My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
The folks at 1Password recently attended the RSA conference in San Francisco and were struck by how infatuated everyone was with the promise of new, shiny solutions to fix new, shiny problems.
But there are a lot of non-shiny, foundational problems still out there. In the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, accidental breaches caused by human error or victimization in phishing attacks was the number one cause of breaches. The same was true last year, and the year before that, and the year before that. The single biggest culprit in breaches continues to be weak and stolen credentials.
“Raiders of the Lost Ark” is one of my favorite movies (and Steven Spielberg’s best, in my opinion), but I never knew about this “loose end” until I read about it in a compilation of deleted scenes:
A plot element involving the Ark of the Covenant was cut from the film and is only hinted at during the finale when the Ark is opened. Basically, there were 2 rules about the Ark not mentioned in the final cut of the film:
If you touch the Ark, you die.
If you look at the Ark when it is opened, you die.
This is first explained in additional dialogue for the scene when Indy and Sallah visit Imam. Before translating the writings on the headpiece that give the height of the Staff of Ra, Imam warns Indy not to touch the Ark or look at it when it is opened….
Notice that nobody ever touches the Ark throughout the rest of the film until the finale.
This scene is screenwriting 101 in that it properly sets up the rules of the Ark, so that when Indy shouts, “Don’t look at it, Marion!” at the film’s climax (spoilers for a 43-year-old movie, I guess) we understand why.
But Steven Spielberg had gone way beyond Screenwriting 101, even in 1981. He knew there was literally no need to include these rules, which turn the Ark from an unknowable supernatural object into something more mundane. And so that scene is cut out, and at the fateful moment when the Ark is opened by Belloq and a crew of Nazi officers, noted archaeologist Dr. Indiana Jones just knows that he and Marion need to close their eyes and not look upon the fiery judgment of the God of the Old Testament.
Here it comes, barreling down on us full steam: 2025. Somehow we’ve already burned through a quarter of this century. It’s been a good twenty-five years for Apple, to be sure, and from all the early indications it seems like the next year will continue the trend, insofar as such things can be predicted with any certainty.
While there are plenty of rumors about what Apple might do in the next twelve months, the simple truth is that the company only has so much time and so much money. (To be fair, it is a lot of money.) Not everything can be a priority, and not everything that gets talked about will actually end up happening.
Even amongst the things that do happen, there are always some that will stand out in terms of their impact for the company—and for its customers. In looking ahead to 2025, there I’m thinking of a few that are most likely to be the kind with ramifications that move the needle—even if, in some cases, it may take a little time for the true effects to be felt.
Our likelihood of investing in smart home tech with Apple’s entry, our technology goals for 2025, our end/start of year tech rituals, and predictions for how technology will improve the world in 2025.
One of my persistent quests over the years has been making it easy to access all my devices no matter where I am. I’ve played with everything from SSH and SFTP to remote screen sharing and VPNs. 2024 was the year I added a new tool to the mix: Tailscale.
The idea of Tailscale is that you create your own little network that all your devices can connect to (it accomplishes this using VPN technology). You can also set up any of your devices to be an “exit node,” so, for example, if you’re surfing the web from a café, you can set it up so that your connection is routed through your Mac mini sitting at home. Plus it lets you access any of the machines on your little network, so it’s easy if you need to retrieve a file or do something on your home Mac.
Tailscale is free, works with any platform—including everything from your iPhone to your Apple TV to your Synology—and is relatively easy to set up. As someone who has more devices than is probably wise, it’s a great little utility for making sure they can always talk to each other. —Dan Moren
Shareshot
For a couple of months each year, framing iOS screenshots is a major task on my to-do list. My book about iOS accessibility features 175 or so. I’ve used various shortcuts over the years to place device frames around the shots I take. Some worked better than others, and most performed the basic task of framing one or more screenshots, hopefully allowing me to create an easy workflow from phone to computer to book document.
This year, I was happily surprised to come upon Shareshot. It’s an iOS app (not a shortcut) that frames your screenshots according to several parameters, and based on the device that took the screenshot. Employ a shadow, a simulated spotlight, a small, medium or large amount of white space – there are many ways to make your screenshots look just the way you want them. It’s a slick, professional app.
Since the product is new, there are features that have yet to be implemented, like support for placing multiple screenshots side-by-side. But the current version has already come a long way in the few short months it’s been available. A surprise bonus for me was the innovative way the developer supports VoiceOver accessibility. Any app can tell you which settings are on and off, as you flick across them. But with Shareshot, tapping your screenshot gives you a full description of everything you’ve done to it within the app. That’s very innovative.
