Jason’s former co-host from another TV podcast, Tim Goodman, drops by to discuss his decision to be a TV writer at the very end of the Peak TV era, the challenges of TV criticism, and his return to writing about TV on his own terms via Substack.
This week we react to rumors of future Apple health services and try to understand the difference between a service and a feature. Also, is Apple right to keep advanced AI out of Siri until it’s trustworthy? And we celebrate the suggestion that watchOS might be getting a fresh new Widget-centric interface.
For a smart watch, the Apple Watch can sometimes be…less than intelligent. Case in point: more than a few times in the past weeks, I’ve found myself bitten by one relatively minor missing feature.
There I am, out for my daily walk—with the outdoor walk workout running on my watch—when I pause to pop into a store on an errand or to grab a snack. Being the honest person that I am, I manually pause my workout. But ten or twenty minutes later, as I’m on my way home, I realize I’ve forgotten to resume it.
Walk, interrupted.
So, I ask: why can’t the Apple Watch detect that I’ve started my walk again and offer to un-pause—my workout?
If you find yourself thinking that this feature sounds familiar, that’s because the Apple Watch already auto-pauses and auto-resumes outdoor running and cycling workouts. Moreover, it can detect when you’ve forgotten to start a walking workout, prompt you to start it, and retroactively apply that workout back to the beginning. And it can automatically figure out when you’ve stopped your workout and forgotten to turn it off or pause it.
So there’s really only one missing piece of the puzzle, and yet it’s one that drives me bananas. I’m not quite sure why watchOS can handle part of the equation but not the exact opposite.
There are reportedly a lot of big changes expected for watchOS 10 when it’s unveiled in June, and I’m glad to hear the Apple Watch is getting some love, but while the company’s at it, maybe they could throw in a few little features too.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
The problem with the warnings coming out of the FCC and FBI is that they divert attention away from bigger security threats, such as weak passwords and the failure to install security updates. They create unneeded anxiety and inconvenience that run the risk of people simply giving up trying to be secure.
I admit, I’ve been wary of public charging stations for the last several years, but Goodin’s thorough breakdown explains why this kind of exploit—though technically feasible—is extremely difficult to pull off. Most importantly, he points out that there have been zero documented cases of juice jacking ever having happened outside of proof of concepts demonstrated by security researchers.
There are a lot of these kind of exploits that get shown off by researchers, and that’s good, because it encourages device makers to continually improve their security. But they also tend to be stories that are ripe for scaremongering because they garner a lot of attention and get shared and amplified without actual understanding.
In short: your public USB charging port is probably fine. But it’s never a bad idea to carry your own charger and cable, for convenience if nothing else.
We here at Six Colors don’t get a lot of scoops—simply put, it’s not what we do. Sure, we hear rumors from time to time, and sometimes even a little birdie or two crosses our path with an interesting tidbit, but they generally don’t rise to the level of an entire story.
However, on rare occasion, just such a nugget does come to our attention, and it’s simply too good to pass up. Which is why we can exclusively report upon a recent development inside Apple that changes the very way the company handles its internal projects.
Tim Cook is, obviously, a very difficult man to read. He’s buttoned-down. He plays his cards1 close to his chest. On which he wears a button-down. That can be quite a challenge for the Apple executives who want to sell him on a particular project they’re working on: how best to gauge whether or not Tim is receptive to a specific idea?…
The headset cometh, if reports are to be believed (would it kill you to clap for the headset?), and Apple has a slew of operating system updates in store with some wild and wacky features.
Headset on a hardware introduction
Have you ordered your Apple headset yet?! Why not?! THEY’RE COMING! HURRY!
To tell the truth, I haven’t ordered mine yet, either, even though people say I have a face for goggles. What I don’t have is a wallet for $3,000. Also, you can’t actually order one yet, as it hasn’t been announced, despite the veritable salivation of the rumor mill.
There’s been a lot of question about this device. What is it? When is it? Why is it? Those kinds of questions. But recently someone claiming to have seen it talked to someone else and our concerns may be unwarranted.
