Brian Williams will bring live news to Prime Video, but what’s the future of streaming news? Also: More cable bundles include streaming services; Amazon programs a night of game shows; Netflix’s coming compensation crunch; and a Diamond/MLB update.
Apple’s often got a reputation as an uncompromising driver of new technology. Look no further than the classic example of shipping the original iMac without a floppy drive or legacy ports, or designing the iPhone without a hardware keyboard, or even killing off the iPod mini to make way for the iPod nano. The company certainly puts forth an image of pushing technology forward without dwelling on the past.
But while those examples might get a lot of attention, the Apple of these days is a bigger, more ponderous organization—a battleship that can’t simply turn on a dime. As a result, the move to any new technology takes time, and often what came before isn’t excised in months, or sometimes even years.
So as much as Apple might like to see itself as an unstoppable force barreling ever forward, you don’t have to look too far through its lineup to see plenty of places where it’s still clinging to the past, even if it’s out of sheer practicality.
Our preferred devices for listening to music out loud, recent frustrating tech-related customer service experiences, current social media habits, and examples of technology that have recently impressed us.
In the demo, you can see Nguyen and Caine Ardayfio, the other student behind the project, use the glasses to identify several classmates, their addresses, and names of relatives in real time. Perhaps more chilling, Nguyen and Ardayfio are also shown chatting up complete strangers on public transit, pretending as if they know them based on information gleaned from the tech.
It’s really creepy stuff. Nguyen and Ardayfio aren’t releasing the tech behind it, but most of this system is built on top of publicly available information from online databases and LLMs that anyone can use. The pair have also detailed the places you can go to try and opt out of some these databases (but there are a lot of them and not all of them make it easy).
As Song points out, part of what makes this extra unsettling is the fact that Meta’s smart glasses are largely indistinguishable from a normal pair of glasses, and the only indication that they’re capturing video (a small privacy light) is subtle and hard to notice in daylight. (At least Google Glass was pretty obvious.)
In some senses, we’ve all gotten used to having cameras all around us all the time, but the even more sobering fact is that if this is what two college students can cook up with mostly off-the-shelf ingredients, it’s not hard to imagine what a giant company or government agency with a lot more resources could do.
Meta, however, seems less than concerned:
For its part, Meta cautions users against being glassholes in its privacy policy for the Ray-Bans. It urges users to “respect people’s preferences” and to clearly gesture or use voice controls when capturing video, livestreaming, or taking photos.
Yeah, don’t be creepy when using Meta’s smart glasses. That’s Meta’s job.
It’s rare that I find a new app that immediately becomes part of my workflow, but it’s just as rare that an app as useful as Croissant comes out.
Hailing from indie developers Aaron Vegh and Ben McCarthy, Croissant aims to simplify the process of posting to multiple social media sites. You know what I’m talking about: in the wake of Twitter’s X-ification, many of us are dealing with a splintered social media landscape. I, personally, have been reading and posting on no less than Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky, and boy am I tired.
This came to a head last week as I was promoting the launch of my latest book and various ancillary projects like new t-shirts and a live event. Copying and pasting posts between those three sites was practically a full-time job1, especially when they included pictures with attendant alt text.
But I got a chance to try Croissant in beta last week and it absolutely saved my sanity. It supports text and images, complete with that alt text, as well as threaded posts, and lets you choose which services you want to post to each time. You can also archive drafts for later, choose post visibility on both Mastodon and Threads, and add content warnings for Mastodon.
There are some limitations, however. For example, right now, while you can insert images from your Photos library, you can’t copy and paste, which can be frustrating. There’s also no support for GIFs or videos as attachments. And it’s currently only designed for the iPhone.2 Many of those are on the app’s roadmap, according to the developers.
There are also issues that are beyond Croissant’s control: for example, tagging other accounts can work, but you won’t get autocomplete, and if a username doesn’t exist on a service it’s just going to show up as text. And ultimately it’s still only an app for posting to multiple networks, not for reading all of them in one place. But such are the vagaries of social media in 2024.
