It should come as a surprise to no one that Tim Cook is a very busy man. He’s the CEO of one of the world’s largest and most valuable companies—and he’s not just a stuffed, button-down blue shirt; he really cares. As we learned from a recent Wall Street Journal article, he uses every single Apple product every day.
Now, most of us are Apple product users. Many of us have more than a device or two. But even the most ardent among us may wonder how Tim can use every single product every day. It seems impossible.
So I did some digging, reached out to some sources, and I can now exclusively report that I have obtained a rare copy of Tim Cook’s detailed schedule. Behold.
4am: Wake up. Use HomePod mini to turn on lights, start coffee machine.
4:30am: Start Apple Fitness+ workout (dance, naturally) on Apple Watch Ultra 2, Apple TV 4K, and AirPods Pro 2.
5am: Check email on 11-inch iPad Air with Magic Keyboard over breakfast (yogurt, blueberry, and Cheerios smoothie).
5:30am: Drive to Apple Park, using Apple Maps on CarPlay.
6:30am: Finally reach Apple Park.
7am: Lament lack of Diet Mountain Dew. Check emails on 13-inch iPad Pro with Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro. Reply using Apple Pencil Pro. Doodle in Apple Notes.
8am: Morning staff meeting. In person, but all don Vision Pros to hold meeting in virtual environment of Apple Park conference room. Agree Tim’s spatial persona is as realistic as Tim, if not more.
9am: Thinking time. Don AirPods Max, stroll through Apple Park ring and check customer sat numbers on iPhone 16 Plus.
10am: Return to desk. Check email on M4 iMac (silver) with Magic Keyboard and Magic Trackpad. (Magic Mouse is charging.)
10:30am: Visit Caffe Macs. Diet Mountain Dew still absent. Perch at table with 13-inch MacBook Air. Check email.
11am: Pop in AirPods 4 for walk back to office. Text group chat with John Ternus, Jeff Williams, and John Gianndrea (Named “The Johns and also Jeff”) on iPhone SE. Agree to meet for lunch.
11:30am: Return to desk. Check email on tenth-generation iPad. Use Apple Pencil (not Pro) to draw diagram of new possible project:
12pm: Lunch time. Use AirPods 4 with Active Noise Cancellation to walk to Caffe Macs. Buy lunch for the Johns and also Jeff at Caffe Macs with Apple Card via Apple Pay. Eat salad. With apples.
1pm: Focused time with new product [REDACTED]. Try to figure out how it fits into life and, more specifically, schedule. Use Mindfulness meditation feature on Apple Watch SE to calm down.
2pm: Take 15-inch MacBook Air to Rainbow Stage. Practice “Good mornings.” Use 11-inch iPad Pro as teleprompter. Ignore looks from bemused passing employees.
3pm: Mandatory Memoji FaceTime with Craig Federighi via iPhone 16 Pro Max.
3:30pm: Return to desk, check email on 14-inch MacBook Pro.
4pm: Assistant swaps in 16-inch MacBook Pro while Tim relaxes in Bali on Apple Vision Pro and checks his email.
4:30pm: Afternoon stroll to close rings and use iPhone 16 Pro to track down AirTag that Phil Schiller hides daily on Apple Park campus.
5pm: Evening check in call with global division chiefs via iPhone 16.
5:30pm: Assistant wheels in Mac mini and Apple Studio Display. Check email.
7pm: Eat dinner while continuing Ted Lasso rewatch on 13-inch iPad Air. Finally drink Diet Mountain Dew and remember why living is worthwhile. Make note to FaceTime Jason Sudeikis with Season 4 thoughts. Put feet up on Mac Pro.
8pm: Drive home, listen to latest episode of Six Colors Subscriber podcast via CarPlay.
9pm: Relax with iPad mini in bed, reading latest Dan Moren novel in Apple Books.1
9:30pm: Use Siri via HomePod to turn off lights. Fire up Apple Watch Series 10 sleep tracking.
11pm: Wake from dead of sleep to fumble for bedside Mac Studio and Pro Display XDR. Check email. Breathe sigh of relief and go back to sleep.
[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.]
The hearing test first checks your fit and environmental noise (left). During the test, you tap the screen when you hear a tone, as the screen image throbs (center). Even if your AirPods Pro hearing test says you have little or no hearing loss, you’ll get a number that quantifies the small amount it finds (right).
When Apple launched new phones and other hardware in September, I said on a couple of podcasts that the AirPods Pro’s forthcoming hearing aid tech was the most important item on that day’s bill of fare. And finally, this week, the release of iOS 18.1 and updated AirPods Pro firmware brought the promised hearing test functionality to my AirPods Pro, along with the promise of software tuning to meet any hearing loss the test found.
