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Apple Newsroom:

Apple and Ford today announced that Apple Maps will be integrated directly into Ford’s upcoming Universal Electric Vehicle (UEV) Platform through Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK. Coming to Ford’s UEV Platform in 2027, this integration will deliver a beautiful and easy-to-use navigation experience powered by Apple Maps directly to the vehicle’s displays. Road-level Maps information will also enable Ford’s Latitude AI team to build a seamless hands-free driving experience.

This shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: Ford CEO Jim Farley has been bullish on CarPlay and the UEV project was previously headed up by Doug Field¹, who spent several years at Apple both on the Mac hardware team and, more significantly, leading up the abandoned car effort.

This integration is interesting, though, because of the lukewarm reception of CarPlay Ultra in the automotive industry. The new “MapKit for Automotive SDK”, which as far as I can tell is being announced in this press release, seems more like the Android Automotive approach of building in support at a low level, though here it’s predominantly focused on navigation rather than providing the full stack for the car. Here’s how Apple describes it:

This integration is made possible by Apple’s new MapKit for Automotive SDK, which allows automakers to embed and customize Apple Maps. The SDK also enables automakers to deliver a cohesive navigation experience for drivers that is consistent with the look and feel of their vehicles, and provides road-level information to help automakers build hands-free driving experiences.

I also appreciated this little tidbit nestled at the very end of the press release:

In addition to the integration of Apple Maps into Ford’s UEV Platform, CarPlay will continue to be available on Ford vehicles, providing drivers with a safe and smart way to use their iPhone in the car.

Translation: Eat it, GM.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

How much waterproofing matters in our tech and our riskiest water moments, the last time we changed our minds about a technology, how we buy our phones and thoughts on upgrade programs, and the recent tech purchases we feel guilty about.

Go to the podcast page.

The market for small e-readers has been booming lately. Earlier this year, Jason took a look at the Xteink X4, a pint-sized reading device that was about as light and small as they come. But those maniacs at Xteink weren’t done yet: they followed it up with the $79 X3, which is unbelievably even lighter and smaller.

I wouldn’t blame you for wondering if there’s such a thing as too small and light—at 3.84 inches by 2.51 inches (and just 0.2 inches thick) the X3 is still larger than, say, a credit card, but not by much. The screen itself measures just 3.7 inches, more than half an inch smaller than the X4’s 4.3 inch, but its 259 ppi resolution still makes it plenty easy to read on.¹ At that size it’s little imposition to take it with you wherever you go. Easy to lose? Maybe. Easy to love? Yes.

For one thing, this small size unlocks at least one capability that the X4 couldn’t fully deliver upon—the ability to stick to the back of your phone. Like the X4, the X3 has a MagSafe-compatible magnet in its rear case and it fits just about perfectly on the back of my iPhone 17 Pro, nestled below the camera plateau.

However, the magnet is not particularly strong, and it lacks the secondary stabilizing magnet that you see on official MagSafe accessories, meaning it wobbles around a bit. I wouldn’t call it a super secure connection, but it’s pretty good if you’re just slipping it in and out of a pocket. Just be aware that it probably will come loose.

Like the X4 before it, the X3 features a pair of rocker switches on the front for a total of four possible buttons. But they’ve opted to skip the X4’s side mounted rocker switch in favor of a single buttons on each side. There’s also an on/off switch at the top (plus a recessed button used for resetting the device). And with all of that, they somehow managed to continue to fit a microSD slot in the top. The bottom left corner also has a little set of holes for a lanyard or wrist strap.

The one casualty of the smaller X3, however, is the port. The X4 was big enough to accommodate a USB-C connector, but the X3’s thin profile makes that impossible. Instead, there’s a pogo-pin USB cable that connects to four magnetic contacts on the reader. Is this a step back? Strictly speaking, yes. Using a proprietary connector is a bummer in the year 2026, especially because it means having to keep track of a single-use cable. That said, once you get the X3 up and running, the only real need for the connector is charging, and the battery on this thing lasts a very long time. (I’ve yet to run it down in several weeks of usage.) Just remember to make a note of where you stow that cable for the point months down the road when you do need to charge it and find yourself wondering whatever happened to it.

As with the X4, the X3 lacks any sort of screen lighting, meaning that it’s strictly a “read in bright light” device. But don’t worry, because Xteink has already unveiled a new X4 Pro with the company’s first lit screen.²

All in all, I found the X3 very comfortable to read on, whether attached to my iPhone or not. The side buttons work great as page-turners, and the screen is high-contrast and sharp enough to make text render very clearly. All in all, it’s a great reading experience—if you take into account one major caveat.

Soft where?

The elephant in the room for the Xteink X3 is the software. Xteink ships the X3 with its own built-in firmware which, by all accounts, has improved since the first version. But I can’t really tell you, because upon opening the box and powering up the device, the first thing I did was install Crosspoint, the open-source community-built firmware that has turned this device from a curiosity into a real contender.³

Unlike a lot of other firmware replacements, Crosspoint is super easy to install; you can do it right from a web browser. While it’s not fully free of technological hurdles, I’d say that most people comfortable using an e-reader or updating their iPhones will be able to handle the process with few problems. And the benefits are manifold.

Crosspoint goes beyond simply turning this into a functional device and into one that is actually fun to use. It’s got a straightforward, easy to navigate interface that makes it simple to do everything from reading to loading books (accomplished via a web-based interface). For those who like to tweak their reading setup, there are plenty of configuration options, everything from screen orientation to hyphenation and, yes, custom fonts loaded via the SD card.

