Since the early 1990s, researchers have known that certain composite integers are especially susceptible to being factored by NFS. They also know that primes with certain properties allow for easier computation of discrete logarithms. This special set of primes can be broken much more quickly than regular primes using NFS. For some 25 years, researchers believed the trapdoored primes weren’t a threat because they were easy to spot. The new research provided novel insights into the special number field sieve that proved these assumptions wrong.
In short, there are a few things going on here. One is that the 1024-bit key length that’s in wide use and presumed to require an unreasonable amount of time to compromise could in fact require only about a tenth of the time that was previously thought. There’s also the question of the provenance of the random numbers used to generate encryption keys–some suspect that the NSA may have had a hand in some of the sources that are often used, seeding them with these “trapdoored” prime numbers.
The best alternative currently seems to be trying to move as much encryption as possible to 2048- or 4096-bit keys, which–at least for the present–require much, much longer to crack.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
As good as the smart light setup in my house is, one thing I’ve found somewhat limiting is the lack of input. You can have automation make decisions on things like time or location, but not environmental factors. For example, I have a floor lamp in my office that’s on a timer: it comes on in the evening and turns off when I go to bed. But sometimes–especially in the dead of winter–it gets a bit dark and grim in my office, and it’d be nice if it could automatically turn on during the day if it wasn’t very sunny.
When Philips announced earlier this year that it would be adding a $40 motion sensor to the Hue family, I was interested–but it wasn’t until I noted that it had a built-in daylight sensor that I decided I needed to test it out.
The sensor arrived late last week, so I had a little time to set it up and play around with the configuration. The hardware itself is very nice; it’s a small, solid-feeling little device with a wide-angle sensor and an optional mounting kit1. Setup was simple: just pull the plastic battery tab out of the back of the sensor, which activates it, and then find it using the Hue app. Choose which of your existing rooms you want to place it in, and you’re basically all set. Because it doesn’t require a plug, you can put it basically anywhere.
You can tweak the motion sensor’s behavior in a few ways–for example, you can define different actions for Day and Night, which themselves are determined based on hours that you set. You can also set a daylight threshold–if that threshold is met, the actions won’t trigger.2 And you can adjust the sensitivity of the motion detection, from low to high. Finally, you can choose to have the lights turn off after a certain amount of time if no motion is detected.
Here’s where I ran into some problems. One thing I found frustrating is that the Day/Night periods are inextricably linked. You can decide when the day starts and when the nights starts, but it automatically adjusts the other’s end point. So you can’t have, say, daylight run from 8am to 5pm and night from 7pm to 5am. So, if you want different actions triggered in the evening hours versus overnight, that’s not really possible. (And given that daylight hours change over the course of the year, this may require some tweaking in different seasons–it’d be handy if they let you base it on local sunrise/sunset times.) I’ve played around with a few different settings for these two periods, but haven’t yet found one that really accommodates my setup.
Similarly, the trigger for what happens after no motion is detected is equally limited. While you can choose from a variety of intervals between 1 and 60 minutes, there are only two options: turn off the lights or do nothing. If you choose to have the lights turn off, they dim around 30 seconds beforehand. However, this setting applies to both Day and Night–you can’t choose separate options depending on the time of day.
For me, that interferes with the timer on my office light. Because after, for example, 20 minutes without detecting motion, the office light will turn off–even if it’s during the hours when I’d usually have it on. But if I try the other tack and tell the timer to do nothing after no motion is detected, it might end up staying on all day, which isn’t ideal either.
I also ran into some issues with the daylight sensitivity setting: even when the app itself told me that there was sufficient daylight and it wouldn’t turn on the lights if motion was detected, it would sometimes turn them on anyway. Adjusting the slider to require more daylight seemed to help somewhat, but it’s possible there’s a bug in the software.