[Leaker Evan] Blass said that over the course of the last few months, the tester has gone from “lamenting its ‘underwhelming’ capabilities” to being “blown away” by the experience and the hardware.
OK, so they were blown away. But were they blown away in a “take my money” kind of way?
“I was so skeptical; now I’m blown away in a ‘take my money kind of way,'” they said.
Oh! Well, glad I asked.
You might be asking yourself “but is it still going to have an external battery pack?” That, my friend, is an excellent question to which the answer is “boy, is it ever.”
Do you like MagSafe? Cool, because this is not that. This is more like ScrewSafe, which is not the hot new hookup app all the young people are using these days. As far as I know.
According to Gurman, the round tip must be rotated clockwise to lock it in so that it doesn’t fall out during use…
Again, not a hookup app. I can’t stress that enough.
I know I keep saying that but you keep looking at me and doing that Milhouse thing with your eyebrows.
The battery will power the headset for approximately two hours…
I swear, everything in this article just sounds like an innuendo now. Let’s just move on.
An OS by any other name
Speaking of Apple’s headset, there’s been a lot of consternation over what its operating system will be called. The current contenders are xrOS—is that “ex-arr-oh-ess” or “ten-arr-oh-ess”?—or the longer but equally capitalization-challenged sobriquet of realityOS.
What’s in a name, you may ask? Well! There’s, uh, there’s the letters…
Yeah, I don’t get the fuss, either. Look, they already lowercased “mac” on us; I think we’ll get through either of these options (although “realityOS” seems a little more Apple-y to me).
If you think Apple’s pantheon of operating systems is getting too full, well, hold on to your software update dance card.
You got your macOS. You got your iOS. You got your iPadOS. Now you’re gonna have your bigiPadOS. You’ll be GLaDOS that Apple has taken care of all of your devices in such a bespoke manner.
Look, as long as Apple doesn’t start naming these anything like “Large Tablet Operating System for Workgroups, Enterprise Edition”, they can call it whatever they want.
Feature-packed
As we’re talking about operating systems, the Apple rumor mill surfaced more purported iOS 17 features this week.
For instance, you will supposedly be able to view Apple Music lyrics from the lock screen. Now you have no excuse for not sharing your dulcet rendition of Lizzo’s “Juice” anywhere, anytime.
If you like them apples, Matt Damon, how about these apples?
Codenamed Quartz, the AI-based service will help encourage users to exercise, improve their eating habits, and take steps to improve their sleep.
Hmm, well, let’s just say that, given some of the results I’ve seen from AIs to date, I’m not sure if I want to take too many of one’s health recommendations, honestly.
“I’m sorry, I’m not sure why I suggested you could do a salmon ladder. I have called 911 for you.”
And on top of that, a mood tracker! I predict my mood will be “bitter and disillusioned.”
While these very 2023 features will surely surprise and delight iOS 17 users, there may be a sleeper hit lurking inside.
…Apple wants to expand the social networking capabilities of Find My.
Please, I know it’s tempting, but I must insist you make your Ping jokes inside your heart.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
The opportunities are endless with an always-on Mac.
Yes, this. This exactly. I’ve had a Mac running as a server in my house for more than 20 years now, and I have zero regrets. As I detailed five years ago, the specific uses for my always-on Mac have changed numerous times over the decades, but the various Macs that have served the purpose have always made themselves useful.
I have friends who run network-attached storage devices in their houses, but they’ve never really been my style. You can attach storage to a Mac just as easily. Also, those storage keep getting smarter, but they’re using their own (usually unix-based) operating systems.
I’d rather just keep using a Mac, for a few reasons: It’s the operating system I’m the most familiar with. The Mac’s unix heritage means it will run most of the same software that’s available for those network-attached devices. And it lets me put Mac apps in the mix, most of which will never run on a random storage device.
After the tragic death of my Drobo in 2020, I bought an OWC Thunderbolt RAID and the replacement has been flawless. I’ve got 24TB of available storage hanging off a 2018 Intel Mac mini.
Here’s what that Mac mini currently does:
File server for all my archived work files, including large podcast and video files.
