I really enjoyed today’s Stratechery piece by Ben Thompson, which tries to understand how Apple can have an impressive roll-out of some really good new products, and yet it all seems so much quieter than it used to:
I have, for the last several years, noted how, from a Stratechery perspective, iPhone launches just aren’t nearly as big of a deal as they were when I first started. Back then I would spend weeks before the event predicting what Apple would announce, and would spend weeks afterwards breaking down the implications; now I usually dash off an Update that, in recent years, has been dominated by discussions about price and elasticity and Apple’s transition to being a services company.
What was shocking to me, however, was actually watching the event in real time: my group chats and X feed acknowledged that the event was happening, but I had the distinct impression that almost no one was paying much attention, which was not at all the case a decade ago. And, particularly when it comes to tech discussion, you can understand why: by far the biggest thing in tech — and on Stratechery — is AI, and Apple simply isn’t a meaningful player.
The circus was Smartphones for a while, but right now the circus is AI.
I found myself thinking about satellite connectivity during today’s Apple event, during which the company announced that the Apple Watch Ultra 3 would include the feature. Back when the feature debuted on the iPhone 14 line, Apple said it would remain free for two years. When that period was up, Apple extended free coverage for another year. Which brings us to this year! Will people have to finally start paying?
iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 users are getting another year of free access to satellite connectivity features, according to a footnote on Apple’s newsroom posts for the iPhone 17 and iPhone 17 Pro. “The free trial will be extended for iPhone 14 and iPhone 15 users who have activated their device in a country that supports Apple’s satellite features prior to 12 a.m. PT on September 9, 2025,” Apple says.
Yep, we’re going to keep kicking that can right on down the road—probably forever, at least as far as the Emergency SOS features go—as I said previously, somebody dying because they didn’t pay the fee for satellites would put a real damper on that keynote montage.
However, it is worth noting that while the Apple Watch Ultra 3’s satellite features are likewise free for two years, using the Find My or texting features requires a carrier plan. Moreover, as Apple’s footnote reads: “To send and receive SMS/MMS from cellular models of Apple Watch over satellite, your paired iPhone must be powered on and connected to Wi-Fi or an active cellular network, but your iPhone doesn’t need to be nearby.” So you can’t just rely on your Apple Watch Ultra 3 for all your satellite texting needs, I guess.
It’ll be interesting to see if Apple ever does start directly charging for non-emergency satellite features, but I think it’s going to be a while yet before we find out.
From the iPhone Air to the iPhone 17 models, from AirPods Pro 3 to the new Apple Watches, we break down all the announcements from the September Apple Media Event!
Apple crams a lot into its keynotes, but almost as notable is what it chooses not to talk about. Having had some time after today’s “awe-dropping” event announcing the iPhone 17 line, Apple Watch Series 11, and AirPods Pro 3, here are a few things I found out.
The new MagSafe battery is an iPhone Air exclusive
There were no doubt some shouts of joy when Apple mentioned it had a new version of its MagSafe Battery, but if you want one of those to boost your phone’s longevity, be aware: it’s an iPhone Air exclusive. The key’s in the name “iPhone Air MagSafe Battery”—Apple says it “was created exclusively for iPhone Air” and only the iPhone Air is listed in the Compatibility section. Sorry iPhone 17/17 Pro users, you’re out of luck. (Alas, the same is true of the new iPhone bumper case too.)
FineWoven…lives!
Apple introduced new “TechWoven” cases at this year’s event, but Apple’s previous attempt at a premium material, FineWoven, is not only still around, but is included in new products. There’s a brand new set of FineWoven MagSafe wallets in various colors to compliment the latest iPhone models, including a “Fox Orange.”
The iPhone Air is likely using binned chips
Impressive as it is that the new iPhone Air uses the same A19 Pro as the iPhone 17 Pro models, they aren’t quite as good: looking at the specs comparison page will show you that the Air boasts just 5 GPU cores to the 6 cores found on the Pro and Pro Max. Guess you won’t be doing important AI pipeline tasks on your new incredibly thin iPhone, oh well.
Live Translation isn’t just for AirPods Pro 3
Apple spent some time talking about the new Live Translation features in AirPods Pro 3 (a feature that’s also available in other forms on the company’s various platforms), but don’t worry, you won’t be left out in the cold if you don’t buy the latest and greatest earbuds. The company’s fine print says “Live Translation with AirPods works on AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation and AirPods Pro 2 and later with the latest firmware when paired with an Apple Intelligence-enabled iPhone running iOS 26 and later.” You are free to travel about the world.