Of course, all of it seems to have been eclipsed by the multi-day rollout of a bunch of new Mac computers. Still, somewhere between ordering a new Mac Mini and showing my coworkers the updated iMac colors, I took the AirPods Pro hearing test—along with a family member who has a longstanding hearing loss.
Is something wrong?
When AirPods Pro detects a mild hearing losss, you can proceed to set them up as a pair of hearing aids.
I’ve suspected for a few months that I’d lost a few frequencies in my left ear for age-related reasons. I don’t seem to hear as much detail from a big Sonos speaker in the kitchen, when I’m facing the other way, in the living room. I have some tinnitus, too, which is relatively new. Meanwhile, I’ve been spending a lot of time with a family member whose hearing has never been the greatest due to a number of childhood infections. So we both took Apple’s hearing test.
Once you’ve installed iOS 18.1, the test is offered by the AirPods Pro configuration screen. First, iOS runs a version of the AirPods Pro fit test, which I don’t think I’ve ever taken before. When I got my ‘pods, I just chose the smallest ear tips in the box.
Sure enough, I passed the fit test, and it was on to the hearing check. You’re tested one ear at a time, touching the screen anytime you hear a tone. Meanwhile, the image onscreen throbs in a way that convinced me that I should be hearing something, whether I did or not. I’m sure I tapped once or twice when I thought I was something was happening, but was not.
Hearing upgrade?
When the test for both ears was completed, I got the verdict: little to no hearing loss. iOS did offer to tune my earbud so that media listening would be the best it could be for me—sure, why not? Music did sound noticeably better with Media Assist. It felt like a nice qualitative improvement. A podcast I listened to sounded as though they had slightly more high frequencies. Nice, but the improvement in music listening was greater for me.
My family member, who is not a power user by any means, had been gifted a pair of AirPods Pro precisely because of the hearing evaluation and assistance features. Her test showed mild hearing loss, and she was offered the chance to set up her AirPods Pro as hearing aids. (Despite the ruling, she believes her hearing loss is more than mild.)
She wore her AirPods at home and in the car throughout the day. She has worn hearing aids before, and says that like those devices, AirPods Pro sometimes accentuate sounds she doesn’t want to hear, like the noise of paper being crumpled. Overall, her take is that everyday sounds are sharper in tone. She said she wasn’t able to lower the required volume of her kitchen television as she had hoped. She also noted that AirPods Pro need to be charged during the day. While that process is quick, she perceives the buds’ battery life as a limitation versus other hearing aids.
For my part, it’s tough to tell if AirPods Pro have made listening to media mind-blowingly better. It’s good, though. Your mileage will almost certainly vary. It’s also worth pointing out that you can retake the AirPods Pro hearing test at any time. That might offer some peace of mind if you’re worried about the trajectory of your hearing.
Our use of tech in Halloween celebrations; the smallest tech we regularly use and the small gadget that wowed us; which Apple Intelligence features we’re using and looking forward to next; and the one item we’d give up this week, tech or non-tech.
Twelve years ago, my former Macworld colleague Lex Friedman and I were at an Apple focused conference where we presented a talk called “Apple is Huge Now (And That Sucks For You)”. The long and short of it was that the Apple of 2012 was not the same Apple of the 1980s, 1990s, or even the 2000s—now Apple was a giant company that could less afford time worrying about you as an individual.
A decade-plus on, it’s hard to believe that Apple has gotten even bigger and that, fundamentally, each and every one of us matter that much less to it, but it’s unarguably true. Simply put, it’s a matter of scale—the company simply can’t afford to spend the same amount of time worrying about its customers that it could have twenty years ago, because there are just that many more of them.
In its role as one of the largest purveyors of technology in the world, Apple has no choice but to adopt a perspective of scale. This comes to play in all sorts of decisions the company makes, from the biggest of the big to the smallest of the small.
This week, all of Apple’s Mac announcements have featured one trend beyond the arrival of the M4 processor family on macOS: The lifting of base RAM configurations from 8GB to 16GB across the board on new models.
But it’s actually not just new models that are getting this boost. On Wednesday Apple also reconfigured its most popular laptop, the MacBook Air, to feature 16GB of RAM across all configurations at the same starting prices: $999 for the M2 model, $1099 for the M3 model.
With this move, there’s not a single new Mac being sold directly by Apple with less than 16GB of RAM. This is a big deal, because Apple doesn’t change base RAM that often—it’s a source of lucrative upgrade revenue.
As pointed out by Friend of the Site David Schaub, Apple’s base RAM figures tend to stick around for a long time. On consumer Mac laptops, since 2011 the base has only increased once—to 8GB, back in 2017.