Running Channels, recording TV stations and acting as a home DVR.
Running Homebridge to add incompatible home devices to the Home app.
Being constantly available as a Mac I can connect to and use via Screens. This is especially useful when I’m on an iPad and don’t have a Mac handy.
The applications change as my needs change, but the flexibility of having an always-on Mac has always served me well. And just knowing that the Mac is there is helpful when I’m considering solutions to various technical problems—because I know that if I can get something running on my Mac, I can keep it running all the time to solve the problem. (I’ve started upgrading some of my automations on my server to use Shortcuts rather than AppleScript or shell scripts. It begins…)
One of these days I’ll probably upgrade my Mac mini to an Apple silicon model, which will certainly reduce the amount of power it consumes. I dream of replacing my spinning hard drives with fast, silent SSDs, but SSD storage large enough to cover my entire archive is still out of reach, for now.
But I think it’s very unlikely I’ll ever stop having a Mac server in my house. The possibilities remain endless.
For my own mental health, I haven’t read the comments on most websites in years (and don’t offer them here). Various Safari extensions, including dedicated ones like Shut Up as well as ad blockers like 1Blocker, will give you the option to also hide comments.
Alas, a few sites I read have begun injecting “top comments” into their story text lately. I hate it.
Fortunately, there are several ways to suppress specific kinds of content via Safari extensions these days.
First, to diagnose the problem, I control-clicked on the header of the “top comment” and choose Inspect Element, bringing up Safari’s inspector interface. There is apparently a div in the webpage called top-comment. That’s what I want to kill.
In 1Blocker, I can just use the Hide Elements section in the Custom tab to block .top-comment. (I’ve also got a seasonal 1Blocker rule to hide the Daring Fireball banner when the Yankees are in the playoffs.)
My rules in 1Blocker.
Another good utility for controlling your Safari browsing experience is StopTheMadness, which in addition to many other features, offers CSS-based content blocking. In StopTheMadness, I have to craft a CSS rule that attacks specific CSS styles, in this case .top-comment as well as .crowdsignal-poll-wrapper, because while I’m at it I might as well also block this network’s collection of in-story polls.
My rules in StopTheMadness.
You have to wrap the whole thing in proper CSS syntax — the key thing to remember is display: none — but it also does the job.)
Alternately, you could use a Safari extension like PageExtender, which lets you apply custom JavaScript and CSS to individual websites. It’ll do the job, but it’s a more manual interface—you have to create CSS files and save them in a special folder on disk.
My larger point is, if there’s something on the Web that annoys you—and maybe only you!—you can probably find a way to turn it off with a Safari extension. And these days, Safari extensions generally work across Mac, iPad, and iPhone, so if you can block something in one place you can probably block it everywhere.
On this, our 500th episode, we start by complaining about the apps we begrudgingly use regularly. Then we predict the future of phones, reveal our history with dual-booting PCs, and share what it would take to get us to buy a mixed-reality headset.
If you haven’t been closely following the world of streaming media, you may have missed the major changes in the past year. Following a particularly bad financial quarter at Netflix, the entertainment industry collectively decided they were done spending huge sums of money to establish new streaming services.
The gold rush is over, and the rules have changed. One of the biggest changes is that Netflix, which for years refused to even consider offering advertising on its platform, instead announced it would add a discounted version of its service… with commercials. And the results are in: already, Netflix makes more money from a subscriber viewing its ad-laden version than it does from a subscriber who’s signed up for a more expensive ad-free tier.
If you don’t like ads on your Internet video, this is bad news because it means you’ll be paying even more to keep the ads at bay. But for Apple, it’s an opportunity—and a data point that might make the company question its video strategy.
As rumor season kicks into high gear, we discuss Apple’s potential new app, more reports about its VR headset, and some updates about forthcoming Mac hardware.
Since the advent of Apple Pay back in 2014, Apple has slowly but surely rolled out a number of other financial-related products: Apple Cash (née Apple Pay Cash) in 2017, the Apple Card in 2019, the recent Apple Pay Later service, and just this past week, the new Apple Card savings account.
