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By Six Colors Staff

Our 2024 favorites: Hardware

[As the year comes to a close, those of us who write for Six Colors have decided to share some of our favorite things of the past year. First up: our favorite hardware.]

iPhone 16

Apple’s most advanced features always debut on the high-end phones, differentiating them from the rest, and tempting buyers to upgrade as soon as, or even before, their budgets might dictate. But the speed with which Apple lets features trickle down, even from one year’s Pro/Max iPhone lineup to the very next year’s non-Pros, tells an interesting story for those who keep a phone for two years or more, and/or who opted for an iPhone 16 or 16 Plus this year..

Let’s make a short list, shall we? If you own an iPhone 13 or 14, the non-Pro 16 models give you all of these hardware upgrades at once: USB-C, the Action Button, the Dynamic Island, and Camera Control. Of course, the chips are faster, the cameras are better, and you’re all set to take spatial video, too. Even if you got an iPhone 15 last year, and buttons are your thing, Camera Control and the Action button would be new for you this year, but the upgrade certainly is a mite less compelling than the two+ year cycle.

Let that sink in for a second. That’s two years worth of formerly Pro updates packed into a phone that’s cheaper than this year’s Pro by hundreds of dollars, with a physical size and weight that reminds some of us why the non-Pro phones feel better in hand or purse. And if you’re a die-hard Pro user whose upgrade cycle is more than a year, the 16 Pro or Max still packs a pleasing punch, what with a lighter titanium frame, and many of the hardware updates already mentioned. —Shelly Brisbin

iPhone 16 Pro

I’m in complete agreement with Shelly that the iPhone 16 series is a great one. I know it’s less exciting, year-over-year, for people that update their iPhones often, but I went from an iPhone 13 Pro to an iPhone 16 Pro. The only way to go was up. The promised features of Apple Intelligence didn’t play a role in my decision to purchase, but the ability to edit the new Photographic Styles after taking a photo has been a huge benefit. Like a lot of people, my iPhone is the primary camera in my life, and this is the best iPhone camera that they’ve ever made. Camera Control is not exactly delivering on its promise, but it really doesn’t hurt what I would otherwise be doing an iPhone. It’s a really great piece of hardware over all, despite what my complaints about software would indicate. —Joe Rosensteel

Mac mini

When I bought my M2 Pro Mac mini in 2023, I felt confident that it would be good enough to last me for several years to come. But that longevity has proved to be a double-edged sword as I found myself extremely envious of this year’s M4 Mac mini. It’s compact, it’s powerful, and it has ports on the front. All of a sudden, that old M2 Pro Mac mini is an albatross hanging from my neck! Which would be much easier if it were an M4 Mac mini, because it’s so much lighter.

Apple doesn’t update the Mac mini very often—this is the first major form factor redesign in more than a decade—and it’s good to see the little computer get some attention. With the M4 version, Apple’s made what is likely the best (certainly most versatile) desktop Mac in years. The good news is that if previous incarnations are any indication, this form factor’s going to stick around. —Dan Moren

M4 MacBook Pros

Has there ever been a time when Apple has been as on top of its game with Mac laptops as right now? The Macbook Air is great, yes, and this year’s M4 MacBook Pro is also spectacularly good at what it does. After two updates last year, the MacBook Pro got another update this year, and it really shines. The slight holdover flaws got corrected: The stripped-down base model MacBook Pro is no longer the Space Gray sheep of the family, as it’s got the same color options and flexible ports (Thunderbolt on both sides is key) as the higher-end models. The M4 chip is fast enough for it to be truly called “pro,” too. At at the high end, the chip performance just kept getting better. My ultimate endorsement: I bought my first MacBook Pro ever this year, and it was the M4 Max model, which is now my primary computer in all contexts. -—Jason Snell

Magic Keyboard for M4 iPad Pro

Nothing was so transformative to the iPad’s productivity cred as the introduction of the original Magic Keyboard for iPad in 2020. But it had flaws, most notably the omission of a function key row. The 2024 Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro adds that row, and a matched aluminum keyboard frame for a more premium laptop feel. Most of the summer, I’m writing things in my backyard with the iPad Pro perched on my lap, and this keyboard is the perfect companion for the thin M4-powered iPad Pro. Apple’s ultimate portable productivity machine isn’t the MacBook Air, it’s the iPad equipped with this accessory.—JS