So far, the motion sensor seems to require using the Hue app; there’s currently no support for other smart home protocols, such as HomeKit (the Home app couldn’t find it when I searched for new accessories). The motion sensor requires the Hue Bridge in order to work, so hopefully that means the motion sensor uses the same API as the smart bulbs. I’m hopeful that at least some third parties will add support for using the sensor.
Overall, the Hue motion sensor is a mixed bag–but fortunately, most of the things that frustrate me appear to be software issues, which are certainly easier to fix than hardware. Given that the device has only just come out, I’m hopeful that even if it isn’t just what I need right now, it might become that in time.
I really dig the mounting kit: it’s essentially a little magnet that you screw into the wall and then just pop the sensor on. ↩
The control for that is a slider based on the current light level when you’re setting it; the app tells you whether or not current conditions would trigger the motion sensor, given what level of sensitivity you’ve set it at. ↩
[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.]
I started testing the iPhone 7 thinking that a small phone could no longer fit in my daily life, and I’m still going to upgrade to an iPhone 7 Plus. But using the iPhone 7 also made me appreciate the meaning of changes that will reshape the iPhone platform going forward – something that’s more significant than endlessly debating what we left behind.
It’s got all the depth and consideration I’ve come to expect from Federico. It’s fun to read product reviews that don’t come under the intense pressure of initial release and embargoes—they have a very different tone, and I like it.
My thanks to Capto for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Capto is an app for screen capturing and video and image editing that’s designed for people in education, creative professionals, and anyone else who needs to make screencasts or tutorial videos. Readers of Six Colors can get 25% off Capto by using coupon code SIXCOLORS at checkout when buying Capto.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
Documents and Desktop, nestled into iCloud.
So many of macOS Sierra’s new features are about freeing up space from our fast-but-tiny solid-state drives. In addition, Apple has extended support for iCloud Drive to optionally include your Desktop and Documents folder, and mixed those two approaches together to create a third feature, called Optimize Mac Storage.
I like what Apple’s going for, but both of these features have problems, and some of them bit me when I was writing my review of Sierra. Let’s take a much closer look at what’s going on with syncing and optimizing, including the bugs, the missed opportunities, and the workarounds.
Syncing Documents and Desktop to iCloud Drive
In Sierra, iCloud Drive finally gets to break out of its own protected folder and into the system at large.
In reality, that’s not quite what’s going on—when you first install Sierra, you’re asked if you want to sync your Desktop and Documents folders with iCloud. If you turn this feature on, your Desktop and Documents folders are really moved inside iCloud Drive, with the old locations linked to your home folder so that everything behaves more or less normally. (Except when there are bugs—a few of my apps seemed to get confused when those folders changed locations.)
iCloud syncing is pretty robust, and once I got up and running with this feature, it worked as advertised. However, the act of turning it on can be terrifying, especially if you’ve already turned it on while using a different Mac. If your Mac discovers that another Mac is already syncing its Desktop to your iCloud Drive, Sierra will create new folder called “Desktop – Your System Name” inside the Desktop folder within iCloud, and move your files inside. (The same thing happens with your Documents folder.)
What this looks like in the Finder: All your files disappear off of your desktop. Maybe a few new files from your other Mac appear. If you keep your key files on your Desktop, it can be terrifying. However, if you look around, you’ll probably see that “Desktop – Your System Name” folder, and all your files should be in there.
Apparently Apple didn’t anticipate this moment of terror, though it should’ve seen it coming. The right thing to do is probably to generate a warning for users, and maybe leave that folder open in a Finder window. Even better would be to give the user a few options when they turn on Desktop and Documents syncing on a different Mac—keep the two Desktops separate, merge them together, or set either one of the Macs as the “real desktop.” But right now, the first Mac wins and the next Mac stuffs its files into a subfolder and waits for the user to sort it out.
Because I wrote a book about Photos, I bought a huge amount of iCloud space to sync my entire Photos library. As a result, I was able to sync everything in my Desktop folder—even huge audio files—to iCloud without difficulty. If you don’t have enough free iCloud space to sync your Desktop and Documents folders, Apple will offer you the exciting opportunity to buy more. If you decline, Apple won’t let you enable this feature.