Based on Schaub’s charts and the prevailing conversation in my own circles, these changes certainly feel long overdue. But let’s not be too quick to applaud Apple for its largesse here. Remember, Apple Intelligence (and AI models in general) tend to require a whole lot of memory to run well. The advent of Apple Intelligence seems likely to be the real motivator in giving even the cheapest Macs—a $599 Mac mini and a $999 M2 Macbook Air—a full load of 16GB of memory.
Apple’s week of Mac reveals rolls on with Wednesday’s announcement of the M4 MacBook Pro line. In some ways this is the smallest update of the week, but I’d wager that Apple sells far more MacBook Pros than iMacs and Mac minis put together. So in some ways, this is the biggest announcement yet.
The new 14-inch M4 MacBook Pro base model now starts at 16GB of RAM—the days of base 8GB of RAM in Macs seem to be at an end—but retains the same base price of $1599. Unlike last year, where only more expensive configurations gained access to the Space Black shade, this year all MacBook Pro models come in just Silver and Space Black, even the base M4 model.
The 14-inch base model now has ports on both sides!
The M4 model sports three Thunderbolt 4 ports, one more than in the M3 model. And, yes, this means that the base-model MacBook Pro now has Thunderbolt ports on both sides.
The MacBook Pro’s best feature is its gorgeous Liquid Retina XDR display, which gets a boost in the M4 generation by getting quite a bit brighter, with a maximum of 1000 nits (up from 600) in standard-dynamic-range mode. (The max peak brightness in HDR mode remains unchanged at 1600 nits.) There’s also now a nano-texture display option, for laptop users who really need to get screen glare out of their eyes.
The 14-inch MacBook Pro also comes in higher-end chip configurations, and the 16-inch model only comes with the more powerful chips. The M4 Pro, which technically debuted Tuesday with the Mac mini, is of course also available on these models. It sure seems like the M4 Pro is the chip to gain the most between generations, with 75% more memory bandwidth and performance. Apple claims the M4 Pro is 30 percent faster than the M3 Pro, and three times as fast as the M1 Pro. The M4 Pro maxes out at 14 cores, 10 for performance and four for efficiency, can have as many as 20 GPU cores, and starts at 24GB of RAM with configurations up to 48GB. M4 Pro models start at $1999 (14-inch) and $2499 (16-inch).
But of course, there’s more—the M4 Max chip is making its debut in these systems. The M4 Max just offers more of everything, from its 16 CPU cores (12 performance, four efficiency) to up to 40-core GPU, to support for up to 128GB of memory.
Both higher-end chips support Thunderbolt 5, with doesn’t just support much faster data transfers, but also twice as much power delivery (200 watts, up from 100 watts in Thunderbolt 4), which is probably more relevant to a laptop than it would be to a Mac mini.
All three chip levels get a major webcam upgrade to the 12MP Center stage camera, which is the first Mac laptop webcam upgrade in quite a while. And Apple is claiming that all models can get up to 24 hours of battery life, which seems like a bit of a major milestone, even though (as always) battery life is not a simple thing to measure, and can vary widely based on how you use the computer in question.
Apple is taking pre-orders now, and the new MacBook Pro models will arrive in customers’ hands on Nov. 8.
Alexa is still mainly doing what it’s always done: playing music, reporting the weather, and setting timers. Its capabilities have expanded — Alexa can now do useful things like control your lights, call your mom, and remind you to take out the trash. But despite a significant investment of time, money, and resources over the last decade, the voice assistant hasn’t become noticeably more intelligent. As one former Amazon employee said, “We worried we’ve hired 10,000 people and we’ve built a smart timer.”
I’ve had some sort of smart speaker in my house since the first Echo, which I reviewed back in 2015, and I agree wholeheartedly with Tuohy’s assessment. There was a real feeling of breakthrough to that original product, but—not unlike Siri—it feels like it never really moved a base level of functionality, despite all of Amazon’s efforts.
I think a big part of what has stymied Amazon in particular is trying to figure out where the Echo fit into its overall strategy. If Apple’s business is selling hardware and Google’s is selling ads, Amazon’s biggest might be shopping? But the shopping experience from the Echo has always been weird and less than ideal. 1
Some of these problems might get resolved by the introduction of large language models that make voice assistants like Alexa and Siri more responsive, but again, as Tuohy points out, the real challenge is acting on our requests—to which I’d argue, the real underlying subtext is that whether we can get to a point where we can trust the voice assistants to do what we’re asking them. If you can’t—if the worry is that you will ask it to water your plants and come home to find your house flooded—then this whole technology is nothing more than an evolutionary cul de sac.