AirPods Pro as OTC hearing aids

Are a built-in hearing test and the ability to function as hearing aids the mark of a new product category, or simply a tacked-on feature for a popular set of earbuds? Well, that depends on whether you have noticeable hearing loss, and it especially depends on whether you learned about that hearing loss from taking a test with your AirPods Pro 2. Apple rightly touts these hearing features as an important move into a health category that matters tremendously to more and more people. And many of those people are self-conscious about advertising their hearing loss with a hearing aid, or they’re wary of spending thousands of dollars for a prescription model. This is the landscape Apple entered this fall when hearing features came to the already-available AirPods Pro. So if you had a pair, as I do, you simply waited for the software update and took a hearing test in the privacy of your home.

AirPods as hearing aids somehow feel like the most tangible medically-adjacent feature Apple provides. Your Apple Watch might save your life one day, but that’s an abstraction until something happens that forces you to focus on a scary experience. Many more people, with significant hearing loss and not, will take the AirPods Pro hearing test and learn something about their health. And maybe they’ll recommend these relatively inexpensive hearing aids, disguised as earbuds, to a friend or family member who struggles with a hearing loss they’d rather not talk about. Bonus: even if an AirPods Pro hearing test finds a very small hearing loss, the earbuds can tune themselves to make media listening easier, based on whatever hearing limitation you do have.—SB

Beats Studio Buds+

No, the “+” does not indicate a streaming service, and it wasn’t even released this year, but I did buy it on sale this year. As a kid that lived through the translucent plastic era of consumer electronics, how could I not? The Beats Studio Buds+ kind of sit between the regular AirPods and the AirPods Pro in certain ways. The active noise cancellation has been a dream when I need to run my desk fan, or drown out other noises that never cease.—JR

Lutron Caseta Diva Smart Dimmer

We did some work on our house this year, including adding a screened-in porch, and one thing I insisted upon for the porch lights and fan was HomeKit-compatible controls. We’d previously put in Lutron Caseta switches when we did our renovations after buying the house, and while they’ve been great, my one complaint was they look a bit nerdy with all the various buttons. Good news: Lutron is now also offering the Diva Smart Dimmer, which works just as well as the classic Caseta switches, but looks like your standard “paddle rocker” switch. I love these; they’re way easier to use by feel and they have a far sleeker look—they even work with the Pico remote if you need to control a light from multiple locations. I’d consider redoing all my lights with them if they weren’t a bit on the pricey side. (If you don’t need the dimmer functionality, the Claro gives you the same switch style but just for on and off.) —DM

Zoom HEssentials audio recorders

The Zoom H6essential audio recorder I wrote about in April is the rare sequel that improves on a great product. The H1Essential, H4Essential and H6Essential all take what were already excellent, affordable devices and give them a boost in features and usability. The recorders in the Essentials line are all handheld, and the H4E and H6E support connecting microphones, musical instruments, or plugging into a sound board. But all three offer pretty good stereo mics of their own, too. In these details, the Essential models are a lot like the devices they replace. But for around the same money, you now get 32-bit floating point recording, which prevents you from recording clipped audio. It’s a major value breakthrough for recorders at these price points. There’s a redesigned and simplified set of hardware buttons, and menus that are simpler, and easier to read. There’s also a talking interface if you need it, to make the devices more accessible. —SB

Eve Energy

Yes, I’m picking a Matter smart plug from two years ago. I feel like there’s very little incentive to rush out and buy new smart plugs when they’re released. We don’t ask much of our existing smart plugs, just that they work. Which is why when my WeMo plugs started misbehaving, I decided enough was enough and I treated myself to a couple 2 packs of Eve Energy smart plugs and haven’t looked back. I also replaced the old iHome plug that I used for my seasonal Christmas tree. Merry Christmas, you filthy smart home animals.—JR


Rumors of a foldable iPad, spatial computing on the Mac, how often we use Street View-like features, and the iOS 18 features we’ve turned off.


By Jason Snell for Macworld

2024 predictions in review: Apple Intelligence didn’t surprise, but the M4 sure did

Hi, it’s me, Father Time. This is my 421st More Color column, only about 20 of which have been part of my annual attempt to predict the future while blaming myself for failing to properly predict the year gone by. (Look, if I got them all right, 421 of the columns would be prediction based!)

