Fortunately reader Neil came to the rescue: using the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine, he retrieved an older version of Apple’s list of functions and compared it to the new version, thus isolating all the new functions. Well done, Neil, and thanks for passing them on.
Here, then, is a list of all the new functions in the latest update, organized by Apple’s categories and linked to their documentation. Now, fellow Numbers enthusiasts, we at least know what we have at our disposal.
Since 2021, Six Colors has been compiling an annual report card focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise, and we ask them every year.
If you’re part of the Apple IT community and would like to participate in this year’s survey, it’s just a click away. Results will be posted at the end of the month.
The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries. Apple has what is among the most complex supply chains that has ever been designed in human history, and it is not going to be able to completely change that supply chain anytime soon.
It’s not one thing, it’s a whole stack of things that have evolved over a couple of decades at least. There aren’t enough trained American workers. America’s standard of living is higher, so wages would be higher, making expenses higher. Not a lot of Americans are interested in working brutal hours on factory assembly lines. The list goes on and on.
There are moves Apple can make to start mitigating its risk in terms of international assembly and U.S. tariffs (more on that from me soon), but even for mitigation we are talking about a long game, measured in decades.
How did the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg get added to that Signal group about military action in Yemen? It might have been a helpful suggestion from iOS. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian writes:
According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by [National Security Adviser Mike] Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.
The White House claims that during the campaign, Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes was forwarded an email from Goldberg requesting a comment for a story, and that Hughes texted Goldberg’s email (including his contact info) to Waltz. The presence of contact info in a text message then led iOS to infer that Hughes was sending his contact information to Waltz, which it then helpfully suggested adding to a new or existing contact.
I’ve seen a lot of people doubt this report and suggest that Waltz was secretly leaking stuff to Goldberg and that’s why he was in his iPhone to be added to the Signal chat, but the explanation that it was an unthinking “tap yes to add” tap that led to a ticking time bomb in Waltz’s contacts file rings true to me.
It doesn’t really change anything about using insecure smartphones and an external messaging platform to discuss military plans in advance, rather than the approved secure government pathways for those communications, but it does seem like a plausible explanation for how Goldberg got added to the Signal group.
David Smith joins Jason to discuss how Apple will respond to U.S. tariffs, AI Apple health rumors, the release of iOS 18.4, and Jason’s stressful family trip to the Apple Store.
I get that maybe most people don’t get as excited about an update to Apple’s spreadsheets app, but I am, frankly, a Numbers enthusiast.1
So when I saw that this past week’s update to Numbers 14.4 added “over 30 new functions”, I was intrigued to see what was available2—and, more to the point, if there was anything that could fill in some gaps in functionality.
The newer functions like SORT, FILTER, and LET certainly won’t blow away any Excel users, who have had those—and more—for some time, but as a Numbers user, I’m just glad to see them join the party.
And, as it turns out, a couple of those do help me resolve some longstanding issues with one of my spreadsheets. Specifically, the freelance accounting sheet that I’ve been using for almost a decade.
The median is the message
One of the sheets in my Numbers file breaks down my income and expenses on a monthly basis, with some aggregate information like totals, minimums, maximums, averages, and medians. But because I create the table with the entire twelve months of the year, I have to make sure to discount some of the data or else it causes problems.
For example, telling me that my lowest monthly income in 2025 was the $0 I logged for October isn’t useful if it’s currently April. Likewise, having those zeroed out months can throw off the calculations for averages and medians.
Previously, for both the minimum and average I was able to use the MINIFS and AVERAGEIF functions respectively, keyed to a hidden field that said whether the month in question had passed or not.3 The MEDIAN ended up being more complicated, though, since there is no corresponding MEDIANIF function. I ended up just manually adjusting the cells it was looking at every month or two when I checked these tables. But because I had it on three separate tables (gross income, expenses, and net income), that was a bit of a pain.
Just include the figure in the median calculation if the month has already happened (or is happening). It’s that easy!
Fortunately, the addition of the FILTER function solves this problem by letting me simply ignore months that haven’t happened yet, and instead just run my calculations on the subset of applicable values. I was not only able to create a median measurement I never have to update, but I could also remove that hidden month field and replace the AVERAGEIF function with a simpler filtered version too. All of that saves time and means less manual tweaking of the sheet.