Even the onscreen keyboard that you need to use for various configuration tasks is pretty solid for what’s available—on par with navigating via an onscreen keyboard with a game controller, in my opinion. I wouldn’t want to have to type in my Wi-Fi password every time—and you don’t, because it saves it for you—but one time was fine.

There are also a bunch of other features that might appeal to those who want to take reading to the next level. For example, support for Open Publication Distribution System (OPDS) standard means that if you want to host your book library on your own server, you can point your reader at that and download any of the books you already own directly to your device. There’s also support for KOreader sync to help keep your place between supported devices.⁴

Crosspoint has been so successful, in fact, that the team at Xteink has smartened up and started collaborating. (This after a brief moment when it looked like the company might try to firmware lock its devices.) Now, not only do the “developer editions” sold directly by the company continue to allow you to install the custom firmware, the company has been working with the Crosspoint team to make sure new devices, like the X4 Pro, will already be supported when they arrive. While Xteink hasn’t quite adopted Crosspoint as the default OS, it’s not far off.

The world is not enough

Given how positive I’ve been above, you might be all too tempted to run out and snap up an Xteink X3 for yourself. I don’t blame you! At $79 (and often discounted for less than that), it’s well positioned as an impulse buy. And while I don’t want to dissuade you, I have to note the biggest caveat of all: the world.

If there’s one thing that’s holding back the X3 and the X4 and, frankly, all the other wacky readers out there, it’s the market. The e-reader space is still unquestionably dominated by Amazon purveying its razors-and-blades strategy: buy the Kindle for cheap⁵ and the company earns it all back when you buy your books or sign up for Kindle Unlimited’s all-you-can-eat plan. Kobo, who makes the hardware that I prefer, is a distant second, and has some advantages, but operates on roughly a similar scheme.

Both of these companies benefit from lock-in in the form of Digital Rights Management. DRM is, of course, largely pushed by publishers, who insist upon cryptographic schemes to lock down the books they sell in order to nominally protect against piracy. Never mind the fact that books are still easily and widely pirated, the DRM is relatively simple to crack⁶, and many of those books have been vacuumed up by the boatload by an even more insidious thief in the form of AI training data.

I come at this, of course, from the perspective of both reader and writer. As a writer, I certainly want to be compensated for all the hard work I put in to create my books, but I also want people to read and enjoy them. That’s why you’ll find no stauncher defender of libraries.

Personally, I find the industry’s insistence on DRM misplaced, just as I did with the music industry two decades ago. The lack of these security features does not automatically turn people at large into thieves and it’s insulting to think that it would. In fact, the sci-fi publisher Tor, one of the biggest names in the business and a subsidiary of Big Five publisher Macmillan, has put out its titles without DRM for almost fifteen years and I haven’t seen any significant indication that it’s harmed their business. Many of my books are also available directly from my publisher without DRM, and I don’t think that’s put a dent in my bottom line either.

I would love to be able to easily load any book I’ve ever purchased onto my Xteink devices—or, for that matter, any e-reader or e-reading app of my choice. There are, of course, extensive repositories of DRM-free public domain books available. Amazon, to its credit, does now allow you to download DRM-free copies of any book that you’ve purchased.⁷ I argued a few years back that this is an opportunity for Apple to distinguish its stagnant ebook marketplace from the competition. But for first-run books, your options are currently more limited (and sometimes harder to suss out).

I’d also love to somehow see support for Libby, the popular library ebook borrowing app, on Xteink devices, though I don’t see that happening anytime soon. But in my opinion, the bottom line is that more ways to read makes more readers of books, which in turn makes more customers of books.

But I digress.

The conclusion

The other week I was riding the train with my kid, our usual weekend pastime. As he was enjoying looking out the window, I was reading a book on the X3, magneted to the back of my iPhone 17 Pro. As we neared a stop, a woman nearby caught sight of it and marveled over it. “Is that a tiny e-reader?”

I extolled its virtues for a moment before they got off at their stop. But it told me one important thing: there’s a hunger for these types of devices. Because people who self-select as readers in this day and age are, above all, passionate. You have to make a choice to be sitting and reading a book when you could be watching TikTok or Instagram or listening to music or a podcast, all of which are constantly at your fingertips.

That’s where the X3 (and the X4) deliver. A Kindle or Kobo isn’t exactly bulky, but they’re not pocketable either. Being able to take your e-reader with you just as we stuffed mass market paperbacks in our back pockets in days gone by is freeing and fun. Now if the world might just shift a little bit more to meet us, maybe we could free ourselves a little further.

Dan starts drinking early, James gets bad vibes and Moltz screams for ice cream.

Go to the podcast page.

Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports that Apple is set to announce a new “Apple Upgrade” program (paywalled) next week to replace both its existing financing offerings and the iPhone Upgrade program. Details are still vague at present, but it will supposedly offer lease-style arrangements for not just iPhones, but Macs, iPads, and Apple Watches as well.

I’ve been in the iPhone Upgrade Program since Apple debuted it more than a decade ago. There have been plenty of ups and downs over that time—especially in the early years, when Apple was still figuring out how the whole program worked, but more recently it’s been pretty smooth.

And, I have to say, effective: I’ve had a new iPhone every year, without fail, and I’ve ended up paying only about half of what I would pay for a new phone outright.¹

I do, however, have some concerns about the details Gurman does report. For one, the involvement of Klarna. They’re best known for their buy-now-pay-later service—a realm Apple was prepared to play in but ended up quickly abandoning. At the time I wondered if part of that about-face was Apple “perhaps not wanting to be in a business that can feel a bit troublesome.” But the company still subsequently partnered with other companies that offer that feature, like Affirm and, yes, Klarna.

