When Apple updated its iWork suite in April of last year, I complained that the company didn’t break out the full list of functions that it had added to Numbers in its 14.4 release. Subsequently, a reader did the legwork of digging into the Wayback machine to identify the additions. Well, this week, Apple updated iWork again, including new functions for Numbers, and glory be—this time it did provide a full list of all the new functions available in the release notes. Can I hope that I played a part in this change? I’ll take it. Of those new functions,...

After my massive article on migrating your passwords, passkeys, and other secrets from third-party password managers to Apple’s Passwords, Wallet, Safari, and general ecosystem—potentially with help from another app—reader Scott asked whether I was directing people into weaker security. He wrote: If someone manages to steal my device and its passcode, they have access to the contents of my phone, including all of the information stored in Apple Passwords. This is not the case if I use a third-party password manager and have set a separate password for access, as the thief will not have access to my other passwords…I’m...

Apple has a great relationship with some third parties, the past comes back, and get ready for a big windfall. Valued partners When last we checked in on the ongoing will they/won’t they soap opera with GM and CarPlay (which was just two weeks ago), it seemed like GM was doodling “Mrs. GM CarPlay” on its Trapper Keeper. This week, however, GM insists it was just a one-time thing. “GM Wants You to Know It Still Plans to Ditch Apple CarPlay in Future EVs” Look, just because we were seen making out with CarPlay in a Chevy Silverado… and then...

Everyone loves the MacBook Neo. Apple’s fresh-squeezed laptop was a not-too-surprising hit with computer buyers, and presumably sales have continued to be good despite a $100 mid-stream price increase elevating its original $599 price tag to a still-good-but-not-astounding $699. The Neo proved that Apple’s iPhone-class processor, the A18 Pro, was powerful enough to drive a Mac and the Mac’s wide-open software platform. With performance roughly in between an M1 and M2 processor, the Neo is completely capable of even somewhat difficult tasks like audio and video editing. Obviously, RAM and processor limitations prevent it from tackling the toughest jobs, but that’s […]

New podcast: Hey, remember Cards? Also, Jason tests the M6, we gauge the new Apple Watch and Siri AI, and here’s hoping Apple is zealously trying to fix longstanding bugs.

I’ve been using the Apple Watch Series 12 for a week now, but this isn’t a review. The first wave of reviews that dropped at embargo time were all from people who had used the device for about the same amount of time, and it seems a bit silly to just repeat those observations—and a week after all of those stories were published. In addition, the most tantalizing features of the new Apple Watch—Live Rewind and Siri Recap—won’t be available until “late 2026.”1 So instead of sprinting to a quick judgment, I’ve decided to take the long path and live...

Over at LexOnTech our pal Lex Friedman1 has the skinny behind the long defunct Apple Cards, a project driven by Steve Jobs himself: In 2011, Mike said, “Steve Jobs was on one of his famous walks after having had a dinner with someone,” and he said to his walking companions from Apple, Mike was later told: “Wouldn’t it be great if I could just right now on my iPhone send [the dinner companion] a thank you card?” Apple decided to build an iPhone app just for creating and mailing cards. And the project moved fast, because it was a Steve-initiated...

Qualcomm: Qualcomm Incorporated today announced the renewal of its global patent license agreement with Apple, effective April 1, 2027. “We are pleased to extend the Apple license agreement,” said John Han, Executive Vice President and General Manager of Qualcomm Technology Licensing (QTL). That’s it. That’s the whole statement. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Apple has made no announcement. Apple first struck a deal back in 2019, which not only ended ongoing litigation between the two, but also launched the patent licensing deal and a “multiyear chipset supply agreement.” Apple’s last re-up of its Qualcomm deal in 2023 extended that deal through 2026. Despite...

Stephen Hackett reminds you that it’s September, and you know why that matters: We are flying through September, and our St. Jude campaign is rocking and rolling. As of this writing, we are knocking on the door of $450,000 raised this month! St. Jude cares for some of the world’s sickest children regardless of their race, ethnicity, beliefs, or ability to pay. Its patients receive the customized care they need to treat childhood cancer and other life-threatening diseases, no matter what barriers they face. Donations from normal folks like you and me make that possible. If you haven’t donated or signed […]

Sometimes, it’s the little things in life, as this week’s crop of intriguing apps proves. None of our entries promise anything revolutionary — just control over one aspect or another of your Mac that should stand to make your user experience just a tad bit better. Oh and we throw in a game, too. All work, no play and all that. So let’s work our way down the list of possible additions to your Mac or iPhone. And if you have something you’d like to see featured in this space, let us know about it via email at apps@sixcolors.com. Mainspring Your […]