While Numbers still doesn’t have a way to link to a file, I set up an automatically-generated receipt ID, which I use as the file name for my receipts stored in Dropbox. (The ID is created when you check the related Receipt box.) It’s formatted as Year-Month-Day-First Five Characters of Expense Name-Amount in the hopes that I’ll never spend the exact same amount at the exact same vendor on the same day
It’s true that Numbers still doesn’t let you include a link to a file, even though it has long had a HYPERLINK function that can make text into a clickable link. That, however, seems to primarily be aimed at including a web URL or a mailto: link and it doesn’t let you use a file:/// URL.4
However, it occurred to me that I could use a URL scheme to run a shortcut. And surely I could create a shortcut that could simply open a specific file?
They called me mad at the academy!
While I didn’t, strictly speaking, need any of Numbers’s new powers to do this, the LET function ended up being a timesaver, since it let me avoid having to do lengthy operations either in a separate, hidden field, or repeated within in a single cell.
I was thus able to drop my old naming formula into the new construction and use LET to define it as a variable called receiptname. Then I could not only display that value in the field itself, but also pass it to the shortcut I’d created, without having to write all those pesky functions a second time.
As for that shortcut, I actually made two versions: the first was a native one, but I discovered that every time I ran it for the first time on a specific file, it would pop up a privacy dialog box to approve the action. No thanks.
For my second crack at it, I switched to just using the Run Shell Script action to open the file via the command line, which bypasses the privacy dialog.5
I subsequently combined those two versions of the shortcut into one that detects which platform you’re on, using the shell script action if you’re on macOS while otherwise relying on native controls. That way it does at least work on iOS, even if you still have to contend with privacy warnings.6
Before I could declare victory, however, I discovered the need one final tweak: though the formula for my receipt file name already explicitly filters out spaces as well as the other characters caught by Numbers’s CLEAN function, I’ve had to replace ampersands with their URL-encoded equivalents.7 Since I’m using the URL scheme to pass the filename to Shortcuts, ampersands are a big no-no (they’re interpreted as part of the URL syntax) and I found that filenames that included them were routinely being truncated on their way into Shortcuts.
So, I’ve now fixed all the major problems with my accounting spreadsheet which means surely fame and fortune awaits! Any day now.
My wife, meanwhile, is a die-hard Excel fan, but reconciling your differences is what marriage is all about. ↩
Alas, I could not find a full list of exactly which functions are new. Apple lists all the functions available in the app, but only broken down by type, not by when they were added. ↩
As I revisited these, I wondered why I’d needed that hidden field at all, since it was possible to do the month check in one, but hindsight, etc. ↩
Probably for well-founded security concerns, since that would in theory let you run an external app or program. ↩
Is this a security risk? Technically, yes, but since I’m the only one using it, I’m not too worried. 🤫 ↩
I also had to add a simple Apple Script to tell the Shortcuts app to quit at the end of the Shortcut, because when you’re using the URL scheme, it apparently forces the app to launch. Fun times! ↩
[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.]
Apple gets caught in the middle of a trade war like Maoi Madakor; if you have to ask how much the foldable iPhone will cost, you can’t afford one; and you might need to settle your Apple tab with a new card company.
On the tumble cycle
Good news, everyone! Everything is about to get a lot more expensive for no good reason! Also, you now have less money literally overnight.
Look, this is all super frustrating and very stupid and pointless, so I’m just going to jam a bunch of references in here and try to speed run to the end, OK?
Remind me again what, exactly, Tim Cook got for that $1 million contribution to Trump’s inaugural fund? Was it a commemorative plate? Because it certainly doesn’t seem like it curried him any favor. Possibly Tim’s parents never read him If You Give A Mouse a Cookie as a child and he didn’t realize that currying favor is a full-time job.
“Tim, son, if yah give a mouse a cookie, that’ll be the end of it.”
OK, Tim’s dad.
Don’t worry about Tim’s dad’s son, though. That guy cleverly cashed out some spending change right before the Trump stock market crash (well, this Trump stock market crash, look for more coming soon to a stock market near you).
As far as screen sizes go, the foldable iPhone is rumored to be an iPhone mini in the streets and an iPad mini in the sheets.