Unlike the iPhone Upgrade program, this new offering will also reportedly not include AppleCare, meaning that you’ll have to shell out to protect the device you are leasing from Apple. There’s more than a whiff of “services revenue” around that, AppleCare now being somewhat more expensive than it was. No doubt some will choose not to go through the hassle and additional cost of purchasing it, which means a subset of those people will invariably damage their phones and incur additional payments to Apple. AppleCare as part of the iPhone Upgrade Program was fundamentally a good deal because it insured devices that Apple was probably getting back, whether for eventual refurbishment or just for parts.

But the iPhone Upgrade Program often felt like an afterthought to Apple—for example, despite Apple officially telling me devices on it were eligible for the company’s restructured AppleCare One program, I heard from several users that this was effectively not the case.

Additionally, this part of Gurman’s story made me hesitate:

The Apple Upgrade service will work like a subscription and users can pay off the device early during their term, upgrade early to a new model or keep it at the end of the leasing period. In certain cases, those transactions will incur an additional fee. Like a car lease, it can also be returned at the end of the term. [emphasis added]

So “certain cases” and “an additional fee” are doing a lot of heavy lifting there. How many cases? What kind of fee? 9to5Mac’s Ben Lovejoy points out that if this really is structured like a car lease, that could mean some serious charges.

The iPhone Upgrade Program was, by comparison, straightforward. The cost of buying your phone was divvied up into 24 payments; after 12, you can upgrade. Loans were backed by Citizens Bank, but there were no interest charges or other fees. Hence it probably wasn’t a big money-maker. I don’t know what Apple’s deal with Klarna will be, but I’m skeptical that it’s going to be as consumer-friendly.

Finally, the other questionable part circling this is this report from 9to5Mac’s Marcus Mendes that code in iOS 27 suggests Apple will be able to restrict features of devices that fall behind on their payments:

The code describes a system called App Managed Features, which allows an authorized financing or provider app to enroll an iPhone and perform ongoing status checks.

If the contract is no longer in good standing, Apple’s system services can place the iPhone in “Restricted Mode,” which blocks access to most apps until the payment or contract issue is resolved, while keeping a small set of apps available.

Forget paying for heated seats, imagine if your car just decided not to offer CarPlay or, I don’t know, climate controls if you fell behind on your lease payments. This just feels, for lack of a better term, gross. Certainly predatory on lower income consumers who are most likely to take advantage of such a payment structure to buy an expensive phone.

As I said, details are still not concrete, so it’s always possible that this won’t be the exact situation. But if it is, I can say with some confidence that my days in Apple’s upgrade programs are at an end, and I certainly would be loath to recommend them to anybody.

The season finale of Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey’s excellent Origin Story podcast is about the Luddites, and why the name doesn’t mean what you think it means.

It’s really about people reacting negatively to new technology that threatens their jobs, and therefore their livelihood. This might be extremely relevant to some modern technology topics, come to think of it.

(Available on Apple Podcasts / Spotify / Overcast / YouTube and everywhere else.)

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

While OpenAI readies a familar-sounding smart speaker, Jason and Myke break down the public betas for macOS, iOS, and watchOS, including Siri AI and new Photos features.

Go to the podcast page.

I dispense what might be called valuable insight to my friends, as well as in this public forum. My friends know the danger: they might become the topic of a column, which is true for my buddy Jeff, who left a bag containing his passport behind at a hotel. Fortunately, he had an AirTag in his bag. That was, however, just the beginning of the journey. (Jeff gave me permission to share his story.)¹

To avoid suspense, I’ll tell you that Jeff doesn’t have his bag back, but will soon.

Grate news

Jeff was out of town on business for a few days—he’s one of those nearly extinct creatures called a “full-time technology reporter“—and was carrying his passport to Texas not because it’s another country (it hasn’t seceded yet), but because he lacks a Real ID-upgraded driver’s license. He had a small bag with a few items, including the passport and an AirTag, that he didn’t need to carry, so he used the hotel safe. There have been many articles written about how unsafe hotel safes are, but it feels as if you’re in a decent hotel, it’s still another bar for someone to get through to steal your stuff.

Leaving in a bit of a rush, Jeff didn’t retrieve the bag from the safe. When he realized it wasn’t with him, thousands of miles later, he was peeved. Shouldn’t the “left behind” feature in Find My have alerted him? Find My showed the bag’s location, however. For some reason, it appeared as if it were in the hotel parking lot. I catastrophized with him, assuming it was stolen. He called the hotel, which said it wasn’t in lost and found.

A staff member went out, looked in the parking lot, and said the rough location was a grate—perhaps the bag had been stolen and someone had found the AirTag and dropped it through the slats? Which would imply that a hotel employee or a thief had managed to get into Jeff’s room after he left, open the safe, leave the hotel, and rummage through the bag in the parking lot before absconding.

That wasn’t the case (or valise). The hotel called back the next day. The previous staffer didn’t know, for some reason, that valuable left-behind items were tagged and placed in a safe in the basement, presumably below or near the parking lot. His bag, containing his passport and other items, would be sent back to him.

Jeff’s experience reveals several aspects of the Find My tracking system that you can take advantage of in advance or use if you’ve lost something or left it behind.

Don’t leave me!

Every device and item you have can be set to alert you when you “leave it behind.” I believe this setting is enabled by default, though Apple’s documentation isn’t clear on this point. All of my devices and items have it enabled, and Jeff found it was turned on for all his gear. Here’s how to check:

1. In a native Find My app, select the device (like a Mac) or an item (an AirTag or other Find My network item) in the list of such things.
2. On an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch, the action sheet appears. On a Mac, click the info (i) icon next to the item’s name on the map. In the upcoming version 27 operating system releases on all platforms, tap or click the More (…) button that appears when you select the device from the list.
3. Tap or click Notify When Left Behind, which should already show On. (In the 27 releases, tap or click When Left Behind.)
4. If disabled, turn it on.