Croissant’s free to download and give a whirl, but it requires a subscription for posting to multiple services: either $2.99 per month, $19.99 annually, or $59.99 forever.
On the iPhone with its—sigh—still very limited copying and pasting abilities, it felt less like a job than something that I was paying for. My sins, perhaps. ↩
The app does sort of work on the Mac, though not without some interface quirks (pop-up sheets that you can’t dismiss, for example). ↩
[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.]
Jason and Myke break down Meta’s preview of its Orion AR glasses project and what it says (or doesn’t say) about the future of Apple’s Vision product line. Also: An Apple Intelligence timeline, Masimo board intrigue, and a million-dollar celebration.
Say what you will about them being ridiculously expensive to build or not actually a shipping product, but Meta’s AR glasses, shown off last week, have accomplished a feat I thought utterly impossible: they have stopped us from talking about AI for at least two, maybe three days. To be honest, that may be the best feature they’ll ever have.
Remember just a few years ago, when wearables was the hot new market we were all obsessed with? Before AI and crypto and NFTs and the increasingly rapid destruction of our environment? Well, kudos to Meta for kicking it old school and going full retro.
But if you’re going to keep the wearables market fresh and new, it’s time to push the envelope. Smart glasses are so obvious. Google tried its hand with Google Glass a decade ago. We know Apple’s been trying to build them for years. It’s all old hat.1
No, if a company is looking to really rejuvenate the wearables market, then it needs to think outside the box. No more smart watches, or smart rings, or smart nose piercings2. Here are my modest pitches for five smart wearables that will change the
Smart belt: First, let’s get it out of the way: Orion should have been the codename for Meta’s smart belt.3 Come on, we all know they’re working on it. Keep track of your waistline? Automatically expand after a big meal? Could they have made one that wouldn’t have been so bulky it looked like Batman’s utility belt? No. Would that have been a dealbreaker? Also no.
Smart cufflinks: Honestly, the casual cufflink market just never really had its day. But that’s all about to change with smart cufflinks. They’ve got all sorts of useful potential features, like letting you track how many times you’ve rolled up your sleeves in a day. Or…actually, no I think that’s it? Look, they’re not all going to be winners.
Smart socks: Socks make the man, as the expression does not go but definitely should. I’m always torn between buying basic black athletics socks and zhuzhing up my wardrobe with more fun footwear. Smart socks are clearly the way to appeal to everyone. Color changing, pattern changing, throw in the ability for a quick foot massage and maybe even automatically moisturizing and you may never take off your socks again. Did I mention anti-odor technology?
Smart monocle: The primary purpose of a monocle is as a status symbol, to let everybody out there know that you are rolling in dough. Look what kind of icons you could bring out to advertise: The Penguin? Uncle Moneybags? Mr. Peanut? And the only thing that says “rich” more than a monocle is a smart monocle. Plus, the most obvious advantage? Half the cost of smart glasses.
Smart anklet: It’s like a smart watch for your leg. (This pitch writes itself!) That means even more accurate tracking of your steps, helping you improve your soccer game, and most importantly, being something unobtrusive that you can wear at all times with a built-in GPS to share your location with important peo—you know what? I see where this is going and I’m going to stop right now. Really sorry.
Unless that hat…is a smart hat. Are you picking up what I’m putting down? Which is, in fact, my smart hat, because it is too heavy to wear for more than about twenty minutes. ↩
Aromatherapy-enabled, obviously. What, you don’t have one? ↩
For glasses, they should have gone with something like Argus if they were married to the whole Greek mythology angle. Or maybe, I dunno, Scorsese, if the wanted to go pop culture. ↩
[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.]
Executives are in the news this week as Tim Cook discusses pressed meat products, Jony Ive is what you’re not wearing and Sonos… hoo, boy, those ding-dongs at Sonos.
The Timmy and Jimmy show
You won’t believe this. In an amazing coincidence, TV’s Jimmy Fallon happened to be first in line at the Fifth Avenue Apple Store, and who should come out to deliver his new iPhone to him? Guess. You’ll never guess in a mill-
Yeah, it was Tim Cook. How did you know? That’s so weird!