To the task of predicting, I bring years of experience. The Mac’s 40 years old and I’ve been associated with Macworld for 27 of those years, which is, uh… two-thirds of the Mac’s existence? Geez. You know, I was the summer intern once! (Kurt Cobain was alive then.)

Anyway, who better to listen to than Father Time, just before he turns into a New Year’s Baby? Next time I’ll once again fearlessly attempt to predict the future, but for this column we’re all going to point at laugh at my failures… or will we? Maybe I had a good year in 2024. Let’s see.

Continue reading on Macworld ↦


By Joe Rosensteel

iOS 18.2 Mail is a misfire

Out of all the new features in iOS 18.2, I really didn’t expect that I’d be writing about Mail of all things. And yet, given how many times a day I use Mail on my iPhone, the changes in Mail in iOS 18.2 might be the worst thing about the release.

I’ve used Mail for iOS since I had a first-generation iPod Touch. The Mail team has maintained the app so that it has always functioned well enough, even though it lacked features. Unfortunately, they’ve now begun adding features, and it’s no longer functioning well enough.

Scattergories

iOS 18.2 introduces Categories in Mail, and I think the entire concept is completely incompatible with my brain and my experience with other email clients (including previous versions of Mail for iOS). I’m trying to be flexible and not immediately dismiss new stuff out of hand, but that positive attitude is at odds with my desire not to make something in my life more difficult just because someone else thinks they’ve got a hot, new take on things.

Allow me to explain my boring approach to email: I have several personal email accounts. (Any employer-assigned email accounts have been siloed off in other apps, like Outlook or Gmail.) I leave all my read emails in the Inbox and don’t move things out because the chronological “feed” of email helps me revisit old emails in a way I can’t if I moved them to folders.1

Obviously, this mentality is somewhat incompatible with Apple’s bold approach to Categories. The good news is that each category isn’t a folder that moves my message from my inbox. The bad news is that the interface behaves completely differently depending on how Mail categorizes your email.

The Primary category features messages that the Mail app deemed important. If the app considers emails from other categories time-sensitive, they can also appear here. If an email from another category appears in Primary, it will have a little icon of the category it also appears in.

Primary is the only category used with the Priority feature, which scans messages and marks those of special importance. This feature shipped with iOS 18.1. Under the menu in the upper right, Priority can be toggled off separately from everything else. Priority is not Primary, but it only lives in Primary. Got it?

Primary is also the only category that will show a badge on the Mail icon by default, but you’ll still receive notifications for all messages in all categories.

A screenshot of iOS Mail cropped to show the Primary category and the first-launch explainer stub 'Manage Badge Count. Only unread messages categorized as primary will appear on the Mail icon. Learn More.

Confusingly, the categories that don’t count towards the badge notification or unread mail count get little dots next to their icons when they contain new mail. But that’s the only place you see those dots—they don’t display as a count anywhere, and new also doesn’t mean the same thing as unread (more on that later).

When you’re looking at the Mailboxes view of all your mail accounts and their inboxes/folders, items will only display an unread count if they contain messages that are marked as Primary. If a message is categorized as anything else, the list will appear as if you’ve read all your mail in all your inboxes.

It is my strong personal opinion that the unread count in the Mailboxes view should reflect the unread count of the emails you have in those mailboxes. Suppressing badges so you can focus is unrelated to whether or not a message is unread. I know why people want to hide badges and notifications because they’re drowning in mail, but oftentimes, I just want to see where an unread message lives.

To get a full unread count and return to normal badges, you need to go to Settings -> Notifications -> Mail and then scroll down to Customize Notifications. You can choose to list the unread messages in Primary or all unread messages. That’s it. You can’t exclude Promotions, or only include Primary and Updates. Primary or all are your choices.

The Transactions view supposedly puts all my transactional emails together. Fine. Except, for some reason, my informed delivery emails from the United States Postal Service appear under Transactions. I didn’t buy my mail!

I don’t know why deliveries appear here. Some deliveries are connected to transactions, but not all. Strangely, emails I receive about packages that are out for delivery today are somehow not considered time-sensitive enough to appear in Primary as well as Transactions.

