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.
Joseph Cox of 404 Media reports on an unusual phenomenon when he and other Apple users have seen “both the iOS and Mac versions of the Podcasts app… open religion, spirituality, and education podcasts with no apparent rhyme or reason.” It appears to be someone using Apple’s auto-opening technology to kick off a hacking attack:
That said, someone has tried to deliver something a bit more malicious through the Podcasts app. It’s the first podcast I mentioned, with the title “5../XEWE2′””"″onclic…”. Maybe some readers have already picked up on this, but the podcast is trying to direct listeners to a site that attempts to perform a cross-site scripting, or XSS, attack. XSS is basically when a hacker injects their own malicious code into a website that otherwise looks legit. It’s definitely a low-hanging fruit kind of attack, at least today. I remember it being way, way more common 10 years ago, and it was ultimately what led to the infamous MySpace worm.
Apple did not comment for Cox’s story. My guess is that this is someone testing around the edges to see if there’s a vulnerability here, but even if everything’s secure, nobody should have strange podcasts opening up in the Podcasts app.
Apple’s annual tradition of commissioning a special holiday-themed commercial film continues this year with “A Critter Carol,” a two-minute long film starring an array of singing woodland creatures portrayed by hand-made puppets.
The film definitely gives off muppet vibes, what with the shaggy forest puppets, occasional good-natured mayhem, and humor amplified by the spot’s use of a fun song, “Friends,” by Flight of the Conchords. Muppet vibes are good.
In addition to being imbued by the spirit of the holidays, does the film spotlight a blue iPhone 17 Pro? Yes, Virginia, it does. And as you might expect, it was shot (by veteran Apple short director Mark Molloy) on iPhone. (There’s also a brief behind-the-scenes video that’s almost as cute as the film.)
In 1987, 14 years before the first Apple Store, Mr. Lerner and Dick Demenus, a fellow former engineer at WBAI, the counterculture listener-supported FM radio station in New York, started what became Tekserve, a warren of workshops in four locations on West 23rd Street. The company was an immediate success.
In a single day, Mr. Lerner told The New York Times in 2002, the company sold computers to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission (an international public policy network and regular quarry of conspiracists) and the Communist Party (whose offices were down the block).
Back in the day, when there were no Apple Stores, shops like Tekserve saved the bacon of Mac users on a regular basis. I never visited Tekserve, but it was legendary.
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 wide CarPlay screen in the Chevy Trax was fun.
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.
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.
Other than the Overcast widget, I haven’t really found much utility with widgets yet.
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.
If the people with “I bought this before Elon was crazy” bumper stickers also get to use CarPlay as an update, and it makes it easier for them to transition to another CarPlay vehicle the next time they buy a car, then that’s an unintended side effect I’m totally fine with. ↩
If you’re old enough to get this reference, make sure your eye prescription is up to date before renewing your driver’s license. ↩
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
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.
A shortcut that will start Festivitas snowing… one time in ten. (Early versions of Festivitas required a random number between 0 and 1; now it accepts 0 to 100.)
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.
It’s Thanksgiving week, and Myke and Jason are using the occasion to draft their favorite Apple TV shows. There’s also some drama at the Rumor Roundup corral involving Apple’s succession planning, and Google engineers AirDrop for Android.
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.
Liquid Glass’s Clear and Tinted options in the 26.1 releases offer only a slight distinction.
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.
Starting in the upcoming 26.2 release, you’ll be able to adjust or disable Liquid Glass on the Lock screen for the time display.
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.
This comparison lets you see how common interface elements and overlaps work with the Liquid Glass and Accessibility settings. Only combinations that have a distinct difference are shown; others are identical to existing combinations.
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/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
Today I updated a story I wrote back in August about folder automation in macOS Tahoe. One of the great new features in Tahoe is a whole slew of automations attached to Shortcuts, including not just time-based ones but ones based on when files or folders change on your Mac.
Shortcuts is a little impenetrable, so I thought I’d give a couple examples of how you handle building an automation when a folder changes. (The trick is to repeat through the list of changed items and act on them one by one, perhaps preceded by a filter to limit the items to the ones you actually want to act upon.) Using this technique, I’ve built automations that convert files of the wrong format into the right one when they appear on my Desktop, file downloads to the appropriate places in my filesystem, and run scripts to modify downloaded calendar files from my airline of choice.
It’s all very useful, and one of my favorite features in Tahoe. But the reason I updated the story is that half of it used to address how you get an automation to act only on files at the top level of a folder, rather than within subfolders. There were several ways to solve the problem—all of them tricky. Fortunately, Apple subsequently updated Tahoe to add a “Ignore subfolders” checkbox that does all the work for you. So I ripped out that whole section, and things are a lot clearer now.
If you are running Tahoe and haven’t explored Automations within Shortcuts, I highly recommend giving it a look.
Apple tells us Tim Cook may be going out for cigarettes soon and he’s not coming back. The Mac Pro may also not be coming back but London thieves will if you try to slip them an Android phone.
To everything, Ternus, Ternus, Ternus
There is a season…
Ternus, Ternus, Ternus.
Yeah, you get it. And Apple hopes you get what they’re laying down because the company is spending a lot of time these days greasing the skids for Tim Cook’s retirement.
Is that duck fat? Whatever it is, it is designed for minimum possible friction.
Despite the “retirement” rumors, Cook is expected to stay on with the company in an exciting new role: Apple SEIC.
That’s Sin Eater In Chief. What does this role entail? Glad you asked.
