Developer Tim Rogers’s litra-rs project on GitHub is a freely available command-line tool for controlling not only the Litra Glow but the Litra Beam and Beam LX key lights. By specifying command line options you can turn the light on or off, toggle the power, and adjust both brightness and color temperature as either an absolute value or relative to the current setting. You can even get all the information about your currently connected devices—including having it provided in JSON in case you want to more easily connect to some external apps.
Most convenient of all, it’s available via homebrew, making it a snap to install and set up.1
On its own, this would be good enough; it’s a simple matter to write a shortcut or use some other utility to easily control these features from a keyboard shortcut or the Stream Deck. However, Rogers also offers a second app called litra-autotoggle that makes life even easier: it automatically turns on the light whenever you activate your webcam and turns it off when you’re done.
I love this: the only thing better than making these devices easier to use is making it so I don’t have to think about it at all. There are some additional options to require that a device be present or only work with a specific light or camera on your set up, but otherwise it just chugs along in the background and doesn’t bother you.
I’d still love to see a GUI wrapper for this app to make it easier to adjust brightness and temperature without having to figure out numerical values or resort to Logitech’s own not great software, but for the moment, this setup makes life way easier for my videoconferencing life.
There’s also a precompiled binary, source code, and installation via Cargo, if that’s how you roll. ↩
[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.]
My book about Apple’s Photos app on Mac, iPhone, and iPad has been updated to cover some additional stuff announced with the iPhone 16. It’s a free update for fourth edition readers.
Also, Take Control is currently doing a Black Friday sale, so for everyone else it’s 50% off through midnight CDT on Tuesday, December 3.
CarPlay comes to GM cars, despite the company’s desires; Apple faces more regulatory headwinds; and, no, that AI supercycle is not happening.
CarPlayin’ around
I often keep tabs open with stories about GM’s travails since grandiosely ditching CarPlay and Android Auto because I am a big fan of cringe comedy.
So, in reviewing my open tabs for this week’s column I ran into this interview The Verge did earlier this month with GM’s VP of software, Baris Cetinok. Cetinok defended the company’s move, saying:
“You get the most out of your vehicle because now we’re the company that builds the vehicle and is also creating the infotainment experience, the cluster experience, the app, and everything. We’re going to build that one day and maybe a voice assistant on top of it.”
And a pony.
For its part, The Verge noted:
Every time we do a Decoder episode with a car person, we talk about CarPlay, and then we get an avalanche of emails from people who say they’ll never buy a car without it.
I might be a little more amenable to the idea that you should own the whole stack if much of that user experience didn’t already exist outside of the car environment and wasn’t owned by smartphone companies and if it was a company other than GM trying to do it. Ah, yes, put the company that made the Corvair and the Vega in charge of my entire user experience. Mmm, nice.
Good news: this week the market stepped in and said “Enough!”
White Automotive & Media Services of New Hudson, Mich., has created a fully integrated CarPlay/Android Auto system for Chevy EVs. You know, if you don’t want to wait for GM to cobble a pony together from spare parts.
Everybody’s doing it
Oh, boy, more Apple regulatory news this week. Yayyyyy.
Oh nooo. Will Chinese citizens not be allowed to know the awkward pleasures of wandering through Image Playground’s uncanny valley? First they had to suffer through the Cultural Revolution and now this?
This stuff makes writing about daily deals look interesting.
Honestly, maybe it’s self-indulgent, but I’m really tired of talking about Apple’s run-ins with government regulations. I started writing about Apple because I loved its products. I didn’t start writing about it because I loved fights between companies and regulatory agencies over app store rules. There weren’t even any app stores when I started writing about Apple! That would have been impossible!
Gah.
I wonder if Jason would mind if I just started captioning these sections something like “EU fines Apple for Candy Crush approval fiasco” but then put my Star Trek fan fiction in the body.
It’s good stuff. All post-Dominion War.
There’s a dryly sarcastic Andorian security officer.
No one asked for this
Get ready to put on your surprised face because, according to IDC, AI is not driving a smartphone supercycle as many had predicted.