Apple Watch health feature availabilities
Likewise, Apple Watch’s new health features—hypertension detection and the sleep score—are available on more than just the company’s latest devices. Hypertension detection works with Apple Watches with S9 and later processors (sorry, owners of the original Apple Watch Ultra), probably using the same sort of machine learning systems that enable the gesture detections. Sleep score appears more broadly available, dating back to the Apple Watch 6 and second-generation Apple Watch SE.
Operating system updates coming soon
While there was no specific release date for Apple’s platform updates announced during the keynote, the company says iOS 26, iPadOS 26, watchOS 26, macOS 26, and visionOS 26 (and presumably tvOS 26 and the HomePod update) will arrive on Monday, September 15.
Updated at 5:20pm Eastern to clarify that all platform updates are coming on Monday.
[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.]
Concerns have been raised about “excessive noise” during a recent commercial film shoot.
Merchant City and Trongate Community Council (MCTCC) say they received a complaint from a local resident about the noise and “other disruption” during filming which took place on Cochrane Street from Saturday, August 23 to Wednesday, August 27.
It’s understood the filming was for an Apple advert. A video taken of the shoot and shared by the Glasgow Times showed one actor ‘floating’ down from the roof of a building.
Hmm. An Apple advertisement featuring an actor floating down from the roof while using their iPhone? Seems like that might be promoting a very light iPhone of some sort.
I suppose we’ll find out sooner or later. (Update: Yep, it’s the iPhone Air all right.)
Before the iPhone, Apple took a shot at making the iPod a device that could do more than just play music. Amongst it: playing games.1 If you find yourself feeling nostalgic for that era, you can now revisit those classic games designed for the iPod—it just takes jumping through a few hoops, as Ars Technica’s Kyle Orland reports:
Now that the consolidated clickwheel game collection is complete, though, owners of any iPod 5G+ or iPod Nano 3G+ should be able to sync the complete library to their personal device completely offline, without worrying about any server checks from Apple. They can do that by setting up a Virtual Machine using these GitHub instructions or by downloading this torrented Internet Archive collection and creating their own Virtual Machine from the files contained therein.
The project has recently added the last missing game, Real Soccer 2009, to the archive, so it’s now complete. Apple has in the past revived one of those old games, but I wouldn’t be holding my breath for the rest of them to resurface in the App Store anytime soon.
Like our vestigial appendix, which can sometimes burst and cause us trouble, the origins of “modern” networking date back so far that weird shapes and forms still guide us under the surface as we conduct our cyberspace 3D adventures. Reader Rick wrote in with a question about networking that relates to this:
I have disconnected my MacBook Pro from all external connections (Ethernet cable unplugged, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off). But if I look in Activity Monitor > Network, there are lots of packets in and packets out. How is this possible?
Let us shrink ourselves down, Fantastic Voyage-like (or Innerspace, if that’s more your speed), to look at what’s happening at the network interface level and unpick this seemingly unwanted activity.
Tales from the loop
Operating systems derived in some fashion from Unix all have a “loopback” interface as part of their array of network interfaces. This term originated before the Internet, in the context of testing circuits. A loop test literally ensured that a signal would go to the far end of the circuit and return as expected. A failure meant something was wrong.
With the introduction of modems sending signals across phone lines, various loopback tests allowed checking local signals, the line over which data traversed, and the remote modem. As Internet pioneer Jack Havertywrote in a 2017 post on an Internet Society technical mailing list:
By “looping a line” the NOC [network operations center] operator could determine what was likely to have failed – the modem at either end, the line itself (backhoe attack), or the interface card in the IMPs at either end of the line.1
For networking, a loopback interface lets a device talk to itself. The Unix loopback lets any part of the system, from the lowest level to applications or scripts, communicate via standard Internet networking. Applications may talk to each other this way, for instance, as it’s easier than setting up other kinds of inter-process or inter-application communications.
As with many things, like the digital world starting on January 1, 1970, at 00:00:00 UTC, the loopback interface remains a vestige.2
Because your devices talk to themselves constantly, disabling network interfaces will still make it seem as if your hardware is chatting. But you can drill down to make sure that it’s only being solipsistic.
Decoding network traffic
Using DEVONtechnologies’s free Neo Network Utility3 or from the command line, you can see a list of all current connections:
Launch Neo Network Utility, click the Netstat button, select “Display the state of all current socket connections,” check Hostname resolution, and click Netstat.
