority for some Apple executives who want their car’s interface to look a certain way. It doesn’t extend to real control of the vehicle. No portability of car settings in multi-driver households (that’s for the automaker’s profile selection screen), or integration with assistive driving tech, etc. Ultra is about making the climate and volume sliders look like Control Center sliders.

Apple’s continued efforts at improving CarPlay in iOS 26 instead of letting it go stale in some effort to push Ultra adoption are a huge relief.

We’ve got widgets now! I haven’t really found any personal utility in them so far, except the Overcast widget that lets me more easily resume playback of my most recently listened to episode. Still, it’s great that it’s there, and with 26.2 you’ll apparently be able to squeeze in another column of them on certain screens.

It’s been a long road

CarPlay is such a boon that we take for granted. Any attempts to veer further into Apple’s control, or swerve back to automakers, ruin that. Staying between the lines is pretty key to CarPlay’s success.

The ability to literally get up and go with any car can’t be overestimated. Whether that’s my month of rental cars or it’s the reliable, everyday vehicle that someone’s been using for years, it’s worth reflecting on how CarPlay has helped reduce friction in our lives.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]

By Jason Snell

November 25, 2025 2:34 PM PT

Festivitas adds snow, Shortcuts, iPhone widgets to its holiday package

Last year Developer Simon Støvring released Festivitas, a delightful app that lets you adorn your Mac’s Dock and Menu Bar with holiday lights.

This year, Støvring has outdone himself. There’s a new update for Festivitas for Mac that adds fully customizable snowfalls, including size of flakes, snow amount, fall speed, wind speed and direction. You can even determine how much (if any) the snowflakes will be repelled by your pointer!

And Festivitas now has Shortcuts support, which (when combined with MacOS Tahoe automations) can let you turn the lights or snow on and off based on events occurring on or off your Mac.

The first thing I did is built a Shortcut that randomly chooses whether it’s going to snow or not. I set a 10% chance for snow, and if it hits, it chooses a random amount of snow and wind to add.

Unfortunately, running an automation every n minutes is not offered as an option even in Tahoe, so I had to add this line to my crontab in the Terminal:

*/20 * * * * shortcuts run "Random Snowfall"

Now every 20 minutes my Mac will give me a 10% chance at a surprise snowfall, which (I have scientifically calculated) is the exactly right amount to surprise and delight me when it does happen.

It’s a lot easier if you don’t want the random dice flip—you could, for example, use Shortcuts to tell Festivitas to turn on the lights at 4pm every day and start the snow at 5pm. Or whenever. Festivitas for Mac is available now for a suggested price of €4.

Meanwhile, on iOS and iPadOS, Støvring has introduced an alternate version of Festivitas that lets you build widgets surrounded by animated holiday lights.

By Glenn Fleishman

November 24, 2025 8:30 AM PT

Soaping up Liquid Glass: less transparency, more contrast

For those who find the fall 2025 Liquid Glass interface that Apple applied to all its operating systems a bit much—too transparent, too shiny, too hard to read or interpret stuff through layers—Apple introduced a new option in its 26.1 releases in early November to dial things back.

This choice can bump down the glassification of Apple’s interfaces. The overlap of type, search fields, toolbars, and other objects now has a bit more solidity at each layer, reducing transparency, and making them easier to read on their own. It also reduces the interference of multiple overlapping bits of interface, image, and type, so you can visually interpret something without puzzling out which layer it’s on.

The Tinted option only goes so far. Apple already added a slider for Liquid Glass for Lock screens in its 26.2 releases, already out in beta—maybe that will extend further? For now, you can combine Accessibility options on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac to dial in more precisely how you want Liquid Glass to appear.

I can see clearly now

I originally found Liquid Glass almost offensively illegible and shiny. I thought I’d never get used to it. But Apple refined the interface through what must have been an enormous amount of feedback, with the release version—particularly in Tahoe—dialing down and working around some of the worst interactions.

However, there’s still a lot of room for improvement, where type overlaps images or translucent fields or buttons are too see-through to see easily.

The 26.1 releases of iOS, iPadOS, and macOS offer relief in Settings: Display & Brightness on an iPhone or iPad or System Settings: Appearance on a Mac. The option is shown via the Liquid Glass label, with a small simulated preview to help visualize the change. Clear is selected by default, and represents the default Liquid Glass as implemented in the 26.0 releases. Tinted reduces transparency a little—it varies by element and layer—and increases contrast slightly.

In the 26.2 betas of iOS and iPadOS, you can see a different approach to tuning Liquid Glass on the Lock screen editor. With your device locked, tap the screen to wake it, then touch and hold the lock screen, tap Customize, and tap the time elements. You now see a slider below the typeface selection and Glass and Solid buttons at the bottom of the view. Use the slider to control intensity or tap Solid to remove the Glass effect entirely.

Tahoe does have one additional trick up its sleeve with Safari—and in previous versions of macOS that support Safari 26 or later. The current foreground tab in a Safari window passes the dominant color scheme of the page you’re visiting onto the entire upper bar of the interface. In Safari: Settings: Tabs, uncheck “Show color in tab bar” to have the standard interface color and contrast.

Accessibility options

Two options found in Accessibility can give you more vividly distinct results. Both interact with the Clear and Tinted options for Liquid Glass. These options are Reduce Transparency and Increase Contrast. You almost certainly have read about these features with the release of the fall 2025 operating systems, because they provided the only real ways to mitigate Liquid Glass.

With the 26.1 releases, you can combine Clear and Tinted with the above in a sort of matrix I show in the image below for iOS (and iPadOS by extension). Use Settings: Accessibility: Display & Text Size on iPhone or iPad, and System Settings: Accessibility: Display on a Mac. In Tahoe, enabling Increase Contrast also forces Reduce Transparency to turn on and locks it in that state. Not every combination of Clear and Tinted with those Accessibility settings appears differently, so I’ve listed only the ones that are distinct.

The Clear and Tinted options produce far less difference in Tahoe and on an iPhone or iPad. I’d use Accessibility display options on top of Tinted to get the best outcome. I find the Dock in Tahoe particularly irritating because of how Liquid Glass has made its outline illegible. Only using Increase Contrast provides what I’d like there.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]