Here’s a crucial detail: examine the “Notify me, except at” list. You can manually add to this set of locations (tap or click New Location). However, it primarily grows when you’re notified by an item or device being left behind, and then you tap or click in the notification to ignore it at that location. You are presented with the option to just exclude that item or device from that location or all of your equipment.

It’s very easy to approve that exclude-all button. (Jeff did not; his list didn’t include the hotel.) This can be convenient when you’re at a hotel, a friend’s house, or another location for a few days or frequently, and sometimes leave Find My-tracked stuff there. But once you ignore the location, you won’t get notified in the future. You can modify the list by hand, too.

Jeff may instead have been tripped up by the safe acting as a Faraday cage—a metal mesh or box that shields electromagnetic signals from passing through. The AirTag and other Find My items use Bluetooth to broadcast a rotating identifier at regular intervals.² If the safe blocked that signal, Jeff’s iPhone lost contact with the AirTag the moment the bag went in—a few days before he left. With no fresh separation between the phone and the item at departure time, the alert may have lacked the necessary trigger. Jeff was on the verge of sharing the location with the hotel when they found it.

Apple says this takes longer than the few days Jeff was on his trip: “You can see its last known location for up to seven days in the Find My app.” After seven days, the device or item’s location will appear as “No location found” or “Offline.” Jeff could see the item’s location, which made the lack of notification seem like a bug.

Now for the grate part (not great part): once Jeff’s bag was removed from the safe in his former room, it would have been carried through the hotel and detected by every iPhone, iPad, or Mac nearby. When it reached the hotel’s lost-and-found safe, the rough location would likely still be relatively close before it entered that particular Faraday cage. At which point, when Jeff looked at Find My, he saw it at (or under) the parking lot.

Sack attack

The hotel works with a service that handles the return. Jeff paid both a whopping and reasonable $60 to have it sent two-day air back to him. Fair enough! Unfair enough, days after he paid, the bag is still at the hotel (as I write this). Jeff will, of course, follow its progress via Find My.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

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Just ahead of WWDC 2026, Jason Snell noted that he gets a lot of pitches about Mac apps, attributing the sudden boom in macOS offerings to vibe coding aided by artificial intelligence. Regardless of how apps are getting built — be it with AI tools or the more conventional developer kits that Apple offers — it’s certainly true that a lot more macOS apps seem to be popping up, extending the capabilities of your hardware. And some of those apps deserve a little extra attention.

And that’s what I’m hoping to do with these app spotlights for Six Colors. We’ll profile some interesting new apps for the Mac (and maybe the odd iOS offering every now and again), and explain why you might want to give it a download.

Do you have an app you’d like to bring to my attention? Simply drop me a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of your app, and we’ll take it from there.

With that housekeeping out of the way, here’s what I’ve been downloading lately.

Park Shelf

Cleanliness may be next to godliness, but for most of us, our Mac screens are an unholy mess. Open windows clutter up the view, adding another layer of complication to multitasking. An app called ParkShelf from Digital X Design looks to bring some order to the chaos with a handy place for storing open windows instead of placing them in the dock or relying on your Mac’s App Switcher to jump between windows.

Instead, ParkShelf features a floating bar you can position anywhere on your screen (though there is an option to pin it to a specific area if you prefer). That way you need to call up a particular window, it’s just a matter of heading over to where you’ve stashed it in ParkShelf and summoning what you need. The rest of the time, you’ve got a clean, uncluttered workspace so that you can focus on the task at hand.

I’ve been trying out the free version of ParkShelf, where you can store up to three different windows at any one time. For unlimited storage, you’ll need to pay a one-time fee of $6.99 for the Pro version. In addition to the unlimited storage, the Pro version also gives you the ability to customize a hot key that sends an open window into ParkShelf’s waiting arms. (In the free version, option-P serves as the default hot key.)

For my purposes, ParkShelf works best when I’m focusing on a specific project. If I’m on a writing assignment, I can use the app to stash a window of notes, a browser page I’m using to research the topic, and data sheets in PDF form while I type away in my text editor. When I need anyone of those windows, I can turn to ParkShelf to look something up, but otherwise, those windows are out of sight and out of mind.

I’d like it better if I could store multiple web pages or notes, but ParkShelf seems to treat each app as its own window. For instance, even when I have web pages open in Safari for multiple windows instead of tabs, ParkShelf stores the whole kit and caboodle. Still, the free version of Park Shelf is certainly worth trying out if you’re looking for a way to better manage all the open windows on your screen.

Other apps

• ScrollPods lets you control scrolling on a Mac by tilting your head. The free utility works with 3rd-gen AirPods as well as any AirPods Pro, AirPods Max and Beats Fit Pro models. Install the app, turn on a switch, and a tilt of your head lets you scroll through emails, web pages and other windows. Mastering just the right tilt takes a little bit of practice, but this is a pretty clever accessibility tool that takes advantage of an accessory you probably already have on hand.

• Sleepr is a $5 app that serves as a sleep timer that lives in your Mac’s menu bar and lets you time shutdowns after 15-, 30-, 60- and 120-minute intervals; you can also have your Mac go to sleep at a very specific time. The 3.0 release adds Liquid Glass support, recurring bedtimes that automatically start themselves, a floating alert that can even appear over full-screen apps, and a live menu bar countdown.