Updates is apparently where some (but not all!) of my newsletters go, along with terms of service updates, flight emails, and explanations of benefits from my healthcare provider. It’s basically everything from a business or business-like entity, that isn’t directly about money or a delivery.

That seems fine, I guess, except that’s a really broad category that has the full spectrum of things that I’d like to know about, ranging from sooner to later. I can move a sender from here to Primary if I want it to alert me sooner, but that’s a powerful all-or-nothing decision that will cover every email that the sender ever sends and has sent. It doesn’t train the system that this kind of email from this sender is important. Choose wisely if you think something is more important than “Updates.”

Promotions is where you’ll find Deals! Deals! Deals! Honestly, this category makes me think this whole thing about my email disappearing into three oubliettes might be worth it. Unfortunately, several of the newsletters I subscribe to are in this category, including the Six Colors newsletter. Perhaps it is overly aggressive in relegating senders to this category—almost like there’s a total lack of precision—which makes me not trust it at all.

For a day, I let messages accumulate in this category and only dealt with my Primary inbox, Updates, and Transactions. That’s what it’s for, right? To keep you from being distracted by these unimportant promotions?

Except when I did finally dive in to Promotions, I had to go through and read the subject and AI summary for each one to figure out if I trusted it enough to mark the email as read or not, or if I really needed to read it anyway. This didn’t save me any time. It’s not like there were hundreds of these promotional emails. The day after that, I started worrying something valuable was in Promotions, so I ended up checking it anyway. Net result: It created more work rather than saving me time.

Group project

The quirky new Grouped Messages feature applies to all categories except Primary and All Mail (where messages can not be grouped by sender, for some reason).

Tapping on a message, like the one I got from the USPS, leads to a view of all messages from that sender. However, the header for that view takes up a large portion of the screen. There’s a header image for the sender, which heavily pads the email address or name of the sender. (It also occasionally lops off descenders on letters, apparently. Guess they needed more room.)

A cropped screenshot of the iOS Mail app showing the grouped sender view for auto-reply@usps.com but all the descenders are cut off at the baseline. There is an enormous amount of padding, but the subject is crammed together and truncated.
It’s hard to believe this is the company that sparked the desktop publishing revolution. Can I please see the subject line? Pretty please?

The subject line of a message is truncated with an ellipsis feature, which is frustrating, given how much space is being wasted by this view. (Why would I need to know what the email is about when I can see a huge circle with a graphic in it and an enormous version of the sender’s name or address?)

Sometimes, the entire message at the end of a group of messages is displayed, and sometimes, there’s a “See more” to expand the message. I got here by tapping on this message from the Category view, why won’t it show me the whole message like if I tapped to get to the message from the Priority or All Mail view? Shouldn’t the last email in a bundle always be fully expanded because it’s the thing I tapped on to open this bundle view in the first place? There’s infinite room below it! This isn’t saving any space!

That truncated view could theoretically be useful if you’re going back up in the bundle and expanding those to find a previous email from the Sender, as if it was a threaded chain of email replies instead of individual messages. Except… when I scroll back up, it expands the entire message for each message fully. I can’t even expand it to just see the full subject line and close it again.

Speaking of closing it again, I can’t find any way to do that other than force-quitting Mail. Tapping the subject stub, which had expanded the item, doesn’t collapse it, but expands the subject stub so you can tap the email addresses. Long-pressing doesn’t do anything. There has to be a way to collapse messages in this view, but I honestly can’t figure it out.

Refusing categorization

If you’re in the truncated, padded bundle view, you can tap the ellipsis button in the upper right corner to change the sender’s category. However, this will change the categorization of every message the sender has sent or will send. Sometimes, a single sender sends me Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. Some companies split these into different email addresses, and others don’t or don’t reliably.

And remember, if you move a sender from Transactions, Updates, or Promotions to Primary, you no longer get the bundle view of the sender. Why? I don’t know. I thought that view was supposed to be helpful?

That also means you don’t get the ellipsis button in the upper right to move the Sender. However, you can tap the Reply icon in the bottom bar of a message, which brings up that ridiculous menu, and scroll down to Categorize Sender to once again change all of the emails from that sender. That’s how email rules and filters should work, right?

