By Glenn Fleishman

May 19, 2025 8:00 AM PT

The i’s are the Windows of the soul

Six Colors subscriber Brandon Minich asked:

I haven’t been able to keep track of…what is the current status of the emulation of Windows on the Mac after the changeover to Apple silicon? Is this even worth doing like it used to be in the Intel days? And how does the ARM-based Windows work with Mac emulation, if at all?

It’s been a somewhat twisty road at times, but there is one strong option and one also-ran for using Windows in a virtual machine on a Mac at not far below the performance you would get on today’s comparable ARM-based chips used to run Windows. As of January 2025, you can even run Intel 64-bit x86 versions of Windows, though you will find it painfully slow.

Giving Boot Camp the boot

The M-series Macs came out of the gate blazing fast. While many pundits had predicted for years that Apple would release Macs running silicon the company had designed, the ARM-based Apple chips’ performance exceeded everyone’s expectations. But this caused immediate trouble for people who relied on Windows emulation (using VMware or Parallels) or who used Apple’s multi-system Boot Camp option: ARM processors couldn’t run x86 Windows code.

The fortunate timing was that the computer industry was already making a shift from Intel’s long-running x86 architecture to ARM-based chips before Apple released the first M1 Macs. As a result, Microsoft had a version of Windows for ARM well into testing, although the company hadn’t yet authorized its virtualized use.¹ And Windows for ARM would seemingly require new versions of popular software, too.

The sheer computational power of Apple silicon beckoned us to give up our Intel Macs, yet any dependency on Windows software meant the shiny red ball was being held just out of reach, beyond our grasping efforts.

But there were glimmers of what was to come. Apple had wisely shipped the M1 Macs with Rosetta 2, which enabled the emulation of Intel Mac code on ARM.² And Microsoft was no slouch, either, including 32-bit x86 emulation in Windows 10; it added x64 (64-bit) emulation in Windows 11, using a system it calls Prism.

With Boot Camp dead, since you can’t start up into an Intel environment, Parallels and VMware Fusion became the only alternative, with Parallels releasing a version supporting Windows 11 for ARM in August 2021 and VMware over a year later. Microsoft initially didn’t offer official support for using its operating system in emulation on Apple silicon, but blessed Parallels Desktop in 2023. VMware took this as a blessing, too, though I’ve never understood why.

Just pause for a minute to realize something absurd: an M-series processor, even the original M1, was powerful enough to run a virtualized version of Windows for ARM, which could handle executing x86 Windows software in emulation while you also ran Intel-based Mac software in the main macOS environment.

You make a dead Mac cry

The landscape today puts Windows emulation on Apple silicon on stable ground with a boost in January 2025 that gives you even more options, depending on your needs.

Parallels seems to have won the consumer desktop game in a quirky way. Both Parallels and VMware have continued developing their virtualization software for Apple silicon. However, Parallels’s feature set now significantly outpaces VMware Fusion, and VMware has given up on selling licenses for Fusion, which is free for personal and commercial use as of November 2024—that may speak to its future. Parallels integration with macOS has always been better, from installation to drag-and-drop support to commingling Mac and Windows apps in a unique Coherence mode.

Parallels has two versions that most people would consider: Parallel Desktop Standard Edition and Pro Edition. Standard has limitations on the amount of RAM and processing power you can throw at a virtual machine and is meant to run a single VM at a time. Pro strips the limits off, adds graphical processing support, and allows multiple VMs to run simultaneously. You might find Standard sufficient if you’re not engaged in development, documentation, or testing, but its memory, CPU, and GPU restrictions could chafe.

Because of its relationship with Microsoft, you can purchase Parallels Desktop and install Windows 11 with a couple of clicks. Windows 11 can be used without paying for a license and activating it, though this prevents personalization and may prevent downloading non-critical updates. The OS will also nag you (including in a persistent background image) about activation. For occasional use, this might be ok, although you can purchase highly discounted legal Windows 11 licenses.

In January 2025, Parallels announced the release of one missing piece: Desktop can fully emulate a 64-bit x86 processor, although not all Parallels features are available). It’s also apparently incredibly slow, taking several minutes just to boot. However, with a sufficiently powerful M-series Mac and patience, you can now run 32-bit or 64-bit x86 apps in a 64-bit operating system as a virtual machine if you had a previously unmet need or one that was incompatible with Windows x86-based ARM emulation.