• Senqu Image Converter is a $5 image utility that lets you convert among JPEG, PNG, HEIC, TIFF and PDF files. The recent 1.2 update added the ability to drop images onto a preset in the full window for instant conversions, while dropping a file now immediately starts the conversion process using current settings.

Writing at The New York Times, tech reporter Kashmir Hill tells the strange story (NYT gift link) of coming across an AI-generated biography of herself on Amazon.

To me, the sobering part is when Hill, unable to track down the source of her own biography, talks to an “author” of hundreds of AI books:

Mr. Johns, who has long curly white hair and the bronzed skin of someone who spends a considerable amount of time outside, retired in 2024 from his work as a cybersecurity consultant. Divorced and living alone with two Shih Tzus, he suddenly had a lot of time on his hands. He was curious about A.I. and decided to experiment with it.
“Almost everyone I know says they want to write a book,” he said. “It’s a very romantic concept to sit down and toil, page after page and paragraph after paragraph, but it doesn’t make economic sense.”

[stares directly into camera]

Lest you think this exclusively an Amazon problem, this comes just a few weeks after Joanna Stern’s story of AI-generated knockoffs of her book on Apple Books.

You know, it’s hard enough making any sort of living as a writer, but crowding the field with AI slop? It’s not even as if people are buying them and reviewing them favorably. They’re just old socks stuffed down the drain, clogging up the sink with putrid water.¹ What are we even doing here, people?

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Analyst Dan Rayburn, on (sigh) LinkedIn:

Going forward, Apple TV hardware is now essentially dead. Last month, Apple raised the price of its Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi (64GB) from $129 to $199, while the Apple TV 4K Wi-Fi + Ethernet (128GB) now costs $249, up from $169. That’s a major increase for hardware that hasn’t changed since its 2022 debut…. I don’t envision anyone in the market spending $200 on a streaming device.

Leaving aside Rayburn’s bizarre complaints in his post about Apple TV audio format support (which reflects nothing I’ve seen and sounds more like a user grinding a personal axe), this is a classic example of something we don’t see around these parts much anymore: The market share argument.

Apple’s strategies used to be attacked by the market share argument all the time. The premise is this: If you don’t have market share, nothing else matters. You could be making a profit. You could be serving a nice niche audience that is happy with your product. You could, in fact, be servicing your own lucrative ecosystem rather than focusing on competing with companies that are happy to race to the bottom.

Or as Rayburn puts it:

Of course, Apple has never competed on price and has shocked many by refusing to compete in the living room. Apple prioritizes the premium experience of its tvOS platform over low-margin hardware without home-screen ads and promoted content. 

So the Apple TV is dead because of the (admittedly ridiculous) recent price hikes… but also, Apple has always “refuse[d] to compete in the living room” and made the heinous decision of prioritizing a “premium experience” over cheap boxes stuffed with ads and paid marketing. Apple TV was always mostly dead, because Apple has never deigned to make a $20 streaming stick infested with ads, but this price hike is the final stake in the heart?

Okay.

I have always been frustrated with the price of Apple’s TV box. And it’s ridiculous now—those are prices that should only be applied to brand-new models with great functionality, not to stale years-old hardware. But Apple’s competition in this market is selling $20 sticks at Walmart. They’re monetizing through TV licensing deals and aggressive user tracking, including logging everything you watch so that it can be used to profile you.

As for Apple not being competitive, the Apple TV used to start at $129, and the Roku Ultra is $100, so in the premium segment where Apple plays, they weren’t that far off. Now they’re twice as expensive, which is rough.

In his post, Rayburn concedes that “A small minority of users might purchase the hardware to stay in the Apple ecosystem, but that won’t increase Apple’s market share.” His point is that market share matters for TV streaming boxes because streamers won’t ultimately bother to support the platform at all if nobody’s using it.

I think that’s poor analysis, because I’m positive Apple TV owners are more engaged with their devices and probably have extremely favorable demographics compared to the users of a $20 streaming stick. Also, those streamers will be building iOS apps anyway, at which point it feels like tvOS apps just aren’t far enough removed. In fact, some streamers like building apps for tvOS because they can show off advanced features (like on-device multiview) that cheap boxes just can’t handle.

I came across Rayburn’s post via this post from Janko Roettgers, which is all about installing custom home screens to Android TV boxes. Why would you do that? Roettgers writes:

Monet is just one of a number of home screen replacements (or launchers, as they’re called among Android enthusiasts) that takes cues from Apple TV to bring a new sense of minimalism to Google’s streaming platform. Most of these launchers do away with the endless rows of content recommendations, the big hero images that try to get you hooked on the latest TV shows, and the increasing amount of ads and sponsored content.

“Honestly, the stock Google TV launcher [keeps] getting worse,” [Monet developer Nico] Klein says. “It’s clunky and full of ads. It actively gets in the way of what users are trying to do. You have to fight your way through a jungle of menus just to get where you actually want to go, it’s just not intuitive.”

Sounds fun. When I tried out a bunch of non-Apple streaming boxes last year, I pretty much found the same. The whole space is infested with this kind of garbage and clutter.

Apple TV has plenty of reasons to keep on living. But it sure would be nice if Apple would show the product some attention beyond the massive price increases. Attention like new hardware, OS improvements, and (eventually) a price that makes it less of a hard sell to people who are desperate to escape the garbage of all the other streamer-box platforms.

Apple’s public betas, how we read for pleasure, whether we have multicolored smart lighting, and digital disaster preparedness.

Go to the podcast page.

Guy meets someone in the woods, Moltz makes a proposal and Dan finds books frustrating.

Go to the podcast page.

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 to capabilities. That’s not to say there isn’t still room for improvement, but this is the beta period, and improvements may be forthcoming.