(Later, if your folders surpass the amount of space available on iCloud, you’ll get an alert and your files will stop syncing with iCloud. They’ll still be present on your Mac, safe and sound, but syncing will stop until you free up or purchase more iCloud space.)
The trouble with optimizing iCloud storage
Combine the concept of purgeable space and the ability to sync more files with iCloud and you get a third key feature of macOS Sierra. When you turn on syncing of the Desktop and Document folders, the Optimize Mac Storage feature is turned on. (You can turn it off in the iCloud Drive section of the iCloud Preference Pane, and probably should, for now.)
Optimize Mac Storage is a feature that defines files that have been uploaded to iCloud as purgeable, more or less. Apple prioritizes your files so that things you’ve accessed recently will be kept around, but items you haven’t accessed for a long time can be removed. When a file is removed, it’s gone from your hard drive, but it lives on in the cloud, and can be downloaded again by clicking an icon in the Finder or when it’s demanded by an application.
Scary, right? But again, if everything’s working perfectly, you’ve just granted that tiny SSD on your MacBook an extra few hundreds of gigabytes of storage, because it can offload your old junk to the cloud. And if it turns out you need it, you can get it back.
If everything’s working perfectly. And if the system can truly differentiate between files you need and files you don’t.
So something bad happened when I was working on my review of macOS Sierra. As a responsible reviewer, I need to use all the features of a new operating system. That comes with some risks, but that’s why I’m here. Risk (of losing data) is our business.
Here’s what happened: While I was working on a podcast-editing project in Logic Pro X, a bunch of my audio files were removed by Optimize Mac Storage. I keep all my key files and projects on the Desktop, as many people do, and since this is a feature that’s designed to keep your work in sync, I decided I was not going change my workflow one bit.
Apple has since told me that I absolutely ran into several different bugs, as well as a few quirks of the file-management process. Many apps store all of their asset files in a single package file—it’s really a folder, but all the important files are stuffed inside so that if you move the package, everything comes along for the ride. A Keynote presentation file is actually a package with a Keynote document and all of the images and movies you dragged in, all bundled together.
Optimize Mac Storage works great with packages. It’s not going to delve down inside a package and get rid of your files—old projects can be optimized away, but new products will remain on your drive, and nothing gets plucked out of the inside of projects.
The problem with some apps—and Apple’s Logic Pro X and Final Cut Pro X fit into this category—is that either they don’t use packages, or stuffing all your files inside a package is optional. My podcast template keeps audio files in the same folder as my Logic project files, but they don’t live inside a package.
Now, it turns out that App developers can take advantage of file-coordination APIs to designate all the files that a given project is using, even if they’re not inside a package. If Logic Pro X used those APIs, perhaps my files wouldn’t have been touched, because iCloud would recognize that they were part of an active project. Alas, not even Apple’s own apps support all of Apple’s APIs. (Optimize Mac Storage apparently looks at the last time you opened a file in the Finder as a way to help determine the age of a file, but if you open a project file and that file then reads from other files, the feature doesn’t consider them actively used.)
The setup of my project folders, Logic’s lack of support for file coordination, and the bugs that made my Mac think it was much more space constrained than it actually was—this was the situation that conspired to make Optimize Mac Storage look at a few 14-day-old 600MB audio files and decide that they were old junk.
Pro tip: Turn it off or move key files elsewhere
With any luck, Apple’s hot on the case of fixing the bugs. Perhaps the teams in charge of Apple’s pro apps are working on coordinating project files a bit more aggressively. And I suspect that I might be a little responsible for this new Apple tech note, which suggests that if you’re using a pro app, you should move your projects out of synced folders or turn off Optimize Mac Storage.