My wife and I still regularly joke about the time when, after having bought several ceiling fans from Amazon in the process of renovating our now house, the Echo weeks later chimed, seemingly at random, and suggested that it might be time to order more ceiling fans. ↩
Just in time for Halloween, Apple has delivered a new version of its smallest Mac, which you could probably even fit into one of those plastic pumpkins.
As a current Mac mini user (and someone who’s owned three or four of them over the years), I eyed today’s announcement with interest and, if we’re being painfully honest, no small amount of envy. This M2 Pro Mac mini sitting on my desk? It’s fine. Well, truthfully, it’s better than fine: it’s great. I use it every day and it never bats an eye at any task I throw in its direction. It’s just a year and a half old, and as we know with Apple Silicon Macs, these things last. (Just ask my M1 MacBook Air.)
But the siren song of the new and shiny is always alluring, and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t already priced out a new M4 model within a few minutes of its announcement. But in true Halloween fashion, there are some spoooooky factors to consider that make a swap not quite straightforward as you might think.
Treat: The mini-est Mac ever
It’s jut so wee. At 5 inches square, the M4 Mac mini is more than a third smaller in both width and depth than its 7.75-inch predecessor—in fact, it’s closer in footprint to the 3.66 inches of the Apple TV 4K. (Although at 2 inches, it’s a bit taller than both the M2 mini and the Apple TV.) I won’t say my desk space is at a premium—all you have to do is look at the junk strewn across it—but the idea of freeing up some room is pleasing, as is the fact that the M4 models weigh about a pound less than the M2 models—aluminum may be light, but it’s still metal.
Trick: Memory games
32GB was dead all along!?
My current M2 Pro Mac mini has 32GB of RAM; the M4 Pro Mac mini ships standard with 24GB of RAM, but the upgrade options are 48GB for an extra $400 or 64GB for an extra $600. That’s not an insignificant cost to meet (and, to be fair, beat) my current specs. Would I choose to pay the money or downgrade? Now that’s a dilemma.
Treat: USB-C what I did there?
I’ve been calling for this ever since Apple proved it could put ports on the front of its desktop Macs with the Mac Studio, and I’m pleased as punch it delivered. No more maneuvering behind my mini or Studio Display when I want to plug in a thumb drive or security key. I could even plug in the audio interface on my desk with a shorter cord if I needed to. Convenience! Function over form! Who would have thunk it!
Treat/Trick: Audio port affront
…Wait, there’s an audio jack in the front too? Look, having just extolled the virtues of front-mounted USB-C ports, I feel that I would be a cad to ding the design for putting the headphone jack there too. After all, if you’re plugging in headphones, you don’t want to root around in back of the mini every time.
Except I use my audio port to keep a pair of desktop speakers plugged in, which is a little awkward from a cable management perspective. Sure, I could use a dongle, I guess, but then I’m eating up a valuable Thunderbolt 5 port for speakers. Maybe it’s time to—*gasp*—finally ditch those desktop monitors in favor of the Studio Display’s built-in ones.
Trick: Trade-in shun
Yes, I did go ahead and price out exactly how much Apple would give me for my pristine Mac mini with a 10 core CPU/16 core GPU M2 Pro, 32GB of RAM, and a 1TB SSD. It’s practically brand new, well, from April 2023. And the result was…$445.
Look, I’m not saying that’s nothing compared to the cost of a brand new computer, but it is on the sobering side. They say your computer loses half the value when you drive it off the Apple Store lot, but that’s more like two-thirds! I’d probably fare better selling it elsewhere.
Ultimately, I think an M4 Pro Mac mini is unfortunately not in my future, even though I keep getting misty-eyed when I look at the pictures. But good news: given the last design of the Mac mini lasted effectively fourteen years, this one’s not going anywhere soon. So I guess there’s always the M5.
[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.]
Just in time for Halloween, it’s a Fun Size Mac mini. The redesigned M4 Mac mini has a footprint of five inches by five inches (and two inches high), making it 60 percent less volume than the previous design and easily the smallest desktop Mac ever.
The previous Mac mini design dates from all the way back to 2010, when it was sized to incorporate an internal optical drive! That was terrible timing because of course that was the last generation of the Mac mini to even offer an internal optical drive as an option. Still, all the extra space inside that 7.75-inch-by-7.75-inch footprint was probably helpful in fitting in PowerPC and Intel hardware… and cooling it. Now, fourteen years later, the Mac mini is sized for the tiny, cool Apple silicon era at last.
Behold! (Image: Apple.)
Following the lead of its larger silver-aluminum cousin, 2022’s Mac Studio, the new Mac mini features two conveniently front-facing USB-C ports (but no SD card slot). On the back are three Thunderbolt ports, as well as Ethernet and HDMI. Apple says the new enclosure uses 85% less aluminum than the previous model, is partially made of recycled aluminum, and is officially Apple’s first carbon-neutral Mac.