Still, the promise of iOS 27 is that it’ll not only unlock new possibilities but also make your existing workflows smoother and quicker. That’s not a bad proposition for the device that many of us carry more than any other—as long as it can deliver.

As of today, iOS 27 is available to any and all who want to try it as a public beta. Some features are buggy, others aren’t yet finished, and every once in a while something may go haywire. But it’s all in the name of getting everything working for the final release in the fall.

Siri & AI: Two okay tastes that taste great together?

The call for Apple to do a major overhaul of Siri has existed almost as long as Siri as existed. Heck, I wrote a story about it back in 2015, more than a decade ago and only four years after the first version of Siri debuted. But even as competitors emerged and Siri moved to more Apple platforms, the voice assistant improved only in relatively small, targeted ways—a testament, perhaps, to the limitations of its underlying technology. With the recent rise of chatbots backed by large language models, it quickly became apparent how much Siri had fallen behind, and so drastic measures were necessary to bring it up to speed.

The good news is that Siri AI is capable: impressively so, at times. In the lowest of low bars, it certainly beats the pants off the previous incarnation of Siri, but its access to your own personal data and all of the app on your phone also unlocks a host of new possibilities.

But it’s also not without the pitfalls that underlie all LLM-powered chatbots: errors in understanding, hallucinations, and so on. Perhaps the biggest challenge of Siri AI will be getting people who have written Siri off as a limited feature, only to be used for trusted tasks—setting timers, checking the weather, playing music—to be more ambitious about what they ask the assistant.

New Siri is integrated throughout iOS, whether you access it via the traditional press-and-hold of the side button or by saying the wake word, or in its new home integrated with the Spotlight search when you swipe down from the middle of the top edge of the screen, a gesture that’s now available not just on the home screen but in any app. It’s got a new look too: a black liquid glass bubble with silver overtones. You can ask Siri questions by voice, or by simply typing to it.

There’s also a new standalone Siri app that stores all your conversations (with some exceptions). The app itself is pretty barebones, letting you view those conversations in List or Grid layouts, select multiple conversations to delete them, and pin or rename any single conversation. In Settings : Siri, you can choose to either open to the overview or to a new conversation and decide whether old conversations are kept for 30 days, 1 year, or forever. It’s a little strange that one-off queries (“What’s the average height of the Norwegian World Cup team?”) are stored alongside more involved conversations (“Can you help me build a specific RSS feed for this site?”); I also ended up with a few orphan blank “New conversations” which I deleted, but it’d be nice if you could filter to find those. Conversations are fully searchable and sync between devices via iCloud.

I’ve had a couple of real “wow” moments with the feature in the month-plus that I’ve spent with the beta. For example, a couple of weeks ago I was on a rare long solo car trip when I realized that I wanted to listen to a specific episode of a podcast. This wasn’t a podcast that I listen to regularly or even subscribe to, and to make matters more challenging, it was an older episode. Hard enough to find in the Podcasts app when you’re not driving down the highway, but something I would never have even attempted with old Siri. But hey, now’s the time to give it a shot, so I asked Siri AI, via CarPlay, to play the episode of “The Rest is History” about the American Revolution.

After a moment of chugging—like most of those AIs, the process isn’t exactly fast—Siri came back to report that it had found one episode of the podcast about the American Revolution. “Play that,” I said…and it did. No need to specify the precise title of the episode, which I would not have remembered from earlier in our conversation.

Moments like that make me feel like a Star-Trek-computer-like voice interface is here now. In large part because it does leverage the great strength of Apple’s AI implementation (and I’m not going to spend the time dithering about models and distillation and all that jazz, because the question to me is how do people use it and how does it work). But that strength is that the AI isn’t siloed off in its own website or app, but on your device with all the information that includes.

The same went for when I asked it about the date for a pool party my wife had texted me about, and who would be there. (It even correctly identified an attendee with an ambiguous name based on proximity to their partner’s name.) And when I was viewing a webpage with an upcoming flight that I asked it to add to my calendar. It was also able to identify a movie still in a brochure for a local movie theater, give me the performance of the Red Sox over their last ten games¹, and help me figure out which model of IKEA curtain rods I was dealing with. None of them things that I would have even thought about using Siri for prior to this incarnation.

Unfortunately, not every moment is like that. Like any LLM-based chatbot, Siri AI sometimes misunderstands or gives confidently wrong answers. For example, when I asked it about when my neighbor said they’d be back from vacation, it found the relevant text message but said that no return date had been mentioned, despite the fact that it was right there in the message.

Of course, some of this is easily ascribable to this being beta software. But some of it also the new normal for dealing with computers in 2026. Is that better or worse than having old Siri’s frequent habit of shrugging at things it simply couldn’t do? I’m not sure that’s an easy qualitative call. In the end, it’s a mode shift: a different experience of how we interact with our voice assistants and chatbots, and we’ll have to see how people adapt.

All of that said, one thing I do appreciate about Siri AI’s implementation is that Apple has done a good job of, for the most part, making sure that the traditional things that Siri has always been good at—setting timers, playing media, adding reminders, controlling smart home accessories, and so on—are no worse than under old Siri. From what I can tell, Siri is mediating these requests and handling those things locally rather than handing them off to the cloud. That also means not every request to turn on lights or play your podcast gets logged into the Siri app as a separate conversation, which is I think the right approach: I certainly don’t need a dozen conversations where I’m setting my five-minute tea timer.

In general, I’m bullish on the future of AI, and fascinated to see what happens as it rolls out to more and more users. Will it be able to sway the habits of those who’ve been using Claude and ChatGPT? Perhaps not for advanced uses like coding, but for your run of the mill world knowledge queries? That seems eminently plausible. Especially because it’s already there, built into your phone.