From the command line, enter netstat -a -p tcp.
Both methods will take a moment because of the time required to look up all the IP addresses and find their corresponding hostnames (the first part of the name that’s local and the domain name).
Network Utility provide a slightly friendly front end to a list of active network connections.
You will see way too many results! But it’s good to have a sense of what normal looks like. Among the connections out to the rest of the world, you will see entries like this:
tcp4 0 0 localhost.49330 localhost.64862 ESTABLISHED
That localhost is what you’re looking for. The loopback interface has the IPv4 address of 127.0.0.1 and IPv6 address of 0:0:0:0:0:0:0:1, which shortens to just ::1.4 These are mapped to the local hostname of, literally, localhost. When you see that name, it’s a connection from your Mac back to itself, whether by IPv4 or IPv6.
Now, if you disconnect all your network interfaces, you should only see localhost entries. To turn off your connections, the best way is through these steps:
Go to System Settings > Network.
Control-click/right-click each interface marked Connected in turn.
Choose Make Service Inactive. There’s no prompt—it just happens.
Disable network interfaces to stop traffic from entering or leaving your Mac
At this point, your network traffic should be shut down. If you re-run netstat above, you would see only localhost or similar loopback address connections.
However, there’s a complicated command-line invocation you can use that’s a bit simpler when you parse the output:
Paste the above in and press return, and you get a list of your active network interfaces and the assigned IP addresses. With my setup, including an active VPN via Tailscale, I see:
To decipher those, lo0 is the IPv4 loopback address; en0 is “Ethernet 0,” which is actually Ethernet; en1 is the Wi-Fi connection (Wi-Fi pretends to be Ethernet, which is a long story); and utun8 is the tunneling TailScale connection.
After disabling interfaces as described above, you should see just this:
lo0: 127.0.0.1
Your computer is safely murmuring to itself. To enable network interfaces, return to the three steps above and choose Make Service Active.
For further reading
You might be interested in one or more Take Control Books that includes advice on networking, though none is quite as deep a dive as the above: Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices or Take Control of Wi-Fi Networking and Security. (Securing will be updated soon for the new Apple operating systems, and if you purchase the book today, you will receive the new version at no cost.)
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
A backhoe attack is when someone is digging and severs phone wiring—local or potentially carrying thousands of calls—back in the days of the primacy of wireline telephone networks. Backhoes remain the enemy of fiber-optic and other cables. ↩
Unix officially started its clock at that time. That is known as the “epoch.” Typically in a 32-bit signed integer, the epoch will end on 03:14:07 UTC on 19 January 2038. This Y2K38 or “year 2038 problem” needs to be solved. ↩
A drop-in replacement for Apple’s venerable Network Utility, which was removed from macOS a few years ago. ↩
How does this shortening work? In IPv6, which uses eight separated 8-bit numbers (each 0 to 255), any entry between colons that’s zero can be omitted. Multiple sets of leading zeros can be omitted (or “compressed“) as well, leading to just an unambiguous ::1. ↩
Now that David Ellison owns Paramount, what’s next? Also, your letters and our TV picks! [Downstream+ subscribers also get: K-Pop Demon Hunters, Wheel & Jeopardy & Sesame Street stream, Apple TV+ price hike, and binging “The Paper.”]
With John Moltz traversing America’s heartland, it falls to me, his trusty editor, to step in and fill his shoes. After five days in hell, I’m here with only one goal: to recap the week in Apple news. To do so, I’ll have to become someone else. Something else.
Sorry, wrong show.
As Apple’s annual September event closes in, the speculation continues apace. With apologies to the Klondike Bar: 🎶 What would you payyyyy for an iPhone Pro?🎶 Plus, Mr. Cook goes to Washington, and just another reason why 2025 won’t be like 1984.
The price is wrong, Bob
In a world of tariffs and inflation, one thing has remained largely consistent for the last few years: iPhone prices. But nothing lasts forever, as my scratched and disintegrating CD of Boyz II Men’s “Cooleyhighharmony” reminds me.
My thanks to Footnote Accessories for sponsoring Six Colors this week for the OneSnap.
The OneSnap is a MagSafe-compatible wireless charger that delivers up to 15W of fast power to Qi-enabled devices and even your Apple Watch. Engineered with a soft-touch surface and multi-layer charging protections, OneSnap keeps your devices secure while ensuring consistent performance.