Depending on how you use your iPhone, I guess. I’m not here to judge.
Except for you, Karl. Gross.
Ming-Chi Kuo suggests the foldable iPhone will have a 5.5-inch screen on the outside and a 7.8-inch screen on the inside.
Do you know what this means for long-suffering iPhone mini fans?! Absolutely nothing because the human body does not contain enough kidneys to sell in order to afford one.
Balance forward
At least that balance you won’t be able to pay off might be on a brand new shiny Apple Card from another credit card company. That… that’ll be fun, right?
$100 million? That’s just 100 Trump Inauguration Collectible Plates.
American Express is also reportedly making offers for the Apple Card business but seems to be a bit of a dark horse since it’s not usable everywhere like Visa is, particularly at Costco.
But, let’s face it, news in general just seems to be of lesser and lesser quality these days so don’t be surprised if it does end up being American Express. And there’s an annual fee. And a punch in the gut.
[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.]
It’s under-remarked upon, but Apple, to a point of almost obstinance, considers pricing part of the brand for its products. They tend not to raise or lower prices with the ebbs and flows of the world economy or even the obvious constraints of simple supply and demand. Throughout the entire COVID crisis, I don’t recall them changing their prices for anything.
We talked about this a bit today on the latest episode of the Six Colors Podcast (for members only, you should sign up!), also in regards to the tariff situation.
In his piece, Gruber particularly calls out the trashcan Mac Pro sticking at $2999 throughout its existence, but I think an even more striking example is the iMac. Introduced in 1998 at a base price of $1299, today’s infinitely more powerful iMac M4 starts at…$1299.
Granted, with inflation, those prices would be a little different. In researching the details, I came across this great piece from PerfectRec charting the iMac’s price history over the years, including adjusting for inflation. Impressively, while the iMac’s base price has dipped as low as $1099 in all that time, it’s never gone over $1299.
The biggest risk to Apple in pricing is, of course, the iPhone, and at least the company has a few months before it really needs to make a decision about whether or not it’s going to raise the price, eat the difference, or some combination of both. Or, who knows, the situation could be totally different by then.
[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.]
Dan and Jason navigate complicated spreadsheets; we bring a penguin to a knife fight as we ponder what Apple’s approach to new major tariffs on its products might be. [More Colors and Backstage subscribers also get to hear us discuss Apple Health+ rumors—it’s like AppleCare for your body.]
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Churn is a subscription-industry term that refers to losing subscribers. If you run a subscription-based business, you want loyal customers who don’t cancel their subscriptions. The more cancellations, the more money and effort you need to expend to replace them with new subscribers. Low churn rates are good.
Which is why I was fascinated to see an Antenna report that Apple TV+ has the highest churn rate among major streaming platforms. I’m surprised because Apple’s customer base is loyal and I would think that the Apple One Bundle helps them a lot, but I’m open to the idea because Apple famously hasn’t licensed much content for its streaming service, and so its catalog is considered to be scant when compared to others.
But Apple TV+ has been around since 2019, and that means that Apple has had more than five years to get its content-generation engine in gear and fill up that catalog. Maybe people just subscribe for a single buzzy show and then don’t bother to look through the catalog?
Anyway, in the spirit of helping out anyone who’s got an Apple TV+ subscription for a month or two just to watch “Severance,” I thought I’d give you a list of stuff to watch on Apple TV+. Just a note: this is stuff I have personally watched and like enough to recommend. I’m not listing shows my friends and family liked, or that I have heard are good: these are my personal favorites.
Netflix and Amazon prepare to celebrate NFL Christmas, the PVOD vs. Theatrical debate rages on, Gunsmoke is having a moment, Max rebrands again, Jason watched some Netflix ads, and did we mention that Julia is back?
With Apple having delayed its most ambitious Apple Intelligence features, you might find yourself thinking: it’s probably best if the company just focuses on other endeavors for the time being, like a rumored iOS redesign or even pushing forward its Vision Pro platform.
Nope, not so much. According to a report from Bloomberg‘s Mark Gurman, Apple is embarking on future AI-based features, including most prominently an “AI-based doctor” dubbed Project Mulberry.