People have asked for filters/rules for years for Mail on iOS, and Apple didn’t give them to us… until, all of a sudden, we’ve got a few hard-coded invisible rules that users can nudge a little. We can’t be trusted with Smart Mailboxes or labels, but we do have three immutable categories that all email is supposed to fit into.

Why can’t I make a category called Deliveries and elect for it to be worthy of the unread badge? Why can’t I make a category called Newsletters that’s silently delivered but not lumped in with all non-business related mails and get around to reading them just after I die?

Or you could give up…

Now that we’ve got categories, there’s got to be a way to temporarily not view them. This is the All Mail category, which is hidden off to the right side of the other categories, so you don’t even know it’s there unless you swipe on those categories to reveal it. Surprise!

This view doesn’t expose any of the category features. It doesn’t put little icons next to mail items to let you know those messages are also in Transactions, Updates, and Promotions, like the Primary category does. Why not? It can’t group notifications by sender. It seemingly doesn’t have Priority either since there’s no option in the right ellipsis button menu to turn it off.

It’s basically like temporarily embedding the old List View underneath all the other Category items. Since you can just tap the ellipsis (top right) and List View to leave Categories behind, I’m unclear why the All Mail category also exists. If it worked in a way that also integrated categories, it would make more sense. But it doesn’t.

(If you’ve got multiple email accounts and you leave the All Inboxes view, you’ll find that your individual Inboxes have Categories of their own too. That’s fine, but Mail will also remember the category you were last in in that particular inbox. If you jump from All Inboxes, All Mail to your Gmail Inbox, it might be set to Updates, and you might not see an expected message because you have to remember that the category isn’t a setting that persists as a view across all inboxes when you move around the interface. It can be quite disorienting.)

The escape hatch for all of this categorical goodness is simply to give up and return to the classic List View. That should really be the default instead of this first attempt at Categories.

Think back to major changes in email clients you’ve used over the years. Almost all of them have been controversial because people are used to the current way of doing things. Their life, or their job, isn’t about learning new approaches to this mundane necessity.

That is why they nag users of the old version to try the new version while reassuring them they can go back. Over time, this becomes a matter of sticking them in the new version and telling them they can go back to the old version. Then, the new version becomes the only version. Rinse and repeat.

Apple skipped the opt-in step, which I suspect will engender far more ire than had they gone the traditional route. There will always be people who are resistant to any change, but this release strategy isn’t helping. What’s worse, there’s no universal “go back” switch people can flip. Some of the feature toggles are in Settings, and some are in hidden menu buttons inside the Mail app.

I had to walk my boyfriend through the steps to get List View back, turn off Priority, and to turn off all summarization because he hated it. I’m sticking with it for a little while longer, but I don’t know if I’ll make through Christmas before bailing.

As iOS 18.2 rolls out more widely, people are going to find themselves challenged by having to change their years-old or decades-old habits for an email client that thinks your package delivery for today is a non-time-sensitive transaction, and your newsletters are promotions. I’m not convinced people will have a ton of patience to try to calibrate this system, and adjust themselves to it. (And let’s not forget, these features still don’t exist on your iPad or Mac, eliminating one of the advantages of using the same app on different platforms.)

Mail on iOS is pretty important to Apple’s plans for on-device intelligence. A lot of what an AI can know about you is gleaned from your text messages, calendar appointments, and most importantly, email. If people ditch Mail out of frustration, it undermines the value proposition of the iPhone.

I hope that Apple moves quickly in the new year to correct some of these issues. In the meantime, all of us expert users will get another Christmas in the trenches helping loved ones figure out how to get Mail to work the way they expect it to.


  1. You will not change my mind. I do not need tips. I don’t care about your system. Leave me alone. 

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]



By Dan Moren

Acorn 8 brings subject selection, Live Text, Data Merge, more

Not unlike text editors, image-editing software is a category that provokes strong feelings from its users. There are your Photoshop fans, Affinity users, and those who adore Pixelmator.1

Personally, I’ve been a longtime user of Flying Meat’s Acorn—and I do mean longtime: all the way back to version 1.0. Even though I’m primarily someone who deals with words, Acorn is an app that I find myself using daily, often for something as simple as cropping or resizing an image, but I’ve also used it for more complex tasks like designing book covers.

Acorn 8
Acorn now has a tool for selecting the subject of a photo, masking it, or removing the background.