Parallels Desktop Standard Edition is $100 per year (currently discounted to $65) or can be purchased with no recurring fee for $220. The Pro Edition is available only as a subscription: $120 but with a current discount of $80. Those reduced rates are for the first year. However, I have found in the past, when I needed an active subscription, I was typically able to find a reduced license fee through a bundle with another product I already purchased; I’m not sure if this is still the case.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Thanks to Jackson for emailing that VMware had updated its terms to include free commercial use for its emulators!

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Jason Snell

May 15, 2025 9:57 AM PT

How will Apple re-think AI features for WWDC 2025?

Between the delay of a bunch of promised Apple Intelligence features and the realignment of Siri and other AI features under Apple software chief Craig Federighi, I’ve got to think that the Apple Intelligence situation at Apple is pretty intense right now.

The somewhat half-baked set of features we saw announced at WWDC in June 2024 was, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, the result of Apple going “all-in on AI” nearly a year before. Apple added a bunch of features into iOS 18 and macOS 15 and came up with a marketing plan built around the new Apple Intelligence brand, but by Apple standards it was a rush job.

Contrast that with the current status of Apple Intelligence. In the last few months, Apple has had to pull back on features it already promised and bring in new leadership. Meanwhile, WWDC 2025 looms. There’s not a lot of time to decide how Apple’s going to approach its AI functionality over the next year.

When I consider what’s going on at Apple right now, I keep thinking back to one of my favorite movies, “Apollo 13,” in which a bunch of engineers back in Houston are guided through a series of intense analytical steps by Flight Director Gene Kranz in order to understand what’s happened and how they can best work the problem and save the crew.

This exchange, between Kranz (played by Ed Harris) and Flight Controller Sy Liebergot (Clint Howard), is what I’ve kept thinking about:

Gene Kranz: Can we review our status here, Sy? Let’s look at this thing from a standpoint of status. What have we got on the spacecraft that’s good?

Sy Liebergot: I’ll get back to you, Gene.

While there are no lives at stake, this is very much a situation where there is a daunting technical challenge that demands an immediate response. So what do you do if you’re Federighi and Mike Rockwell (the new head of Siri)? You do what Gene Kranz did (and yes, kids, “Apollo 13” is a true story): look at the entire thing from a standpoint of status.

What does Apple have in artificial intelligence that’s good?

It’s triage, which involves reviewing a list of projects and determining what’s feasible. Balancing the needs of WWDC marketing with the art of the possible has to be one of the toughest things Federighi and company have done in the last few months.

First up: What’s the current status of the items announced last year and delayed back in March? Is it close to shipping, or is it far off? Federighi and company need to find out whether these features are just lagging, or if the initial conception was misguided and things need to be reconceptualized.

For example, Gurman has just reported that Apple is using Anthropic’s AI to build internal coding tools. Where does that leave Swift Assist, which was demoed last year but has never appeared, even in beta? One of the jobs of this triage project is to decide that some ideas just didn’t pan out, and move on to new ideas.

Another question for both Federighi and Apple’s marketing group is how to handle features already promised a year ago. Do they get re-promised? Are they not mentioned? If they’re reconceptualized, how does that get communicated? Apple has always been reluctant to admit to failure, so do revised features just get re-announced without any acknowledgement that they were previously promised?

Next: What’s the state of the stuff being worked on that hasn’t been announced? Between the features being built by Federighi’s team and the work he’s inheriting from AI chief John Giannandrea, there are undoubtedly a whole bunch of new items that were intended for the 2025-2026 OS cycle.

Obviously, the first step is a status check, to get a realistic sense of when a feature will be ready to ship to customers. But there’s another aspect to this part of the job: The whole group needs to consider all the mistakes they made last year in terms of gauging readiness. Obviously, last year’s judgment about what was ready to be announced was… flawed. How does Apple avoid that this time around? And then considering those mistakes, what features are really going to ship by spring 2026? Everything else gets delayed until 2026.

Someone also needs to look critically at Apple’s own AI models and judge whether they’re suitable for deployment. One would hope that over the past year, Apple has developed better versions of the models it currently ships on devices, but even those new models may still lag behind the functionality of models from other providers. Some reports suggest that Federighi has softened on the use of third-party models in Apple features and functionality.

If Apple’s models are not state-of-the-art (and they are almost certainly not), are there “quick wins” Apple could accomplish by integrating third-party models? Could they be integrated into specific features? Does Apple have time to build a modular AI system that lets users choose which models—Apple, OpenAI, Perplexity, Google, whatever—they’d prefer to use? (And, separately, is Apple going to provide tools for app developers to use to integrate AI functionality as well?)

