An Apple event may be nigh as the company shakes up its organization. Apple’s so busy, no wonder it needs to lie down!
One day in October
The calendar on the wall says it’s October which means it is or it could be or it might be or maybe even isn’t time for a less exciting Apple event! Aren’t you less excited? I know I am.
Rumors indicated Apple could be set to announce a blockluster (sic) lineup including the following:
M5-based iPad Pros. WARNING: standing between them and the power outlet could void the warranty. Your warranty. I may have picked the wrong year to be a Star Trek red shirt for Halloween.
A faster HomePod mini with support for an as-yet-to-be-delivered conversational Siri, thrilling thousands of customers.
A faster Apple TV with support for an as-yet-to-be-delivered conversational Siri, thrilling hundreds of customers.
With Apple Immersive, a remarkable storytelling format available on Vision Pro, Lakers fans will feel like they are sitting courtside for those games. Live games, available via streams of up to 150 Mbps, will be accessible to authenticated Spectrum SportsNet subscribers, as well as Spectrum Internet customers, via the Spectrum SportsNet app in the Lakers’ territory. The game replay and highlights in Apple Immersive will also be available on demand via the Spectrum SportsNet app across the Spectrum footprint and on the NBA App for national and international fans.
Since the very first Vision Pro demos showed a third baseman’s throw to first go wide of the bag at Fenway Park, it’s been clear that immersive video could really transform the sports experience. I have no idea what it feels like to sit courtside at an NBA game—though I did sit courtside at a few Cal women’s basketball games last winter!—but I am looking forward to trying it out.
The first game will be streaming by early next year. Games will be captured using the new URSA Cine Immersive Live cameras from Blackmagic.
I was there on that early October day 14 years ago when Apple—led on stage by Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, and Scott Forstall—rolled out iOS 5, the iPhone 4S, and one of the most important iOS features ever, Siri. (Steve Jobs wasn’t there, an empty seat left for him in the front row. He died the next day.)
Siri was the first true “voice assistant,” a voice-driven interface that Jobs clearly thought would be a huge part of the future of how we use our devices. He legendarily called Siri’s co-founder 24 straight days to express his desire to buy the app and add it to iOS.
While Apple got there first, competitors followed. In some ways, it’s the contrary example to what Apple normally does: Instead of entering a category late and perfecting it, Apple entered this category first and found itself limited by those early decisions. The company has been struggling to make Siri better for more than a decade now, and it’s generally perceived as being a feature that fails to live up to Apple’s brand promise.
The shift to modern AI-driven technology is an opportunity for Apple to revamp Siri, but the company has struggled to get a smarter version of Siri out the door. While the original version of Siri was more of a novelty, with every passing year, it becomes more critical to Apple’s future—and its troubling state becomes more of a red flag about the future of all of Apple’s products.
Whether color e-ink displays feel compelling or like a fad, our impressions of OpenAI’s Sora and text-to-video tech, how we manage Mac menu bar icons, and whether we’ll use the new resizable Slide Over feature in iPadOS 26.1 and for what purpose.
Apple is partnering with satellite company Globalstar for the iPhone’s emergency SOS feature. The service is free to iPhone users, at least for now. Apple declined a pitch from [Elon] Musk, who reportedly sought a $5 billion payment from the iPhone maker in exchange for an 18-month exclusivity deal.
There’s some internal frustration at Apple about Globalstar’s limited capabilities compared to Starlink, according to a May report by The Information. The concerns are that the Globalstar network is “outdated, slow, and limited in what features it can support compared with offerings from SpaceX and others.”
Brodkin’s piece is a good deep dive into the issues here. With SpaceX’s purchase of spectrum from EchoStar, and SpaceX’s enormous advantage in launching satellites (the entire Starlink business is built on SpaceX’s fleet of cheap, reusable rockets), it may be tough for competitors to keep up. Which has an impact on Apple’s strategy when it comes to providing access outside of traditional cellular networks.
I mean, really orange. Not “brown but if you hold it in a certain light, it kind of looks orange if you squint.” That in and of itself is a cause for celebration, as it finally brings some much-needed fun to Apple’s pro phone lineup. Pros like color too, you know? And for the ones that don’t there are perfectly respectable options of traditional silver or subdued blue. But the orange phone, well, you can’t forget the orange phone is orange, even when looking at it straight on where the orange frame limns the display with a constant halo.