The newly released Acorn 8 adds a bunch of great features to the mix. A few of them will be familiar to Apple platform users: subject selection uses machine learning to let you quickly isolate and grab the subject of a picture (there’s also a corresponding “Remove Background” feature to simplify that task) and a Live Text tool allows you to select and copy text within an image.

For me, the star of the show is the fascinating Data Merge, which is a bit like Mail Merge for images. If you’ve ever needed to create the same image several times but with different information—nametags, for example, or personalized gift cards—this is a life-saver. You open your template image, identify your variables, then hand Acorn a CSV file with the relevant data and it will process through them, assigning text where needed and even putting images in assigned layers. It’s the kind of wild automation tool that might not be something you need every day, but when you do need it, there’s really no replacement.

Acorn 8 has a bunch of other great additions, including an on-canvas ruler, support for JPEG-XL, and compatibility with Look up Tables (LUT) that let you quickly apply image color adjustments. And, be still my beating heart, there’s improved support for Shortcuts, for everything from cropping and resizing images to adding watermarks and dynamically assigning text.

There’s currently an introductory sale for Acorn 8: for a limited time, it’s just $19.99 instead of its usual $29.99, and there’s also a bundle with Flying Meat’s equally excellent Retrobatch batch image processing app. Plus, you’re supporting a small independent Mac developer, and that’s a good reason in and of itself.

[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.]


Myke prepares the way for a big arrival (including of many Upgrade guest hosts), we’re deeply puzzled by reports of a large folding Apple device, and Myke gets out the conspiracy yarn regarding what Tim Cook is up to in the United Kingdom.


The long, strange story of Audio Hijack

Audio Hijack is a thing of beauty. And we almost lost it.

Back in the early Apple silicon era, must-have Mac audio tool got a serious downgrade via a new installation process that required many steps and multiple reboots. The problem wasn’t really addressed until earlier this year, when Apple rolled out a bunch of audio permissions that allowed Rogue Amoeba to ship a new version of the app that didn’t require an installer or any reboots.

Now Rogue Amoeba leader Paul Kafasis tells the story:

In 2020, the disaster foreshadowed literally one sentence ago struck. Beta versions of MacOS 11 broke ACE, our then-current audio capture technology, and the damage looked permanent. When we spoke briefly to Apple during WWDC 2020, our appeals for assistance were flatly rejected. We spent weeks attempting to get ACE working again, but eventually we had to admit defeat. ACE as we knew it was dead in the water, and all options for replacing it involved substantial reductions in functionality. Though we did not discuss it publicly at the time, things looked grim for the future of our products.

Kafasis ascribes Apple’s change of heart to a passionate user base and a bunch of other developers (“some quite large,” he writes) who relied on Rogue Amoeba’s technology for their apps. Still, it took years for Apple to roll out a solution.

It’s scary to think that one of the Mac’s best apps could’ve been completely wrecked by Apple’s architectural changes. I’m glad that in this case, Audio Hijack and Rogue Amoeba’s other apps weren’t a victim of Apple’s out-of-balance attempt to lock down macOS without providing appropriate alternatives to fulfill the needs of users and developers alike.


By John Moltz

This Week in Apple: The sincerest form of flattery

John Moltz and his conspiracy board. Art by Shafer Brown.

The Vision Pro gains some respect while Image Playground is a thing you can now use. Speaking of getting used, look out, Johny Srouji!

C:\ONGRTLNS.AXR

While sales of the Vision Pro may not be huge, Apple does have a couple of feathers to add to its figurative cap.

Does Tim Cook wear literal hats? Will have to research.

First, Popular Science has named Apple’s latest the “Innovation of the Year”. Apparently the “popular” part is judged on a sliding scale, adjusted by price.

Calling it “a new dimension for augmented reality”, Popular Science likes the cut of the Vision Pro’s jib and thinks the platform has potential.

So, if you’re going to copy, why not copy from the best? Yes, the Vision Pro is apparently at least good enough to warrant a Samsung copy. That counts as a feather, right? I mean… not like an eagle feather. Something from a more common bird. Pigeon. Budgie, maybe.

“This Vision Pro clone from Samsung and Google is good news for Apple users”

It weighs less, will probably cost less, and looks as much like a Vision Pro as you’ve come to expect from Samsung’s crack Apple copying team. Whether or not anyone will want to use Android XR, which is now built around AI after Google changed gears, is still a question.