The M4 Mac mini starts at the same $599 price point as the previous model, despite the fact that the base model now ships with 16GB of RAM, twice the previous 8GB minimum. (All M4 models come with 10 CPU and GPU cores.) Of course, prices escalate quickly from there, if you want to add RAM or storage capacity or a 10G ethernet option.
While the M4 Mac mini will undoubtedly be quite a bit faster than its M2 predecessor, there are more substantial gains to be made on the higher end. Just as with previous Apple Silicon-era models, the new Mac mini will also be available in a higher-end chip configuration.
The Mac mini with the new M4 Pro chip—which starts at $1399—supports the upgraded Thunderbolt 5 specification, comes with 24GB of RAM (upgradeable to 64GB), offers 14 CPU cores (10 performance and four efficiency) and up to 20 GPU cores, and 75% faster memory bandwidth (!!!) than the M3 Pro. The base model has 12 CPU cores and 16 GPU cores; a $200 upgrade gets you the full 14 CPU cores and 20 GPU cores. As with the M4 mini, the M4 Pro model can very rapidly cost you $2500 or $3000 if you boost RAM, storage, and more.
And keep in mind, the Mac mini was never updated to the M3—its last update was to the M2 in early 2023. So if you’re just looking at the Mac mini, the model-to-model speed boosts will be even more impressive than the gains between this chip generation and the last.
Finally, if you’re afraid Apple has cheated by moving its power supply outboard to make the Mac mini smaller, don’t worry. Just like the previous Mac mini, the new model’s power supply is internal, and it’s connected by the same two-pin power plug used in previous models. (The only difference is that Apple’s now using a braided power cable.)
The new Mac mini models will arrive in stores and customers’ hands beginning Nov. 8.
We kick off a busy week by analyzing the new M4 iMac, the arrival of two different waves of Apple Intelligence, and Jason’s review of the iPad mini, but we’ll have to wait a week to score our draft because there’s more yet to come!
With the release of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, Apple is hopping aboard the generative AI train. Apple Intelligence is a suite of disparate features, first announced earlier this year at the company’s Worldwide Developers Conference, that the company is gradually rolling out over the course of several software updates in the next months.
The first round of these features includes a few different capabilities, most prominently a systemwide set of Writing Tools; summaries of notifications and email messages; minor changes to Siri (with more coming later); and tools in Photos that led you remove unwanted elements or create themed movies with just a text prompt.
It’s unquestionable that Apple is putting its weight behind these efforts, but what’s been less clear is just how effective and useful these tools will be. Perhaps unsurprisingly, for anybody who has used similar generative AI tools, the answer is a definite maybe.
Begun, the week of Mac announcements has. Apple on Monday unveiled revamped iMac models, powered by its new M4 processors, in a series of bold new tints.
The iMac’s design remains largely the same as its predecessor, with a 24-inch 4.5K Retina display, although Apple has now added a nano-texture option, à la the Studio Display and the new iPad Pro, for some models.1 There’s also now a 12MP Center Stage capable webcam, replacing the previous 1080p option. Apple also notes that this version supports the Desk View feature that allows it to show the user’s desk in addition to their face.
While the colors remain the same—blue, purple, pink, orange, yellow, green, and silver—Apple has tweaked the backs of the computer with more vibrant versions of most of the colors.
The new M4 iMac green and pink colors (left) compared to the M3 models (right).
The M4 iMac comes in a handful of configurations: a $1299 base 8-core CPU/8-core CPU model with 16GB of RAM (double the previous 8GB, and expandable to 24GB) and a 256GB SSD (configurable up to 2TB), along with two Thunderbolt 4 ports. The previous model offered only two Thunderbolt 3 ports along with two USB 3 ports. This model supports a single external 6K external display at 60Hz in addition to the built-in display. Gigabit Ethernet is available as a $30 configuration option.
The higher end $1499 model features a 10-core CPU/10-core GPU processor and adds the ability to go up to 32GB of RAM as well as an additional two Thunderbolt 4 ports and Gigabit Ethernet standard. There are also $1699 and $1899 configurations as well; the former upgrades to 512GB of storage, while the latter includes both that and 24GB of RAM. Any of these configurations offer the nano-texture display for an additional $200, and can drive up to two 6K external displays at 60Hz or a single 8K external display at 60Hz. (Apple’s iMac website originally said 120Hz, but that was an error that the company has corrected.)
VESA mount versions of all models are available at the same price.
