By Joe Rosensteel

March 20, 2024 9:35 AM PT

It’s time for a new AirPort

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

Jason recently reviewed the new M3 MacBook Air, and a key feature of the new models is Wi-Fi 6E support. Wi-Fi 6E is a big deal because it adds the 6GHz spectrum to the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands we’re all used to.

The M3 Air also adds support for Wi-Fi 6E, while the older M2 models only support Wi-Fi 6. The difference is real. On my home Internet connection, I was able to get 931 Mbps down and 813 MBps up via Wi-Fi, which is more or less the same speed as my wired connection to my router. In the same spot, my M2 Air could only manage 618 up and 700 down. I wouldn’t buy a new laptop just to have faster Wi-Fi—and keep in mind that you need to upgrade your router and possibly your home internet to take advantage of these speeds—but that’s the fastest Wi-Fi connection I’ve ever experienced.

Jason didn’t get that speed boost from an Apple-made wireless router, because Apple got out of making those long ago. He didn’t get that speed from a wireless router currently for sale at the Apple Store because the only two options are the Linksys Velop AX4200 WiFi 6 Mesh System, and AmpliFi Alien Router (with optional mesh extenders). Linksys does make a version of their Velop mesh network with 6E, but it’s not for sale through Apple.

Jason used an Eero 6E router, and wasted half a day trying to change his network topology to allow for it so he could see that speed difference.¹

It seems like a great time for Apple to sell a friendly 6E router.

Apple was the catalyst for consumer wireless internet with AirPort, but after a decade-plus of glory, they wound down AirPort and it quietly disappeared. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. The last new AirPort product was released in 2013. The AirPort team dispersed to other teams in Apple, like the group working on the 4th generation Apple TV in 2016. In 2018, the death was official. Having left an indelible mark on the wireless router industry in the form of plastic roundrect routers and bespoke “friendly” utility software, Apple left the field.

The thinking at the time was that Apple wasn’t really competitive in the market, just like they weren’t competitive in external displays, so why bother expending resources on such a thing? Other companies had the market covered, and most home Internet routers came with Wi-Fi, so why bother?² Let Apple reserve its magic dust for something other than commodity hardware with thin margins.

I never agreed with that line of thinking, because networking underpins everything that Apple does care about. Every Mac, iPad, Apple TV, HomePod, Vision Pro, and most importantly every iPhone. The iPhone is a cellular device, but when you’re at home, you’re on your Wi-Fi network. If your iPhone and your wireless router aren’t playing well together than you are an unhappy person.

The performance, reliability, and ease of use of your home network really matters a lot to you, and everyone you share your home with, along with all of their devices. Just start counting everything in your home that’s on your Wi-Fi network right now.

When my AirPort Extreme died in 2019, I needed to replace it, and I didn’t need a mesh network, so I went with a terrible Wirecutter pick, the Netgear Nighthawk R7000, which would just periodically stop being on the internet until I hard-rebooted it. The Nighthawk’s design wasn’t from the Apple-aping school of rounded corners—it was presumably made by and for men who were Very Serious About The Internet, which is why it looked like something you might find in the Batcave.

When I moved to a home that needed a mesh solution, I was again disappointed in a product: the Eero, which occasionally has undiagnosable flaky moments, and always bumps one of my smart plugs off the network when it restarts after a software update.

We all love AirPort security

Let’s not forget about how your router figures into your security and privacy, which are both things Apple cares about. To get around sketchy networking, Apple has added iCloud Private Relay to operate on any network inside and outside your home. However, sometimes iCloud Private Relay doesn’t get along with a network, or a service. You have no recourse but to toggle it off, and see if the site works. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a blessed Apple router in your home that iCloud Private Relay would always play nice with?

Apple also obfuscates your devices on a network, which is a great feature on untrusted networks. However, when I am at home, it sometimes decides to play Cold War spy games with my Eero router. Occasionally a handful of devices will simply be “Unnamed Device” and I have no idea what each one is. What if an Apple-blessed router could be consistently entrusted with my device names?

While I don’t have any little tweens getting into trouble online, I know that parental controls are a big deal for some people, and they have to set those parental controls on Apple IDs and on routers, and etc. What if that was unified?

Home is where the hub is

Putting aside the absolute mess of the software side of Home, let’s discuss the networking side of Home. Apple leans heavily on Apple TVs and HomePods to provide the networking backbone for all the connected smart home devices you have.