Wait, nobody wants that thing nobody asked for?
Weirrrrd.
“While GenAI continues to be a hot topic and top priority for many vendors…
Vendors, not customers.
…it is yet to impact demand significantly and drive early upgrades.” said Nabila Popal, senior research director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.
You can add another feature almost no one wants to this bonfire of the tech vanities.
“New foldable phone models continue to grab headlines despite the low volumes in the market,” said Anthony Scarsella, research director with IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.
Apple was able to inch up iPhone sales and the smartphone market overall is growing but not because of AI or foldables. (Someone really thought foldables would drive an upgrade cycle? I’m gonna need names.) So, why are people buying new phones? Just to upgrade. And when they do, they’re getting cheaper phones.
Rapid Android growth of 7.6% year-over-year focused in APeJC, Latin America, Middle East and Africa and China, primarily in low end devices…
Still, big tech’s current favorite technologies cannot fail, they can only be failed. IDC insists sales of foldables will grow in double digits through 2028 and:
…we continue to believe GenAI will revolutionize the user experience in the years to come…
Technically 2167 is one of the years that will someday be coming. Then when AI is finally viable because it’s actual artificial intelligence instead of Rube Goldberg-style large language models, the heads of these analysts that are being kept alive in jars will be able to say “I told you it was going to be a hit technology.”
Heads in jars always get the last laugh.
[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.]
Here in the United States, it’s our annual tradition of Thanksgiving, in which we prepare way more food than any group of people we can eat. Also, we give thanks for the things that we are grateful for over the past year, such as…uh…there was that…no…maybe when…oh, right…how about that one…oh did they? Geez. Well, I’m sure I’ll come up with some any time now.
As your local and organically sourced Apple columnist, it seems only appropriate that I take this occasion to call out a few things that I’m grateful Cupertino has bestowed upon us in the last year. I mean, without Apple, where would I be?1
Run DMA: Who doesn’t enjoy a good battle royale? Forget Apple taking on Microsoft or Google; it’s graduated to the big time now: an entire continent. The amount of back-and-forth, back-and-forth between the European Commission and Apple is like watching a tennis match where one player is slamming the ball as hard as they can while the other is tipping it gently back over the net with minimal effort. Also there are billions of dollars at stake. What I’m saying is that I’m finally starting to see why people enjoy sports.
The Vision Pro provides: With the Apple Car out of the running, we’ve been badly in need of a new punchline, and the Vision Pro has delivered in spades. A ridiculous looking headset that’s mainly good for playing movies and occasionally pretending that you can still afford to go to the beach after you’ve spent all your money on the thing that lets you pretend you can go to the beach? Frankly, I’m starting to wonder if that $3,499 price tag was just so we could all have something to sit back and have a good laugh at. Come on, these are hard times; everybody deserves a little humor.
Not so intelligent, are you?: The main reason I appreciate how much Apple has spent developing and promoting its Apple Intelligence features is that they are all still so bad it makes me look great by comparison. Although, to be fair, I’ve been drawing people with six fingers since I was a kid, and nobody’s ever decided to invest billions of dollars in me. At least the next time my parents lament the ridiculous amount of money that my education did cost, I can at least point out that I write a better email than a computer.
Money money money money…monnnnneyyyyy: Apple making billions of dollars every quarter doesn’t directly benefit me, but I’m honestly glad because it seems to empower the company to feel like it can do whatever weird things it wants to (see the Vision Pro). Oh no, your growth slowed this last quarter and you only made $20 billion in profit? The horror. Why don’t you go build a robotic HomePod or something—that will make you feel better. I don’t miss the days of worrying that Apple might go out of business any minute—but I am now concerned about the world exploding first. Real trade-off vibes there.
The M1 chip: Here we are, four years later, and my M1 MacBook Air is going strong. Stronger than ever, I’d argue. Last night I caught it bench-pressing my M2 Pro Mac mini just for fun. Honestly, I’m a little scared of it now, which is why I will, uh, definitely not be replacing it any time soon. (Help.) It’s just so good at what it does, that I may never need to buy another computer. (I’m whispering because it can hear me.) So, Apple should probably just stop building new M-series processors already—why bother when it already achieved perfection the first time around? (I’m AirTagging myself now, please come find me before it does.)