You ever have one of those moments when you start to copy a large file in the Finder and groan when the Progress Window tells you it’s going to take forever? I used to have them all the time, and it didn’t make sense until I figured out that macOS was gaslighting me about my network connection. The other day, Friend of the site Todd Vaziri wrote on Mastodon: Two M4 Mac minis, both running Tahoe on the same local network, gigabit ethernet, using standard File Sharing. I can’t reliably play a Blu-ray rip from one computer to another without it […]

The new iPhone 18 Pro Max battery is quite capacious—so much so, in fact, that it potentially runs afoul of international shipping regulations. If you’re shipping batteries over 20 Wh, it triggers more restrictions. So Apple came up with a loophole, as it has documented on its support site: iPhone 18 Pro Max uses an innovative battery-firmware solution that limits battery capacity to below 20 Wh from the time it’s manufactured through its transport from the factory. When you activate your iPhone, the limit is removed and the battery’s full charging capacity is available. However, should you need to ship...

2024’s M4 Mac mini was a revelation. It packed Apple silicon power into a shockingly compact space, breathing new life into Apple’s all-time utility Mac and (eventually) making it into a go-to device for home AI and even back-end podcast transcription. Two years later, the Mac mini gets its first update since it became such a popular purchase. It’s a bit surprising: while the high-end model has updated to the familiar M5 Pro chip found in the MacBook Pro, the lower-end model has skipped right over the M5 and become the first Mac to be released using the next-generation 2-nanometer...

Apple TV scores big and while the iPhone 18 reviews are in, the iOS 27.1 beta is not. Time to bring back the plus sign Let’s give a hearty round of applause for TV. Fantastic. Well done just in general. So many shows and so many of high quality. And there’s also Peacock! Just great. While TV is broadly very good these days, Apple TV is especially good and this week it got more bonafides to prove it. “Widow’s Bay sweeps 78th Primetime Emmy Awards as Apple TV scores 9 more wins” “Apple TV’s Pluribus Wins Six Awards at the...

New podcast: Jason likes Glacier. Dan buys an unexpected Apple Watch. And, oh yeah, there were new OS releases this week!

Ashley Belanger at Ars Technica runs through recently unsealed documents in the case brought by news organizations led by The New York Times against OpenAI and Microsoft: Perhaps most explosively, Microsoft Director of Applied Science Brent Hecht repeatedly warned in documents that scraping news for AI training was “an astonishing theft of unprecedented proportions,” calling it perhaps the “largest theft of labor in human history,” news orgs said. In another document, Hecht contradicted Microsoft and OpenAI’s argument that training AI on news content is fair use, suggesting that the plan to widely scrape news made “a complete mockery of the...

David Pogue, in his newsletter: The new AI Siri came out this week as part of OS 27 for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Mac, and it’s a life changer. A phone changer. It replaces most Google searches, most ChatGPT or Claude interactions, and cumulative hours of fumbling and searching and dragging and copying and finding and tapping and pasting…. The hardest part will be getting out of the habit of opening apps, and remembering that you have Siri. Give it a few tries. Learn to trust it. You’ll save incredible amounts of time and fumbling. I used the beta-test version […]

Last year, Apple integrated the iPhone 17 Pro into its Friday Night Baseball coverage. As you might expect, this year it’s doing the same with the recently announced iPhone 18 Pro. According to Apple, its coverage of Friday’s Giants-Dodgers game at Dodger Stadium will include 14 different iPhone 18 Pros “embedded throughout Dodger Stadium,” including in the pitch clock, backstop, foul pole, and both bullpens. The idea is to provide unusual vantage points that haven’t been seen in baseball broadcasts before. In addition, Friday’s game marks the fourth immersive broadcast of the season, providing a you-are-there perspective for Vision Pro users. […]

One of the benefits to being part of the Apple ecosystem is the plethora of apps that work across all of Apple’s devices so that you can access them whether you’re sitting in front of a Mac, out and about with your iPhone or even strapping on a Vision Pro headset. Come on — somebody out there has to be wearing one of those things. This week’s look at interesting apps features four such multiplatform wonders that let you do everything from type with your voice, post on a social network or jot down random thoughts on at least two different […]

If you have at least the minimum iCloud+ 2 TB subscription, you can enable video summaries. The number of cameras you can activate (right) depends on your tier. If you have HomeKit-compatible security cameras, you may have heard that Apple was going to ship an Apple Intelligence upgrade with the version 27 operating system releases. Apple Home would now provide an analysis in words of what was happening in a clip, making it easier to search for things that had occurred, instead of “animal” or a person’s name. But it’ll cost you. Maybe more than you expected. Apple had said it […]