One caveat, however. As always, the future is not evenly distributed: on the iPhone side, Siri AI’s only available on the iPhone 15 Pro and Pro Max, as well as the iPhone 16 or later. And, of course, due to Apple’s ongoing disagreement with the European Union, it won’t be available on that continent either.

All roads lead to Siri

While Apple Intelligence is still apparently a going concern, much of that brand has been subsumed by the “Siri” identity in iOS 27. For example, any time you put a blank cursor in a text field, you’re prompted with a Write with Siri button hovering aboard the keyboard. (Once you start typing, you get the usual word suggestions, and Siri is reduced to just an icon.) As someone who is perfectly happy writing their own text messages and emails, this prompt sometimes feels a little bit aggressive, and I wish you could disable it without turning off all of Siri.

There’s also a Siri mode in Camera, which replaces the previous Visual Intelligence interface. Now it’s just something you swipe to, like Video or Photos. In this mode, the Siri icon replaces the shutter button; snap a picture with that and it’ll attempt to tell you what you’re looking at; there are also image search and ask buttons which, respectively, query a search engine for image results and attach an image of what you’re looking at to a more targeted Siri query. But this mode essentially is just a front end for the Siri app—you can attach an image in a new conversation there too, including snapping one with the camera.

Liquid Glass half full

To call iOS 26’s Liquid Glass redesign contentious is an understatement on the proportion of saying that Lionel Messi is good at kicking a ball. In iOS 27, Apple has made two major moves: first, tweaking the overall look and feel of Liquid Glass, and second, providing a way to further fine-tune that look yourself.

In general, the iOS 27 incarnation of Liquid Glass is far easier on the eyes, dialing down the transparency in favor of legibility. Apple’s also imposed some distinction between user interface elements and content. For example, in list views like in Messages and Mail there are now much clearer “toolbar” areas at the top when you start scrolling, even if they still have some degree of translucency. App icons have also gotten a face lift; they’re sharper, and feel more vibrant.

In case you still aren’t happy with the default look, Apple also offers an option for adjusting the glass effect without resorting to the classic accessibility tweaks that can often have unintended design consequences. Settings: Appearance: Liquid Glass offers a slider that goes from More Clear to More Tinted, with a stop at the Default or anywhere in between. You can see right in the scrollable pane above the slider how your choice will look in a live interface, which is a nice touch.

It’s a rare concession from Apple that there is no one true way that the UI should appear, but given that the company has in recent years allowed far more interface choices (for example, Mail, Safari, and Phone all offering toggles between older styles and newer interfaces), this feels like par for the course. While the most stringent Liquid Glass detractors will likely never be satisfied, the improvements and ability to tweak further thus far feel as though they will satisfy most users.

Performance, no anxiety

Tempting as it might be to spend this entire preview piece talking about Siri AI, there are indeed other things in iOS 27 that are worth your time. Exactly which improvements they are depends on how you use your phone.

That’s because one of the odd things about looking at iOS 27 is that there’s just a ton of small stuff—those “quality of life” improvements that chip away at little frustrations and annoyances. Being able to send a text message while a photo or video attachment is still sending. Faster switching from Wi-Fi to cellular when you walk out of range of your house. The ability to change volume on your alarms independently from system volume.

All of these are just nice enhancements, sanding off rough edges and just generally making things work better. But because they’re so niche, lots of people are going to have different experiences with iOS 27, because it depends on what’s important to them. For example, is anybody going to be as excited as I am that Shortcuts now offers an “else if” option? No, probably not! But that’s okay, because I’m happy enough for all of us.

The good news is there are some places where things are just better across the board. In general, iOS 27 feels peppy. I know, we always talk about snappiness, but given the time Apple has spent on improving performance and removing bugs with this release, it’s reassuring to see that it’s borne out by my experience. Apps launch quickly, photos sync faster via iCloud, browsing my NAS via the Files app was downright speedy compared to earlier versions.

AirDrop transfers were also notably rapid, though I say was because in recent beta builds my iPhone has stopped sending files via that method, though it still receives them. (That’s betas, folks!)

Apple also touted improvements to search, particularly in Mail, an app that I use daily, which has always been a bit lackluster in that regard, especially when compared with Gmail. I do find it improved in iOS 27, even though I do have an inbox of more than 144,000 messages going back nearly 25 years. I have mostly been able to locate emails, even obscure and old ones, within a relatively short amount of time, which is definitely a nice improvement.

I’m most intrigued to see how this affects the experience of those using older iPhone models. Apple says that it’s brought its optimized CPU scheduler to devices all the way back to the iPhone 11, which ought to noticeably improve performance even for those who don’t have one of the latest and greatest iPhones, but the public beta experience will certainly bear out the truth of that claim.

Photo fit and finish

If there’s one app that always seems to get some love from Apple in its yearly updates, it’s Photos. No surprise there: our cameras document everything about our lives and we take pictures constantly.

The filter menu now lets you choose between sorting by when photos were added versus when photos were captured, as well as providing quick access to photos that were captured by you (as opposed to photos taken by others that you imported). I’m not exactly sure what the rubric there is—when I used that filter, it only showed me images back to 2017, when I have surely been capturing photos—and even just iPhone photos—for a decade before that.

There are some big improvements, particularly in Shared Albums, which now let you share pictures as full resolution, quickly download all photos from an album, and even respond with emoji other than just thumbs up. Keep in mind, though, that all members of a Shared Album will need to be upgraded to iOS/iPadOS/macOS 27 in order for anyone to use the new features.