At WWDC, we’ll get our first sense of what Apple, with a revised software structure and still feeling the sting from failing to ship what it promised last year, thinks it can deliver. Failure is not an option.

By Dan Moren

May 15, 2025 6:45 AM PT

Apple rolls out rebranded “CarPlay Ultra” three years after its unveiling

Almost three years after announcing what was then called next-generation CarPlay—or, colloquially, CarPlay 2—Apple on Thursday celebrated rolling out what it now calls “CarPlay Ultra” in a single automaker’s vehicles.

If you guessed that automaker was an exceptionally high-end company selling a relatively small number of vehicles, you’d be right: hello, Aston Martin. According to Apple, the update is available in new Aston Martin vehicles in the U.S. and Canada starting today and will start appearing in compatible existing models in “the coming weeks” via a dealer-provided software update. It requires an iPhone 12 or later running iOS 18.5 or later.

CarPlay Ultra’s goals, according to Apple, are to provide deeper integration with the car experience, taking over all of the vehicle’s screens, including providing real-time information in the instrument cluster. It’s intended to move beyond navigation and entertainment, letting drivers also interact with car features like climate control.

This update has traveled a bumpy road with a lot of detours since its initial introduction at WWDC 2022. At the time, Apple said the first car models with support would be announced in late 2023, and named a variety of partners, none of which have yet delivered a product. Aston Martin, notably, was not on that initial list. In January of this year, the company edited its website to remove a note about the first vehicles shipping in 2024.

The CarPlay 2 traffic jam has been largely the result of conflicting priorities between Apple and its partners where the rubber meets the road. Apple, of course, wants to exercise control over the whole system, but automakers are loath to give up control to a third-party, especially as they’d like to generate revenue by selling their own services—see General Motors, which said in 2023 that it would be discontinuing support for CarPlay and Android Auto.

That’s one reason Apple’s press release revving up CarPlay Ultra is replete with language about “reflecting the automaker’s look and feel” and “deeply integrating with the car’s systems and showcasing the unique look and feel of each automaker.” In fact, there’s a whole section of the announcement called “A Design Unique to Each Automaker” that stresses how Apple creates the design in collaboration with automakers.

Apple claims to be working with additional car manufacturers, specifically naming Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis. But it stops short of providing specific timelines or vehicles that might support the new system.

Personally, I’m a longtime CarPlay user and fan—I put a compatible head unit in my car back in 2019 and haven’t looked back. I appreciate what Apple’s trying to do here—let’s all agree that most automakers aren’t great at the software side of the business—but it’s also clear Apple has an uphill drive to get carmakers to sign on and give up their control.

Dealing with the imperfect realities of partner companies is a place where Apple doesn’t always have the best track record. While I’m glad to see the company isn’t pumping the brakes on next-generation CarPlay, it does still feel like they’ve taken their foot off the gas.

[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.]

By Anže Tomić

May 14, 2025 8:00 AM PT

Want Apple to add a feature? Pass a law

When I wrote about switching to the Mac in July of 2023, I lamented the Mac’s lack of support for my language, Slovene. Apple has never gotten around to supporting many languages, but for Slovene, it all changed with iOS 18 and macOS 15. So I am writing this on my Mac Mini with the default language set to my native tongue.

Why did Apple do this after 18 years of iOS and a thousand years of the Mac? The simple answer is: Regulation works.

In April of last year, the Slovenian parliament passed a new version of The Public Use of the Slovenian Language Act stating that if you want to sell products in Slovenia, they must “speak” Slovene. Before I discuss the reasoning behind the law, it’s worth explaining why Apple’s past exclusion of Slovene was so unusual.

Continue reading “Want Apple to add a feature? Pass a law”…

By Jason Snell

May 14, 2025 5:00 AM PT

Apple Maps gets in on F1 hype with Monaco update

I never thought I’d see the day where computer map data would be part of a feature film promotional push, but here we are: Apple’s big-budget Brad Pitt film “F1 The Movie” hits theaters in late June, and the company is making the most of its cross-promotional opportunities with a big update to Monaco in advance of the May 25 running of the Monaco Grand Prix.

Apple’s been slowly rolling out new maps in Apple Maps for areas all around the world, most recently in Thailand last week, including hand-designed 3D landmarks in select cities. Monaco is getting the treatment on Tuesday, similar to the design additions Apple rolled out for Las Vegas in advance of that city’s F1 race last year.