A new, but familiar, Strategery. Strategery was always one of our very favorite games in the early days of iOS. And by “we,” I mean large portions of the staff at Macworld, including both myself and Lex Friedman. Lex reviewed the app for Macworld, and we even gave it an award. It was a Hall of Fame iPhone game. Strategery—named for Will Ferrell’s made-up word during his impression of George W. Bush—was a take on the classic strategy board game Risk. Risk is a clunky game to play, with an awful lot of little plastic pieces and dice rolling. Strategery did […]

By now you’ve probably heard the promise of iOS 27: it’s a Snow Leopard-like year where Apple spent a lot of time not on big marquee features, but on smaller fixes and enhancements throughout the operating system. And that’s largely true—and largely to the benefit of the platform—but it’s also not the whole story. Because there is, of course, at least one major feature that comes to iOS 27 (and Apple’s other platforms) this year, and it’s a doozy: Siri AI. The result is an OS that feels like a marked improvement over its predecessor, in everything from design to performance […]

Last year’s macOS release, macOS 26 Tahoe, was a mixed bag. While it added a bunch of solid new productivity features, it also included a half-baked visual update that muddied the entire interface. While I chose to view the glass as half full and accepted the interface imperfections, I understand that a lot of people just gave Tahoe a pass rather than inflict a visual regression on themselves. No matter how full you think the (liquid) glass was, I have good news: macOS 27 Golden Gate is here, and it’s good. Not only has Apple addressed most of the visual problems […]

Apple holds an event, developers pay the price, and look who’s crawling back! Finally, we’ll know what today’s specials are At its “Surprise and shine” event this week, Apple unveiled a raft of updated products, including the new iPhone Pro and Pro Max, the Apple Watch Series 12, AirPods 5, some guy named “Ternus” and, in an absolute shocker that no one was expecting, a foldable phone. I know, right? Just completely out of the blue. Who… who knew? OK, if the iPhone Duo itself wasn’t shocking — having been the subject of rumors since the Nixon administration, a full...

New podcast: John Ternus’s role in this week’s Apple Event, and our first impressions of the iPhone Duo’s hardware and software stories.

The Internet’s Dr. Drang on the Live Rewind and Siri Recap features announced this week: The hoops Apple jumped through to avoid certain words is pretty funny. For example, in the discussion of Live Rewind, we learn that Audio from the microphone flows into the audio buffer inside the Secure Exclave on the S11 chip. You think your watch records the audio around you? No no no. The audio flows into the Secure Enclave, and flowing is definitely not recording because it’s a different word. Notably Apple chose not to use a very common synonym for “flowing” that would be...

(Anastasiya Badun/Unsplash) At my gym, all the signs are handwritten and friendly. In one section, a sign asks members not to drop their weights because there are downstairs neighbors.1 In the bathrooms, reminders to flush and wash hands. But throughout the gym, signs say—more directly—no live streaming. Other signs ask people to exercise consideration when recording their routines for themselves or their coaches to ensure nobody else is in their sight lines. Privacy in the gym is paramount to ensure everyone is not self-conscious and is comfortable. Siri Recap requires continuous audio capture, relying on Apple’s privacy protections and with no […]

“It’s just a big iPhone.” A description of the Pro Max? The iPhone 6? The iPhone 6 Plus? None of the above. Those old enough—cough, cough—to remember all the way back to 2010’s introduction of the iPad might recall this as a common dismissal of the first generation of Apple’s tablet. Which, to be fair, was kind of just a big iPhone.1 Not that there was anything wrong with that—in fact, it was a pretty successful elevator pitch for an entirely new product category. But if you tuned in for Apple’s announcement of the iPhone Duo this week, you may...

In his first event video since taking over as Apple CEO, John Ternus got a cheeky introduction from his predecessor Tim Cook before boldly referencing some classic Steve Jobs moments and setting the company’s most important product on a new course. I appreciated the video’s opening conceit, which was essentially a cinematic debate about what makes for a great opening scene, leading to Tim Cook narrating his own entrance to Apple Park—and then, in a twist, explaining that he’s not the main character of this story, it’s the other guy—namely Ternus. What a great, ego-deflating moment of support—and it stuck the […]

Apple’s events are always a deluge of information, delivered by smooth-talking presenters who are probably trying to hypnotize you with their soothing hand motions. So it can take a little bit of time after watching the presentation to come back to reality, and sift through the details. This year’s iPhone event1 was no exception. The company rolled out new Pro iPhones, two new Apple Watches, a new pair of AirPods, and, of course, the first folding iPhone. Having had a couple of hours to poke around and think about the slew of announcements, I’ve been mulling over the implications of...