Yep, that’s Apple saying that people who use pro apps should just turn off or avoid using a major new feature of macOS Sierra. It burns a little—what’s the point of making new productivity features if some classes of Mac user just shouldn’t use them? What’s worse, it points out the larger risk in turning on Optimize Mac Storage: If you keep key files outside of a package—images you’re planning on dropping into a Keynote presentation, for example, but haven’t yet—you risk them being deleted by Optimize Mac Storage.
If your internet connection is permanent, fast and unmetered, this is no big deal. If you’re working on an airplane and discover that one of your files you were counting on is gone, welp… that sucks for you. Optimize Mac Storage offers no user interface, so there’s no way to designate certain files or folders as un-purgeable. It’s all or nothing. Either you take your chances or you walk away.
For many classes of Mac user, the risks are low and the benefits are great. For other classes, the right answer is to do what Apple recommends in its tech note: walk away.
We know that Apple will revamp some products on a pretty regular schedule: the iPhone, for example. Others get slightly less frequent updates, like the iPad or MacBooks.
But what about the Apple products that seem to sometimes go years without a refresh? There are more than a few of them, and while some occasionally find themselves in the rumor spotlight, others just continue chugging along as they are–perhaps doomed to an evolutionary dead-end, or maybe to be resurrected when Apple decides the moment is ripe.
Let’s take a moment to praise some of these unsung heroes, and hope that they may one day earn a press release or perhaps, unlikely as it might be, some stage time at an Apple event.
It’s a big time for the Apple Watch. Not only did it get its first hardware upgrade — adding GPS connectivity, waterproofing, and a brighter screen in the Apple Watch Series 2 — but it got a major update to its underlying operating system, watchOS. That means there are plenty of new opportunities to use your Apple Watch in ways you might never have known about before. Here’s a list of 21 top tips for the Apple Watch under watchOS 3.
iPhone 7 case brings back the headphone jack: http://www.ubergizmo.com/2016/09/iphone-7-case-brings-back-headphone-jack/
iPhone 7 battery life questioned, Tom’s Guide questions the questions: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/iphone-7-battery-life-bust-185402336.html
New iPad rumors include a small Pro: https://9to5mac.com/2016/10/03/2017-ipad-line-up-2017-ipad-pro/
Moltz’s kid’s current hobby is installing old operating systems on Virtual Box: https://www.virtualbox.org
Moltz still likes Hidden Game: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/hidden-my-game-by-mom-escape/id1140266903?mt=8
Makorama is the Monument Valley knockoff that Phil Schiller recommended: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/mekorama/id1079464948?mt=8
Dropbox has more ‘splaining to do: http://mjtsai.com/blog/2016/10/04/dropboxs-finder-toolbar/
Lex recommends Slicker stickers: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/slicker-stickers/id1143631563?mt=8
Moltz recommends Rubber Stamps: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/rubber-stamps/id1156694311?mt=8
The story of Phoneys: http://daringfireball.net/linked/2016/09/30/phoneys-ill-fated-tale
The Grammar Snob sticker pack is a nice way to alienate your friends: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/grammar-snob/id1153479737?mt=8
Dan uses the Word Flow iOS keyboard: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/word-flow-keyboard-gif-swipe/id1077864246?mt=8
And the Bitmoji keyboard: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/bitmoji-your-personal-emoji/id868077558?mt=8
Our thanks to Indochino (https://www.indochino.com), where you’ll find the best made to measure shirts and suits at a great price. Use the promo code “REBOUND” and get any premium suit for just $389.
Our thanks this week go to Harry’s (http://harrys.com/rebound). Harry’s sells premium shaving products for much less than those crappy blades that you have to get someone to unlock from a cabinet. With coupon code “REBOUND”, you’ll get a free shave balm. Don’t wait, get the shave you deserve.
And thanks as well to FanDuel, the leader in one-week fantasy football with more winners and more payouts than any other site. Go to FanDuel.com and click on the microphone in the upper right hand corner. Use the code “REBOUND” for five free entries and sign up now.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
For years, the storage inside our computers just kept increasing. But with the advent of solid-state drives, which are less prone to failure, dramatically faster, and more energy efficient than spinning hard drives, there came a tough transition. Instead of having a terabyte or two of disk space, maybe you’ve only got 250 or 500 GB. Maybe you used to never think about running out of space, and now every so often your Mac throws up that terrifying warning box that your disk is almost full.
