My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Getting OS updates installed on end user devices should be easy, but of course it isn’t. Forcing restarts without user approval will lead to data loss (and angry users), but most users don’t install updates themselves!
OS updates are the single most common issue Kolide’s customers want them to
solve. Kolide reaches out to users directly with instructions on how to get their devices into compliance. The user chooses when to restart, but if they don’t fix the problem by a predetermined deadline, they’re unable to authenticate with Okta.
Apple updated almost every system app in watchOS 10. Unfortunately, the redesign of the Timer app is a serious regression, according to Iconfactory developer Craig Hockenberry:
The new visual appearance and functionality of watchOS 10 is a welcome change. There was clearly a lot of design and engineering effort put into this new interface and the improvements are tangible for most apps.
Unfortunately, the app that I use the most on the Apple Watch has lost much of its usability, both in functionality and accessibility.
Using plenty of examples and use cases, Hockenberry masterfully chronicles all the ways the new app fails him and, presumably, many other users. The details matter.
So it sounds like a lot of people don’t like Apple’s new FineWoven material, which is used in the company’s new iPhone 15 cases instead of leather.
FineWoven has variously been described as plasticy, tacky (usually in the materials/stickiness sense), and cheap feeling. I received a (mulberry) FineWoven case this week and clapped it onto an iPhone 15 Pro. No one should be more surprised than me to find that… get ready…
I didn’t hate it.
At first.
In my brain, I’m a lovable contrarian, always happy to talk about price and accessibility when the rest of the world is going all wobbly for a new camera system, titanium or ProMotion. I relish the space I inhabit. But I did not expect to have an opinion, contrarian or otherwise, about FineWoven.
Here is where I confess that I care about cases. My phone has two; a leather wallet case from Tucah and the Smartish Gripmunk for when I’m at home.
That’s right. I switch when I get home, just like Mr. Rogers and his sweater. Judge me if you must.
But I don’t usually buy Apple cases, because there’s no full-on wallet style, and the price for the bumper styles is too high for my taste—FineWoven definitely included. My two third-party cases equal the approximate cost of one FineWoven.
And so, when an iPhone 15 Pro accompanied by a FineWoven case came skidding into my life this week, I opened the case package first. Because drama!
Don’t expect FineWoven to feel or look like leather. It does not. But putting the case on my phone did not result in instant outrage or palpitations. It was, like the name says, fine. The sides feel good to hold—smooth, but not too slippery.
The back is a bit of another story. Dragging my nails across the material yielded a sort of rhythmic squeakiness that I suppose I meant to be reminiscent of suede. (The case did not become scratched when I did this.) This surface does seem like a potential dirt magnet, but in the day I’ve been carrying it around, the dirt seems to have remained at bay. I have not dropped it from great heights, or given it to a family pet to gnaw. My first impression of FineWoven durability, except the part that’s colored by some of the most scorching product reviews I’ve ever read, has been: It’s fine.
Some users have reported problems with the connector cutouts at the bottom of the new cases. Sure enough, the first non-Apple USB-C cable I plugged into the phone fell right out. When I took the case off, everything was great again, just as it had been with a new Apple cable that shipped with the iPhone 15 Pro. Whatever my take on the aesthetics of the case, a bad connector cutout is a stone-cold deal breaker, even though I also have a couple of MagSafe pucks in service.
My advice to any who resisted the pull of first-day ordering, and might want to go FineWoven, is to view and touch them in person before you buy one. Look at the (surely well handled) ones in an Apple Store. Roll one around on your palm. And by all means, watch the YouTube videos where people torture a $60 case, rather than the phone it’s meant to protect.
And even if you like the case, consider waiting a few weeks or months for a new supply with better connector cutouts. Fortunately, there are a lot of less expensive cases out there, though they may not provide FineWoven’s eco bonafides, and certainly don’t have the branded appeal of an Apple logo.
One of the biggest imprints Steve Jobs and Jony Ive left on Apple’s design process is a certain kind of product idealism. At its best, Apple is striving to take ridiculously complex products, fusions of cutting-edge computer hardware design and eye-wateringly enormous software code bases, and make them simple.