It’s a lot of interest—if you’ll pardon the expression—in the financial realm for a company that tends to be focused on cutting edge technology, especially given that, in the U.S. at least, the banking system is anything but.
Nevertheless, with all of these various offerings, Apple seems well poised to become something a bit like a bank in its own right. Why would Apple want to be a bank? Well, in the apocryphal words of famous bank robber Willie Sutton: “that’s where the money is.” But to zoom out and take the 35,000 foot view, there may be even more of a long game playing out here.
This week Tim takes a trip, Apple has another convenient, easy-to-use way for it to hang on to your money, and will iOS 17 have a startling new feature?!
No, will it?
I’m really asking.
Timdia
You know the old saying: only Nixon could go to China but only Tim Cook going to India will bring out all the old Apple hardware.
That’s totally in The Big Book of Old Sayings. I don’t know what you’re talking about.
India rolled out the red carpet for the Apple CEO who showed up for the opening of the company’s first retail store in the country. The store has been a long time coming as Apple was first required to conduct manufacturing in India before opening a store, a deal that actually helps the company wean itself off complete dependence on China.
One of the first shoppers brought with him a Mac SE to show Cook and if you haven’t seen Tim’s expression upon being presented with the device, well, it’s not to be missed.…
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Kolide offers a more nuanced approach to setting and enforcing sensitive data policies. At most companies, employees can download sensitive company data onto any device, keep it there forever, and never even know that they’re doing something wrong.
IT teams routinely struggle to enforce timely OS updates and patch management, meaning that end users are storing sensitive on devices that are vulnerable to attack. Many MDM solutions are too blunt an instrument and many DLP tools are too extreme and invasive.
Kolide’s premise is simple: if an employee’s device is out of compliance, it can’t access their company’s apps. Kolide lets admins run queries to detect sensitive data, flag devices that have violated policies, and enforce OS and browser updates so vulnerable devices aren’t accessing data. And instead of creating more work for IT, Kolide provides instructions so users can get unblocked on their own. Check out Kolide today.
The Athletic just updated its iOS app to support iOS’s dynamic text setting. This is a good thing, because that text is now adjustable at a system level and allows people who need larger type to get it, systemwide.
The problem is that the default type in The Athletic’s app on my iPad is much smaller than it was before this change. And yet, if I simply crank up the size of the text using iOS’s text settings, everything else on my iPad gets much larger than I would prefer. (The Athletic’s app is, weirdly, the outlier.)
To enable per-app settings, you add the app to the list in Settings > Accessibility > Per-App Settings, then configure the iOS options you need for this app. Options here include text size, but you don’t actually need to configure per-app settings to tweak the text size you see in a specific app. That’s because Control Center offers an express train to text size adjustment.
First, add the text size control to Control Center, if it’s not already there. Now open an app whose text size you want to change, and keep changed. I’ll use Mail. Open Control Center and then Text Size. Flip the toggle below the vertical slider to Mail Only. If you haven’t changed text sizes before, the slider probably shows 100% (default). I’ll raise mine to 160%, which is within the range of accessibility text sizes. When I return to Mail, list text and individual message text will reflect the change.
Try this with any app that would benefit from larger (or smaller, for that matter) text than usual. If you do this on the Home screen, notification text will change. as will some text in Today view. You can’t enlarge lock screen widget text, unfortunately, or even media player text on the lock screen. And if an app doesn’t support dynamic type, none of this will work.
It’s that simple. Either add a per-app text size in Settings, or add the Text Size item to Control Center and customize the text size of any app you like. Thank you, Shelly!
Look, there’s no interesting Apple news. We’re all waiting on tenterhooks for the big hardware announcement so we can find out the only thing anyone cares about: Will the 15″ MacBook Air come in a chip configuration that supports two external displays? While we wait for that—and only that—to happen, we might as well take advantage of this spring weather and go outside to shoot some photos. Snap some pics. Record those photons.