Apple recognized this, too, and to its credit, it made this transition one of the main features of macOS Sierra. A lot of the stuff on our drives doesn’t need to be there. It either isn’t necessary (log files, used app installers, and the like), or it’s just a duplicate of something that’s stored in the cloud.
The result is a whole raft of features in macOS Sierra that are all about freeing up more space on your drive. One of the biggest changes affects about how free space is calculated and displayed.
Free space and purgeable space
macOS displays the amount of free space on your drive in a few places, including:
If you’ve got the Status Bar turned on in the Finder (View: Show Status Bar or Command-slash), you’ll see it at the bottom of the window
If you’ve got Finder preferences set to show hard disks on the Desktop, you can turn on Show Item Info from the View Options panel (Command-J)
If you select your drive from the Desktop or from the Computer window (Go: Computer or Command-Shift-C) and choose Get Info (Command-I)
You can choose About This Mac from the Apple menu and click the Storage tab.
In macOS Sierra, you can activate Siri and ask it how much free space you’ve got.
The Storage tab in About this Mac has been redesigned for macOS Sierra to give you more information about what’s filling your drive. The mysterious “Other” area of the storage graph is gone, and there’s much more granularity about what’s using that space, including unexpected space hogs like GarageBand and iTunes backups of iOS devices. The new Manage button, above the right edge of the graph, can help you reduce that stuff.
But if you look at the right end of the graph you’ll find two blocks: Free Space, labeled in white, and Purgeable, labeled in white with a diagonal gray pattern. In macOS Sierra, there are two different kinds of free space: Free and Purgeable.
Free space is what we’ve always known it to be. It’s space on disk where there’s nothing1, that’s ready to have data poured into it. Purgeable space is different. Purgeable space is a collection of files that are really on disk, ready to be read or modified or added to at any time—stuff like files stored in iCloud, dictionaries you haven’t used recently, certain large fonts (especially of Asian languages) that you may never or rarely use, movies and TV shows you’ve already watched (and are re-downloadable from iTunes), and photos and videos in that are synced with iCloud Photo Library (if the Optimize Mac Storage setting is turned on in Photos preferences).
These are real files, but Apple considers them expendable. They can be deleted immediately, without warning, in order to free up disk space, because they can always be downloaded again later.
Now here’s the big change in macOS Sierra: Apple adds the amount of truly free space to the amount of purgeable space, and that’s what is displayed on your Mac as the amount of free space on disk. As I write this, my boot drive has 51.3GB of free space—and 22.6GB of purgeable space. In the old days, this would be reported to me as 51.3GB free. In macOS Sierra, it’s reported as 73.9GB free.
According to Apple, if I were to try to copy a 60GB file onto my drive, it would just work. The system would work in the background to purge enough stuff to fit my file and keep a decent amount of free space on the drive so that my Mac wouldn’t slow to a crawl, which happens when your disk is nearly completely full.
Now, when I was writing my review of macOS Sierra, I ran into a few bugs on this front. My system became confused about the real amount of free space on my drive, and prevented me from performing an iOS device backup when I had plenty of space. None of my data was lost, but I was prevented from performing actions that shouldn’t have been a problem. At one point—you can see this in the screen shot at the top of my Sierra review—my Mac couldn’t decide how much free space it really had. Siri said 30GB, but the System Information app said 55GB2.
I’m confident that Apple will squash these bugs in short order. But the new concept of free space is here to stay. In an ideal world, your Mac should treat that free space as real free space, and there’s no need to peek behind the curtain. In the shorter term, there will probably be bugs and incompatibilities, and if you’re someone who cares about what’s going on behind the scenes of your Mac, you should be aware that not all free space is the same.