It’s a philosophy that has led Apple to build wildly successful products that its customers love. And there’s one new iPhone 15 feature that perfectly illustrates why Apple’s idealism can take it to very interesting places.
Our favorite (or least-favorite) features in macOS Sonoma, our harrowing AppleCare stories, the cases we do or don’t have on our phones, and whether we upgraded to an iPhone 15.
macOS Sonoma is an update that feels small—but in all the best ways. Upgrading it won’t change how you look at your Mac, at least not at first. This means that if you’re desperate for change to longstanding features of macOS, you will not find what you’re looking for in macOS Sonoma. I suspect, however, that most Mac users just want incremental improvements without disruptive changes. Slow and steady wins the race.
To be sure, Apple is tinkering quite a bit around the edges, but mostly in the sense of minor features getting a facelift or new quality-of-life features that span across its platforms. If all the effort expended getting visionOS ready to ship has meant that things are quieter than usual around these parts, so be it. macOS Sonoma will make portions of your Mac experience better (with some really nice detail work on Apple’s part!) without breaking the stuff you count on. That’s my kind of update.
Free the widgets
iOS 14 introduced a new form of attractive informational widget to the iPhone, and iOS 15 extended it to the iPad. macOS Big Sur introduced widgets to the Mac, but in the least visible way, trapped in the Notification Center sidebar.
With Sonoma (and iOS and iPadOS), widgets can now be interactive, but more importantly for the Mac, they can now go where no Apple widget—not even Dashboard widgets, back in the day1—has gone before. In macOS Sonoma, widgets can live in Notification Center or on the Desktop.
Widgets live on the Desktop, stuck to it like a bunch of stickers, rather than floating in some sort of weird interstitial layer. As a result, Widgets can never float above your windows. If your windows are covering up the Desktop, the only way to see widgets is to move, close, or hide those windows. (I’ve been giving the Reveal Desktop command—accessible via function key or by spreading your fingers out on a trackpad—a real workout.) To make it a little easier, Apple has also imported a convention from Stage Manager, in which clicking on the Desktop hides everything but the Desktop. It makes sense, I suppose, but I hate it—my years of bringing Finder forward by clicking on the Desktop make it a nonstarter—and thankfully, Apple has given users the option to turn that gesture off when they’re not in Stage Manager.
The “stuck to the Desktop” approach is simple, and I think that’s why Apple chose it, but I’m a little disappointed that there’s no way to float a widget or the entire widget layer above Mac windows, even temporarily. If you want to work with a widget (they’re interactive now, after all) while looking at content in a standard window, you’ll need to rearrange or hide windows, which is probably more work than it’s worth.
Widgets can dynamically shift between color and monochrome—or you can choose to keep them in either style all the time.
Apple has also chosen by default to have widgets become desaturated of color—and therefore be a bit less obnoxious—when the Desktop/Finder isn’t selected. It definitely reduces the distraction, though widgets are also a lot less pretty when they’re desaturated. Fortunately, if you don’t mind the distraction, you can set widgets to display in full color all of the time. I chose this setting and got used to color widgets pretty quickly. (If you prefer the monochromatic look, you can also choose for widgets to remain monochromatic all the time.)
You can even choose settings for iPhone widgets.
Of course, one of the other big limitations of widgets on macOS has been that they require a corresponding macOS app—and some iPhone and iPad apps with cool widgets never make their way to macOS. To counteract this problem, Apple has added a feature that lets iPhone widgets run on the Mac. If your iPhone is on the same network as your Mac or within AirDrop distance, its apps will be available on the Mac. (They obviously won’t work if the iPhone leaves the house.)
It’s a pretty cool idea, and when it works, it feels like magic. I added a widget I built for my iPhone using Simon Støvring’s Scriptable app, which isn’t available on the Mac, and it worked, miraculously.
Unfortunately, iOS 17’s entire widget architecture feels a little bit shaky right now. Occasionally, widgets just stop updating or go completely blank, especially if there’s been an update in the App Store (or, for beta users, via TestFlight). I’ve restarted my iPhone more in the last few months than I had in the previous few years, all because it was the only way to get my widgets to start updating again. And when an iPhone widget turned into a zombie on iOS, it vanished entirely from my Mac’s Desktop. It’s frustrating, and Apple needs to get this issue fixed.
