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.
Personal computers started out simple. So simple that you could just type in programs and run them, save them, and even give them to your friends. But over time, things got more complicated. A lot more complicated.
To a kid growing up in the 1980s, the idea that the maker of your computer would actively stop you from using software it didn’t approve of would have seemed beyond the pale. It certainly would’ve been a deal-breaker. And yet so many of today’s computing devices are locked down—for some good reasons, but also a lot of bad ones.
What do we want the world to look like in the future? Is the destiny of the most important invention of the last half-century, the computer, to become a series of locked-down devices controlled by the giant companies that designed them? Should the iPhone be the model for all future devices?
If Apple’s locked-down approach in the App Store era is our future, it’s a bleak one indeed. But there’s good news: Apple has also built a system that provides security, flexibility, and responsibility while letting device owners run the software they want to run.
It’s called the Mac. When we consider the future of computing devices, the Mac is the model we should aspire to, not the iPhone.
In my previous post for Six Colors, I wrote about why Apple’s Clean Up (and photo retouching tools in general) were a fine tool for people to have in their photo editing toolkits.
Now that Clean Up has been released in iOS 18.1 and macOS 15.1, I’d like to go over some technical things I’ve noticed while using it, and seeing the ways it is similar and different from some other photo retouching tools—like the ones I used in the previous post.
Is Apple trying to boost revenue by truly embracing smart home products, or is it too late? Also, Jason reviews Kindles while lamenting the current state of e-readers, and the Vision Pro gets new accessories and a music video by The Weeknd!
The product will take the form of “a wall-mounted display” that resembles a traditional home security panel.
The device will run Apple Intelligence, be priced “far less than” $1,000, and will show a grid of icons for a number of status indicators such as the temperature, stocks (eye roll), and appointments.
It will feature a square display that Bloomberg says is roughly 6 inches and “about the size of two iPhones side by side, with a thick edge around the display.”
Sources indicate Apple already hates the thick edge with a fiery passion and will stop at nothing to get rid of it.
The device will also feature a camera, so it’s unclear if it’s the same product as this:
Kuo said mass production of Apple’s smart home camera is scheduled to begin in 2026, and the company apparently aims to sell tens of millions of them over the long term.
Bigger than a Vision Pro but smaller than an iPhone. Got it.
More regulatory fun
Apple is facing more regulatory scrutiny as the EU is back at it again.
There is a whole slew of “Be honest” memes you could make based on the AI industry but the most salient one would be about none of this “AI” being “AI”. And it turns out you can only squeeze the large language model stone so much before you notice all the blood you’re getting is coming out of your hands, not the stone.
Leading artificial intelligence companies including OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are facing “diminishing returns” from their costly efforts to build newer AI models…
Try throwing some more money at it, see if that works.
“The AGI bubble is bursting a little bit,” said Margaret Mitchell, chief ethics scientist at AI startup Hugging Face
Still cannot get over that name.
Founder 1: “AI can be scary to people. What should we name our startup?”
Founder 2: “What if… hear me out… it implied we were smothering people?”
[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.]
With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.
Designed from the ground up to protect your privacy, Magic Lasso blocks all intrusive ads, trackers and annoyances – stopping you from being followed by ads around the web.
Monday Night football on ABC, streaming delays, and more TV picks. (Downstream+ subscribers also get: an Unrivaled new sports TV product; Amazon’s deal with the NBA; and pondering the limits of the NFL.)
On Halloween, Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter results, posting another flat sales quarter even while continuing to beat all-time quarterly revenue records. And as usual, I filled a bunch of numbers into a Numbers spreadsheet, ran my little charting Automator app, and posted out a bunch of (six?) colorful charts.
It being the fiscal fourth quarter, of course, means it’s also the end of Apple’s fiscal year. That gives me the opportunity to cart out a separate set of charts, ones that take the longer view and show the changes in Apple’s business over an entire year.
Let’s dig into the charts, starting with the big one, overall Apple revenue for the last 26 years:
After the extreme revenue gains Apple made in fiscal 2021 (probably due to a combination of sales egged on by the pandemic and the arrival of Apple silicon), the past three years have been much quieter. While 2022’s record revenue was the proverbial “tough compare,” the fact that the company has held on to most of the revenue from that record year is still pretty impressive—unless you’re an investor who is only looking for signs of more growth.
Speaking of growth: Usually, in the year or two following a major growth spurt, there’s a backslide year, and that was most definitely 2023. But 2024 follows a bit of another trend: after the backslide, a stabilization. This fiscal year’s modest 2% growth rate won’t wow many people, but it does show improvement from the slight 3% slide last year.
Of course, the driver of half of Apple’s revenue is the iPhone. As the iPhone goes, so goes Apple:
The iPhone more or less matched last year’s total. (There was actually a $600 million improvement that got washed out of my chart because I’m so jaded that I round to the nearest billion.) The most interesting things to note in this macro view: Unlike the last two revenue spikes, which were followed by two down years and then another spike, this latest four-year period features a spike, a growth year, and then two slightly down years.
What does that mean? I don’t know, but it suggests that Apple’s most recent sales peak was a bit longer, and the resulting post-peak period also seems to have been extended. After a couple of three-year periods, we’re currently in year four of the current reset. What 2025 has in store is anyone’s guess.