Okay, pedants, there’s actually data there, but it’s essentially garbage—the system can overwrite it when it wants. ↩
I notice now that it also claims my boot volume was 120GB in size, when it’s actually 466GB. More bugs! ↩
Keep it simple. That’s been Apple’s design philosophy for ages. Whether it’s buttons or ports, the history of modern Apple design makes it clear that Apple is a company that looks at every product and asks, “Could there be less stuff on this thing?”
When Steve Jobs announced the original Apple Remote, he displayed a slide comparing it to two typical TV remotes—one with 43 buttons and the other with 45. In contrast, the Apple Remote had six. The third-generation iPod Shuffle was designed with no buttons at all, an extreme decision that led to a rare flip-flop on Apple’s part—the next generation of the Shuffle reverted to the previous design, which offered playback controls.
The most recent examples of Apple’s minimalist philosophy—it’s become a running joke to call this “Apple’s war on buttons—are the MacBook and the iPhone 7. The MacBook, introduced in 2015, offered a single USB-C port and a headphone jack, and that was it. And of course, the iPhone 7 lacks a headphone jack, making it simpler still.
The trend is clear and consistent: Those familiar things you’ve got on the outside of your Apple products are coming off. Or at least, some of them are, if Apple can figure out a way to do it with minimal fuss and loss of functionality. With the headphone jack cleared away, then, it’s worth considering what’s left—and what’s next to go.
Ubiquity, Kittlaus said in an interview, is the reason Viv is trundling into Samsung’s bosom. Specifically, when I asked him why Samsung, he said this:
“They ship 500 million devices a year. You asked me onstage about what our real goal is, and I said ubiquity.
If you take a look around what’s going on in the market these days, and our readiness to really expand on our distribution, it made perfect sense when we discovered that our visions are so completely aligned, and our assets using the core technology in this huge distribution, the opportunity that now is the right time, and Samsung’s the right partner.”
Despite success that is built on the shoulders of Android, Samsung is working pretty hard to divorce itself from Google. Having its own non-Google virtual assistant is a major stepping stone in that direction.
Viv had its first public demo earlier this year, and the system, which is built from the ground-up to be extensible and work with many different services, is certainly promising. However, we’ve yet to see it how it holds up in the real world.
The teardown artists at iFixit take a look at what’s going on inside the Lightning-to-headphone adapter that Apple included with the iPhone 7 series. There’s a decent amount going on inside that tiny cable, including a digital-to-analog conversion chip and an analog-to-digital chip. But the conclusion is that the sound difference is nigh imperceptible.
The oldest ones are nearly 15 years old: 1600-by-1200-pixel snaps taken from my first digital camera, a Canon PowerShot. I bought that camera in October 2001 because my wife and I were about to have our first child; we knew we were about to have a life experience that really needed to be documented.
Here’s how much photography has changed in the last 15 years: One of the selling points I had to make back then was the relative cost of having prints made from digital photos versus taking film to the supermarket and getting back prints. (I won the argument, because even in 2001 the economics were shifting away from film — it was cheaper to digitally print only the images that turned out well, rather than paying for an entire roll of film to be printed, regardless of quality.)
As part of its Pixel phone announcement today, Google said it will give Pixel phone users free unlimited cloud storage of the full-sized, high-resolution images and videos that are captured on the phone. This includes 4K video, which the new smartphone is capable of capturing.
Note: This story has not been updated for several years.
If you haven’t updated to macOS Sierra yet, you might find your installation will go more quickly than you might have anticipated. That’s because Apple has made a subtle change to the way major macOS updates are sent to eligible Macs.
For a while now, macOS has featured an option to download software updates in the background. You can find the settings in the App Store panel of the System Preferences app. If you have the “Download newly available updates in the background” box checked, your Mac will do just what it says—download updates automatically, so they’re ready to install immediately.
But up to now, that setting didn’t cover major system updates like macOS Sierra. Beginning today and rolling out over the next few weeks, the full update to macOS Sierra will be available for background downloading on Macs that are compatible with the macOS Sierra update.