[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.]
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Our tech use with family and friends during the holidays; gadgets we’d bring for a long, power-limited day trip like attending a Supreme Court rally; seeking or avoiding Black Friday tech deals; and the apps we use for recipe discovery and management.
Apple, it’s often been pointed out, generally isn’t the first to enter a specific product category.
Take, most recently, the reports that Apple’s working on a version of Siri backed by large language models that’s not expected to be announced until next year before rolling out to users sometime in 2026.
Does that feel a little late when other rivals are showing off products like these now? A bit, but the truth is Apple is a bit like a wizard, arriving neither early nor late but precisely when it means to.
It’s not the first time, either. The personal computer, the digital music player, the smartphone…these are all markets that the company arguably defined, even though its entrants often came years after its competitors.
That philosophy has been baked in since the company’s earliest days, and yet it’s one that has only gotten more entrenched over time because the company’s large balance sheet allows it to take these kinds of risks.
Apple’s movie mistakes, Comcast pushes cable channels onto the ice floe, Diamond exits bankruptcy, Netflix goes live, the holiday season as a streaming opportunity, and our TV picks!
Apple might recommit to the smart home, Smart Siri feels a long way off, Apple’s movie movies anger Hollywood creatives, and Jason’s done with the era of App Store exclusivity.
Apple reportedly considers going where it never went before as it gains the attention of yet another government watchdog. And then, are you ready for a smarter Siri? Well, don’t worry if you’re not, it’s still years away.
Gene Munster’s revenge
Time is a flat circle much in the way an Apple television would be a flat screen.
Definitely put this in the “I’ll believe it when I see it” category but I think I’m slightly more amenable to the idea now than I was 15 years ago because of stuff like this:
So, I’m paying $16 and up a month each to Disney, Max, Apple, Netflix, Hulu and whoever else happens to have a show that someone in the house wants to watch… and my TV wants to see what I’m watching and show me ads on top of that.
Well, joke’s on them because I never connect my TVs to the internet! You can’t catch me, advertising companies, I’m like the wind!
Even if Apple made a privacy forward television with the Apple TV part baked into it, would it have enough HDMI ports? Could anyone afford it? And what would it be called? You already used “Apple TV”!
Television hasn’t always been a big winner for Apple. Bloomberg reports that Apple will start licensing some of its movies to other services in order to defray costs. That might help but it’s a beginner move, Apple. Everyone knows the big money is in making movies and then never showing them anywhere ever. Get with the program. Which is, oddly, deprogramming things.
The Bank of Apple
There are a lot of things that a younger me would find surprising were I able to time-travel back 20 years.
A tragically high number, really.
Right in the middle there — somewhere between the horrible state of national affairs and the amazing state of 3D home printing — would be “Oh, yeah, by the way, Apple’s a bank now.”
The company mostly has Apple Pay to thank for its newfound ability to pull off wearing a top hat and a monocle while reading a copy of The Wall Street Journal, chewing on the stub of a cigar, and murmuring “Hrmm. Ahhh. Mmm-hmm. Yes, quite. Pork bellies.”
The CFPB recently took on looking over technology firms that handle more than 50 million transactions per year using digital payments, which means both Apple Pay and Google Pay.
50 million sounds like a lot but I bet at least 500,000 of them are mine.
Siri 2: Electric Boogaloo.
If you’ve been holding your breath until Apple ships a much-improved Siri… well, you’re probably dead. Still, don’t start now because it’s still two years away.
The new system will take a two-tiered approach to satisfying you needy customers.
…Apple will use a first-generation Apple LLM to evaluate requests to determine whether the existing Siri infrastructure should be used, or if a second LLM that’s able to handle more complex requests should be queried.
This is great. Now when you have a problem with Siri, you can ask to speak with its manager.
While Siri will be previewed early, Apple does not intend to launch the update until several months after it is unveiled.
AI is always six months away from being really awesome.