We’ll all know soon enough, but kudos to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman for breaking some new details 12 hours before Apple’s event begins: Its device, called the iPhone Duo, will start at $2,000… The entry-level version will include 256 gigabytes of storage, with Apple offering higher-capacity versions that will take the price all the way up to roughly $3,000…. There will be a magnetic hinge system and support for the Apple Pencil stylus. The Duo will go on sale as early as October and come in white and dark blue. iPhone Duo is a good name. Not only does it make sense […]

You might be interested in knowing how to embrace Apple Passwords with a bear hug, leaving behind your current password manager. If you tried Apple’s Passwords app in the past and were disappointed, you should probably give it another try. The improvements Apple has made in the last couple of releases have brought it to what I consider parity with the most important useful features of well-designed third-party password managers. Despite that, Passwords is focused on—no surprise—passwords and password-like items: website logins, passkeys, and Time-based One-Time Passwords (TOTPs). Many password managers include a junk drawer of other kinds of structured material […]

General Motors has been saying for a few years now that it’s going to get rid of CarPlay and Android Auto on its EVs because, well, reasons. Well, well, well… maybe not. Ian Wright of CarBuzz writes: The Cadillac configurator is up for several 2027 models, and we spotted that the Lyriq still shows CarPlay and Android Auto being standard. The Lyriq is Cadillac’s first all-electric vehicle and a tech-forward vehicle that we think is becoming one of the best luxury EVs available. So, it piqued our interest that the GM brand was still including the things it was supposed to […]

The deed is done! John Ternus is now CEO of Apple! Memomento mori [extreme TV infomercial announcer voice] Do you suffer from insomnia, sleeplessness, or the condition known as “Snooze Deficiency Syndrome”? Do you lie awake staring at the ceiling, unable to lull yourself to unconsciousness, despite lately really preferring it to consciousness? Well, don’t worry! Apple’s outgoing CEO has you covered! “Read Tim Cook’s full memo to Apple employees on his last day as CEO” Today is my last day as CEO of Apple. Story checks out so far. This is a moment I always knew would come one...

This is more of a comment than a question. A few months ago I added a “Report a Typo” feature to Six Colors. The goal was to give people a simple place to go — sixcolors.com/typo — if they found a mistake on the website. That Google form inserts the information into a Google Sheet, and a script attached to the Google Sheet kicks off a simple automation that sends me a notification in a couple different places. This works pretty well. I’m using a very simple Google Apps script to fire off a webhook when there’s a new form submission. […]

Artificial Intelligence takes center stage in a few of the apps enjoying this week’s spotlight — and not the kind of AI that’s going to have you rolling your eyes or organizing a protest march against the nearest data center. No, these are actually useful AI features that take some of the busy work of daily life out of your hands so you can concentrate on other things. AI or no, we’re always looking for top macOS and iOS apps to feature here. If you’ve got something that fits that description, drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief...

Listen up, you primitive screwheads, Dear beloved team, Today marks the end of my remarkable—many would say “historic” and who would I be to argue?—tenure as Apple’s chief executive officer. Over the last 15 years, I’ve taken a piddling little tech company from a pair of nerds in a garage to the most profitable company in the world. Or, at least, that’s how I remember it. I’m sure you’ll miss me, and I’ll miss me too. As I think about where I’m headed, I can’t help but think about how much I’ve done for this company. I cast my mind...

Today Tim Cook is stepping down as Apple CEO and Phil Schiller is scaling back his involvement in the company’s events and his supervision of the App Store. I thought I’d find the oldest Tim Cook photo in my Photos library (what, do you not have numerous Apple executives in your People view?) and it’s from October 2008: Tim (left), Phil (right), and some other guy. This was from the post-event Q&A session, back when that was a thing! In the video of this event you’ll see that Tim Cook, then Apple’s COO, is asked by Steve Jobs to present “the […]

I know there’s no connection between my local area network and our house’s plumbing system, but when the faucet started running uncontrollably literally seconds after I fixed a network outage, I had to wonder: did we have a poltergeist? The jury is still out. But I can tell you that my hour of fruitless examination of router settings is to your benefit: you won’t have to do this when it happens to you. The weakest TP-Link As a guy known for Wi-Fi since the early 2000s, you might think my house is ablaze with wireless signals.1 Yes, it is: we have […]