It’s also worth mentioning that when I reached out to the developer about some screen contrast issues I had with Shareshot, he quickly responded, and sought further information about my issue. Two thumbs, way up.—Shelly Brisbin
Sleeve
I discovered quite a few nifty Mac utilities this year, and Sleeve remains in constant use on my desktop. It’s a $6 utility that displays what’s currently playing in Apple Music or (if you prefer) Spotify. I’ve permanently parked a widget on the bottom left corner of my display, showing the currently playing tack. Sleeve also adds global hotkeys for play/pause and volume control, and even scrobbles to Last.fm! I just like seeing pretty album art and song information on my desktop, though.—Jason Snell
A Better Route Planner (ABRP)
My husband and I began our electric car journey this year. We started, as nerds naturally do, by hunting down apps we could use with our new Kia EV6. One of our favorites is ABRP, which will plan routes, based on charging locations between your starting point and destination, and the range of your specific car. You can set parameters, like the speed or provider of a charging station, and you can save routes for future use. This year, ABRP got a big boost in CarPlay integration, making it easy to follow routes from the driver’s seat. You’ll also get efficiency data for your charging and driving experiences, which is especially welcome if you’re just getting comfortable with how measuring EV efficiency differs from the same task for gas-powered cars. There are also all sorts of live data feeds you can use to connect to other EV drivers, if you want them. ABRP was acquired by Rivian late last year. So far, that’s meant rapid feature improvements, no matter what EV you drive, but there are a few Rivian-specific features that seem interesting, too.—SB
SwiftBar 2
On January 2, one of my very favorite Mac utilities got a 2.0 update: SwiftBar. This utility lets you put anything in your menu bar, making it a great place to stash ambient data. The 2.0 update added support for plugins fed by Shortcuts, making it even more accessible to people who aren’t comfortable feeding data via pretty much anything that runs via the command line. I use SwiftBar to display my local weather data, my solar data, and even my podcast live-stream stats. But it can pretty much do anything you want. And it’s free and open source.-JS
Runestone
2024 marked the release of the Apple Vision Pro, and while I don’t think I’m going to award anything to a $3500 developer kit, I do want to praise it as a tool that’s remarkably good at certain tasks, including letting me write in complete isolation. On iPadOS, my text editor of choice is 1Writer, but it only works on the Vision Pro in iPad compatibility mode—and the text rendering in that mode is inferior to native visionOS apps.
Enter Simon Støvring’s Runestone, an open-source visionOS (and iOS and iPadOS) text editor that supports Markdown. It’s pretty bare bones, but it does the job. I’ve written thousands of words on my Vision Pro, and almost all of them have been in an immersive environment while using Runestone.—JS
Star Wars: Outlaws
For me, it’s not a year-end list if there’s not something Star Wars on it. For years I wanted an immersive Star Wars game, one where I could run around on a planet, dealing with stormtroopers or scoundrels, then hop in my starship and take off for space-based combat. Star Wars: Outlaws finally delivers on that, all couched in a fun story about minor criminal Kay Vess and her journey to becoming a serious player in the galaxy. Is it wonky at times? Sure, though patches have fixed a lot of the most egregious issues. And it does, as many AAA games do these days, suffer a bit from over-collectible-ization, but nothing has come closer to the feel of being immersed in a galaxy far, far away.—DM
Balatro
I spent most of this year playing Marvel Snap, but the release of Balatro on the iOS App Store and Apple Arcade broke me out of that rut in a hurry. Balatro is a card game that’s modeled on poker, but that doesn’t do it justice: it’s a roguelike game where you face increasing challenges that you can only surmount by modifying the rules with a series of jokers, and by using your earned cash to change your deck and alter the payout math. Once you lose, all that work is wiped clean and you must start again, which isn’t as bad as it sounds since it basically leads you to explore different winning strategies based on the jokers that come your way. It’s exactly what I want from a game: you can play a session pretty quickly, but there’s always another challenge the next time you sit down to play.—JS
Disney+ for Vision Pro
I feel like I need to praise the third-party visionOS app I’ve probably spent the most time in: Disney+. There are other streaming apps for visionOS, but none (other than Apple’s own TV app) offer the breadth of 3-D content that Disney+ offers. (C’mon, Max, where are the 3-D movies?) Disney also offers some pretty amazing immersive environments for you to watch movies in, including Marvel and Star Wars worlds. My only real complaint is that they’re so good, they should be available as environments throughout visionOS… but Apple is the one who needs to make that visionOS feature happen.—JS
To celebrate the season we discuss Christmas lights, tech gifts, favorite holiday food items, holiday TV and movies, and answer some holiday-themed listener questions. Happy holidays to all Upgradians!
The rumor-mill crystal ball could use some polishing, nobody wants AI, and Apple canceled a new way to take your money? Does that sound right at all?
Outlook hazy
You love your iPad, right? You would never do anything… unnatural to it. Like… folding it, would you? Seems like shenanigans like that would void the warranty.
DSCC also expects an 18.8-inch foldable iPad Pro…
That’s a big iPad. No wonder it needs to be folded. The rumored device is expected in either 2027 or 2028. So probably more like 2029. Or never.