Compact and premium in design, OneSnap is built for travel and includes a convenient travel case to keep everything neatly organized wherever you go.
Writing at The Verge (paywalled), Ash Parrish talks to Apple Arcade senior director Alex Rothman about the state of the service. It’s not the most in-depth of interviews, but it’s always interesting when an Apple executive is willing to go on the record. This part in particular jumped out at me:
“By no means are we going all into only IP,” Rothman said. “It’s a broad mix, because we have a broad player base.” And while Rothman understands the criticisms Arcade has faced, he says Apple is invested in Arcade for the long haul. “We care very deeply about games,” he said. “Not just the Arcade team, it’s across the company.” [emphasis added]
I’m sure there are things that Apple likes about Arcade, like having a big backlog of games to point to (Rothman says there are more than 250 now). I’m also interested by Apple working as a publisher to bring together developers and IP holders; that’s a smart use of the company’s clout.
But the idea that Apple cares “very deeply” about games? It’s pretty hard to stomach that after all these years. Arcade feels pretty scattershot to me; I can’t remember the last time I played a game there. Like, I’d wager, many other customers, I get the service for free as part of the Apple One bundle, and I definitely get the feeling that the higher echelons of Apple see it as little more than a “nice to have” value-add. I’d like to be proven wrong, but I don’t see it happening anytime soon.
When designing Instagram for iPad, we wanted to take advantage of the bigger screen to give people more features with fewer taps, while keeping it simple. We’ve made it easier to catch up on your messages and notifications with layouts that display both tabs. When you watch reels, you can expand the comments while the reel stays at full size, making it easy to catch up on the best reactions without missing a moment. It’s the Instagram you love, now with more space to play.
The app update is rolling out globally and works on iPads that support iPadOS 15.1 and later. Instagram says the tablet design will also follow for Android tablets.
While messages, notifications, and reels do feel more expansive on the new app, the standard view still feels… pretty empty. I’m glad the app is fully iPad native now, but it would sure be nice if Instagram considered what might be an elevated tablet experience. (I guess we can stop waiting for the app and start waiting for it to be better instead!)
Jason and Myke preview what will happen at next week’s Apple event. What form might a thinner iPhone Air take? Will the AirPods Pro come roaring back? Is the Apple Watch Ultra in store for an upgrade? To the winner goes the glory.
If you’re someone who’s only using email, a web browser, and some messaging apps to get stuff done, changes to your desktop appearance aren’t going to be disruptive. It’s also likely that you’ll appreciate changes that make it look like your phone.
If you’re doing anything more complex than that, your response to change will be much different.
Professionals on the Mac are like truck drivers. Drivers have a cockpit filled with specialized dials, knobs, switches, microwave ovens, refrigerators, and pillows that are absolutely necessary for hauling goods across country. Those of us who are making movies, producing hit songs, building apps, or doing scientific research have our own highly specialized cockpits.
And along comes Alan Dye with his standard cockpit, that is beautiful to look at and fun to use on curvy roads. But also completely wrong for the jobs we’re doing. There’s no air ride seat, microwave oven, or air brake release. His response will be to hide these things that we use all the time behind a hidden menu.
The iPhone has utterly changed Apple’s priorities as a company. It generates, directly or indirectly, most of Apple’s revenue and profit. But it’s also had knock-on effects: The popularity of the iPhone has driven more people to the Mac. The proportion of Mac users who are “using email, a web browser, and some messaging apps” has risen, probably markedly.
The problem, as Hockenberry points out, is that the Mac is also a professional tool designed for people with very specific, technical use cases that go beyond the email-web-messaging trifecta. And it feels to him like Apple’s lack of focus on those users is increasingly problematic for the platform.
So what happens now? In many ways, it makes good financial sense for Apple to steer the Mac in a direction that feels familiar to iPhone users and pleases those casual Mac users. They’re probably the majority of Mac users! But what about the Mac as a platform for professional users, who use the Mac as a truck, not a car?
I don’t know what the answer is, and Hockenberry’s suggestion that it might lead technical users like him to look for an exit from the Mac platform is deeply troubling. Can the Mac ever possibly be both a truck and a car? This year Apple’s introducing a second mode for iPad users who want to manage windowing like a Mac; is this the future fate of the Mac, too?
It would be a sad and darkly funny thing if the Mac becomes the most popular it’s ever been at the expense of the users who kept it alive over the last couple of decades. But what it wouldn’t be is surprising.