[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.]
Next year, [Apple] will reportedly launch an “AI wall tablet for home control,” and it’s said to be developing more devices for the home (including cameras, a tabletop robot, and maybe even a TV). Among other features, such as video calling, this new smart display will reportedly be a hub for Apple’s home automation platform, Apple Home, providing a communal household interface for controlling smart devices like lights, locks, security systems, and cameras.
It’s about damn time Apple took the smart home seriously, having let Apple Home / HomeKit largely languish in the decade since its launch. All signs point to a renewed interest here, kick-started by the company’s involvement in Matter (a new smart home connectivity standard it helped develop) and spurred by a need to find its next big thing.
This is a piece I was planning on writing, but I guess I don’t have to, because Pattison Tuohy makes every point I was going to make. All I can add is that if you look at Apple’s annual financial trends, you’ll see that after several years of major growth, the Wearables, Home & Accessories category has stalled out.
The Apple Watch and AirPods can only do so much. Maybe Apple has finally realized that for this category to grow, the company will need more of a home strategy than “benign neglect.”
Today I’m excited to launch the public beta of Sill, my new social media tool. Sill connects to your Bluesky and Mastodon accounts and aggregates the most popular links in your network. (Yes, a little like Nuzzel.)
Nuzzel was an all-time great service, and I still miss it. Sill is meant to be an open-source replacement of a sort, trawling your social-media feeds (it currently supports Mastodon and Bluesky) for popular links and aggregating them in a single place.
I’ve been using Sill for a few days, receiving a daily email with highlights from my social feeds at a time of my choosing (sent to my Feedbin account), and it’s extremely promising. Even better, some of the things it’s obviously missing—like support for lists, which are really popping off on my Bluesky feed these days—are in the plan for the future.
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
1Password wants you to understand the details about how laws like GDPR can affect your business. The EU enacted GDPR in 2018, and the days of betting that you’re too big or too small to be noticed by GDPR are over.
You need to comply, and it’s not the kind of thing you can solve by buying a tool or
scheduling a training session. You need to collect only the data you truly need to function, and secure the data you have. Starting with common breach culprits like compromised passwords might be a good idea—sensible advice from the maker of a fine password manager.
Apple’s spent a lot of time investigating alternative ways of interacting with its devices, but one of my favorite is one of the newest: head gestures with AirPods.
If you’re not familiar with this feature, introduced in iOS 18, it allows to you use a head nod (up and down) or a shake (side to side) as substitutions for OK and Cancel. For example, you can answer or decline a phone call, reply to or dismiss a notification or message.1 It works with both the AirPods Pro 2 and the AirPods 4 line.
I love this feature. Is it a little silly at times? Sure. But there are plenty of occasions where I can’t easily get to my phone or Apple Watch—say I’m carrying things in both hands, or wearing gloves—and I don’t necessarily want to talk to Siri. Nodding and shaking my head is second nature, and I like the audio feedback the AirPods provide to encourage the gesture.2 Could it be a little better? Sure; at times I feel that I have to move my head somewhat too vigorously, which probably looks a bit comical. (More so than talking to Siri? Probably not.) But I also have faith that the machine learning algorithm Apple is no doubt using to detect these movements will be refined with time.
What I wish, though, is that there were more options for gestures. For example, I’d love the ability to change volume or move back and forth through music tracks using a head gesture—say tilting my head to the right to increase, tilt my head to the left to decrease. I appreciate that the AirPods Pro 2 have the ability to slide your fingers up and down to adjust volume, but I find those controls finicky at times, especially while wearing gloves in the cold of winter. The same goes for using the Digital Crown on my Apple Watch—if it’s even on the right screen for it. More often than not, I just try to hit my phone’s volume button while it’s inside my pocket, which isn’t much better.
As an Apple Watch Series 7 user, I haven’t gotten to really try out the gestures there, but I have briefly used the hand gestures Apple added in visionOS 2 and found those to be winners. As Apple continues to develop these platforms and add more sensors to its devices, I expect these kind of alternative interactions to only increase, and I, for one, am here for it.