I’m not sure that’s a useful strategy because when there are issues with your home network, the device designated as your Home Hub loses the game of musical chairs, and a device you do not want to be Home Hub is selected. You want a device that has robust connectivity, which is usually the most modern Apple TV you have (except the $129 one they’re selling without a Thread radio, and without Ethernet).

The device that has the most robust connectivity in my home is my Eero wired to my fiber connection, and its affiliated Eeros. Eero’s Thread network is not compatible with Apple’s approach to Thread, which is just great. Some day Matter might deliver on its promise, but I’m not holding my breath.

What if Apple shipped mesh network devices? Devices that could be the backbone for a Home initiative that Apple allegedly cares about?

Bring back spinning disks!

I’m just kidding about enthusiasm for spinning disks, but one of the strengths of Apple’s AirPort line was that you could shove Time Machine backups somewhere that wasn’t wired to your Mac. Time Capsule was a slow hard drive crammed into the white plastic of your internet router. There was also an option to hook up an external drive to your AirPort Extreme over the USB cable. It was a good idea, because it took something hanging off of your Mac and moved it somewhere else where it could be quiet. Also not everyone wants to build and maintain a NAS.

Yes, backing up a Mac via Wi-Fi back then was slower than doing it over a wire, but wireless networking was also slower back then. I would be interested to see what Apple could do with a 6E router. Surely it’ll never be blistering speeds, but it could be a quiet, competent solution.

And just think of how much they could charge for that embedded solid-state storage! They’re leaving money on the table! Bleed us dry, Tim! Sell a line of them: AirPort Express mesh nodes, AirPort Extreme with ports, AirPort Ultra with Time Capsule (just skip the titanium finish).

Step 4: Profit

I know that it’s still easy to argue that Apple doesn’t need to make wireless routers. They won’t make enough money to make it worth the effort. Whatever “enough money” means is so flexible when you think about all the various things Apple does make. Those networking boffins are better allocated to other products, rather than making commodity hardware.

The return of Apple to the monitor market illustrates how effective Apple’s integration can be when it comes to supposedly superfluous product categories, especially when those products complement or support the products Apple already makes lots of money on… like the Macs it sells that use those displays. It’s called synergy, people.

Designing networking solutions in every device to work around the one component Apple doesn’t want to make is a lot of effort. The R&D can’t cost more than a self-driving, bread-loaf saloon, and the benefits of an Apple wireless router will lift all of Apple’s products. It’s time to head back to the AirPort³.

[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]

By Dan Moren

March 18, 2024 4:46 PM PT

Apple’s still thinking about the Core Technology Fee in Europe

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

Developer Steve Troughton-Smith watched all of today’s workshop between Apple and the EU on the Digital Markets Act and posted some highlights on Mastodon.

Of particular interest was an exchange between Apple’s representatives and Riley Testut, the developer of AltStore, an existing third-party places to get apps for jailbroken iPhones. Testut has already announced that AltStore will be available as a third-party app marketplace in Europe under the DMA. I’ll embed the post with the video below because it’s worth watching, but 9to5Mac has transcribed it as well.

During the workshop, Testut used his time to ask about the Core Technology Fee. Under Apple’s new business terms in Europe (required for apps looking to be distributed via non-Apple app marketplaces or the web), there’s a €0.50 fee per app install over the first million. Testut rightly points out that a free app, such as the one he made in high school, that becomes popular could easily accrue enough costs to ruin a young developer’s life.

Apple VP of Legal Kyle Andeer responded sympathetically, saying that the company is continuing to try and find a good solution, and to “stay tuned.”

Obviously, we’ve already seen plenty of alterations in Apple’s original DMA plans, including the late addition of Web Distribution, but this certainly seems to suggest that further changes are coming.

The CTF has been a point of contention amongst developers; it certainly provides a potential disincentive for those looking to distribute apps outside the App Store—especially in cases where those apps derive revenue from other places, such as subscriptions not available via in-app purchase or advertising. (And yes, to be clear, that is exactly why Apple is putting that fee in place.)¹

But free apps in particular seem to be the biggest sticking point. When the App Store debuted with the commission model, it was a relatively simple matter to say that if an app made no revenue, then Apple charged the developer nothing. But not all free apps are created equal, as the boom for in-app ads and subscription services have shown. That’s a bed of Apple’s own making, but it shouldn’t be surprising the company is trying to course correct to close those loopholes—that same impetus has been at the heart of a lot of its questionable App Store policy decisions over the past decade-plus.

Still, apps that are completely free—including open-source apps—certainly don’t seem like they should be subject to the Core Technology Fee. The question, from Apple’s perspective, is how to police that? What about, say, an app that’s distributed for free outside the App Store but has a big Patreon community that brings in a lot of money?