The iPhone 17 Pro marks the most significant redesign of Apple’s pro phone lineup since its introduction with the 11 Pro. Sure, over time the phone has gotten a little larger, traded out the notch for the dynamic island, and added a few additional buttons. But the 17 Pro’s two-tone back and—sigh—iconic plateau make this phone instantly identifiable.
The more I think about the iPhone Air, the more I think back to the introduction of the MacBook Air back in 2008. I used the word “compromise” ten times in my review of that first lightweight Mac laptop.
If the story of the MacBook Air is a story about compromise, the decision about whether the MacBook Air is a product worth having can be answered by one question: How much are you willing to compromise?
This year’s selection of iPhones offers users a ridiculous amount of choice. The iPhone 17 has gained numerous features previously limited to the high-end iPhone Pro line. The iPhone 17 Pro has powerful new cameras and a new unibody look, including a spectacular Cosmic Orange color option. Back in 2008, the low-end MacBook and high-end MacBook Pro held similar positions.
Just like back then, an interloper has arrived that completely breaks up the high-end/low-end dynamic. The iPhone Air is priced in the middle, but doesn’t quite fit there. It’s an iPhone that doesn’t share the design priorities of other iPhones. It’s designed for people who also have different priorities.
There are dozens of obvious reasons to buy an iPhone 17 or iPhone 17 Pro instead of the iPhone Air. But when I hold the Air between my thumb and index finger and feel its weight and thinness, I begin to wonder how much those reasons matter.
Slide Over lets you hide apps off the side of the iPad screen. Again.
Monday’s second beta for iPadOS 26.1 includes two highly requested changes from iPad users (including us) that were absent in this summer’s iPadOS 26 beta cycle: a return of Slide Over and the addition of USB microphone gain control.
Slide Over is back
In throwing out iPadOS’s old multitasking interface, Apple also chucked out a simple multitasking feature that it turns out was maybe a bit more beloved than anyone expected. Slide Over, one of the iPad’s original “multitasking” features, let you stash a single window off to the side of your iPad, so you could work full-screen on different tasks and still have quick access to information in another app. As I wrote in my iPadOS 26 review:
The loss of Slide Over, however, strikes me as an oversight on Apple’s part. It turns out that a lot of people use Slide Over as a simple way to keep an app hanging around for quick access, a very simple form of multitasking, and multi-window mode is overkill for this use case. I understand why Apple killed Slide Over: it was very easy for novice users to accidentally enable the mode and pretty non-trivial to deactivate it. (Perhaps Apple should consider a new approach that lets users dock an app off the side of the screen, as you can with a picture-in-picture window.)
In iPadOS 26.1 beta 2, Slide Over is now an explicit part of the new multi-window multitasking view. To enable it, open a window and resize it so that the three “stoplight” buttons appear, tap and hold on the green one, and choose Add to Slide Over. Or choose Move to Left (or Right) Slide Over from the Window menu. Or type option-globe, left or right. All of those will work.
When Slide Over is invoked, the current window will be resized and stuck in the corner. You can grab the top of it and slide it off-screen, and it’ll vanish—only to reappear when you swipe your finger from off the side of the screen back on. You can stick the window on either side, and it’ll hang out there, regardless of whether you’re using full-screen windows or have a bunch of windows. You can even resize the Slide Over window when it’s on screen, and it’ll stay that size—unlike the old implementation.
Like Split View (which was reincarnated as two tiled side-by-side windows in multi-window mode), Slide Over only works in multi-window mode—but if you prefer to use your iPad apps at full size, you can just keep doing that even in multi-window mode. Nobody’s going to force you to make those windows smaller.
Slide Over only supports one app per display, so while you can only position one window on your main iPad display, if you use an external display, you can position a different app on that one.
Gain control for local capture
Loud microphones can now be quieted down.
An issue with iPadOS 26’s new support for local recordings of camera and microphones was that you couldn’t adjust the gain on USB microphones, leading to some serious overmodulation on hot mics. In iPadOS 26.1 beta 2, the local capture control in Control Center now includes a gain control. In our testing, this cured the issue involving the notoriously hot Audio-Technica ATR microphone popular with podcasters as a low-cost, portable option.