The upgrades come in both permanent and transitory forms. Temporary structures like grandstands will appear and then disappear after the race. The entire race circuit will be highlighted, including road closures and detours during the race. All 19 of the race’s turns will be marked, as well as all the pedestrian bridges over the race. The F1 pit area, which is a permanent structure, will stay on the map all the time. (Apple’s also whimsically placing race cars in various locations throughout the city—presumably, Waldo approves.)

Among the enhanced city designs are 3D models of signs, most of which (in the preview I saw) featured ads for… “F1 The Movie,” of course. That’s synergy! There’s also a new Maps guide that points to several iconic F1 racetracks, including the ones featured in the film, of course.

By Glenn Fleishman

May 13, 2025 8:00 AM PT

Can we still love Apple? Should we ever have?

I fell in love with Apple with the first Mac I used. My forward-thinking journalism teacher in high school could tell in 1985 that desktop publishing was about to sweep over the world. She bought one, and a copy of Aldus PageMaker, for the newspaper. As the paper’s (paid) typesetter, then using a phototypesetter, she sent me home for a couple weeks of winter break with the Mac and a manual. I never looked back. I bought my first Mac in 1987, managed over 100 in a job from 1991–1993, and have owned oodles since then.

My career’s foundation has been knowing how to use Apple hardware (and sometimes software) and teaching others to use it or get more out of it. Nearly every significant professional advancement I’ve made across 35-plus years has been because I knew the ins and outs of making a Mac produce what we needed—and later, Xserves, iPhones, iPads, and more.

I certainly loved the company as a concept and was loyal to it, though I have never been someone who ignored its flaws. As one version of the old saying goes, “Our Country! In her intercourse with foreign nations may she always be in the right; but right or wrong, our country!”

Apple wasn’t always right, but it was my Apple—our Apple—and we celebrated it for what it did, even though we would complain or openly critique its problems in management, direction, finances, bug fixing, user interface direction, and more. We are often more frank about things we love in describing their flaws than those we hate because we care enough to want them to improve. (That’s okay advice vis-a-vis businesses; maybe don’t try to tell people how to fix themselves, though!) One of my most popular all-time blog entries was a 2015 listing of all of Yosemite’s many weaknesses and bugs—over 100,000 views.

Perhaps this is why I was shocked by the inner sanctum details revealed by Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in a suit against Apple by Epic Games. You can read all the back-and-forth details elsewhere, including this very site.

The upshot is this: Apple was directed to give developers in the United States a pathway to let customers pay for stuff used in the app outside of Apple’s payment system. The judge’s decision was upheld on appeal and the Supreme Court declined a review. In January 2024, Apple unveiled its new system: developers could apply to add links to outside payment web pages, which customers would reach after clicking a scary warning. Apple would collect a mere 27%.

Love is a many-colored thing

Maybe this is when my decades-long love affair started to crack. That was a clearly offensive action, contemptuous of the developer community that built the software Apple reaped a reward from; of users who paid an implicit Apple tax (like renters in a housing market dealing indirectly with property tax spikes); and the court, practically flipping the bird at the judge. Apple wrote this at the time: “As both this Court and the Ninth Circuit recognized, collecting a commission in this way will impose additional costs on Apple and the developers.” Ha.

I mean, there had been many previous challenges, but none this overtly hostile—and the worst was yet to come. There was Antennagate, when Steve Jobs said users were holding their phones wrong: “All phones have sensitive areas. Just avoid holding it in this way.” There was the $17,000 gold Apple Watch. The $700 Mac Pro wheels. Their obscure revenue recognition practices—albeit in line with other tech companies—that let them avoid paying the full tax bite. (Apple stated, “At Apple we follow the laws, and if the system changes we will comply.”) Reports of violating workers’ rights, particularly at retail, anti-union tactics, as well as discrimination. Even the iPod Socks, for god’s sake.

But I’m not sure I ever felt the sense of actual personal betrayal until Judge Rogers revealed in a scathing order that she had found not that Apple’s plan was merely egregious, but that “Vice-President of Finance, Alex Roman, outright lied under oath.” She wrote, “Apple sought to maintain a revenue stream worth billions in direct defiance of this Court’s Injunction.” She said that rather than figure out a compliant plan, the company came up with an arbitrarily high fee and built lies around it despite marketing chief Phil Schiller raising red flags. At least somebody tried. She ordered the company to allow immediate access to developers, which Apple did: You can now click a link in the Kindle app to buy ebooks from Amazon’s web site. Apple has also filed an emergency appeal to reverse this.

