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.
The Find My system lets you find lost things and alerts you when you leave something behind. But because devices (things that can contact the Internet) and items (things like AirTags that can transmit Bluetooth signals) are so trackable, it means you have valid concerns when something you own could be followed by someone you don’t know.
My pal Lex Friedman, known to all as a stand-up guy (he does comedy, too), wrote me a few weeks ago with a question on that front:
A few years ago, I bought AirPods Max from Amazon. They were used, like new. They’re great. They’re linked to my Apple ID. It’s wonderful. Except they’re also linked to someone else’s Apple ID. Which I know because iOS constantly warns me that the original owner can see where I live and where I go.
Is there anything I can do to permanently disconnect the old owner from potentially having access to these AirPods?
Indeed, there is! And Lex did it. And it worked. As usual, you can jump ahead if you don’t want to learn the fascinating background and want to skip to the chase. (Lex would read the whole thing.)
An invisible glowing network of location transmission
Apple has grown its Find My ecosystem slowly over the years into the current octopus of coverage with which it girdles the world. Initially designed to help track iPhones—lost or stolen, but probably stolen—you can now keep tabs on an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch. A few years ago, Apple added or improved tracking for audio hardware sold under its name or the Beats brand.
Broadly, Apple labels these things devices: Anything that can connect directly to the Internet to update its location or anything that has a paired relationship with a device that it can relay through to report its location.
Apple also introduced a second kind of thing, which it calls items (as in Find My items): initially AirTags, then followed by Apple-licensed third-party tracking hardware, now available from about two dozen companies, who compete on form factor, battery life, and recharging capability.
To prevent iPhones from being stolen, erased, and reused, Apple added Activation Lock over a decade ago. It later extended it to the iPad, Mac, and Watch. When you disable Find My on a device, this also disables Activation Lock. Activation Lock can be removed remotely, too, by removing the device from your set of Apple hardware in Settings > Your Name (iPhone/iPad), System Settings > Your Name (Mac), or via icloud.com/find.
After the AirTag was introduced, Apple added Find My Lock, which keeps AirTags and third-party Find My items from being reset and used with other devices. Because audio hardware is not exactly a “device” and not exactly an “item,” this lock applies to them, too.
Originally called Pairing Lock, you couldn’t remove this connection unless the item was within Bluetooth range of your paired device. However, Apple updated the AirTag and item firmware, and now you can remove it while you are not within range using the Find My app (iPhone, iPad, or Mac) in the Items tab.
I spy someone named Lex
Lex’s AirPods Max existed in a limbo, neither fully his nor the original owner’s.
Lex bought his AirPods Max used. He was able to pair them with his iPhone and see them in his Apple Account. However, their location never appeared for him—and iOS warned him the original owner could see his location.
This happened because the original owner didn’t carry out all the necessary steps before selling. You can pair AirPods 3, AirPods 4 (ANC), AirPods Pro (all models), and AirPods Max with multiple Apple Accounts. However, Apple mentions in a footnote to one of their support documents, “…only the person who turned on the Find My network can see them in the Find My app. You may also get an alert if someone else’s AirPods are traveling with you.”
Lex was not precisely concerned about this, as he didn’t know who the former owner was. But it’s a little bit of a worry, because you don’t really want to have your whereabouts known to a random person, either.
I’d also like to know why the former owner apparently didn’t see a random set of AirPods Max in Find My and remove them—perhaps they never use Find My or have lost access to the Apple device with which the AirPods Max were associated. And the Apple Account. Because the AirPods Max don’t appear in your Apple Account, only in a native Find My app, that’s a possibility.
Fortunately, the solution was easy. It just required Lex trusting that I knew what the heck I was suggesting. That’s what friends are for.
Lex first removed the AirPods Max from his Apple Account by using Find My. Here’s how you do this:
Go to the Find My app; let’s use the iPhone/iPad version as the example here.
Tap the Devices button. (Audio hardware appears under that tab.)
Select your audio device. In my example, that’s my AirPods Pro.
Swipe to the bottom and tap Remove and confirm to remove.
You use the Find My app’s Devices tab to find audio hardware (left). Select a device, tap Remove, and then you’re warned about what happens next (right).
This action removes the Find My Lock, removes the audio device from your Apple Account, and unpairs the device from Bluetooth.
My book Take Control of Find My and AirTags covers all the ins and outs of the increasingly baroque but increasingly helpful Find My network and technology. If you’re trying to track your car or find it in a parking lot, keep an eye on baggage in transit, discover where your pet has disappeared to, or need to recover a lost or stolen laptop, the book will help. Plus, tons of information and tips about preventing unwanted tracking, and what to do if you believe someone is tracking you—or attempting to—without your knowledge.
A new edition is coming in a few weeks with updates for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26, and watchOS 26. Purchase today, and you will get a free update to the new versions (and all later updates to the same edition).