Also, did we say it was an iPad? That may not be right.
Rumors have been unclear on whether the upcoming foldable device will be an iPad or a Mac, but either is feasible depending on what operating system Apple opts to go with.
Used to be when you had rumors of an Apple product they at least knew what the product was. These days, they make the rumors out of nothing. Just like the burgers.
I just imagine Apple working on stuff and going “Is this anything?”
Tim Cook: “Oh, wow. What is this?”
Johny Srouji: “It’s an iPad.”
Tim Cook: …
Johny Srouji: “Or… or a Mac. Um… what do you think it should be?”
Well, at least we know what the iPhone 17 will look like.
Finally, rumors say new Vision products, both Pro and the non-Pro version which I’m calling “Vision Amateur”, will be coming in 2026. And, get this, both will feature lower prices, not just the Vision Amateur, as Apple broadens its list of parts suppliers. Turns out those economies? They scale. Who knew?
Yes, it’s a survey run by a site that buys and sells used phones. Which is not always the best place to get reliable information. But it’s probably at least directionally correct. So, why aren’t people excited about AI? Despite Tim Cook’s repeated insistence that he loooves the summarization feature and uses it all the time, not everyone is as enamored.
OK, yes, Apple Intelligence did suggest that the alleged murderer of the CEO of United Healthcare killed himself. But what about all the people it didn’t incorrectly say killed themselves? No one ever mentions them.
According to Bloomberg, Apple would have charged you directly for your iPhone on a monthly basis instead of using a loan issued by a bank. Tim Cook will have to look for other ways to satiate the god he pledged his undying fealty to all those years ago.
While Apple will not be directly servicing those loans, at least it appears it also won’t be directly impacted by tariffs imposed by the incoming administration, according to Deepwater Management.
Make no mistake, increased tariffs are coming for many manufacturers, but Apple and Tesla will be spared high tariffs – Trump doesn’t want Tesla to lose to BYD or Apple to lose to Samsung.
Oh. Yayyy. Turns out sucking up pays off. Thank goodness the system works.
[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.]
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[As the year comes to a close, those of us who write for Six Colors have decided to share some of our favorite things of the past year. First up: our favorite hardware.]
iPhone 16
Apple’s most advanced features always debut on the high-end phones, differentiating them from the rest, and tempting buyers to upgrade as soon as, or even before, their budgets might dictate. But the speed with which Apple lets features trickle down, even from one year’s Pro/Max iPhone lineup to the very next year’s non-Pros, tells an interesting story for those who keep a phone for two years or more, and/or who opted for an iPhone 16 or 16 Plus this year..
Let’s make a short list, shall we? If you own an iPhone 13 or 14, the non-Pro 16 models give you all of these hardware upgrades at once: USB-C, the Action Button, the Dynamic Island, and Camera Control. Of course, the chips are faster, the cameras are better, and you’re all set to take spatial video, too. Even if you got an iPhone 15 last year, and buttons are your thing, Camera Control and the Action button would be new for you this year, but the upgrade certainly is a mite less compelling than the two+ year cycle.
Let that sink in for a second. That’s two years worth of formerly Pro updates packed into a phone that’s cheaper than this year’s Pro by hundreds of dollars, with a physical size and weight that reminds some of us why the non-Pro phones feel better in hand or purse. And if you’re a die-hard Pro user whose upgrade cycle is more than a year, the 16 Pro or Max still packs a pleasing punch, what with a lighter titanium frame, and many of the hardware updates already mentioned. —Shelly Brisbin
iPhone 16 Pro
I’m in complete agreement with Shelly that the iPhone 16 series is a great one. I know it’s less exciting, year-over-year, for people that update their iPhones often, but I went from an iPhone 13 Pro to an iPhone 16 Pro. The only way to go was up. The promised features of Apple Intelligence didn’t play a role in my decision to purchase, but the ability to edit the new Photographic Styles after taking a photo has been a huge benefit. Like a lot of people, my iPhone is the primary camera in my life, and this is the best iPhone camera that they’ve ever made. Camera Control is not exactly delivering on its promise, but it really doesn’t hurt what I would otherwise be doing an iPhone. It’s a really great piece of hardware over all, despite what my complaints about software would indicate. —Joe Rosensteel
Mac mini
When I bought my M2 Pro Mac mini in 2023, I felt confident that it would be good enough to last me for several years to come. But that longevity has proved to be a double-edged sword as I found myself extremely envious of this year’s M4 Mac mini. It’s compact, it’s powerful, and it has ports on the front. All of a sudden, that old M2 Pro Mac mini is an albatross hanging from my neck! Which would be much easier if it were an M4 Mac mini, because it’s so much lighter.