Along with the new iMacs, Apple has at long last updated its input peripherals with USB-C support, offering color-matched versions of the Magic Keyboard, Magic Mouse, and Magic Trackpad. They remain otherwise unchanged, including the lack of an inverted-T arrow key layout and the Magic Mouse’s underside charging port. It’s also worth noting that the $1299 base model includes a Magic Keyboard without Touch ID standard.
The new iMac models are available for pre-order today and will be on sale as of November 8.
However, those two products use different techniques to achieve that finish and it’s unclear as of this writing which the iMac is using. ↩
[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.]
This week we get to know Tim Cook (did you know, for instance, that he is CEO at Apple Inc.?) and get a gut check on Apple’s AI position. Ultimately, however, we’re just biding time until next week.
Tim time
The Wall Street Journal got up close and personal with Tim Cook last weekend, getting all the dirty deets you want from the top dog at Apple. For instance:
The first thing Tim Cook does when he wakes up is check his iPhone.
No way! That’s what I do! Then I pull the covers up over my head and try to WISH IT WOULD ALL GO AWAY for an hour but ultimately give up and crawl reluctantly out of bed. Does he do that part, too?
Of course not! Cook checks emails and does work. Then he exercises. Also, Cook does this all of this like three hours before I even think about waking up. I’m saying there’s a reason he’s CEO of Apple and I’m not. (I’m guessing some kind of nepotism.)
Other details you will find in this creampuff of a piece: Cook also likes Diet Mountain Dew (but is above commanding his underlings to stock it at Apple) and only recently tried out naming a Messages thread, at the suggestion of the reporter.
The next time we meet, Cook proudly reports that he’s named the group chat with his college roommates: Roommates.
Nailed it.
Better late, then never
According to Mark Gurman, some at Apple believe the company is as much as two years behind on AI.
For example, internal studies at Apple reportedly show that OpenAI’s ChatGPT is 25% more accurate than the new Siri and can answer 30% more questions.
The good news for Apple is consumers really don’t care.
According to a YouGov survey, most consumers would rather have more battery life. Complaints about AI include it not being helpful (25 percent), not wanting to pay a subscription fee for it (45 percent), and privacy concerns (34 percent). One guy said AI “smelled funny” but I think that result was tossed as an outlier.
It wouldn’t be the first time Apple was behind on a technology and it didn’t end up mattering at all. Maps, for example, was a bit of a disaster on launch and now manages to get most people who use it where they’re going, with very few instances of people driving into ravines.
And it barely smells at all.
Big week
Rest up this weekend, because if the rumors are true then next week will be huge. But before we get all excited, let’s just see who’s spreading these rumors.
But if you put your money on Apple throwing an in-person event next week, looks like you’re out $5 (NO REFUNDS). The only event that Apple looks to be throwing is one for a select group of “media/creators”. I’m not sure if that’s “media and creators” or “media creators” or “media divided by creators”, the math of which I cannot do.
It’s unclear exactly how the company will stage this out but we are expecting to see new M4-based MacBook Pros, iMacs and a redesigned Mac mini.
The really big news, though, is the little things. According to Mark Gurman and the laws of common courtesy, Apple will finally (FINALLY!) be updating the Magic Keyboard, Mouse, and Trackpad, finally (FINALLY!) ditching the Lightning port for USB-C.
Which can only mean that USB-D is right around the corner.
[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 week, the first round of Apple Intelligence will be loosed on the general public, including the Clean Up feature in Photos that lets you alter images to remove unwanted elements. This is not a new feature in photography—in fact, Photos is probably the last photo utility in the world to get a feature like this.
But that won’t stop some very loud, reactionary voices complaining about Clean Up as if it were the end of the world. And of course, as with any high-profile Apple announcement, there have been media reports that purposefully try to take features like Clean Up to extremes far beyond what anyone would reasonably do. The approach that leads to headlines like “I only ate peanut butter for a week!”
Last year, people were starting to get very existential about image editing because of the first version of Google’s Magic Editor, and everyone suddenly became concerned that Apple’s image pipeline was getting too over-engineered. People should really have not gotten so hung up on what even is a photograph, maaaaaan.
The photographs you take are not courtroom evidence. They’re not historical documents. Well, they could be, but mostly they’re images to remember a moment or share that moment with other people. If someone rear-ended your car and you’re taking photos for the insurance company, then that is not the time to use Clean Up to get rid of people in the background, of course. Use common sense.
Clean Up is a fairly conservative photo editing tool in comparison to what other companies offer. Sometimes, people like to apply a uniform narrative that Silicon Valley companies are all destroying reality equally in the quest for AI dominance, but that just doesn’t suit this tool that lets you remove some distractions from your image.