Over the last 17 years, since it launched its first App Store with a 30% commission, Apple has had every opportunity to rethink its deal with developers and, by extension, customers. It made a few 15% concessions for small developers and renewing subscriptions. But, by and large, it used its position of power to reap the highest possible return. Faced with a judge’s decision and having lost its appeal, the judge says Tim “Cook chose poorly.”

Fans of Apple are often dismissed as “fanboys/girls” and referred to as the “Apple faithful.” This has always rankled because I love Apple because of what it has enabled me to do, even as it contains seeds of truth: We stick with Apple through its poor decisions and weak periods because they are the only hardware company we trust to keep our best interests at heart. If it’s not always the best, it’s not Microsoft or Google for crying out loud. While I’ve yelled at my Mac on many occasions, I’ve never felt it was out to get me—or my private information.

I had a crisis of faith in 1998, when I told the New York Times, “I bought my last Macintosh last year.” (Jason will note that I also posted hundreds of thousands of messages on Twitter after quitting Twitter—twice! The third time, in 2022, stuck.) That 1998 crisis was that Macs had become expensive and slow, there was no roadmap for better outcomes, and the company seemed to be circling the drain. That was true, and then Steve Jobs regained the helm.

Broken trust may never mend

This court-reported behavior by most Apple executives puts Apple’s disregard in sharp relief. I have never protested its high hardware margins (more than 35% in recent years) because that’s a “tax” I pay for getting the best. After skirting what could have been bankruptcy, I don’t mind the company having a vast cushion to protect its future and pour billions into research and development—it’s paid off. And they charge a price the market will bear: we can freely opt to buy a Mac or iPhone or other hardware or not. While as an Apple user, we might not feel there’s a choice, Android and Windows are viable alternatives, particularly in 2025, and would run all the software we need—an old complaint that’s faded away in both directions.

But there’s a difference between a stated price and a choice in the marketplace and being lied to. Perhaps, as in politics, all businesses lie—some a little, some a lot. Part of sales is selling us on an idea bigger than the thing itself. Apple, particularly in the Jobs eras, was especially good at making us think we were part of something much larger than a mere computer or, later, a phone or tablet. I’m a Pepper, you’re a Pepper, we’re all Peppers.

There’s a classic sci-fi story by James T. Tiptree, Jr. (a.k.a. Alice Sheldon), Brightness Falls from the Air. In it, a race of intelligent, peaceful alien bugs live on a planet bathed in the radiation of a special kind of nova. Speaking for the humans who protect them, the narrator notes, “Beautiful as the adults are, they are surpassed in sheer exquisiteness by their children.”

However, by the end of the book, the nova’s trailing edge passes, and one character says to another, “D’you know, they even looked different to me! Oh, they’re beautiful. But I never really believed they were evolved from, from insects before.” He sees them as they are instead of within this glowing aura. I think Apple’s nova aura may be gone at long last.

Maybe it is the right time for this love affair to come to an end. Not the end of my love for what I can do with Apple stuff, but creating boundaries, something good for any relationship. From Tim Cook down, executives—Schiller excepted—have proven themselves unworthy of our trust. As shepherds of the company, they have revealed themselves. I may still love the concept of Apple, but certainly the company no more.

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Shelly Brisbin

May 13, 2025 5:00 AM PT

Apple teases accessibility nutrition labels as part of wide-ranging feature preview

On Tuesday, Apple announced accessibility feature updates for users with blindness, hearing loss, cognitive delays, and motor disabilities, along with a new way for developers to demonstrate the accessibility of their apps.

The company typically marks Global Accessibility Awareness Day (May 15) with a preview of features that will be available on all platforms as part of the fall OS updates. The list of features slated for “later this year” is especially comprehensive, encompassing a range of options for most accessibility categories.

Continue reading “Apple teases accessibility nutrition labels as part of wide-ranging feature preview”…

By Glenn Fleishman

May 12, 2025 9:00 AM PT

Apple Watch: I’d be lost without it

Six Colors subscriber Ampsonic asked:

Will an Apple Watch without cellular update Find My?

That’s a surprisingly complicated question to answer because of the Apple Watch’s unique place in the Find My ecosystem. The tl;dr is at the bottom of this article, but there is an interesting journey we can take to get there.