Perhaps it’s a good time to take a step back. Rather than just thinking about photos, what about taking a bunch of ’em? Open that closet and get out that neglected SLR, DSLR, or point-and-shoot from yesteryear. This isn’t just some sort of luddite “it used to be better” thing. This is also to make you appreciate what a magical little device your iPhone is. I am deeply uninterested in pitting the iPhone against other cameras, but feel the need to remind people that they’ve got some options in their life, and there are no wrong answers. (The images I’ve included in this story are unlabeled, resized to typical social media resolution, and stripped of metadata.1)
For the purposes of this post, I’m just going to talk about cameras that take SD cards, as that is basically 20 years worth of cameras, and SD cards are the easiest things for most people to deal with. You can spend $100 to buy and develop a single roll of Kodak Gold if you want that warmth two to three weeks from now, but let’s try for some immediate gratification first.
Charge the battery, pop in a SD card, and have an SD card slot or adapter ready to receive your photos. Personally, I recommend making the investment in Apple’s Lightning to SD Card Camera Reader. You can, of course, use any other SD card reader you’re comfortable with, but I find that having the reader at my side is easiest. Don’t waste your time with Wi-Fi apps—they’re always a terrible experience, and making the attempt will ruin your fun photo adventure.
But Joe, you say, won’t an old camera have—gasp—a low resolution? Yes. However, you’re not using these images to print a large-format photo mural, and up until the iPhone 14 you were only working with a 12 MP sensor, anyway. Chances are good that you’ll uploading the end result to a failing social-media company to data mine details of your life from, and they’ll show the images at much lower resolutions. Even early six megapixel cameras can get good images—you just can’t crop in a lot. Lower than six is a little iffy, but gen Zwould say it’s very aesthetic. Some people really lean into what are generally considered to be defects.
Prime time to kit zoom
If you’re taking a camera out with you, odds are it either has a built-in zoom lens, or an interchangeable lens mount that came with at least a kit zoom lens. Maybe you also picked up some other lenses once upon a time. I find, personally, that it’s helpful to at least have a zoom lens with you. Just bring two lenses at most. You’re not trying to take up juggling.
Another reason I recommend bringing a zoom is to do a little back and forth comparison with your iPhone, and it’s the fastest way to hop around a range of focal lengths. It can also help you get an idea of what you do and don’t like about your lens(es). You can quickly google your iPhone model, and “35mm equivalent” to get the answers you seek (or divide the 35mm equivalent number by the crop factor for your sensor, such as 1.5 for APS-C), but here’s the info for the iPhone 13 and 14:
iPhone 13 “wide” lens: 26mm on a full frame (35mm) camera, 17mm lens on an APS-C sensor camera
iPhone 14 “wide” lens: 24mm on full frame, 16mm on an APS-C sensor camera.
iPhone 13 Pro and 14 Pro “telephoto” lens: 77mm for full frame, 51mm for APS-C
iPhone 13 Pro and 14 Pro “ultra-wide”: 13mm on full frame, 8mm2 on APS-C.
Again, this isn’t about generating an A/B comparison library to quiz your friends with. It’s just to build an personal understanding of how things translate.
On a later date, move on to the lenses that can do things your iPhone can’t do. Like the 70-350mm lens for my Sony that is equivalent to a 105-525mm zoom on a 35mm camera. Great to take photos of birds, or the moon with. Eat your heart out, Samsung.
Get in the zone
Get in the zone Auto Zone by walking around with your hand holding the camera grip, not just letting it dangle from your neck and bounce off your stomach every time you take a step. Head somewhere with some flowers, interesting shadows, varied textures, something that makes you think “what if I drew a little rectangle around that and it was a photo?” This might trigger some muscle memory from the last time you used that old camera.3 There’s no shame in auto modes, either, if you’re a little rusty—but try and go back and see what settings the camera picked and whether you agree with it.
This is where plugging in the SD card to your phone can come in handy in 2023, because you can more accurately assess the image the camera took on an iPhone screen. All camera screens are garbage, even new ones, when compared to the iPhone’s display. Your iPhone will give you the most accurate view of what you shot. When you get used to a camera, you can use the bad display to make relative judgments, but don’t assume that your photo will exactly look like that. This is very true when it comes to evaluating lens glare/flaring which might not look like much on the crappy display.