This is where everyone with a computer engineering degree starts saying, “But, but, but…” Because they are uncomfortable with any kind of ambiguity. How can removing a distraction from the background be ethical when hallucinating an image of the northern lights is not? Aren’t they all lies? Through the transitive property, doesn’t that make them both evil?
Yes and no. (Indistinct grumbling.) Ethically, what is the subject of your photo? Who is the audience for the photo? What do you want to communicate to the audience about the photo?
If the subject of the photo is my boyfriend, the audience is the people on Instagram who follow my boyfriend’s private Instagram account, and the thing that he wants to communicate is that he was in front of a famous bridge in Luzerne, then there is no moral or ethical issue with me removing the crossbody bag strap that he had on for some of the photos I shot.
I took the photo, composed with him in the center, as is the way he likes these things composed, and then he remembered he had the bag on and didn’t want the bright green strap. He did move and wanted different framing, though that I didn’t feel was as good as the first shot. I told him I thought the other one I took with him and the strap looked the best for the narrow 9:16 Instagram Story framing, and he agreed, but he wanted the strap removed.
See, that composition on the one without the strap just isn’t as good. However, he didn’t like the strap in the one with the strap. Problem solved with editing.
This was before the release of Clean Up, so I fired up Pixelmator on my iPhone, removed part of the bag with the retouching tool, and then copied and transformed the shoulder and part of the shirt collar from another image. Certainly not as easy as Clean Up, but things like his shoulder are genuine images from another slice in time instead of total reconstructions using only the image being edited as a source (I feel like this is a shortcoming of Clean Up and would like a 2.0 that can source from patterns in surrounding photos, but I digress.)
The point is that yes, the image is no longer courtroom evidence, but courtroom evidence of what? That he never wears bright green bag straps? Who would care about such a thing? Certainly not the audience of people who follow his private account on Instagram that just like to see a photo of him smiling in front of some bridge in Switzerland. That’s exactly what the photo was.
Morally, I’m totally fine with all that. He was at the bridge. He did, at one point, not have that strap on his shoulder. I wasn’t removing a tattoo. I didn’t fabricate a different background for the photo.
“But, but, but!” Yes, I know, it’s not 100% what happened all in that same sliver of time. “The bag strap is part of the moment!” Yeah, but there were all those photos where he’s holding it below the frame, off his shoulder. No one is going to argue that I should have framed the shot to include him holding the bag for truth. Why would they?
For some reason, even the most literal of literal people is fine with composing a shot to not include things. To even (gasp!) crop things out of photos. You can absolutely change meaning and context just as much through framing and cropping as you can with a tool like Clean Up. No one is suggesting that the crop tool be removed or that we should only be allowed to take the widest wide-angle photographs possible to include all context at all times, like security camera footage.
Another example from that day in Luzerne was when we got lunch in a neat brewery by the river. He had a big copper still behind him, but he also had that dreaded green bag and my reflection in that still. I just cropped it. It was the simplest solution. However, he did have a water bottle that I removed with a retouching tool. Is that different from cropping out the bag? Again, is there some court case about water bottles or bag straps? No. No one would care. This is for the people who follow his Instagram Stories. Crop it, and use Clean Up; it’s ethically equivalent.
Artistic considerations
I will provide two counterpoints for when not to use Clean Up that has nothing to do with morality, just to show that there are other artistic considerations. If you have a photo that has a crowd of people in the distance at a landmark, then leave them alone. Those indistinct clumps of people provide scale for the landmark and a sense that you’re not traveling in some world devoid of humanity.
Not every person in the background of a photo is a candidate for removal. You don’t want to be at a haunted beach or a waterfall that could be 2 feet or 200 feet tall. If one bozo has a highlighter-yellow fanny pack, then sure, remove, or selectively desaturate that in Pixelmator or Lightroom. (Gasp! More lies!)
The other time to not use Clean Up is when you have some overlapping areas of high detail behind, or in front, of what you’re trying to remove. Tools like Clean Up, just like all other retouching tools, work best when the thing you’re removing is fairly isolated and distinct, with a very indistinct area of fill behind them. If you’re trying to remove a guy standing in front of a tapestry, then it’s probably not going to go very well. If the foreground subject matter you’re keeping has long hair blowing in the wind, then the bozos behind that hair are not going to be removed cleanly. Wait until they at least walk to the screen left or right of the hair.
People can understand these limitations and use them to make creative choices while they’re framing their shots. If there’s a bozo that’s standing in front of a wall, and they’re just not going to move any time soon, then get a shot where he’s near the edges of your foreground subject (it’s a digital camera, so take a bunch of shots) and then you can have an easier time removing them. Also, things like Portrait Mode (more lies!) can help, especially since Portrait Mode has substantially improved its image segmentation and edge detection. That blurry bozo is even easier to fill in with blurry background than detailed background.