You can also swap those if you prefer, which would do my head in, but is a handy accessibility feature. ↩
[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.]
My current desktop Mac, the one I work on day in and day out in my garage/office, is an M1 Mac Studio. I’ve had it for almost three years, and it’s still great.
I know it’s great because from time to time, I end up using a M2 MacBook Air to encode a video or demux a Zoom recording or transcribe a podcast and find myself wondering exactly what is taking so long. Oh, right. It’s a base M2. The M1 Max blows it away, as it should.
But with the arrival of the M4 Macs, I’m tempted like never before. There’s now a M4 Pro-based Mac mini, and the M4 is just so much faster than the M1 that I could replace my Mac Studio with a tiny Mac mini and actually see a noticeable speed boost. One of my M4 MacBook Pro review units is an M4 Pro, and I can see just how fast it is. What’s more, I can run a bunch of benchmark tests to make myself uneasy:
There it is, in black and white. The same chip in the $1599 M4 Pro Mac mini generates a single-core CPU score that’s 73% faster than my Mac Studio and a multi-core score that’s 92% faster! Less than three years on, the pace of Apple silicon has turned my Mac Studio into something that even generates lower CPU scores than the base M4 Mac mini.
So it’s settled, then?
A GPU problem
Not quite. The 20-GPU-core M4 Pro MacBook Pro is only 8.7% faster than my 24-core M1 Max Mac Studio. One of the big benefits of the Max-class chips is that they’ve just got more GPU cores. And while I’m not much of a gamer or a 3-D graphics pro, there are several machine-learning-based tasks I frequently perform that hammer the GPU. The M4 Max in the MacBook Pro starts at 32 GPU cores and is configurable up to 40.
If I traded in my Mac Studio for a Mac mini, I’d get a big CPU boost, but only a meager 8.7% improvement on GPU. Meanwhile, if I wait until next year, I can probably get a base-model M4 Max Mac Studio that’s firmly in crossover territory with the Mac mini.
(A strange feature of the Apple silicon Mac era is that you can configure a Mac mini so that it costs more than a Mac studio. Yes, that model has more RAM and storage than the comparable Mac Studio, but it’s really close. And for a couple hundred bucks more, wouldn’t I want to hold out for a dramatic increase in GPU speed to go with those improved CPU cores?)
So it’s settled, then?
The desktop laptop
“Join us, Jason.”
This is when I made the mistake of talking to a couple of my computer nerd friends. They suggested that since I spend a lot of time in the winter working in my house’s back bedroom (which has central heating), instead of trying to get my garage up to a workable temperature via a space heater, I might actually be better off buying an M4 Max MacBook Pro and toting it back and forth between the two spaces.
Oh, I do not want to contemplate the laptop-as-a-desktop lifestyle, mostly because I did that for years during the Intel Mac era and it wasn’t great. Using Apple silicon laptops attached to external displays and peripherals is a much, much better experience, but… do I really want to do that to myself?
Advantages: I wouldn’t have to keep making sure settings are synced properly between devices. Using the computer in the back of the house has reminded me that despite all the ways that I can now keep documents in sync across computers via cloud services, some stuff on my Mac still doesn’t sync. It wasn’t so bad when nothing at all synced because I had zero expectations. Now, I want it all to Just Work, and it doesn’t. A laptop would solve this problem—and solve it on the road, too.
But… this also means I would need to travel with a 14-inch MacBook Pro. They are great, don’t get me wrong, but I’m a refugee 11-inch MacBook Air user now accepting life with a 13-inch MacBook Air. Do I want to travel with a larger laptop? (Or, if I mostly use the iPad when I travel, does it not matter?)
I don’t have a good answer. It feels like every week for the next six or eight, I’m going to have a moment of weakness where I click around on Apple’s website, configuring stuff and looking at the final price and realizing it’s a bit high and then closing that browser window. Until the next moment of weakness.
This is what they call the tyranny of choice, right?
How we deal with physical media, the most tech heavy restaurants we’ve patronized, tech that ended up disappointing us, and the social media networks of yesteryear that we’d bring back.