Apple doesn’t update the Mac mini very often—this is the first major form factor redesign in more than a decade—and it’s good to see the little computer get some attention. With the M4 version, Apple’s made what is likely the best (certainly most versatile) desktop Mac in years. The good news is that if previous incarnations are any indication, this form factor’s going to stick around. —Dan Moren
M4 MacBook Pros
Has there ever been a time when Apple has been as on top of its game with Mac laptops as right now? The Macbook Air is great, yes, and this year’s M4 MacBook Pro is also spectacularly good at what it does. After two updates last year, the MacBook Pro got another update this year, and it really shines. The slight holdover flaws got corrected: The stripped-down base model MacBook Pro is no longer the Space Gray sheep of the family, as it’s got the same color options and flexible ports (Thunderbolt on both sides is key) as the higher-end models. The M4 chip is fast enough for it to be truly called “pro,” too. At at the high end, the chip performance just kept getting better. My ultimate endorsement: I bought my first MacBook Pro ever this year, and it was the M4 Max model, which is now my primary computer in all contexts. -—Jason Snell
Magic Keyboard for M4 iPad Pro
Nothing was so transformative to the iPad’s productivity cred as the introduction of the original Magic Keyboard for iPad in 2020. But it had flaws, most notably the omission of a function key row. The 2024 Magic Keyboard for iPad Pro adds that row, and a matched aluminum keyboard frame for a more premium laptop feel. Most of the summer, I’m writing things in my backyard with the iPad Pro perched on my lap, and this keyboard is the perfect companion for the thin M4-powered iPad Pro. Apple’s ultimate portable productivity machine isn’t the MacBook Air, it’s the iPad equipped with this accessory.—JS
AirPods Pro as OTC hearing aids
Are a built-in hearing test and the ability to function as hearing aids the mark of a new product category, or simply a tacked-on feature for a popular set of earbuds? Well, that depends on whether you have noticeable hearing loss, and it especially depends on whether you learned about that hearing loss from taking a test with your AirPods Pro 2. Apple rightly touts these hearing features as an important move into a health category that matters tremendously to more and more people. And many of those people are self-conscious about advertising their hearing loss with a hearing aid, or they’re wary of spending thousands of dollars for a prescription model. This is the landscape Apple entered this fall when hearing features came to the already-available AirPods Pro. So if you had a pair, as I do, you simply waited for the software update and took a hearing test in the privacy of your home.
AirPods as hearing aids somehow feel like the most tangible medically-adjacent feature Apple provides. Your Apple Watch might save your life one day, but that’s an abstraction until something happens that forces you to focus on a scary experience. Many more people, with significant hearing loss and not, will take the AirPods Pro hearing test and learn something about their health. And maybe they’ll recommend these relatively inexpensive hearing aids, disguised as earbuds, to a friend or family member who struggles with a hearing loss they’d rather not talk about. Bonus: even if an AirPods Pro hearing test finds a very small hearing loss, the earbuds can tune themselves to make media listening easier, based on whatever hearing limitation you do have.—SB
Beats Studio Buds+
No, the “+” does not indicate a streaming service, and it wasn’t even released this year, but I did buy it on sale this year. As a kid that lived through the translucent plastic era of consumer electronics, how could I not? The Beats Studio Buds+ kind of sit between the regular AirPods and the AirPods Pro in certain ways. The active noise cancellation has been a dream when I need to run my desk fan, or drown out other noises that never cease.—JR
Lutron Caseta Diva Smart Dimmer
We did some work on our house this year, including adding a screened-in porch, and one thing I insisted upon for the porch lights and fan was HomeKit-compatible controls. We’d previously put in Lutron Caseta switches when we did our renovations after buying the house, and while they’ve been great, my one complaint was they look a bit nerdy with all the various buttons. Good news: Lutron is now also offering the Diva Smart Dimmer, which works just as well as the classic Caseta switches, but looks like your standard “paddle rocker” switch. I love these; they’re way easier to use by feel and they have a far sleeker look—they even work with the Pico remote if you need to control a light from multiple locations. I’d consider redoing all my lights with them if they weren’t a bit on the pricey side. (If you don’t need the dimmer functionality, the Claro gives you the same switch style but just for on and off.) —DM
Zoom HEssentials audio recorders
The Zoom H6essential audio recorder I wrote about in April is the rare sequel that improves on a great product. The H1Essential, H4Essential and H6Essential all take what were already excellent, affordable devices and give them a boost in features and usability. The recorders in the Essentials line are all handheld, and the H4E and H6E support connecting microphones, musical instruments, or plugging into a sound board. But all three offer pretty good stereo mics of their own, too. In these details, the Essential models are a lot like the devices they replace. But for around the same money, you now get 32-bit floating point recording, which prevents you from recording clipped audio. It’s a major value breakthrough for recorders at these price points. There’s a redesigned and simplified set of hardware buttons, and menus that are simpler, and easier to read. There’s also a talking interface if you need it, to make the devices more accessible. —SB
Eve Energy
Yes, I’m picking a Matter smart plug from two years ago. I feel like there’s very little incentive to rush out and buy new smart plugs when they’re released. We don’t ask much of our existing smart plugs, just that they work. Which is why when my WeMo plugs started misbehaving, I decided enough was enough and I treated myself to a couple 2 packs of Eve Energy smart plugs and haven’t looked back. I also replaced the old iHome plug that I used for my seasonal Christmas tree. Merry Christmas, you filthy smart home animals.—JR
Hi, it’s me, Father Time. This is my 421st More Color column, only about 20 of which have been part of my annual attempt to predict the future while blaming myself for failing to properly predict the year gone by. (Look, if I got them all right, 421 of the columns would be prediction based!)