So in short: with its first major update to iPadOS 26, it appears that Apple has addressed two of the most glaring issues with its new feature list. I’m choosing to view that as a very encouraging sign.
Ok, hotshot, here’s a test. You’ve got a Mac with a keyboard. There’s no USB mouse to hand within a 500-mile radius. You have an unpaired Bluetooth mouse. Whatcha gonna do, punk? You got any bright ideas?
Six Colors subscriber Tod was out of luck a few weeks ago, when he wrote me:
How is my dad supposed to pair a Bluetooth mouse to his iMac without a working mouse of any sort? We can get to the Bluetooth pairing screen using Spotlight, and the mouse is visible, but we can’t figure out how to press the Connect button with just a USB keyboard.
By the time I’d connected, Tod’s brother had gone off to collect some peripherals, and they were able to complete the process.
My immediate reaction was: Just press Tab or Shift-Tab. Had I tried this? No. When I did, I discovered my muscle memory had… what’s the opposite of atrophied? It was like a ghost limb, a ghost Tab/Shift-Tab sequence that didn’t work.
After some diligent research, including posts that had the wrong information, I discovered that all you need to do is press Control-Fn (or Globe)-F7. (See “A functional afternote” near the bottom of this article for more on that key sequence.) Using that keystroke toggles the option in System Settings > Keyboard for “Keyboard navigation,” thus restoring my ghost muscle memory to reality.
I think it’s worth digging deeper into cases in which you need an alternative to a mouse or a keyboard to complete operations.
The mouse that roars
I was present at a very awkward moment in 1992 between Apple’s then CEO, John Sculley, and a product manager for a software package. I was the “course manager” at the Kodak Center for Creative Imaging in Camden, Maine. My job entailed a mix of keeping 100 Mac IIfx’s and lots of other gear running, and working with the education director (my friend Charles) to design curriculum. People visited to take multi-day courses on cutting-edge equipment.1
During an invitational event, which tech industry and artistic luminaries attended, Sculley was there and getting some hands-on training with Atex Renaissance, a desktop-publishing application Kodak was developing to compete against QuarkXPress and Aldus PageMaker. Honestly, he was a very nice man to deal with, even when I was a lowly stiff. However, he took umbrage at one point—when a Kodak product manager was helping him use Atex.
Kodak Person: Just type Command-K and it will format the text. Sculley: How do I do that with a mouse? Kodak person: You can’t. The keyboard is better. [Pause] Sculley: No, it isn’t.
You could feel the frost in the air. Apple has been mouse-forward since even before the Macintosh, starting with the Lisa. Over 40-plus years of development, the mouse has almost always been a first-class citizen.
Sometimes—don’t tell Mr. Sculley—a mouse is worse. This is particularly the case for toggle states and repetitive actions that you can rapid-fire to more easily press, press, press on a keyboard.
If you want to know all the Mac keyboard shortcuts you can use, Apple maintains a convenient reference page that I have conveniently managed to avoid knowing existed until now. The list starts with things I imagine most of us have burnt into our fingers, and couldn’t speak the actual sequence required, like Command-grave accent (`) for rotating through open windows in the foreground app, or Command-Option-H for hiding all windows of all apps except the current foreground one.
It moves on to some more obscure ones, including using the power button with modifier keys, sometimes only available on keyboards that lack Touch ID. For instance, you can restart your Mac from a Touch ID-less keyboard by pressing either: Control–Command–Power button (don’t prompt to save unsaved documents) or Control–Option–Command–Power button (do prompt, just like Apple > Restart).2
You can elevate the keyboard even further through an Accessibility setting.
Key to success
Full Keyboard Access is yet another accessibility feature that offers specific benefits for individuals who cannot easily use a point-and-click device or are unable to use one at all, as well as general benefits for everyone who prefers an alternative to movement-based input. Enable it in System Settings > Accessibility > Motor > Keyboard.
Enable Full Keyboard Access to let your fingers do the navigating.
Once enabled, the thing you’ll notice most prominently is that you can tab through switches, buttons, and other fields that typically require clicking. As you press Tab or Shift-Tab, the focus moves through interface elements. Use the Space bar to select, and Control-Tab/Control-Shift-Tab to move among items that you can’t navigate through using the arrow keys.