Above all else, remember that if it’s just a bad photo, then it’s just a bad photo. You can keep it for yourself instead of sharing it or trash it if you prefer. Even with every photo-editing tool under the sun, they can’t all be winners.
Don’t get it twisted
Like I said earlier, this is about common sense, and if, upon some introspection, the thing you find alarming is that you don’t know how to ethically use this tool, then it’s totally fine if you don’t use it.
However, I don’t want to see silly, sweeping statements from people that foist their anxieties based on their ignorance onto other people. I don’t want to see all image editing tools lumped together with one another, or worse, with every other thing that has “AI” in the name. These tools are not all the same thing. These photos aren’t all the same. Use your brain and not some puritanical binary rule to lump all edited photos together. Let people have photos that they like!
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
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Last month, my Mac Studio stopped working. It went quickly from a bizarre error message to the inability to install software updates to a failure to reinstall the base operating system to a trip to the Genius Bar. (Shout out to Apple Genius Jim at the Corte Madera Apple Store for instantly detecting the problem!)
Unfortunately, the solution that got my Mac going again involved entirely wiping the drive. Once I got home from the Apple Store with a functional Mac Studio, I had to pick up the pieces and get my Mac back to a functional state.
It took almost no time because of one choice I made a few years back. And I’m going to encourage you all to make the same choice, if you haven’t already.
I got up and running in no time because I keep a USB drive permanently attached to my Mac Studio, and make sure it’s a complete clone of my drive. When I reinstalled macOS Sequoia, I was able to use Migration Assistant to restore from my cloned backup drive, and it returned me to more or less the same state I had been in when the computer died. (I also rely on files synced with the cloud, which was another help.)
So here’s my two-fold advice for every Mac user, especially if you tend to leave your Mac docked in one place most of the time1:
First, buy an external SSD that’s as big or bigger than your Mac’s internal hard drive. My Mac Studio has a 1TB internal drive and I bought a Samsung external 2TB drive on Amazon for about $175. Today’s external drives are small, silent, and bus powered—a far cry from the external drives of yesteryear. Since my Mac Studio lives under my desk, I just plugged the drive in and slid it next to the Mac Studio in its holding shelf. It’s invisible.
Next, I set a disk cloning program to run every day, in the afternoon, and clone my entire internal drive to the external one. My Mac Studio is currently using Carbon Copy Cloner, but other Macs of mine use SuperDuper! which works more or less the same way. The clone task is automatic and scheduled, so I don’t have to do anything, and it’s as invisible as the drive itself.
Yes, I also do a Time Machine backup—because it’s nice to have redundancy and it can be helpful in grabbing a file that’s changed in the past. It used to be that Time Machine was a must-have because your cloned disk wasn’t really a backup, since it only contained the most recent view of your disk, and if a file was deleted a few days earlier, it would not be retrievable.
But with the advent of Apple’s APFS filesystem, tools like Carbon Copy Cloner use the APFS snapshot feature to fill up all the excess space on your backup drive—remember, I bought a 2TB drive for a 1TB disk—with previous versions of your disk. So there are some extra layers of protection, though I’m still running Time Machine and Backblaze too. You can never have enough data protection.
It used to be that to restore from a clone, you needed to boot your Mac and then clone the copy back to the original disk. These days, they work perfectly with Migration Assistant, so it’s very easy to get up and running in a short amount of time. And of course, the disk I bought runs at USB 3 speeds, so it was even pretty quick. A couple of hours after I brought my Mac Studio home from the Apple Store, it was back in working order as if the disaster had never happened.
If you roam around with a laptop, it’s a little more cumbersome, though you should still do it. ↩
Over on Mastodon, I was embroiled in a whole conversation about fonts we use for writing. I write exclusively using monospaced fonts, and have done so for decades now.
Anyway, I shared my favorites: JetBrains Mono is my current go-to. Craig Hockenberry likes the old-school flavor of IBM Plex Mono. John Gruber uses Consolas in BBEdit’s dark mode, Source Code Pro in MarsEdit’s light mode, and Berkeley Mono in the Terminal.
And for the record: I write in light mode in BBEdit, MarsEdit, and (on iPad) 1Writer, but when I’m editing code in BBEdit or Nova I try to do that in dark mode. Similarly, my Terminal is eternally dark, with bright green letters, because I like to pretend I’m a cyberspace cowboy.
A couple weeks back on MacBreak Weekly, Leo Laporte pointed me to the very clever site Coding Font, which lets you step through a tournament-style bracket of monospace fonts to find the one you like the best. Unfortunately it’s lacking a bunch of the options mentioned above, but if you’ve ever been curious about switching up your terminal font, it’s worth a go.