The result is a five minute ad for Apple that ran on The Tonight Show in which Fallon touches Cook’s face as part of a Vision Pro gag. This is not something I would personally want to have done to me knowing where that hand’s been, but your mileage may vary.
Still, it’s very informative. For instance, did you know that Tim Cook will sometimes get a hot dog while in New York? True story. Or… maybe. Who knows? It’s a thing he said. Fallon then correctly guessed that Cook likes mustard on his hot dogs which, wow, might as well have also guessed that he likes a bun.
Fallon: You don’t just eat the hot dog bare with your hands?
Cook: Noooo. Noooo ah doooon’t.
What’s harder to believe is when Cook, in touting the benefits of Apple Intelligence, says he personally likes it because it can summarize all the emails he gets. Does Cook really use that feature, though? I’ve seen some of those summaries. I don’t think I’d bet the most valuable company in the world on them. Or a New York hot dog.
Thanks to a collaboration between Ive’s LoveFrom and a French fashion brand, you can get these nylon jackets with revolutionary new buttons made from magnets, the thing where no one knows how they work. It’s nice that they’re made from recycled materials, but if I’m paying $3,000 for a jacket, it better be made out of something rarer than nylon, like the silk of an extinct spider or the dreams of children stolen throughout history by a time-traveling sword mistress and her sassy robot sidekick.
The magnetic buttons are cool, though.
Ive was also in the news this week for confirming in an interview with The New York Times that he is working with OpenAI’s Sam Altman on an AI hardware product. That’s quite a feat in and of itself as no one else seems to be able to work with Altman for very long. But with the track record of these AI hardware devices to date, I hope Ive’s getting paid up front. Otherwise he’s going to have to sell a lot more $3,000 jackets.
Facing the music
Apple updated its Apple Music Classical app this week, an app which is now already a year and a half old. They grow up so fast. The new version adds liner notes, orchestra information, and composer biographies. Yes, now you can easily see whether the composer died from consumption, war, lead poisoning, or just patron neglect. At least Apple is paying them some respect.
Apple commissioned high-resolution digital portraits of famous composers like Ludwig van Beethoven, Frédéric Chopin, and Johann Sebastian Bach for the app…
What, they didn’t use Image Playground? What happened to eating your own dog food?
(By the way, as someone who once ate a Beggin’ Strip just to see what all the fuss was about, I can say the analogy is appropriate. Both look like the real thing but lack all the essential quality and taste that make them the real thing.)
One app that hasn’t received a much-need update (right into the sun) is the Sonos app. Despite the company’s promise to update it every two weeks until it’s just right (or all the yelling stops), the company has failed to keep up with that schedule. What’s more, according to Bloomberg, Sonos shipped the app over the protests of its employees.
Executives. You can’t live with them, you can’t… uh, live with them? I don’t have another option.
[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.]
The game is to create a wearable, augmented-reality device that takes everything that’s great about a smartphone and overlays it on your vision, making the entire world a smartphone canvas. It’s part of a larger strategy, which is to own the next must-have technology device that supplants or augments the smartphone.
This game has no rules. There’s no single accepted way to play it.
Earlier this year, Apple made a move: It launched the Vision Pro, a headset that emulates augmented reality in a limited way. It is a finished product shipping to anyone who wants one, but it’s very expensive and has a very limited selection of software and content. It’s also a stake in the ground, suggesting that Apple thinks there’s something to “spatial computing” and that this is the first tentative step on the path to creating something more broadly appealing.
This week, Meta made another move.
Meta has been a leader in VR headsets for a while now—it’s a small market that attracts outsized interest because it’s surrounded by a cyberpunk-tinged cloud of possibilities that it might augur something about future of computing.