To the task of predicting, I bring years of experience. The Mac’s 40 years old and I’ve been associated with Macworld for 27 of those years, which is, uh… two-thirds of the Mac’s existence? Geez. You know, I was the summer intern once! (Kurt Cobain was alive then.)
Anyway, who better to listen to than Father Time, just before he turns into a New Year’s Baby? Next time I’ll once again fearlessly attempt to predict the future, but for this column we’re all going to point at laugh at my failures… or will we? Maybe I had a good year in 2024. Let’s see.
Out of all the new features in iOS 18.2, I really didn’t expect that I’d be writing about Mail of all things. And yet, given how many times a day I use Mail on my iPhone, the changes in Mail in iOS 18.2 might be the worst thing about the release.
I’ve used Mail for iOS since I had a first-generation iPod Touch. The Mail team has maintained the app so that it has always functioned well enough, even though it lacked features. Unfortunately, they’ve now begun adding features, and it’s no longer functioning well enough.
Scattergories
iOS 18.2 introduces Categories in Mail, and I think the entire concept is completely incompatible with my brain and my experience with other email clients (including previous versions of Mail for iOS). I’m trying to be flexible and not immediately dismiss new stuff out of hand, but that positive attitude is at odds with my desire not to make something in my life more difficult just because someone else thinks they’ve got a hot, new take on things.
Allow me to explain my boring approach to email: I have several personal email accounts. (Any employer-assigned email accounts have been siloed off in other apps, like Outlook or Gmail.) I leave all my read emails in the Inbox and don’t move things out because the chronological “feed” of email helps me revisit old emails in a way I can’t if I moved them to folders.1
Obviously, this mentality is somewhat incompatible with Apple’s bold approach to Categories. The good news is that each category isn’t a folder that moves my message from my inbox. The bad news is that the interface behaves completely differently depending on how Mail categorizes your email.
The Primary category features messages that the Mail app deemed important. If the app considers emails from other categories time-sensitive, they can also appear here. If an email from another category appears in Primary, it will have a little icon of the category it also appears in.
Primary is the only category used with the Priority feature, which scans messages and marks those of special importance. This feature shipped with iOS 18.1. Under the menu in the upper right, Priority can be toggled off separately from everything else. Priority is not Primary, but it only lives in Primary. Got it?
Primary is also the only category that will show a badge on the Mail icon by default, but you’ll still receive notifications for all messages in all categories.
Confusingly, the categories that don’t count towards the badge notification or unread mail count get little dots next to their icons when they contain new mail. But that’s the only place you see those dots—they don’t display as a count anywhere, and new also doesn’t mean the same thing as unread (more on that later).
When you’re looking at the Mailboxes view of all your mail accounts and their inboxes/folders, items will only display an unread count if they contain messages that are marked as Primary. If a message is categorized as anything else, the list will appear as if you’ve read all your mail in all your inboxes.
It is my strong personal opinion that the unread count in the Mailboxes view should reflect the unread count of the emails you have in those mailboxes. Suppressing badges so you can focus is unrelated to whether or not a message is unread. I know why people want to hide badges and notifications because they’re drowning in mail, but oftentimes, I just want to see where an unread message lives.
To get a full unread count and return to normal badges, you need to go to Settings -> Notifications -> Mail and then scroll down to Customize Notifications. You can choose to list the unread messages in Primary or all unread messages. That’s it. You can’t exclude Promotions, or only include Primary and Updates. Primary or all are your choices.
The Transactions view supposedly puts all my transactional emails together. Fine. Except, for some reason, my informed delivery emails from the United States Postal Service appear under Transactions. I didn’t buy my mail!
I don’t know why deliveries appear here. Some deliveries are connected to transactions, but not all. Strangely, emails I receive about packages that are out for delivery today are somehow not considered time-sensitive enough to appear in Primary as well as Transactions.
Updates is apparently where some (but not all!) of my newsletters go, along with terms of service updates, flight emails, and explanations of benefits from my healthcare provider. It’s basically everything from a business or business-like entity, that isn’t directly about money or a delivery.