Find My offers device and item tracking

Apple suffers from the problem of feature proliferation and maturity. There are so many automated components, integrated elements, standalone apps, and systems that they don’t all receive the same attention. Find My is, fortunately, not one of them. Apple has devoted what feels like an extraordinary amount of effort to perfecting Find My, from its introduction to the addition of AirTag and other trackers. It even agreed to an industry compatible standard to help deter stalkers and unwanted tracking; Apple and Google apps for tracking their own devices now pick up those of the other company.

Maybe this is because of the value of finding lost stuff. Surely, that’s why Apple recently extended shared location access to AirTags and similar items. If one of these items is lost, you can share the location temporarily with someone else or even drop it into an airline’s lost luggage form.

There are a bunch of different things represented within Find My. There are devices (hardware with displays, plus most audio gear), people who have given you permission to see their whereabouts, and trackers—some of which are now embedded into things like bike-theft alarms.

Apple splits things into devices and items by how they report their location:

• Items have no internet connection and rely on the Find My network’s crowdsourcing function.
• Devices that have an internet connection update their location at regular intervals whenever they have an active link. This information is associated with your iCloud account.

Find my thing that’s not on the internet

All iPhones, iPads, and Macs that have a live internet connection identify Bluetooth broadcast names in their vicinity that use a particular pattern Apple has set up. This includes both items that can only broadcast their location and can’t connect to a network, and internet-capable devices that aren’t currently able to connect.

The Bluetooth broadcast name contains encrypted information only the Find My item or device owner can decode. A device with an internet connection relays the Bluetooth name with its calculated or GPS location information to Apple servers. Here are a few scenarios:

• You’ve brought your Mac to a cafe and haven’t connected to the network. It will broadcast its identity over Bluetooth, and iPads and iPhones with cellular or Wi-Fi connections and Macs connected to Wi-Fi or a personal hotspot will relay that.

• You parked your car in a vast garage and can’t find it, but anyone who has wandered by with an iPhone that can reach a cellular network will have relayed its location in the meantime.

• Someone has stolen your iPad with Wi-Fi only and is using an e-bike to scurry away. When you use the Lost Mode in the Find My app, you can track its location through the thief’s iPhone (if they have one) or the iPhones or other devices they pass by in their journey.

When you want to find the location of an item or device, you launch Find My. Find My on iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, or iCloud.com will show the location of any devices you own and devices in your Family Sharing group with location tracking permission enabled for that person. To see items you own or that have been shared with you, you have to use a native app. iCloud.com can’t show item locations and crowdsourced locations because that requires end-to-end device-based encryption that isn’t yet supported within iCloud.com. (Even Apple can’t decode Find My network location and ownership data.)

(There’s one exception! If you temporarily share access to an item to get help recovering something you’ve lost or that was stolen, the person with that link uses a web app to view the location.)

That’s a lot of preamble to get to the answer!

The answer

The Apple Watch has been an odd hybrid since the introduction of the cellular option. An Apple Watch with Wi-Fi can independently connect to Wi-Fi networks, for which it has stored a connection synced from its paired iPhone. You can also join a network through the device itself since watchOS 5, although I don’t relish entering a long alphanumeric and punctuation password with the tiny on-screen keyboard.

So the answer is: Yes! But with a lot of different circumstances for an Apple Watch with just Wi-Fi:

• Wi-Fi only Apple Watch, iPhone nearby, iPhone connected to cellular: Your iPhone sends your Apple Watch’s location over the internet to your iCloud account.

• Wi-Fi only Apple Watch, no iPhone nearby, connection to Wi-Fi network: Your Apple Watch sends its location directly over the internet to your iCloud account. (It doesn’t use GPS, but approximates it using Wi-Fi positioning.)

• All other cases: Your Apple Watch acts effectively like a Find My item, broadcasting its identity via Bluetooth for relay by devices nearby with an active internet connection.

(If you have an Apple Watch with GPS + Cellular and it has an active cellular connection where you are, it will use GPS to transmit the current location, too, of course.)

As with a tree in the forest falling and making a sound with no one to hear it¹, an Apple Watch with no internet connection over Wi-Fi, cellular, or a paired iPhone and not in proximity of any other user’s Apple device cannot update its location.

If this wasn’t enough about Find My for you, I have implausibly written an entire book on this topic, Take Control of Find My and AirTags. Consult that title if you’re looking for more detail about setting up items, understanding how devices are tracked, deterring stalking or being aware of signs when someone is trying to track you, and working with alerts and privacy when you and other people share your location with each other.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]