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
The Moltz Family Road Trip 2025 (motto: “Oh, god, how many more days do we have?!”) checks in to talk about the little surprises that could appear at Apple’s September event, Eddy Cue’s eyes being bigger than Tim Cook’s wallet, and ongoing complaints about Tahoe—the operating system, not the lake, which we hear is lovely.
Also on the bill
Apple announced its 2025 iPhone event for September 9th, as expected, plugging it with the title “Awe Dropping” which is just another sign of the company’s lack of attention to detail of late.
It’s “Jaw Dropping”, Apple. What an embarrassing typo. Just ridiculous. How do you drop awe? It makes no sense.
Of course there will be new phones, this we know, but there could also be some surprise announcements, one of which will be a huge boon for bondage fetishists.
If you didn’t think the company taking another shot at making a premium, non-leather case with TechWoven was cool, surely you will find lanyards cool.…
Good morning and welcome to Apple Park. We’ve got a lot of very exciting announcements in store for you today, which is totally the same day that I’m recording this. Look, I’m holding up today’s newsletter. Look outside, it’s… [insert weather forecast here]. Why would I lie to you?
To kick things off, let’s talk about AirPods. People love their AirPods. Frankly, a little too much. Sometimes I put mine in and just forget to take them out. No music or podcasts playing at all, like a psychopath. It gives me a plausible excuse every time Eddy asks me if we can buy Netflix or Tesla.
Today we’re thrilled to introduce AirPods Pro 3, which takes everything you know and love about AirPods Pro 2 and adds one to the number at the end. They’re the best AirPods Pro we’ve ever made, and we think you’re going to love them.…
For the new release of the Pixel 10 Pro (and the 10 Pro XL, which is mostly the same phone, just larger), Google has introduced something called the “Pro-Res Zoom,” a process by which, once you zoom in with the camera over about 30x zoom, after you’ve snapped the photo, Google will run it through an “AI” processor, not to bring out the details that are actually there, but to make up details that seem reasonable to assume are there, based on whatever processing algorithm Google is currently using. It then outputs the result of this guessing into your phone, alongside the original photo. Sometimes it looks pretty good! Sometimes it does not! But in neither case is what’s being outputted a photo. Rather, you now have a picture, or an illustration, based on a photo. It’s no more a real photo than it would be if someone made a cartoon version of the photo. The verisimilitude at that point is the same.
For the record, the iPhone camera does the same thing, at least to a certain degree, though perhaps not as much as Google is doing here.
One of the great things about smartphones is that they have enormous processing power to bring to bear on constructing a gorgeous photo out of fundamentally limited camera hardware. Our phones take multiple images with different exposure brackets and run them through complex image processing pipelines to make something shot with a tiny sensor look like something shot with a much larger lens.
But this is the trade-off, and the problem with using ML models on photography is, as Scalzi writes, the departure of the image from reality and into the world of illustration. If you take a zoomed-in picture of a strawberry and it ends up turning into an ML-generated gorgeous photorealistic strawberry, does it matter? Maybe not if you’re sharing it to Instagram. But it’s important to remember that what you’re seeing, beyond a certain point, is not reality but a computer’s interpretation of what reality probably looked like.
(That said, the round stop sign in Scalzi’s sample image is… really something.)
My thanks to Quip for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Clipboard managers aren’t usually exciting. Most of them just capture everything you copy, then become a cluttered dumping ground. Quip takes a very different approach.
Quip is a supercharged clipboard manager and text expander for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, designed to feel like a natural extension of the OS. It gives you full control over your clipboard history, syncs seamlessly across devices with iCloud, and introduces Super Shortcuts—a built-in text expansion system that lets you paste signatures, links, or entire snippets anywhere with a quick trigger.
But what really makes Quip unique is Quip Intelligence: secure, on-device AI that keeps your clipboard clean and useful. It fixes broken links, removes tracking junk, normalizes messy formatting, cleans up code blocks, avoids duplicates, and learns from you—all in real time, right on your device.
Whether you’re managing projects, writing code, or just copying links, Quip makes your clipboard fast, searchable, and surprisingly powerful.
I’m happy to announce that I’ll once again be participating in the live 12-hour Podcastathon from St. Jude’s campus in Memphis on September 19 at noon Eastern. Yep. 12 hours. Circle a large space on your calendar for that. It will be fun and wacky and I hope we raise an awful lot of money for St. Jude while we’re on the air.
I’ve been to St. Jude several times over the last few years, not just for the Podcastathon but for some other events. This spring, most of the hosts of this year’s Podcastathon attended a special St. Jude event for fundraisers and the Relay crew was given the special honor of being taken into an area with patients, which post-COVID has been a lot less common.
After years of raising funds for St. Jude and seeing all those kids on the videos they produce, let me just tell you that it hit a lot harder to see actual cancer patients being rolled around in strollers and wheelchairs and red wagons (really!) in the actual facility. There’s one thing to know it intellectually, and another to share a space with the actual patients of St. Jude. This stuff matters so much.
St. Jude’s mission statement is: No child should die in the dawn of life. This has led the organization to treat children for free (there are no bills!), take care of their families, and also launch an enormous effort to research cures for cancer and other childhood diseases.