That seems fine, I guess, except that’s a really broad category that has the full spectrum of things that I’d like to know about, ranging from sooner to later. I can move a sender from here to Primary if I want it to alert me sooner, but that’s a powerful all-or-nothing decision that will cover every email that the sender ever sends and has sent. It doesn’t train the system that this kind of email from this sender is important. Choose wisely if you think something is more important than “Updates.”
Promotions is where you’ll find Deals! Deals! Deals! Honestly, this category makes me think this whole thing about my email disappearing into three oubliettes might be worth it. Unfortunately, several of the newsletters I subscribe to are in this category, including the Six Colors newsletter. Perhaps it is overly aggressive in relegating senders to this category—almost like there’s a total lack of precision—which makes me not trust it at all.
For a day, I let messages accumulate in this category and only dealt with my Primary inbox, Updates, and Transactions. That’s what it’s for, right? To keep you from being distracted by these unimportant promotions?
Except when I did finally dive in to Promotions, I had to go through and read the subject and AI summary for each one to figure out if I trusted it enough to mark the email as read or not, or if I really needed to read it anyway. This didn’t save me any time. It’s not like there were hundreds of these promotional emails. The day after that, I started worrying something valuable was in Promotions, so I ended up checking it anyway. Net result: It created more work rather than saving me time.
Group project
The quirky new Grouped Messages feature applies to all categories except Primary and All Mail (where messages can not be grouped by sender, for some reason).
Tapping on a message, like the one I got from the USPS, leads to a view of all messages from that sender. However, the header for that view takes up a large portion of the screen. There’s a header image for the sender, which heavily pads the email address or name of the sender. (It also occasionally lops off descenders on letters, apparently. Guess they needed more room.)
It’s hard to believe this is the company that sparked the desktop publishing revolution. Can I please see the subject line? Pretty please?
The subject line of a message is truncated with an ellipsis feature, which is frustrating, given how much space is being wasted by this view. (Why would I need to know what the email is about when I can see a huge circle with a graphic in it and an enormous version of the sender’s name or address?)
Sometimes, the entire message at the end of a group of messages is displayed, and sometimes, there’s a “See more” to expand the message. I got here by tapping on this message from the Category view, why won’t it show me the whole message like if I tapped to get to the message from the Priority or All Mail view? Shouldn’t the last email in a bundle always be fully expanded because it’s the thing I tapped on to open this bundle view in the first place? There’s infinite room below it! This isn’t saving any space!
That truncated view could theoretically be useful if you’re going back up in the bundle and expanding those to find a previous email from the Sender, as if it was a threaded chain of email replies instead of individual messages. Except… when I scroll back up, it expands the entire message for each message fully. I can’t even expand it to just see the full subject line and close it again.
Speaking of closing it again, I can’t find any way to do that other than force-quitting Mail. Tapping the subject stub, which had expanded the item, doesn’t collapse it, but expands the subject stub so you can tap the email addresses. Long-pressing doesn’t do anything. There has to be a way to collapse messages in this view, but I honestly can’t figure it out.
Refusing categorization
If you’re in the truncated, padded bundle view, you can tap the ellipsis button in the upper right corner to change the sender’s category. However, this will change the categorization of every message the sender has sent or will send. Sometimes, a single sender sends me Transactions, Updates, and Promotions. Some companies split these into different email addresses, and others don’t or don’t reliably.
And remember, if you move a sender from Transactions, Updates, or Promotions to Primary, you no longer get the bundle view of the sender. Why? I don’t know. I thought that view was supposed to be helpful?
That also means you don’t get the ellipsis button in the upper right to move the Sender. However, you can tap the Reply icon in the bottom bar of a message, which brings up that ridiculous menu, and scroll down to Categorize Sender to once again change all of the emails from that sender. That’s how email rules and filters should work, right?
People have asked for filters/rules for years for Mail on iOS, and Apple didn’t give them to us… until, all of a sudden, we’ve got a few hard-coded invisible rules that users can nudge a little. We can’t be trusted with Smart Mailboxes or labels, but we do have three immutable categories that all email is supposed to fit into.
Why can’t I make a category called Deliveries and elect for it to be worthy of the unread badge? Why can’t I make a category called Newsletters that’s silently delivered but not lumped in with all non-business related mails and get around to reading them just after I die?
Or you could give up…
Now that we’ve got categories, there’s got to be a way to temporarily not view them. This is the All Mail category, which is hidden off to the right side of the other categories, so you don’t even know it’s there unless you swipe on those categories to reveal it. Surprise!
This view doesn’t expose any of the category features. It doesn’t put little icons next to mail items to let you know those messages are also in Transactions, Updates, and Promotions, like the Primary category does. Why not? It can’t group notifications by sender. It seemingly doesn’t have Priority either since there’s no option in the right ellipsis button menu to turn it off.