Joe Lemire of Sports Business Journal has a detailed story about how MLB came to hire Jason Weingradt, the developer behind the amazing baseball app Mosaic: By drawing on public application programming interfaces (APIs) from the league and other sources, Weingradt built an app in TestFlight — Apple’s home for products still in beta — and shared his new creation, Mosaic, by posting on Threads and tagging #buildinpublic to solicit early adopter feedback…. That very same day, MLB Executive Vice President Kenny Gersh received a Slack message from colleagues alerting him to Mosaic and asking if the league’s legal team should […]

Jason Snell is a journalist, podcaster, and Jeopardy! contestant. The editor-in-chief of Macworld for 17 years, he currently runs the Apple-focused website Six Colors and appears regularly on several podcasts, including MacBreak Weekly and Upgrade. His latest podcast, Designed in California, details the 50-year history of Apple over 50 episodes. We talked to Snell about some of his favorite apps for streamlining his podcasting and writing workflows.

New podcast: Live from the backrooms in Anaheim, we talk Mac mini and Mac Studio and iPhone event.

Apple’s Friday Night Baseball made its immersive video debut on the Vision Pro Friday, with numerous live immersive cameras scattered around Yankee Stadium for the night’s game between the Yankees and the Red Sox. Apple has produced a lot of immersive video, including some sports documentaries and a set of live L.A. Lakers games, and it’s been clear that the makers of all that content have assumed that immersive video should be produced more or less like regular sports content: with lots of quick cuts, despite the fact that quick cuts in immersive video can be disorienting in a way that […]

Apple announces the date of its September event, new M5 Ultra and M6-based Macs are available for pre-order, and Tim Cook gets ready to play his exit music. An event by any other name Apple has announced the date of its September iPhone event! Dubbed “Surprise and Shine”, the event will take place on Wednesday, September 9th. Not surprisingly because it’s a pun, the tagline for the event is actually different in other languages. In French it was “A new day. Soon.” In Spanish “A ray of wow.” In Portuguese “The unfolding of brilliant surprises.” (wink-wink). In Eridian, the tagline was […]

Apple’s overhaul of Siri and its expansion of Apple Intelligence are extensive. Take Control publisher Joe Kissell and I looked at this mountain of changes and opted to research and write an entirely new book, Take Control of Siri AI and Apple Intelligence, to help us get a handle on what’s new and thus pass it along to readers. This title is now available in its 1.0 release, ahead of the version 27 operating systems shipping in September. We also have our books on iOS 27/iPadOS 27 and Golden Gate available in 1.0 versions. All will receive free updates when the […]

Today Relay launched the public and private feeds of my new podcast, Designed in California. If you’re interested in the history of Apple, check it out. The first few episodes in the feed are episodes we previously released in the Upgrade podcast feed; our first all-new episode debuts next week. If you’re a Kickstarter backer who pledged at a level where you’ll get the special member feeds, check your messages for information about how to redeem that pledge and get access to the special feeds. And if you didn’t back the Kickstarter, you can now join us via Relay and get […]

In a bit of a late-August surprise while the world awaits word on the next generation of iPhones, on Tuesday Apple announced two new processors, the M5 Ultra and M6, which help power new iterations of its Mac Studio and Mac mini desktop computers. Both models are available to pre-order now and will ship on September 22 and will run macOS 27 Golden Gate. Bridging the generations The M6 chip kicks off Apple’s next chip generation, and is its first based on a 2-nanometer production process. It’s also got the first 12-core CPU in Apple’s base M-series chip line, up...

We’ve got a pair of apps that help you get a little reading done, albeit with two different approaches. Still, whether you prefer having someone else read the articles to you or if you just prefer a cleaner feed of articles, there’s something for everyone in this week’s App Report. If there’s something you think belongs in our weekly look at promising macOS and iOS apps, just drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of the app in question. We can’t reply to every email we get, but we’ll certainly take a look at any and all apps […]

First we’ll look at how AI IS TEARING THIS FAMILY APART! Then we’ll talk about Apple’s rumored AirPods with cameras, which are also a problem. I’d like to have an argument, please This week Anthropic announced that in order to identify AI from human-generated content it would be watermarking all text it generates by subtly altering the randomness at which its models picked the next word. While this might seem a perfectly cromulent means of accomplishing a worthy goal, it really rubbed John Gruber the wrong way, as if someone suggested putting autocomplete Swiss on his Philly cheesesteak AI. Gruber subsequently […]

New podcast: Glenn Fleishman joins Jason to discuss the growth and change of Apple Wallet, and Jason’s anti-key policies that have led him to review yet another Smart Lock.