Shoot a couple shots with your iPhone too. Any photo you take will have metadata, and you can apply that to your older camera’s shots that might not have location data or accurate time. Also, while shooting, consider using one of the many third-party camera apps (like Halide or Obscura) to make the same kinds of shooting adjustments you were doing on your camera.
The aperture stuff, as it relates to bokeh, is going to be different, but it’s going to be the same as it relates to light hitting the sensor. The blur is based on distance of the object to the sensor, and sensor size, not just the amount of light coming in. This is why Apple invented Portrait Mode. Feel free to shoot with that too. Don’t take photos of wine glasses, and while it’s gotten better at handling some subjects, it’ll still cut off an ear or do weird stuff with drinking straws, even though it’s not as bad as before.
You’ll also notice, after being in the zone, that even at relatively similar exposures your images will have different dynamic ranges and tonality. The iPhone does some tricks to boost certain subjects, and drop those blown-out skies… and your old-school camera is probably not doing any of that. Also, your camera might have a larger sensor than the iPhone, but that sensor might be very old, limiting the potential range between the brightest brights and darkest darks it can record. Images may wind up looking more like slide positive film, but with an unpleasant highlight roll-off. Try shooting RAW and exposing for the highlights in your image (or using exposure compensation to force it down a notch), then take up the darkest parts of your scene in post if you want. Camera companies also added adjustment features to help boost the darkest areas too in-camera. Look up things like Nikon’s Active D-Lighting, Canon’s ALO, or Sony’s DRO, etc.
Lower range can also be something you can lean into in creative ways, like purposefully silhouetting subjects, or letting shadows completely fall away. Your iPhone will try to make everything a bright, even tone with some contrasty edges and highlight pops. Sometimes it looks a lot like what your own eyes are seeing, and other times it can appear a little boosted. But maybe what you really want is just to direct the viewer’s eye with your exposure—in which case, you’ll have to use a third-party app to control that exposure. I do wish the default camera app had exposure compensation.
Working for your work of art
The big thing that you’ve probably noticed from shooting stuff back and forth between the camera and the iPhone is just how much more effort and thought needs to go into your camera shots. Even if you’re using a third party iOS camera app, it’s still doing a lot of the heavy lifting for you. Your camera, mostly as a product of its age, is going to be hella slow.
It also means having to manage a lot of settings that you weren’t previously thinking about, and dealing with files you didn’t have to bother with before.
Ask yourself if any of it would be improved if you changed something about that camera, like a different lens, or getting more familiar with settings and modes. Maybe it’s the circumstances you used it under. Was it daylight or night? Is it a crappy underwater camera that you should only use at the beach? Do you like everything about the lens and shooting experience but wish autofocus was snappier? There are solutions to these problems, sometimes even with relatively inexpensive used equipment from KEH, MPB, or the riskier eBay. Maybe just rent something from Lens Rentals.
Even if you put the camera back in the closet, I hope this experience has reminded you why the iPhone is such a popular camera, and why every year people clamor for even incremental advances in the ever-deepening camera module. Despite objections about “over-processing” images, it’s doing a lot of work you’d manually have to do. For being a camera for everyone, and every situation, it has to put on one hell of a show.
But sometimes it can just be a little fun to shoot with something else on the side.
Cameras used in this post include an iPhone 13 Pro using both “wide” and “telephoto” cameras, a godawful underwater camera from Panasonic called the DMC-TS25 with a 16 MP type 1 CCD sensor that only shoots JPEG released in 2013, a Nikon D3200 DSLR with a 24.2 MP APS-C CMOS sensor shooting RAW released in 2012 with the 18-55mm kit zoom lens, a Nikon D40 DSLR with a 6 MP APS-C CCD sensor and even worse 18-55mm kit zoom lens, and a Sony a6400 mirrorless camera with a 24.2 MP APS-C CMOS released in 2019 with the 18-135mm kit zoom lens. ↩
I’m sure a large majority of the people reading this bought the cameras to take photos of their newborn babies and gave up, but pretend you used to be artsy. ↩