It’s basically like temporarily embedding the old List View underneath all the other Category items. Since you can just tap the ellipsis (top right) and List View to leave Categories behind, I’m unclear why the All Mail category also exists. If it worked in a way that also integrated categories, it would make more sense. But it doesn’t.
(If you’ve got multiple email accounts and you leave the All Inboxes view, you’ll find that your individual Inboxes have Categories of their own too. That’s fine, but Mail will also remember the category you were last in in that particular inbox. If you jump from All Inboxes, All Mail to your Gmail Inbox, it might be set to Updates, and you might not see an expected message because you have to remember that the category isn’t a setting that persists as a view across all inboxes when you move around the interface. It can be quite disorienting.)
The escape hatch for all of this categorical goodness is simply to give up and return to the classic List View. That should really be the default instead of this first attempt at Categories.
Think back to major changes in email clients you’ve used over the years. Almost all of them have been controversial because people are used to the current way of doing things. Their life, or their job, isn’t about learning new approaches to this mundane necessity.
That is why they nag users of the old version to try the new version while reassuring them they can go back. Over time, this becomes a matter of sticking them in the new version and telling them they can go back to the old version. Then, the new version becomes the only version. Rinse and repeat.
Apple skipped the opt-in step, which I suspect will engender far more ire than had they gone the traditional route. There will always be people who are resistant to any change, but this release strategy isn’t helping. What’s worse, there’s no universal “go back” switch people can flip. Some of the feature toggles are in Settings, and some are in hidden menu buttons inside the Mail app.
I had to walk my boyfriend through the steps to get List View back, turn off Priority, and to turn off all summarization because he hated it. I’m sticking with it for a little while longer, but I don’t know if I’ll make through Christmas before bailing.
As iOS 18.2 rolls out more widely, people are going to find themselves challenged by having to change their years-old or decades-old habits for an email client that thinks your package delivery for today is a non-time-sensitive transaction, and your newsletters are promotions. I’m not convinced people will have a ton of patience to try to calibrate this system, and adjust themselves to it. (And let’s not forget, these features still don’t exist on your iPad or Mac, eliminating one of the advantages of using the same app on different platforms.)
Mail on iOS is pretty important to Apple’s plans for on-device intelligence. A lot of what an AI can know about you is gleaned from your text messages, calendar appointments, and most importantly, email. If people ditch Mail out of frustration, it undermines the value proposition of the iPhone.
I hope that Apple moves quickly in the new year to correct some of these issues. In the meantime, all of us expert users will get another Christmas in the trenches helping loved ones figure out how to get Mail to work the way they expect it to.
You will not change my mind. I do not need tips. I don’t care about your system. Leave me alone. ↩
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
Not unlike text editors, image-editing software is a category that provokes strong feelings from its users. There are your Photoshop fans, Affinity users, and those who adore Pixelmator.1
Personally, I’ve been a longtime user of Flying Meat’s Acorn—and I do mean longtime: all the way back to version 1.0. Even though I’m primarily someone who deals with words, Acorn is an app that I find myself using daily, often for something as simple as cropping or resizing an image, but I’ve also used it for more complex tasks like designing book covers.
Acorn now has a tool for selecting the subject of a photo, masking it, or removing the background.
The newly released Acorn 8 adds a bunch of great features to the mix. A few of them will be familiar to Apple platform users: subject selection uses machine learning to let you quickly isolate and grab the subject of a picture (there’s also a corresponding “Remove Background” feature to simplify that task) and a Live Text tool allows you to select and copy text within an image.
For me, the star of the show is the fascinating Data Merge, which is a bit like Mail Merge for images. If you’ve ever needed to create the same image several times but with different information—nametags, for example, or personalized gift cards—this is a life-saver. You open your template image, identify your variables, then hand Acorn a CSV file with the relevant data and it will process through them, assigning text where needed and even putting images in assigned layers. It’s the kind of wild automation tool that might not be something you need every day, but when you do need it, there’s really no replacement.
Acorn 8 has a bunch of other great additions, including an on-canvas ruler, support for JPEG-XL, and compatibility with Look up Tables (LUT) that let you quickly apply image color adjustments. And, be still my beating heart, there’s improved support for Shortcuts, for everything from cropping and resizing images to adding watermarks and dynamically assigning text.
There’s currently an introductory sale for Acorn 8: for a limited time, it’s just $19.99 instead of its usual $29.99, and there’s also a bundle with Flying Meat’s equally excellent Retrobatch batch image processing app. Plus, you’re supporting a small independent Mac developer, and that’s a good reason in and of itself.
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]
Myke prepares the way for a big arrival (including of many Upgrade guest hosts), we’re deeply puzzled by reports of a large folding Apple device, and Myke gets out the conspiracy yarn regarding what Tim Cook is up to in the United Kingdom.