Personally, I prefer to get Google’s AI to tell me to use gasoline to make spaghetti on the web, not my face.

The hellmouth at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley

Apple released iOS 18.2 with additional AI features this week, so now everyone (with a new enough iPhone) can… enjoy? That doesn’t seem like the right word. Let’s just say “experience”, that’s neutral enough. Experience the flabbergasting, twisted nightmare of the soul that is Image Playground.

Have you ever wanted to see computer-generated images of yourself that look a bit like you but also not like you, like staring into a funhouse mirror? Without the fun?

Well…, has Apple got an app for you.

As Jason and Dan’s review details, the interface for Image Playground is pretty good. The results are another matter. I could show you some images it generated of me to drive home the point… but looking at them, I would really rather not.

Apple also delivered Genmoji and some new writing and drawing… again “features” doesn’t seem right. We’ll just call them “things” until we can sort this out. It’s questionable why we really want AI to take over the fun parts of life, like being creative, rather than the drudgery like doing taxes.

When I asked Writing Tool to make that last sentence funnier, it came back with:

Why do we want AI to hog the fun stuff, like painting masterpieces, instead of letting it handle the snoozefest of doing taxes?

It’s not terrible but… I would definitely not say AI is painting any masterpieces. Don’t quit your day job, Apple Intelligence. Whatever that may be.

Inside Intel

Things are going great over at Intel, thanks for asking.

After the forced retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger, Intel now apparently has its sights set on none other than Apple vice president of Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji for the company’s new head honcho.

Personally I would love to hear that pitch.

“Hey, we know you’ve got a nice position with a highly successful company at the top of its processor game, buuut how’d you like to come captain this sinking rowboat being rowed in circles miles from land? Before you answer, you should know that the rowboat is also on fire.”

Sometimes it is nice to take on a challenge (and make a crapton of money doing it), but that didn’t work out so great for Ron Johnson when he went to run JC Penney. Be careful what you sign up for.

[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.]


Intelligence .2 arrives and Jason’s next laptop phase

We give an overview of our thoughts on iOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2; Jason’s got a new laptop but there are still some problems to solve. (More Colors and Backstage members, our hourlong monthly Q&A is also in this episode.)

[The podcast will be off the next two weeks. Back January 3!]



The iPhone-as-computer experience

So many words spent handwringing on whether you can do “real work” on an iPad and yet nobody ever stops to ask the actual question: can you do real work on an iPhone? Nobody except for Ars Technica’s Scharon Harding anyway, who’s put together a fun little story about just that.

There’s something liberating about traveling without your computer. Your load is lighter, your battery needs are fewer, and you don’t have to risk damaging or losing one of your most important and expensive devices. Besides, most of us are already carrying around a pretty powerful and conveniently compact computer 24/7: our smartphones.

This does make me think a bit about the future of something like the Vision Pro. After all, as Harding points out, our iPhones are already tremendously powerful. Something like the Vision Pro’s Mac Virtual Display mode that could offer a larger version of your phone? I dunno, maybe there’s something there. As Jason’s recent laptop conversion makes clear, there is something to be said for having a single device with all your stuff on it.


By Jason Snell

Appearance: Apple Intelligence’s generic humans

Choose from three different collections of appearances.

On Wednesday iOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2 were released, and we wrote about it here. One of my complaints is that you can’t just make generic figures of people—you have to choose actual people in your library.

This is wrong. You can do it—I just completely missed the feature, because it wasn’t positioned or labeled in a way that made me understand what I was looking at. In the interest of correcting the record and also informing people whose brains work like mine, here’s the deal:

To create an image in Image Playground that doesn’t use the face of someone you know, click or tap the Choose… button with the word Person above it. This will bring up the person picker, full of faces from your Photos library. But in the top left corner of the picker is another option, Appearance.

Appearance dialog

The first time you click or tap Appearance, you’ll be prompted to choose a default appearance for your creations. (In subsequent creations, it’ll default to your previous choice, but you can change it by tapping Edit.)