That in turn leads to the root of the question: does Apple deserve to get a cut of apps not distributed from its marketplace? There’s no arguing that the company has benefited from the huge ecosystem of software available for its devices, especially the iPhone. And as the CTF is currently structured, it could very well lead to a chilling effect amongst young developers who can’t risk the downsides—a category of people who Apple has made a big deal of specifically championing

I’m skeptical the entire CTF will end up discarded, but I do suspect that there will be additional carve-outs to come, especially for free/open-source apps (or perhaps Apple will greatly increase the amount of installs before the CTF is triggered, thus even more specifically targeting its biggest rivals). It’s been almost a week since the last changes, so keep your eyes peeled to see if a new batch is incoming.

[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.]

By Jason Snell

March 14, 2024 2:14 PM PT

Using Panic’s Nova for remote Python scripting

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

I’ve been writing scripts in Python for a few years now, and it’s taken over a lot of my remote automation. I’ve got a calendar in my kitchen driven by a bunch of Python scripts, and numerous automations running on a remote linux server for Six Colors and The Incomparable.

Up to now, I’ve been doing all of my Python work in BBEdit, an app I use as my default tool for so much of the work on my Mac. But to be accurate, I have to say that I do all my work in BBEdit and Terminal, because these are scripts running on remote devices that I need to be able to control.

The other day it hit me: While I think of Panic’s $99 Nova as a web development tool (I used it when I moved Six Colors into WordPress, which required rebuilding the site’s entire theme using PHP), it’s also a code tool, with SFTP and a terminal built in. An hour later I had created Nova projects for all my remote Python tools and was happily able to access remote directories and the command line from a single tabbed window. Nova also has some pretty great code editing features of its own that go a little bit beyond BBEdit, including sticky scroll, which helps me know what function(s) I’m inside of while editing.

I know a lot of people swear by Microsoft’s free Visual Studio Code, but every time I look at it I realize that it is made for people who are not me. Nova’s outside my comfort zone, but it’s closer—and seems to want to work the way I work.

This will show you how much of a sicko I am. A recent Nova update added support for debugging features, which I’ve only ever used in Script Debugger, the definitive AppleScript development tool. That’s right, programmer nerds, my only debugging experience ever is with AppleScript.

Anyway, I can’t entirely understand how to set up debugging (and remote debugging?!) in Nova, but I’m going to give it a go because it would be nice to stop debugging by printing various things to the log and waiting for things to break.

I’m sure I’m still only using a fraction of the tools available to me in Nova, but for my projects writing scripts on remote Linux servers, it’s found a place in my tool chest.

By Dan Moren

March 12, 2024 12:23 PM PT

Apple adds Web Distribution for iOS apps in EU, loosens other restrictions

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

It’s been a seismic few weeks for Apple in the European Union, and the company’s approach to distributing iOS apps continues to evolve. On Tuesday, Apple announced a few further changes to its rules, all of which stand to make significant changes to the marketplace for iOS apps. Let’s break them down.

One-stop developer shop

When Apple initially announced third-party app marketplaces on iOS in Europe, one restriction it put in place was that a company could not create a store that featured only its own apps. If Meta or Epic wanted to build a third-party app store, it would have to offer software from any developer that essentially met its criteria.

But that restriction has now been abolished. Which means that if a company wants to gather all its apps in a third-party store, thus reducing its dependance on Apple and avoiding the company’s 30-percent cut, that’s now a possibility. (Granted any extremely popular apps, such as Meta’s, would likely trigger Apple’s new Core Technology Fee.) I’m sure that Meta, Google, and some other large tech companies are doing the math right now to figure out if this new rule works in their favor or not.

An external link’s awakening

One element of Apple’s business practices that has gotten a lot of attention worldwide is its restrictions on apps linking out to the developer’s site in order to offer discounts or promotions. (The company’s harshest restrictions on those external links have gotten them in legal hot water in the U.S. and elsewhere, leading to some relaxing of terms.)

Previously, apps in the EU would have had to adhere to Apple-provided templates in order to provide links out. These templates carefully controlled the way such links would look and where they would appear.

But Apple has now demoted those templates from requirements to optional guidelines, allowing developers to fully choose for themselves where and how they link to their own sites. There’s obviously benefits to that for developers who don’t want to be told where and when to put their links, though it remains to be seen how users will feel if apps start to abuse this ability by getting in people’s faces.

A tangled web

The biggest change that Apple enacted is the addition of Web Distribution, coming later this spring. For the first time, this lets developers distribute apps outside a store for the first time, directly via the web.