Apple provides widget guides, but you can put them anywhere you want.
I’m impressed with the work Apple has put into how you arrange widgets on the Desktop. It’s essentially free-form; you can put widgets anywhere. But when the widget you’re dragging gets close to other widgets, it will snap into alignment with those widgets.
At first, I thought the entire Desktop was a grid, but that’s not what’s happening—Apple’s just making it easy for adjacent widgets to look properly aligned. (Items that live on the Desktop can’t be lost under widgets, either—as you drag a widget around, all the other items on your Desktop get out of the way.)
These touches say a lot about Apple’s priorities. The company wants widgets on the Mac desktop to not look messy, and it’s done a lot of extra work to make that so.
While it’s nice to have widgets on the Mac, the fact is that they’re imports from iOS and iPadOS and, as a result, don’t quite fit right. All widgets feel a bit too large, especially if you’re trying to use them on a laptop display—the appropriate scale for iOS just seems a bit wrong for macOS.
Then there’s the entire concept of the “interactive widget,” which is a real winner on iOS 17 but mostly a nonsequitur on macOS. Yes, your to-do list app now comes with a widget that displays items you can check off… but on the Mac, why not just have your to-do app open to do that task? The Mac is such an able multitasker, and its multi-window interface is so powerful that this feature is blunted quite a bit. This is not to say that there aren’t use cases for interactive widgets on the Mac… it’s just that they’re a lot less exciting.
Widgets are great when it comes to glanceability. It’s nice to lay that weather widget on my Desktop and know that I can just peek over in the corner of my screen to see the current temperature and forecast. But even here, the Mac’s flexibility blunts the value somewhat: most Macs are laptops, and laptops have limited screen space. Is a big widget from iOS sitting on your Desktop (and requiring window management to reveal it) a better glanceable experience than putting items in the Mac’s original glanceable space, the menu bar? Sometimes, the answer will be yes, but it all feels less necessary than on iOS.
Live from Memphis in the aftermath of the Relay FM Podcastathon, Myke and Jason take delivery of new iPhones and Apple Watches. Also, General Motors continues its drive for Apple-like services revenue.
Apple won’t let you gamble on the iPhone, but it seriously considered letting you do the next worst thing. The iPhone 15 Pro Max seems to be selling well but that FineWoven case… eesh.
Taking stock
You loved Apple Cash, you raved about the Apple Card and you adore the Apple Savings Account. But how would you have felt about Apple Stock Trading?
One ability apparently pitched by executives was the ability to invest in Apple shares using spare cash.
Trader, can you spare a dime?
Was this just an elaborate scheme to get people to actually use the Stocks app? Alas, we may never know as this plan was shelved.
When markets worsened last year, Apple and Goldman Sachs shelved the project due to fears over backlash if users lost money in the stock market, and refocused attention on a high-interest savings account for Apple Card users.
Shocking breaking news: sometimes people lose money on the stock market. More on this as information unfolds.
You know, uh, we had a whole Great Depression over that, as I recall. It’s probably a good thing Apple’s plan has been mothballed. You’re not going to have any money to invest after buying an iPhone 15 Pro Max anyway.
Trickle down cameranomics
What an age we live in that we can know how well the iPhone 15 Pro is selling before anyone even gets one. Can you believe we used to have to wait sometimes months to hear how well a particular device was selling? Progress is really amazing.
But it seems the iPhone 15 Pro Max is selling quite well. The economy, it turns out, runs on cameras. Who knew?
Well, Apple knew, apparently. And no one blinked at the fact that you couldn’t get the iPhone 15 Pro Max with 128 GB of storage. I mean, if you’re buying a $1200 smartphone, you’re probably going to want the extra storage anyway. Also, Apple puts the Pro line first on its iPhone web page, so probably a lot of people are just clicking the first thing they see and plopping down $1200, thinking that’s just what iPhones cost these days.
The Verge’s first look at FineWoven doesn’t go so far as to say “Please go back to killing cows” but it definitely lets you know FineWoven is no leather. It does call several cows “real jerks”, though.