In the Appearance view, you’ll be able to choose from five different skin tones and then from three different collections of Appearances. This is where it gets a little weird: Rather that building a person, Memoji style, you choose from three different collections of thumbnails, which are the various Appearances that might come up when you generate an image. They appear to be weighted by gender, so the leftmost is (mostly?) women, the rightmost men, the middle more of a grab bag—but there’s a lot of variation between each collection of Appearances.

Some appearance choices

That’s it. When you select a set, you’re ready to create an image. Unlike images generated from one specific person, you’ll find that different generations will be very different in this mode, because the entire appearance of the person can vary. As I swiped through a single set, I found young women, older women, young men, and people of various racial groups. It’s a grab bag. It’s meant to be generic. Go with it.

They all passed (or failed?) the Kobayashi Maru.

Once you’ve picked the Appearance, you can still add all the other prompts you want, either picked from Apple’s suggestion list or from your own terms. (I generated a bunch of starship captains with laser guns in space, enough to pack an entire star fleet.)

Choose your Genmoji base appearance.

In Genmoji, instead of picking an Appearance, you pick an “Emoji” as a starting point. You can choose between the generic female, non-gender-specific, or male emoji templates, and choose a skin tone. All the genemojis you create will be based on that template.


Our interest in current smart glasses, the smart tech we use to monitor our homes and pets, our thoughts on iOS 18.2 features like Genmoji and Image Playground, and how we organize and manage holiday gift-giving lists for ideas and tracking.


Video

December Backstage Zoom: Apple Intelligence and more

We got together with Backstage pass members live on Zoom earlier today to discuss all sorts of stuff related to this week’s Apple media event.

We’ve embedded the video below, or you can watch it on YouTube.

Thanks for being a Six Colors subscriber!



How Disney’s strategy has led to ESPN inside the Disney+ app, Disney and Netflix content strategies, Warner Bros. Discovery and Comcast make a deal, the ramifications of Comcast’s “SpinCo,” crafting a theatrical hit out of a Disney+ TV show, and TV picks!


By Jason Snell

Mic Drop mutes your microphone everywhere

Mic Drop interface
Mic Drop offers temporary floating status warnings and a persistent Menu Bar item as options.

I’ve gotten so used to having a physical mute button on my podcast recording setup that it’s quite disconcerting when I use a different setup that doesn’t offer one.

In the winter months, I work most of the time in “Studio B”, a second desk in a back bedroom that’s climate controlled in a way my drafty garage can’t be. My microphone here is a sturdy Shure MV7, but I’m connecting it via USB and its mute button is a capacitive circle that’s super awkward to reach.

As a result, I’ve been trying to find a simple way to mute that microphone using a similar gesture—push to mute, push again to unmute—that I use in my primary recording setup. After exploring a bunch of options, I’ve settled on Mic Drop, a free ($5 upgrade for pro features) Mac utility that does the job perfectly.

Mic Drop literally does everything I expected from it. It lives in your menu bar and has support for global hotkeys or AppleScript, optional audio and multiple visual notifications of mute status, the ability to choose which mics are muted and which ones aren’t, and even an optional push-to-talk toggle mode.

It’s a delight to find an app that doesn’t just do the basics, but (via its recently-released 2.0 update) offers all sorts of polish that elevate into a utility that’s truly worth recommending.

MicDrop is available in the Mac App Store.

(Update: It now supports Stream Deck natively, too, which is awesome.)


By Six Colors Staff

iOS 18.2/macOS 15.2 Review: Picture not so perfect?

Generating an image using Image Playground.

Apple Intelligence is back, and this time it’s visual. With the iOS 18.2, iPadOS 18.2, and macOS 15.2 updates, Apple is rolling out its second round of generative AI features, including its first image-related features like Genmoji, Image Playground, and Image Wand.

These features are, on the whole, more ambitious than the initial batch released back in in October, and some of them build on those features: for example, the ability to now generate specific changes to text in Writing Tools. This also marks the first third-party integration of generative AI features into Apple’s own platforms, with the ability to connect to ChatGPT.

Apple Intelligence features are also expanding geographically with these releases, coming to more versions of English, and there are even a few non-AI related features in the mix too, such as improvements to AirPlay and a new mail categorization feature on iOS.

But does this latest round of AI features move the needle in Apple’s quest to improve its users lives? Let’s delve in and see.

Continue reading “iOS 18.2/macOS 15.2 Review: Picture not so perfect?”…



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