If you’re saying “whoa, whoa, wait a minute, that sounds like sideloading“, well, you’re not wrong, but before you get too carried away, I’ll point out that developers need to jump through a number of hoops before Apple will allowed them access to this feature.

Those include being in the Apple Developer Program in the EU, having had two years of tenure within the program, and having an app with “more than one million first annual installs on iOS in the EU in the prior calendar year.” Additional strictures include only offering apps from your developer account, corresponding with Apple about safety and security issues, publishing your data collection policies, and other legal and governmental compliance.

So not just anybody is going to be able to slap together a website and put their iOS apps up for download. Apple’s trying to do something similar to what it’s done with third-party app marketplaces, providing some degree of assurance that users aren’t going to be hit by bad actors and that entities providing web distribution will be able to handle customer service, user privacy, and so on. Apps distributed via the web will still require notarization by Apple and can only be installed from a limited number of domains provided by the developer.

These rules also mean that many small and independent developers likely won’t be able to opt in to web distribution—that one million threshold is still pretty high. Do those shops deserve to be restricted from developing their apps on the web? It’ll be interesting to see if those rules stick.

Times they are changing

Web distribution does seem to open up another avenue for developers of a certain level, but it’s still certainly different from the wide-open nature of the Mac, where apps have been distributed on the web forever, with very little (if any) oversight by Apple.

In terms of why those disparities between macOS and iOS app distribution exist, Apple points to its recently issued security whitepaper. One of the company’s big arguments is that our phones are much more personal devices, carrying everything from our bank info to our health data, and protecting them is even more important than on the Mac. And the company sees the decided lack of widespread malware incidents on iOS under the App Store-only distribution as evidence of its success.

That said, while the Mac has been subject to more malware than iOS in recent years, it still remains a pretty secure platform overall.

Of course, we’ve already seen numerous changes to Apple’s DMA rules in just the last couple weeks, and there’s no telling what further alterations might happen as the rubber meets the road. It’s difficult to put legislation this large into effect without adapting it as you go.

Apple, for its part, says that it’s taking into account feedback from developers and other stakeholders. That presumably includes the European Commission, which certainly has a vested interest in the process.

[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.]

By Jason Snell

March 11, 2024 8:50 AM PT

I put my dumb space heater on HomeKit

Note: This story has not been updated since 2024.

My workspace is what is apparently called an “unconditioned space,” in that it’s a lighly insulated garage with no access to my home’s central heating system. In the winter that’s an issue, so I’ve resorted to using an oil-filled electric space heater to make the space habitable.

Those Delonghi heaters are pretty great at quiet, sustained heat, but the first one I bought used an old-style analog timer to turn itself on and off, which meant that it ticked constantly, and that made me very unhappy. I bought another one that offered a digital timer, but it couldn’t tell the difference between the weekend and weekdays, meaning I frequently heated the garage on a day I wasn’t working, or—even worse—opened the door to discover I hadn’t turned the timer back and the place was unacceptably cold.

After a few years of wrestling with these issues, I finally decided to see if I could solve the issue without buying more heaters. Using a smart outlet didn’t work—when turned on after an extended power outage, my heater is nonfunctional.

Instead, I bought a $26 Wi-Fi infrared blaster, taught it how to speak the language of my heater’s included (and fairly useless!) infrared remote, and now I was in business. (Of course, I had to do some work to get the heater and the IR remote to see one another, but after a few trial-and-error attempts, I got that part locked down.)

Unfortunately, my IR blaster doesn’t support HomeKit—but, you guessed it, there’s a Homebridge plug-in for that. Once I had my heater in the Home app, I could use Automations to turn the heater on automatically very early in the morning (it takes hours for the heater to work its magic) and then turn itself off in the afternoon.

This worked pretty well, but on a warmer morning, the heater would heat things up a bit too fast, and while the Delonghi heater does have its own thermostat, it’s never struck me as being particularly reliable. But I do have a $35 Wi-Fi thermometer in my office, and it works with HomeKit! So I created an additional automation that automatically turns off the Delonghi heater whenever the garage gets above 70 degrees.

I’ve been reluctant to write about this set-up because, frankly, a lot of smart home set-ups don’t stand the test of time. But this is the second cold season that I’ve automated the heating through HomeKit, and it’s worked solidly every time. When I go on vacation, I turn off the one early-morning automation, and the heater never goes on. I just have to remember to turn it back on when I get home.

Maybe someday I’ll find a Wi-Fi-controllable space heater that I like. Until then, this one does the job just fine.