Now let’s look at the Mac, which followed up its record-breaking 2022 with a down year, but has found a new plateau:
The Mac’s sales increased massively in 2021 and even further in 2022. The combination of COVID lockdowns driving sales and Apple moving to Apple silicon led to unprecedented Mac sales. But last year, the Mac came back to earth.
In 2024, the Mac stabilized and grew by about $600 million. The good news for Apple is that after all those new sales, the Mac didn’t take a few years off because literally everyone who wanted a new Mac had just bought one. In fact, Apple’s continued insistence on comparing new Macs to Intel-based models shows that it clearly thinks there are still many Intel Macs in the installed base that are ripe for updates.
If you remove 2020 and 2021, Mac sales figures have continued to grow at a steady pace for the last 15 years, after a huge growth period in the first decade of the century. After a decade of hanging out in the $20s, the Mac seems to be a $30 billion-a-year business with room for growth.
It’s been a rough comedown from pandemic highs for the iPad:
After a nice spike in 2021, iPad sales are down for the third consecutive year. However, it’s all a matter of perspective. Even with a gap of more than a year with no new iPads—until the line began to be refreshed earlier this year—the last four years of iPad sales are all higher than any year since 2014.
Will history repeat itself, with the iPad receding into a six-year slide into the doldrums of low-$20-billion years? I’m doubtful. Quarterly iPad sales have perked up thanks to, you know, the release of new iPads. I don’t think a $30 billion sales year is going to be a regular occurrence, but after the late-2010s doldrums, it does feel like the iPad’s in a better place.
Now let’s look at the popular and growing Services and Wearables, Home, and Accessories lines:
After eight straight years of annual growth, the Wearables curve is bending the other way. $37 billion is still a big number, but it’s the lowest total since 2020. And the arrival of the Vision Pro didn’t really contribute at all to that number.
Apple’s recent AirPods announcements suggest that it’s re-engaging with that product for the first time in a little while, and Apple Watch sales seem good but not spectacular. I wonder if Apple’s rumored re-engagement with the smart home market might goose these numbers over the next few years. We’ll see.
Turning to Services, Apple has yet to run out of fuel for its growth rocket. In the last few fiscal years, Services have grown by $14B, $10B, $7B, and $11B. After the iPhone, services are Apple’s second most important financial line. Next year, they will almost certainly crack the $100B level. There’s a reason Apple has added services to its classic secret-sauce cocktail of hardware and software.
This brings us to the final chart, which I run here every year to properly contextualize all of Apple’s product lines. When I run the numbers as individual charts, they all seem more or less the same. But they are very definitely not all created equal. (It’s still impressive to see Services lift away from the others, though.)
See you back here next year for more annual charts!
As the cavalcade of M4 Macs rained down upon us last week, it became clear that Apple has established a solid rhythm for updates to its processor line. So far, it’s been four years and we’ve seen four generations of Apple silicon chips, each more impressive than the last. In everything from computational and graphics capability to power efficiency, the era of Apple-made processors has proven to be a ground change for the company.
But even such an astounding success comes with challenges. As Apple has increasingly carved out its own category in the PC market, the company has left behind many of its classic competitors. It’s rarely compared to old rivals like Dell or HP, and even its biggest counterparts, such as Meta and Google, don’t care about the same categories.
In truth, Apple’s been left with just one real challenger—the one company it can never quite beat.
E-readers have always been a strange product niche, not just since that oddball first-generation Kindle, but since our first attempts to make computerized books in Hypercard or on PalmPilots.
Paper books are a great medium, tested by the centuries—but the prospect of packing as many books as you want into a small computing device has been a temptation too great for many of us to ignore. Others remain unmoved; the Kindle didn’t destroy paper book sales, and even in my own house, I’m usually found reading an ebook while my wife is almost always reading a paper book.
For those of us who love e-readers, though, that love can be fierce: I love reading books, mostly fiction, and according to GoodReads I’ve read 58 so far this year! Almost all of those were ebooks. E-readers take up very little space (even for massive thousand-page tomes!); download books (either from a bookstore or library) instantaneously; offer a respite from the distractions of our phones, tablets, and computers; let you pick your own typeface, size, and other visual specs; work flawlessly in bright sunlight but also light themselves gently when they’re inside; are easy on the eyes because they’ve got reflective screens that work just like paper; have batteries that last vastly longer than our other tech devices; and are generally waterproof, so you can read at the pool or in the tub or on the beach without worry.
My love for e-readers is strong. But there apparently aren’t enough people like me to feed the growth of a technology category, so the last few years the e-reader manufacturers—and I’m going to focus on Amazon’s Kindle and Rakuten’s Kobo because they are the leaders in this space—have been trying to find other use cases beyond reading text on a page, so they can bring in more users and make more money. Many e-readers support a stylus for handwritten notetaking, something that makes sense to me on a large, PDF-friendly device like the Kindle Scribe, but makes less sense on a small, trade-paperback-sized device.
The latest tech innovation in e-readers, driven by some remarkable engineering breakthroughs by E Ink, the maker of the screens on all of these devices, is the addition of color. Earlier this year, Kobo rolled out a series of color displays, and replaced its excellent Libra 2 with the $220 Libra Colour.
As remarkable as E Ink’s color screen tech is, it comes with one huge tradeoff: the screen’s got a visible light gray dot pattern, which is always there and decreases contrast when you’re just reading words on a page. Words on a page! It’s kind of the top priority when you’re reading a book, I think. If you’re going to degrade that experience, even a little, the trade-off needs to be worth it.