Yep: Just when you think you’re done talking about AI, they pull you back in.
The latest episode of the Twenty Thousand Hertz podcast takes a stab at telling Apple’s accessibility story through sound—not only the sound of a host and his interview subjects, but the way Macs and iPhones sound when they speak to people who use their accessibility features. From the VoiceOver screen reader to AirPods Pro’s hearing assistance features, the episode—which includes interviews and other sound bites from Apple execs—traces a 40-year story of doing the right thing, combined with large dollops of product promotion.
The episode was clearly developed in close cooperation with Apple, and it offers a look at how the company sees its own history with accessibility. But marketing content aside, the episode is a good listen, especially in the first half, when it traces the history of accessibility initiatives at Apple, all the way back to Steve Jobs taking that first Mac out of the bag in 1984, and letting it have its say.
Apple traces its accessibility work back to 1985, and while the podcast skips the dark years in the 90s and early aughts when little was happening on the accessibility front, there is plenty of compelling history here, from the introduction of VoiceOver on the Mac to Stevie Wonder thanking Steve Jobs in 2011 for making iPhones and iPads accessible. That had happened two years before, as I recounted in my documentary 36 Seconds That Changed Everything: How the iPhone Learned to Talk
Apple folks featured in the Twenty Thousand Hertz episode include senior accessibility director Sarah Herrlinger, VP for Sensing and Connectivity Ron Huang, director of Apple Watch product marketing Deidre Caldbeck, and AirPods marketing director Eric Treski. There’s also archival footage of Tim Cook, giving a version of his famous comment about Apple’s support for accessibility being unrelated to ROI.
The second half of the show focuses on hearing-related accessibility features, including sound recognition and, of course, AirPods. Here, the vibe is more marketing-heavy, with stories of lives changed (they do ring true) and recitations of features. But because a podcast has sound-rich audio in its toolbox, the producers are able to demonstrate how AirPods features actually change the sound of the world around the wearer, whether it’s live listen or conversation awareness.
Some people can leave well enough alone, but not us nerds! You may recall a few years ago, I detailed my creation of a smart On Air sign using a color e-ink display.
While I feel that project was largely a success, one major obstacle has kept it from being as useful as I'd hoped: the long battery life.
What? How is long battery life a problem, I can hear you asking.1 The issue is that the battery life is just long enough that I forget to recharge it until I happen to check and see that it's dead, invariably right before I start recording a podcast.
Now, I could just set a reminder to go off every few days to plug in the sign and recharge it, but simple solutions aren't how we ended up here in the first place, are they? Time for some OverEngineering™!
The idea that came to me one day was sheer elegance in its simplicity: what if I built a system that let me know what the current battery level was so that I could charge it when it was getting low but before it had died?
Yep: here we go again.
No, I'm not listening to you, but I can't believe you would say that, Greg. ↩
So, last month, in a fit of pique over the continual increases in the cost of a Netflix plan, I decided to cancel Netflix.
This is a big deal because I’ve been a Netflix subscriber since the very beginning—back when it was all DVDs and no streaming. I checked in with my kids because I was worried Netflix was more popular with the youths than with people like me. But even my kids didn’t care and thought there wasn’t much to watch on Netflix.
So, I canceled it, figuring I’d pick it back up again on a case-by-case basis. “When there’s something to watch, I’ll resubscribe for a month, watch what I want, and then cancel again,” I thought.
This month, though, I already had some reasons to watch. Everybody’s talking about “Adolescence,” and I hadn’t seen the newest iteration of John Mulaney’s live talk show—which means I wasn’t able to talk about it on Downstream last week, which felt like a mistake.
(It turns out that even when there’s nothing you think you want to watch on Netflix, there’s still some stuff you sort of want to watch on Netflix.)
So I figured I’d resubscribe for the month—but I’d stick it to Netflix by opting for the ad plan, which is only $8 a month. Netflix insists that the ads on that plan are “short and seamless” and “won’t interrupt the action”—and it really pushes that ad plan hard because it makes a lot of money from it. (The price hikes for the ad-free plans are largely because the ad plan has such a high average revenue per user that Netflix has needed to jack up the price of the ad-free plans so that they earn similar amounts of money per user.)