Audio Hijack is a thing of beauty. And we almost lost it.
Back in the early Apple silicon era, must-have Mac audio tool got a serious downgrade via a new installation process that required many steps and multiple reboots. The problem wasn’t really addressed until earlier this year, when Apple rolled out a bunch of audio permissions that allowed Rogue Amoeba to ship a new version of the app that didn’t require an installer or any reboots.
In 2020, the disaster foreshadowed literally one sentence ago struck. Beta versions of MacOS 11 broke ACE, our then-current audio capture technology, and the damage looked permanent. When we spoke briefly to Apple during WWDC 2020, our appeals for assistance were flatly rejected. We spent weeks attempting to get ACE working again, but eventually we had to admit defeat. ACE as we knew it was dead in the water, and all options for replacing it involved substantial reductions in functionality. Though we did not discuss it publicly at the time, things looked grim for the future of our products.
Kafasis ascribes Apple’s change of heart to a passionate user base and a bunch of other developers (“some quite large,” he writes) who relied on Rogue Amoeba’s technology for their apps. Still, it took years for Apple to roll out a solution.
It’s scary to think that one of the Mac’s best apps could’ve been completely wrecked by Apple’s architectural changes. I’m glad that in this case, Audio Hijack and Rogue Amoeba’s other apps weren’t a victim of Apple’s out-of-balance attempt to lock down macOS without providing appropriate alternatives to fulfill the needs of users and developers alike.
The Vision Pro gains some respect while Image Playground is a thing you can now use. Speaking of getting used, look out, Johny Srouji!
C:\ONGRTLNS.AXR
While sales of the Vision Pro may not be huge, Apple does have a couple of feathers to add to its figurative cap.
Does Tim Cook wear literal hats? Will have to research.
First, Popular Science has named Apple’s latest the “Innovation of the Year”. Apparently the “popular” part is judged on a sliding scale, adjusted by price.
Calling it “a new dimension for augmented reality”, Popular Science likes the cut of the Vision Pro’s jib and thinks the platform has potential.
So, if you’re going to copy, why not copy from the best? Yes, the Vision Pro is apparently at least good enough to warrant a Samsung copy. That counts as a feather, right? I mean… not like an eagle feather. Something from a more common bird. Pigeon. Budgie, maybe.
It weighs less, will probably cost less, and looks as much like a Vision Pro as you’ve come to expect from Samsung’s crack Apple copying team. Whether or not anyone will want to use Android XR, which is now built around AI after Google changed gears, is still a question.
Personally, I prefer to get Google’s AI to tell me to use gasoline to make spaghetti on the web, not my face.
The hellmouth at the bottom of the Uncanny Valley
Apple released iOS 18.2 with additional AI features this week, so now everyone (with a new enough iPhone) can… enjoy? That doesn’t seem like the right word. Let’s just say “experience”, that’s neutral enough. Experience the flabbergasting, twisted nightmare of the soul that is Image Playground.
Have you ever wanted to see computer-generated images of yourself that look a bit like you but also not like you, like staring into a funhouse mirror? Without the fun?
Well…, has Apple got an app for you.
As Jason and Dan’s review details, the interface for Image Playground is pretty good. The results are another matter. I could show you some images it generated of me to drive home the point… but looking at them, I would really rather not.
Apple also delivered Genmoji and some new writing and drawing… again “features” doesn’t seem right. We’ll just call them “things” until we can sort this out. It’s questionable why we really want AI to take over the fun parts of life, like being creative, rather than the drudgery like doing taxes.
When I asked Writing Tool to make that last sentence funnier, it came back with:
Why do we want AI to hog the fun stuff, like painting masterpieces, instead of letting it handle the snoozefest of doing taxes?
It’s not terrible but… I would definitely not say AI is painting any masterpieces. Don’t quit your day job, Apple Intelligence. Whatever that may be.
Inside Intel
Things are going great over at Intel, thanks for asking.
After the forced retirement of CEO Pat Gelsinger, Intel now apparently has its sights set on none other than Apple vice president of Hardware Technologies Johny Srouji for the company’s new head honcho.
Personally I would love to hear that pitch.
“Hey, we know you’ve got a nice position with a highly successful company at the top of its processor game, buuut how’d you like to come captain this sinking rowboat being rowed in circles miles from land? Before you answer, you should know that the rowboat is also on fire.”
Sometimes it is nice to take on a challenge (and make a crapton of money doing it), but that didn’t work out so great for Ron Johnson when he went to run JC Penney. Be careful what you sign up for.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
Intelligence .2 arrives and Jason’s next laptop phase
We give an overview of our thoughts on iOS 18.2 and macOS 15.2; Jason’s got a new laptop but there are still some problems to solve. (More Colors and Backstage members, our hourlong monthly Q&A is also in this episode.)
[The podcast will be off the next two weeks. Back January 3!]