On one of my recent visits I got to hear a doctor talk about how genetic profiling of cancers has transformed our understanding of the disease. Cancers that used to have simple names based on where we found them are now, genetically, identified as being different sorts of cells with entirely different methods of treatment. This has led to targeted therapies that can not just cure a child’s cancer, but ensure that they are as minimally affected by the treatment itself as possible. As the doctor said, the goal is not just to see these kids live to adulthood, but to see them flourish, graduate from college, get married, that sort of thing.
A lot of your favorite writers and podcasters from the Apple world devote a lot of time to this great cause. If you can, I encourage you donate today. And I hope you’ll tune in on YouTube for the Podcastathon on September 19.
For those of us involved in this event, it’s “basically” been September for a few months now. So forgive us for firing off the starting gun a little early. ↩
Apple’s OS betas are nearing completion, but not all betas for developers are OS Developer Betas: On Thursday Apple released Xcode 26 beta 7, which adds direct support for the new OpenAI GPT-5 model and lets users add existing paid Claude accounts to use Claude Sonnet 4:
Claude in Xcode is now available in the Intelligence settings panel, allowing users to seamlessly add their existing paid Claude account to Xcode and start using Claude Sonnet 4… When using ChatGPT in Xcode, users can now start a new conversation with either GPT-4.1 or GPT-5, with GPT-5 set as the default.
ChatGPT in Xcode provides two model choices. “GPT-5” is optimized for quick, high-quality results, and should work well for most coding tasks. For difficult tasks, choose “GPT-5 (Reasoning)“, which spends more time thinking before responding, and can provide more accurate results for complex coding tasks.
One of the clever things about Xcode 26’s AI support is that if you want to bring your own model to the party, you can, and that’s no different in this beta: Xcode 26 supports API keys from other providers as well as the ability to run local models directly on their Apple silicon Macs.
I appreciate what Adobe is doing with Project Indigo. It’s a free iOS camera app, but it is heavily disclaimed as being experimental with unique features you can’t find in other apps. But Adobe also says they’re targeting “casual” photographers, which seems misguided.
A few people I know have even been evangelizing Project Indigobecause theyloveitso much, especially when they compare it to photos from Apple’s Camera app. My enthusiasm for this product doesn’t match their own. It’s neat but it’s not great.
It isn’t all-purpose (it can only take still photos), and it can’t do panoramas or portrait mode. It doesn’t have the compressed storage of the editable HEIC files Apple introduced with the iPhone 16 Pro, or the new photographic styles pipeline that lets a user control tone mapping and certain processing, both before the photo is taken and after the fact.
There are still a few noteworthy tricks it pulls off that are worth a look.
The read-it-later service Pocket has shut down, and with it went its integration with Kobo e-readers. Fortunately, earlier this summer Kobo owner Rakuten announced that Instapaper would replace Pocket as its new read-it-later service of choice.
As of today, that support is live. After a Kobo software update and a quick trip to a special URL to link a Kobo to an Instapaper account, the system works just like the old Pocket integration did. Add an article to your Instapaper account, and then go to the Articles reader on Kobo (More: My Articles) and you’ll find your Instapaper articles there, ready to read in E-Ink instead of scrolling on the Web. As someone who frequently finds read-it-later services more like never-read-it services, an e-reader is actually the perfect outlet for all those longform articles I aspire to read one day.
Many modern Kobos have support for Dropbox, which makes it easier to add all sorts of other files to the mix. The big missing piece is import via e-mail, which Kindle has supported forever and isn’t offered by Kobo. (Instapaper does offer a limited email import.)
But after Pocket announced its end, I despaired for the future of my Kobo as anything but a book reader. Thankfully, Rakuten and Instapaper were able to make this switchover happen with what appears to be a minimum of disruption.
The tech we have in our vehicles, the dependable tech that just works and what might make us replace it, how often we upgrade our phones or computers and why, and which social platforms we use — including where we heard about Taylor Swift’s engagement.
Fourteen years ago this month, Steve Jobs resigned and Tim Cook became the CEO of Apple. Given Jobs’s ongoing health issues, Cook’s ascension wasn’t unexpected; he had, in fact, filled the role during Jobs’s multiple leaves of absence. Cook was a familiar face and promised to be a steady hand at Apple, but if there ever was a tough act to follow, it was Steve Jobs.
But here we are, living in an era where Cook has now served as Apple CEO longer than Jobs did. The Apple of 2025 is quite different from the company Cook took control of back in 2011. Today’s Apple generates nearly four times the revenue that the company did when Cook took over, driven by more-than-quadrupling iPhone revenue. Back in 2011, there was one iPhone; now there are five, along with several iPad models, a wearables business that basically didn’t exist, an experimental headset, and a revitalized Mac powered by iPhone chips.
It’s been a ride. And while it’s not over yet, now seems as good a time as any to look back at what Cook has done and consider where he and Apple may be going in the future.