You get some bonus modifier-key commands, too, using the Tab key uniquely as a modifier like you would Control or Option:
With Full Keyboard Access, you can use Application Chooser to select among running apps.
Tab-W: Show a list of available windows in the current app.
Tab-F: Search for items in the current view.
Tab-A: Open the Application Chooser.
To view the full range of special commands, press Tab-H. You can customize the appearance and behavior by clicking the “i” info icon to the right of the Full Keyboard Access switch.
We put the fun in function keys
Many Mac users tend only to use function keys to control the features printed on them by Apple and third-party Mac keyboard makers, like increasing or decreasing volume or brightness.
To use a function key like F7 (labeled with a rewind symbol and F7 on Apple and third-party Mac keyboards) as an F7 key, you also have to press the Function key, typically labeled fn (in lowercase like that). On some Apple keyboards, it’s instead the symbol of a globe, possibly with fn in tiny type below it.
You can change that default, however, if you use function keys enough or prefer them to the Mac-specific features. Go to System Settings > Keyboard > Keyboard Shortcuts. Click Function Keys and enable “Use F1, F2, etc. keys as standard function keys.”
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
What I always say about Kodak is that the company’s digital products and strategy were 10 years ahead of their time in 1992. Then, by 2002, they were somehow 10 years behind. An amazing feat to pull off. ↩
Apple seemingly has an error in this keystroke description, stating it shuts down your Mac, equivalent to Apple > Restart, instead of restarting your Mac. ↩
This time the leaks are coming from outside Apple! Got a yacht? Jony Ive has the product for you. And Apple’s software has enough problems without the UK government messing it up.
Thanks to a joint effort between Russian YouTube channels and… [checks notes]… the U.S. Federal Communications Commission (seriously, FCC?), several upcoming Apple products were all but confirmed this week. Despite Apple’s request for confidentiality, FCC documents pertaining to the wireless capabilities of a new MacBook Pro and Vision Pro were accidentally released to the public.
Oops. I guess Tim Cook is not up on his payments.
Meanwhile, Russian YouTubers uploaded purported unboxing videos for an M5-based iPad Pro.
While none of these leaks are particularly shocking, this is all definitely going to please Tim Cook like a pair of burlap undies.…
We dive into the aftermath of the Jimmy Kimmel affair and the strange balance between TV networks and local affiliates. [Downstream+ subscribers also get: Streaming price hikes, Prime Video’s future, and David Letterman’s streaming strategy.]
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We’ve been here before, so many times, since the beginning of this current administration. And I expect we’ll be returning to it for at least as long as the current administration is in power, maybe more. So let me repeat the maxim we should all be living by: do not expect a moral stand from a corporation.
ICEBlock developer Joshua Aaron (who, it should be noted, has taken criticism from security experts over some of his claims about the app), made a strong statement about the removal, saying “Capitulating to an authoritarian regime is never the right move.”2
Look, we had this discussion when Tim Cook ponied up $1 million to the inauguration fund and showed up. We had this discussion when Apple changed the name of the Gulf of Mexico in Apple Maps. We had it when he gave the president the silly trophy and promised more investment in American manufacturing. We had it a couple weeks ago when he went to the state dinner in the UK.
This is not to say that they never take moral stands. Every company is, after all, comprised of people, and every group of people has its breaking point. Take the repeated criticism from Microsoft employees of the company’s stance on providing services to the Israeli military. That did finally elicit some change from the company. Even Apple has taken a stand in the past against government overreach, perhaps most notably perhaps during the San Bernardino incident in 2016 where the company refused to help the FBI create a backdoor to access the iPhone of a suspected shooter.
This one, frankly, was a loser for Apple to fight. Not least of all because there was a recent shooting that allegedly targeted agents of that federal agency. True or not, it’s easy for the administration to point to that incident and argue that an app could be used to facilitate violence.3 But, come on, this is the App Store: Apple regularly rejects and removes apps for capricious reasons about design and branding. Something this contentious? It simply doesn’t want the heat.