What this means is that if your compatible Mac running 10.11.5 or 10.11.6 alerts you that the update to macOS Sierra is available, rather than being prompted to download the (somewhat large) macOS Sierra installer, the installer will immediately launch, because it was downloaded in the background before you were alerted.
If you don’t want to update to Sierra, you can delete the installer. If you’re running short on disk space, the system will automatically delete the installer if it needs to make room for your files. What Apple has basically done is add the installers for major macOS updates to all the other software updates that download in the background so you can install them immediately rather than waiting.
To turn this feature off, you can uncheck the option to download new updates in the App Store pane. If you’ve got plenty of bandwidth and no bandwidth caps, however, allowing the system to download your apps in advance of installation can be a time saver.
As an early adopter of the Amazon Echo, the recent reports that Apple has already embarked upon the development of a competing product have me intrigued. Now that Amazon has shown that such a category has legs, it’s not hard to imagine Apple swooping in with a beautiful competing device that shows off all of the company’s trademarks of beautiful, thoughtful design.
While I’m a comfortable denizen of Apple’s ecosystem, I have to admit that I’m not wholly convinced that the company’s product will entice me to their side of the voice-controlled market. Over the past year and a half, I’ve become a big supporter of the Echo, and it’s hard to see that evaporating away overnight. But there are definitely a few moves that Apple could make that might tip the scales in its favor.
This week Six Colors is sponsored by Boom 2, personalized audio for your Mac.
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Look, the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus are old hat. They’ve been out for a few weeks now, and really, what more is there to say about them? Jet black, blah blah, great camera, blah blah, waterproof, whoop de doo. Great, fine. Time to move on. Let’s talk about what we really want: the iPhone 8. I’ve painstakingly compiled a list of the top five features that I’d like to see on Apple’s next phone, which, as we all know, will be the phone that we deserve—until the iPhone 9 shows up, anyway.
Fireproof: The iPhone 7 is waterproof and that’s great if you go swimming with it, or take it into the shower, or try to skip it off the lake like a flat rock. But there are way more dangerous things out there than water. Lava, for example. If my next iPhone isn’t able to withstand heat up to 500° then Apple has failed. What good is a phone if I can’t drop it into a volcano, “accidentally” bake it in my oven for 30 minutes with cheese sprinkled on top, or leave it sitting next to a Galaxy Note 7?
Cutting-edge design: I’m not just talking about the fact that the iPhone 7 looks like the iPhone 6s or the iPhone 6, I’m talking literally. Why do I have to carry my smartphone and a knife? The thing’s going to keep getting thinner as long as Jony Ive continues his endless battle against the forces from the second dimension, led by his archrival: Mark Papermaster. (There you go, Apple executive fanboys—that’s a deep cut. If you will.)
Fewer buttons: By my count, the iPhone 7 still has at least three more buttons on it than necessary. I’m not saying that we should eliminate all of the iPhone’s buttons—that would be ridiculous. But one button ought to be sufficient for everything you want to do. Press it once to wake or lock the phone, twice to switch from ring to silent, an alternating pattern of long/short long/short to increase the volume, and an alternating pattern of short/long/short short/long/short to decrease the volume. Simple. I don’t know why Apple hasn’t already thought of this!
Even blacker black: What’s better than two different shades of black? Three different shades of black. Jet Black is lovely, from what I’ve heard, but what with the worries about microabrasions, it’s clear it’s not going to stand up to Apple’s high standards. So one more shot at this: Void Black. A black so black that if you drop it in the middle of the night you’re just going to have to buy a new phone, because that one’s gone, man. So black that even Spinal Tap will have to admit that their album cover is just slightly gray-ish. So black that if you stare at it long enough, you won’t even be sure which side of the phone you’re actually on anymore. And here’s the best part: As you gaze into the Void Black iPhone 8, it also gazes into you!
17 headphone jacks: But only one of them works, and it’s random each time.
[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.]