My plan did not survive even the briefest of contact with the enemy.
The first thing my wife and I watched on our reactivated Netflix was episode one of “Adolescence,” a tense, serious, dark drama about children and crime. Each episode is one continuous shot—a technical marvel. But the flow was broken numerous times by bright, shiny, noisy ads, disrupting the mood repeatedly with 30 to 45-second interruptions.
I feel sympathy for whomever Netflix is paying to tag content for the best places to insert ads. There are no clear act breaks in “Adolescence,” and the fact that it’s one continuous shot means that literally any interruption is going to be incredibly disruptive to the content of the show. It was never intended to be shown with advertising inserted mid-stream.
Netflix programmed four separate ad breaks.
Oh yeah?
The truth is, outside of live sports, I haven’t really watched a commercial in 25 years. Back in 2000, I got my first TiVo, and since then, ad skipping has been the norm for me. I’ve been fast-forwarding through ads or, in some cases, clicking a button to skip ads automatically ever since.
So, to sit there in 2025, watching a countdown timer tick down during a loud, colorful ad, all while in the middle of a grim, dark, contemplative show… was unbearable. After 25 years of mostly ad-free viewing, I am irretrievably broken. I just couldn’t take it.
While the ads played on, I began creating a thought experiment: There’s a $10 difference between the ad and ad-free plans. If Mr. Netflix (he wears a top hat) came to my house and said, “Jason, I’ve got a great deal for you. I’m going to pay you $120 a year, and all you have to do is watch ads while you watch Netflix,” what would I do? When I started thinking about it, I thought it might be an interesting intellectual question. What would I accept in exchange for having Mean Mr. Netflix beam ads into every show I watch?
It turns out that whatever my price is, it’s a whole lot more than $120 a year. The next day, I upgraded back to the $18 ad-free plan.
The big news of the last month has been Apple’s inability to ship its most anticipated and most ambitious Apple Intelligence features on time. Granted, though this is a bit of a black eye for the company, it’s unlikely to hurt it in the long run.
Still, as the company Worldwide Developers Conference is fast approaching, there’s certainly an argument that Apple might want to take some of the pressure off by gently redirecting attendees to some other exciting announcements. Some have gone so far as to suggest that the rumored redesign of iOS 19 is just Apple trying to distract users and the media from its shortcomings in the AI realm.
Respectfully, I disagree. Not because Apple is above this, but because if the company really wanted to distract people from talking about Apple Intelligence there are way better things it could announce.
In the interest of helping out a trillion dollar corporation that definitely needs my help, here are just a few things that could show up in Apple’s keynote that would have people saying “Apple Intelliwhatnow?”
Announce Vision Pro 2: Remember back in 2023 when all eyes—sorry not sorry—were on Apple’s rumored headset? Ah, those were the days. Maybe it’s time for a pre-AI throwback to bring back the heady excitement of years gone by. I’m thinking a brand new Apple Vision Pro with an updated processor, lighter construction, and most importantly no screen on the outside to see a fake version of your eyes. Oh, also, as long as we’re going for shock and awe, it’ll cost half the price of the original Apple Vision Pro, and still nobody will buy it. And isn’t that exactly the kind of bananas decision that’s going to get everyone’s attention?
Revive AirPort: Apple abandoned the router game back in back in 2018, but there’s no time like the present to dig up the corpse of a beloved product line and reanimate it. Really, there’s nothing consumers love more than networking hardware—they’re downright passionate about it, at least when they can tell the difference between a router and a modem. Which one connects to my TV again?
Ship AirPower: It says something that AirPort is only the second most mythical Apple product line that starts with “AirP.” Look, sometimes it just takes a little bit of time to perfect your hardware, polishing all those minor details that Apple likes to focus on, like chamfered edges and not catching on fire.
Update the Mac Pro: Of course the existence of the M3 Ultra Mac Studio means that a more powerful chip is just waiting in the wings for the Mac Pro. Even better, I hear Apple’s crack processor team of Bigfoot and Nessie have been real hard at work on it.
Redesign the Magic Mouse: I know Apple just finally switched the Magic Mouse to USB-C, but hear me out: that means a redesign would be that much more unexpec—wait, what now? Damn it, stay in your lane, Apple.
[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.]