Some might argue that Apple is insulated from danger by its size. But in some ways, that scale makes it more vulnerable. It makes it a bigger target for entities like the government, who can deliver even more damage to its bottom line than pretty much any bloc of committed consumers. Apple does not want to go to war with the government. Especially this government.
And, let’s not forget, that when we’re talking as many customers as Apple has, it is inevitable that some percentage of them—some not insignificant percentage—is actually going to agree with a decision like this.
Pressure is what moves the needle, and I’m sorry, but expounding on social media or podcasts or even, frankly, articles on websites about how wrong these decisions are doesn’t cut it. We’ve seen what does work: pressure from employees, to a certain extent, but more than anything, money. Specifically, money lost. When ABC suspended Jimmy Kimmel, it reported saw a massive number of cancellations of Disney+ (even if those exact numbers are in doubt, it seems clear that it was a lot). You want to make a difference? You’re going to have to put your money where your mouth is, uncomfortable as it may be.
But even then, even if the company does “the right thing,” it won’t be a decision taken from a moral standpoint. It will be practical. Mercenary. Because that is what is demanded by this technological/capitalist terror we’ve devised for ourselves.4 That’s the rules of the game. Them’s the breaks. When Apple made the decision to stand firm in the San Bernardino case, it did so not because it was the right thing to do, but because its business reputation relies on its claims of privacy and security.
None of this is to defend Tim Cook or Apple.5 It’s merely to point out they are doing exactly what they are supposed to do by the rules of the game they are playing. Corporations in our capitalist system are not incentivized to act morally. We cheer the company when it takes action that we find laudable because its interests intersecting with our own, but those moments are not born of virtue, they’re just…serendipity.
John Gruber has, for many years, made a point of Apple’s priorities: “Apple first, users second, developers last.”. Most often that’s used to illustrate the company’s seeming disregard for developers, the very people who help bolster their business, but it’s important not to lose sight of the top of that list: Apple first.
Frankly, there’s a reason Apple is spending far more time and energy decrying the Digital Markets Act in Europe than it is fighting authoritarian decisions in the U.S., and it’s not about the political alignment of the company’s leaders. It’s about money.
Look, I’m not saying “don’t be a fan of corporations”…I’m saying we probably should have never been a fan of corporations. We let them entangle our pocketbooks and our psyches to their own enrichment instead of a relationship that should have been kept strictly transactional.
Do not expect corporations to be your proxy in the fight against authoritarianism. They are, simply put, not designed for it. They are machines designed to return profit to shareholders and that means they fundamentally rely on a stability that you’re not going to get from making waves. You will always be disappointed.
Yeah, it’s bad. I mean, even the Cato Institute—the Cato Institute—published a commentary back in July saying “[ICEBlock developer’s] Joshua Aaron’s creativity and public minded spirit is admirable.” ↩
Never mind the reality, of course, that those agents were targeted at an ICE facility that probably could be found on any map. Which of course means the next logical authoritarian step is for the administration to demand tech companies start removing government building locations from their mapping software. 😬 ↩
Proponents will tell you that capitalism means the best solution wins. But that’s not strictly true. The American implementation of capitalism has entirely eschewed the moral axis theorized by father of capitalism, Adam Smith for an entirely quantitative model. Meaning what wins is not the best solution, but the most cost-effective. Capitalistic success in America is a Bezos chart. ↩
[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.]
It’s been a busy few weeks around here, what with Apple’s latest platform updates and new iPhones, but I finally have time to catch my breath and talk about the most important of topics: the Apple Vision Pro.
We’ve already established that the Vision Pro is a “whoa” device that can be a great place to watch a movie, chat with friends, or even just browse the web for a while.
But most of us probably don’t spend the majority of our days entertaining ourselves—more’s the pity. And hey, this is a product with “Pro” in its name, for all of Apple’s various definitions of what exactly that word means. If the Apple Vision Pro is going to have some staying power, if it’s going to fit into my daily life, then it needs to help me get things done.
So, I’ve tried using the Vision Pro for a variety of work tasks over the past few months. I’ve written in it. I’ve revised. I’ve even edited a podcast. I’ve put it through its paces. I’ve tried to get things done. And while it does offer some capabilities that you won’t find anywhere else, that emphasis on “tried” has all too often been well-earned.