See, at just 50 years of age, heir apparent John Ternus is too young and sweet to have to have to perform the more disgusting duties of the job, duties such as giving the president a glass award and then standing there while he fields questions about his close personal ties to a pedophile.…
As we reach the potential end of Tim Cook’s tenure as Apple CEO, we consider how the company might manage an orderly executive transition. (More Colors and Backstage members, this episode also contains your monthly Q&A session.)
Today, we’re introducing a way for Quick Share to work with AirDrop. This makes file transfer easier between iPhones and Android devices, and starts rolling out today to the Pixel 10 family.
It’s currently only available on the Pixel 10 family, though Google says it is “expanding it to more Android devices.” It also requires you to set your AirDrop visibility to “Everyone for 10 minutes”, as it presumably has no visibility into your contacts.
Interestingly, there’s no indication that Apple did anything to make this possible. The provisions of the Digital Markets Act in the European Union do currently stipulate that Apple will have to allow for competing standards to AirDrop (which might very well include the Android Quick Share feature that Google is leveraging here) as well as bring interoperability to the feature. Of course, the company has made its disagreement with the DMA known, so it’s unclear if this development has any bearing on that. Apple hadn’t responded to my request for comment at the time this article was published.
While this feature is hardly seamless, it is nice to have a cross-platform file transfer system. It’s unclear whether or not Apple will (or can) alter AirDrop to block this. The most recent beta versions of Apple’s platforms do contain a new AirDrop feature for sharing temporarily with people via one-time codes but it’s unknown whether or even if that will interact with Google’s feature.
Apple’s been making interesting tweaks to its operating systems after the release of the 26.0 versions in September. Back in October, the 26.1 beta cycle brought Slide Over back to iPadOS, a feature that’s now released for everyone. We’re now three betas into the 26.2 beta cycle, and this week brought interesting new features for both Mac and iPad users.
On the iPad side, Apple continues to tweak the edges of its new multitasking model, most notably the reborn Slide Over feature. This week’s feature updates all seem to be focused on kicking off multitasking functionality by dragging apps out of the Dock while in multi-window mode.
While the new Slide Over still doesn’t offer a built-in app switcher like the old one (which, personal opinion, still seems like a bridge too far and a metaphor too mixed), in 26.2 beta 3 there’s a new way to quickly replace which app is in Slide Over: You just drag an app’s icon out of the Dock and drop it on the Slide Over spot. That’s it. The app you dragged replaces the app that was there.
In 26.1, you could kick an app into Slide Over via the menu bar or by tapping and holding on the Stoplight buttons or via a keyboard shortcut. The 26.2 beta brings the Dock into the mix: if you drag an app icon out of the Dock and drag it to the left or right edge of the screen, you can drop it and it’ll be added to Slide Over.
Finally, if you’re in multi-window mode and you drag an app icon to one side of the screen, but not to the edge, the preview of the app window will change from more horizontal to more vertical (when holding the iPad in horizontal orientation, anyway), and an arrow will appear on the edge of the screen. These are both indicators that if you drop the window, it’ll automatically be tiled to that half of the display. So it’s a quick gesture to add a window already in one half of Split View.
Meanwhile, Apple has made good on some of its M5 chip speed claims that were previously hard to verify because they relied on pre-release software. Apple’s open-source MLX frameworks now support the M5’s Neural Accelerator, which enables dramatic speed improvements.
Federico Viticci of MacStories was also able to test the pre-release MLX frameworks on an M5 iPad Pro and reports some pretty spectacular results. Obviously, these are the earliest days, and it’s a prerelease framework, but it seems like the 26.2 updates will unlock a lot of the promised horsepower of the M5—at least on the AI-related GPU front.
Another Apple update in 26.2 will enable even higher-speed Mac performance in clusters of Macs. This new feature uses the 480Gb/s of the Mac Studio’s six Thunderbolt 5 ports to run shared workloads across (for example) multiple M3 Ultra Mac Studios, creating AI clusters that have enormous processing power while using potentially an order of magnitude less electricity than a more traditional processing cluster.
I have no idea how practical that is, but it’s clear that Apple sees a place where high-end Apple silicon Macs can play in the AI space, and it’s moving further in that direction with these 26.2 updates.
All of this stuff is in beta right now, but you should expect 26.2 final to ship before the end of the year.
Veteran TV critic Alan Sepinwall joins Jason to discuss the current state of TV criticism, the future of scripted TV, why streamers can’t make sitcoms, the difference between recaps and reviews, and the best shows of the year.
A new iPhone accessory available in the U.S. Apple Store prioritizes accessibility for users with a variety of physical and motor disabilities.
The Hikawa MagSafe Phone Grip and Stand functions as both a stand for the phone, and a tool for gripping it, for users with limited muscle strength or ability to hold a phone independently.
The silicone grip and stand snaps onto any MagSafe-capable iPhone, and works in portrait or landscape mode. It’s available in chartreuse and crater – a recycled colorway exclusive to Apple’s U.S. Online Store.
The grip and stand was created by Bailey Hikawa, a Los Angeles-based designer who has also designed iPhone cases. It sells for $69.95.
Black Friday tech deals we’re eyeballing, Meta features that should go retro, whether decentralized internet was better, and how we troubleshoot tech issues.
Tim Cook’s succession planning hits another gear, Tesla may be embracing CarPlay, Apple shifts its iPhone release plans, and Jason considers the place of the iPad Pro today after traveling with it for a week.