OK, not really, but that would have been funny if they had.
Apparently FineWoven cases are more prone to scratches than leather, and here we had all thought we lived in a post-scratch society. It’s a real disappointment. Given that Apple charges a fair amount for these cases, you might want to consider other options if you’re a case person. It will still protect the phone and isn’t that the real point of a case? To take the damage you don’t want the phone to get? You don’t want scratches on the phone, you don’t want scratches on the case, what do you want scratches on?
Let us consider that maybe FineWoven is like early attempts to replace the hamburger. If you were looking for a hamburger in the ‘80s, you were definitely going to be disappointed by a Gardenburger. It took years to create more passable alternatives, like the Beyond Burger and the Impossible Burger and just eating a regular hamburger and then buying some carbon offsets.
Sorry, I wasn’t supposed to type that last one out loud.
Hopefully Apple is able to keep improving the material, because despite what The Verge didn’t actually say, most cows are good people.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
As I write this I’m sitting at St. Jude, about three hours into our 12-hour podcast telethon in support of St. Jude’s goal of stopping childhood cancer. I’m one of four hosts along with Stephen Hackett, Myke Hurley, and Kathy Campbell.
My thanks to BZG Apps, maker of Unite 5, for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
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Apple works very hard to try and manage the massive preorder demand for day-one iPhone deliveries every year.1 Apple originally allowed members of the iPhone Upgrade Program customers to set their orders up in advance, but eventually allowed everyone to pre-configure their phones before the official order time, leaving only the matter of the financial transaction to that Friday. Pre-approvals from financial institutions were started earlier than the Friday to try and prevent the rejections that happen when servers start melting down.
And yet, there’s still always some drama.
Some people live for that adrenaline rush of not knowing what will go wrong. Whether or not their orders for themselves, and family members, will all make it across that finish line. Oh, the stories they can tell about how they had the perfect Apple Store app force-quit workflow! Those people are living on the chamfered edge.
There are also people who were never in that group, or phased out of that group. The urgency isn’t there. A desire for a new phone still exists, but it doesn’t have to be the first day. Those people still might want their phone before December, though.
Both groups have to contend with the decision between shipping and in-store pickup. Here, Apple hasn’t been able to make the strides that it has with the ordering process. When purchasing an iPhone, the options are to preorder for delivery within a certain estimated window, or in-store pickup on a certain day at an appointed time. Both can wreak havoc on a person’s schedule, and have actually made me put off ordering an iPhone (and other Apple hardware) before, because I just couldn’t figure out if I would be able to receive the item.
What’s in store for you?
Being forced to pick your delivery method in your initial order can also lead to some regrets, since availability changes over time. For example, you might initially see a late October delivery window, but with in-store pickup happening on day one. Easy choice, or so you think! But once that initial pool of store iPhones is depleted, you won’t be able to select in-store pickup at all until that local store gets more iPhones in stock.
Store appointment pickup times also seem to suffer from cascading delays, especially during the first launch weekend. Apple will tell you that you have a 15-minute appointment window, which is laughably precise given how busy the stores can be. Your pickup could be prompt, or it could take three hours, which is what happened to a friend of mine.2 You just have no idea if you’re going to get to the store and find an Apple employee that just hands you the phone and lets you leave, or if you’re going to wait in multiple lines and eventually check in at the door to the store only to be told that they’re running behind schedule.
However, if you wait until after launch because you want to reduce the chance of being stuck in the invisible DMV of an Apple Store’s overloaded appointment system, then you’ll be checking the inventory of every Apple Store near you every morning to see which models (and colors and storage options) have in-store pickup available. Then you’ll weigh that day’s schedule and guess how smoothly things will go. You might even avoid some stores based on past bad experiences. But you’ll never know until you get to the door and that Apple Store employee checks their iPad and reveals your fate.
Mail privilege
But Delivery is a bummer, too! Even though the majority of my time is spent at home, I truly have no ability to guarantee I will be able to reach my door for a delivery. When I worked in an office, there was still the off chance that the iPhone would be out for delivery on a Saturday. When I’ve needed to travel, I couldn’t redirect the order to a new location. And sometimes the delivery window slips back—or moves up—rendering your plan useless.