Originally pitched as a game console you put on your face, the Meta Quest series has increasingly also been pitched as being productivity-related. I don’t think that’s a coincidence—productivity is a use case that Apple has emphasized, so Meta is countering. And the new $300 Meta Quest 3S sure sounds like a compelling new device. I’ve got a Quest 2 and Quest 3, and they’re both pretty impressive in their own ways, especially given the price. The Quest 3S seems like it might be a great holiday purchase.
But, of course, the Quest 3S is not what people are talking about. They’re talking about Orion, a pair of chunky augmented-reality glasses that show that Meta really gets where this is all going. It’s a real punch to Apple’s jaw, one that makes the Vision Pro look dowdy and pointless. Media coverage of Orion has been really strong. People who tried it were impressed. It’s a win for Meta.
But look closer, and you can see exactly what game Meta is playing. Meta says that Orion would cost about $10,000 today, and that the company couldn’t see itself shipping the product. Orion, as used this week by various media influencers, is a tech demo—not a product that will ever ship. Meta says that it has backed off any plans to ship it and instead expects that it will ship a product sort of like it between 2027 and 2029.
This is all part of the game, of course. For decades now, competitors have made hay over Apple’s refusal to make public demonstrations of what it’s working on behind the scenes. Apple’s silence is assumed by many to indicate the company is behind on some innovation or another. And sometimes it’s actually behind—but other times, it’s not. It’s just keeping quiet.
At one point, Apple aimed to release the glasses in 2023, before delaying the launch until around 2025. Now, Apple has postponed the rollout indefinitely and pared back its work on the AR device.
That’s a report from early 2023 that suggests that Apple was trying to build AR glasses presumably very much like Orion, but realized that the tech wasn’t yet at the point where they could release anything. So instead, they shifted work to Vision Pro.
In other words, Meta and Apple—both committed to the idea that AR glasses we wear in our daily lives might be a huge part of future computing tech—tried to make the product happen, and realized that the time just wasn’t right. Apple didn’t say anything. Meta showed off a product that will never ship (but might lead to something that will ship at the end of the decade) and gained some nice press coverage this week.
These are companies playing the same game, but in different ways. Who’s ahead? I would argue that it’s impossible to tell, because if Apple had a product like Orion we would never see it. We can argue about whether Apple’s compulsion to never, ever comment on unannounced products is beneficial or not, but it’s a Steve Jobs-created bit of Apple personality that is very unlikely to be countermanded any time soon.
I was impressed by what Meta showed with Orion. It absolutely gives me the sense that there is a product here, and it might actually be closer than I thought it would be. I sort of assumed wearable, powerful AR glasses in the style of Vision Pro would be more like a full decade away, but the end of this decade now seems plausible.
Of course, that’s for a first version—which will be expensive and compromised. It will take more years for the price to come down and for the utility of such a device to overcome resistance from people who don’t want to wear glasses and don’t want to be seen as a cyborg navigating the human world. If that resistance can ever be overcome enough to make that product category a hit, it’ll take years. Like, mid-2030s at the earliest.
This is a long game. We already knew Apple had the pieces to play (Meta’s system features a wristband that’s like a simplified Apple Watch and a compute puck that’s basically an iPhone), and now Meta has shown that it’s planning its own strategy, including working on custom hardware and silicon.
The game is afoot. Meta has shown they’re working on it. Apple remains characteristically silent. But there’s no one right way to play the game… and the clock doesn’t even start ticking until someone ships a product that people can buy.
Jason’s back and recovering from his big trip, but we’ve got time to discuss Shortcuts and the Action Button, the defenestration of Masimo’s founder, and some very bad passwords (and worse password policies). [More Colors and Backstage members get an extra 20 minutes about Meta’s announcements this week.]
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.
A section devoted to passwords injects a large helping of badly needed common sense practices that challenge common policies. An example: The new rules bar the requirement that end users periodically change their passwords. This requirement came into being decades ago when password security was poorly understood, and it was common for people to choose common names, dictionary words, and other secrets that were easily guessed.
Thank god. Back when I worked at a large institution that required password changes, the game was trying to figure out how similar you could keep your new password without it rejecting it. It was a bad game.