I wish Apple could offer something more like an Amazon Locker. Or at the very least, let customers ship to the store after the initial launch-palooza, and allow the customer to set an appointment time once the store had the device. Even Best Buy lets you do that! (But I don’t want to buy my iPhone from Best Buy. I want to buy my iPhone from Apple.)
Shipping to the store gives the safety and security of knowing that your phone is safe and nearby, but removes the pressure to bolt to the store when they’re going to be swamped.
Apple could even contact you if there was a delay with appointments at the store, so things could be rescheduled. And if a delivery window moves up, or slips back, Apple could ask the customer if they want to hold the original date… or change to in-store pick-up.
Many happy returns
The one really positive thing about this entire process is that trading in a device is mercifully easy to do. You can send your expensive, old iPhone into Apple for a undervalued discount on your new expensive iPhone without really feeling rushed, or that you’re putting your investment at great risk. I’ve heard a few stories of people having bad experiences with trade-ins, but not many.
The last time I did this, I had even missed the return window because of travel, and they… just sent a second return kit. No financial penalty incurred. Everything was smooth.
Getting a new iPhone causes me anxiety, when it should be a source of great joy. I’d love to see some creative retail solutions to smooth that out. Apple, please take my money—but don’t stress me out. I’ve got enough going on.
Alas, iPhone orders used to be at a reasonable time for people in California, but then the time was changed to be more friendly to lesser time zones. ↩
That’s way outside the norm, but my friend’s horror story will forever hang in the back of my mind. ↩
[Joe Rosensteel is a VFX artist and writer based in Los Angeles.]
We break down the arrival of Mark Thompson as CNN’s new boss. Also, there’s a mega letters segment! [This episode was recorded September 7. See you in two weeks!]
Ah, September: the time of years when hot summer days turn to crisp autumn ones, leaves are burnished in shades of red and gold, and pumpkin spice begins its inexorable creep back into all our lives. But if you breathe deep you can just smell something else on the air: fresh Apple software updates.
Yes, Apple this week dropped a slew of revisions to almost all of its major platforms (sorry, macOS, you have to wait until next week). You’ve no doubt already read of contact posters, new widget interfaces, and FaceTime on the Apple TV, but I wanted to take a few moments to wax rhapsodic about a few of my favorite overlooked features—and, specifically, features that help you not overlook things.
Because this year’s updates all provide better ways to navigate the world around us, and even without a second-generation ultra wideband chip, you can still find exactly what you’re looking for.
GQ’s Robert Leedham talks to the teams at Apple and Charles M. Schulz Creative Associates about bringing Snoopy to life on watchOS 10. Most interesting to me was how the watch decides what animations to show:
That first meeting at the Charles M Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa, California, was the Watch team’s first in-person meet-up after the pandemic, and what started as a two-hour drive north from Mountain View ultimately ended with plans for 148 unique animations that would be contextual depending on the time of day, local weather and activities. When you go for a swim, Snoopy dons his scuba gear and floats through your watch screen. When night arrives he’ll howl at the moon, and when you’re not up to much at all you can find him draped over his iconic red doghouse in a series of panels that are a direct lift from the comics. It all amounts to over 12 minutes of animation work that stemmed from an unexpectedly chaotic tête-à-tête.
Unsurprisingly, it’s the attention to detail that wins out here. I love the decisions about what activities are particularly Snoopy-like and what kind of nose to use for the beagle, which has evolved over the years.
Personally, I’ve been using the Snoopy watchface pretty much full time since installing watchOS 10 back in June and I continue to see new animations. They are, to a one, delightful, and greatly improve my day—I also appreciate that even though the watch face doesn’t have any complications, watchOS 10’s new widget stack makes me feel okay about foregoing them. As I mentioned in my first look at watchOS 10, my mom had a Snoopy watch when I was growing up, and continues to give me a solid nostalgia hit.
This week we’re wading into follow-up from last week’s Apple event. Then we say goodbye to beta season and list our favorite features of the newly shipped iOS 17, iPadOS 17, tvOS 17, and watchOS 10.