Other proposed changes: no restriction on which special characters can be used, a minimum required length of 8 with a minimum suggest length of 15, and hints that are not accessible to unauthenticated users.
I maintain hope that passkeys will continue their march to make passwords obsolete, though adoption feels mixed so far: several big providers sites have started using them, though the exact manner of implementation varies widely from company to company, and even within sites and services from the same company.
These updates are in public comment phase for the next couple weeks, but will hopefully be put into place before too long. While they aren’t binding, there are a number of places (including government agencies) that do tend to adhere to them as best practices.
Pour one out for the venerable Apple-focused website iMore, which is ceasing publication:
Dig out your old iPod and fire up your ‘Songs to cry to’ playlist, I come bearing sad news. After more than 15 years covering everything Apple, it’s with a heavy heart I announce that we will no longer be publishing new content on iMore.
iMore was one of the major Apple-focused websites for a long time, especially when led by Rene Ritchie and then later Serenity Caldwell. (Both are now gainfully employed by, er, larger companies.) The parent company, Future media (which also publishes Tom’s Guide, Tech Radar, Android Central, and Windows Central), says the site will remain online as an archive.
This new edition covers the new stuff added by Apple this year, which turned out to be a lot—especially on the iOS and iPadOS side. (I think that the changes are largely good ones, given the difficult line Apple has to walk between utility and discovery.) There’s stuff in this edition about the new Collections views, including People and Pets groups, Recent Days, the upgraded search system, and more. There will also be a free update to this edition later this fall that covers the stuff Apple rolled out with the iPhone 16, as well as any breaking Apple Intelligence features.
Some interesting news regarding Masimo, the company that is locked in disputes with Apple over its patents for blood oxygen sensors that has led to that feature being removed from the Apple Watch in the U.S.: Joe Kiani, the company’s firebrand founder and CEO, has resigned as CEO after losing a shareholder vote and being kicked off the company’s board of directors. Reuters reports:
Masimo said on Wednesday founder Joe Kiani has decided to step down as the medical device maker’s CEO, days after shareholders voted to remove him from the company’s board following a bitter proxy battle with activist hedge fund Politan Capital Management. The company named veteran healthcare executive, Michelle Brennan, as interim chief.
Bloomberg’s excellent financial columnist Matt Levine has some extra analysis about the series of steps that could lead to a founder and board chair to completely lose control—it involves unhappy shareholders and freezing out a board you disagree with.
Hanging in the air is this question: With Kiani gone, will Masimo’s board be more willing to cut a deal with Apple to end its dispute over the Apple Watch? If this whole thing has been a cold-eyed dispute over cash, maybe not. But if personal animosity was involved, maybe this change will shake things up.
Which Apple Watch faces we use, our feelings on Apple tying the new iPhone to AI features, where we get our phone wallpapers, and how we’re using the Action button.
Last year, Apple introduced the Action Button to the iPhone 15 Pro, and leaned hard into its use as a button to take pictures. This year, though, the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro both have a new dedicated Camera Control button. So what’s an Action Button—also now on the iPhone 16!—to do?
While the Action Button can be assigned numerous tasks, including setting a Focus mode and toggling the flashlight on and off, I can see Apple struggling with ways of making the Action Button seem less than an afterthought, overshadowed by the new Camera Control.
For example, Apple has suggested on a few occasions that the Action Button is a bit of a chameleon. It can turn on the flashlight at night, but toggle Do Not Disturb during the day, for example. Or it can turn on the flashlight when your iPhone is held horizontally, but launch an app when held vertically!
This all sounds clever, but unfortunately, Apple hasn’t actually added any functionality that lets users easily assign different tasks based on time or orientation. If you want to know how to do that sort of thing, you’ll need to use Apple’s Shortcuts app to get it done.
I know Shortcuts is intimidating to a lot of people, so here’s a very simple guide to creating a basic Action Button shortcut with behavior that varies based on some specific parameters. (For more, much more on this concept, check out Federico Viticci’s MultiButton project.)