Ad hoc slideshows have gotten improvements too. When you select a bunch of photos and play them as a slideshow, you can adjust timing and duration as well choose the transition.

For those who missed being able to assign star ratings and keywords to their pictures (shades of iPhoto!), good news, they’re both back. Keywords are accessible by swiping down in the detail view, whereas star ratings need to be specifically turned on in Settings: Photos: View Options, where you’ll find a Show Rating Controls options. To assign a rating, you’ll need to look for a tiny star icon at the top right while looking at a photo (if you have the spatialize feature on, it’s next to that).

There are some smaller niceties too. For example, you can now save out a frame of a video as an image, rather than jumping through hoops of screenshotting or exporting it to a Mac. And you can adjust the metadata on photos both individually and in bulk, if you need to correct the date, time, or location.

And, although Apple has touted that photos will upload to iCloud faster, there’s a new option for those of us for whom that still might not be fast enough. In Settings: Photos: Sync Immediately, you can tell Photos to prioritize syncing new photos over conserving battery life—for the day. Not unlike the AirDrop “Everyone for 10 minutes” option, it’ll turn the feature back off after the day is over. (In a nice touch, when you turn it on, it shows a counter of how many hours are left before it deactivates.)

But of course, Photos isn’t immune to the expansion of AI, either. Previously we got Clean Up, the tool that lets you remove unwanted elements from your photos. Apple says it’s improved that in iOS 27: you can now choose between Fast and High Quality modes, the latter slower but more powerful.

There are also a pair of new AI features: Extend and Reframe. The former is easier to understand: if you want to zoom out of a photo, whether because you’re trying to fit in a particular shape or simply to tweak the framing of a shot, Extend can generate a little more background, extrapolating from what’s already there. It works best on smaller adjustments with backgrounds that are uniform or predictable. Go too far and you’ll end up with totally invented elements, which can look strange or out of place.

Reframe is a bit harder to grok. Think of it as being able to move the camera after the picture’s been taken. Using the same features the company leverages for creating spatial scenes, it tries to separate out the foreground subjects and the background, and then adjust the perspective. Some pictures work better than others; it seems to help if there’s a clear delineation between foreground and background. Like Extend, it tends to work best for smaller adjustments; go too far and you can end up with some odd-looking artifacts. As tools, they have their utility, though it’s perhaps best used sparingly.

Other features

Apple’s made a big push on child safety across its product lines for the 27 updates. Some small improvements ought to really make the process more usable, such as the ability to convert an Apple account to a child account, default settings for time limits developed in conjunction with the American Academy of Pediatrics, and a much-requested option to lock the Screen Time section of Settings on a device. Taking advantage of some of these features will require you to update all the compatible devices in your family, but you can still use the on-device improvements.

Image Playground now has improved image generation and the ability to generate photo realistic images. While some of those results are better, many of them are…unsettling. Even after a couple years, I personally find this feature misguided and off-putting.

Passwords has an agentic AI feature that will scan your list of compromised passwords and then present you with a list of the ones it believes it can update for you. Even on that subset though, my experience was uneven, with just 5 of 18 updated. It’s a very cool idea, and should hopefully see improvements as the technology progresses, but right now it’s hit or miss.

If you’ve ever been on a customer service phone call and needed to look up salient details like a flight confirmation number, the Phone app will now surface relevant info during the call. I haven’t been able to test this yet, but it seems to be a real potential timesaver. And fun fact: if you call someone on their birthday (assuming you have it in Calendar or Contacts), you’ll get a little animation and note about it.

In a “better late than never” improvement, Calendar now has natural language input when creating new events. Third party apps like Fantastical and Google Calendar have done this for years. Unfortunately, my experience with this was a little disappointing, with it not correctly assigning the event to the right day and ignoring my attempt to provide timezone information; nor did modifying the event with natural language after the fact seem to work. I hope that gets ironed out before the end of the beta period.

For those who love endlessly looking at 3D imagery of cities, Maps gets an improved flyover view with better 3D modeling of buildings and landmarks. In my testing, this isn’t fully rolled out everywhere yet: Boston’s satellite maps were actually two-dimensional compared to iOS 26’s, but if I flew down to New York, I could see far more detail on a building like One World Trade Center.

FaceTime now lets you show the person you’re talking to your front and back cameras simultaneously. No more endlessly flipping back and forth!

Apple’s improved Shortcuts with a bunch of new actions and streamlined automations by including them as part of the shortcut itself. There’s also an impressive new AI “describe your shortcut” mode. It works pretty well for simpler shortcuts, but can start to get a little off the rails the more complex you get. Unfortunately, Shortcuts has been among the buggiest features during the beta period; I’ve had a lot of them stop working, and run into some perplexing issues.

Safari likewise has a few new features, including being notified when a page content changes (as frequently as on the hour, if you’re watching for price changes, for example), as well as a “describe your extension” feature not unlike the Shortcuts functionality. I haven’t had as much of a chance to put this through its paces, but it’s a fascinating addition and will be interesting to see if lots of people who never would have tried their hand at this kind of thing will end up making extensions.

You can also now put an extra large widget—i.e. one that takes up an entire screen—on your home screen. I tried this with Weather for a while and it was…interesting, but ultimately not for me. Still, it feels like the age of the home screen that’s just app icons is slowly dying off.

Conclusion

Despite being put forth as a year of small updates, there’s quite a lot in iOS 27, even without including the massive overhaul that is Siri AI. Apple had found itself on its back foot after its first attempt to integrate Apple Intelligence, but my experience is that Siri AI largely delivers on what the company promised—albeit a couple of years later than intended.

But I’m also very bullish on the enhancements and quality of life updates throughout the operating system. The improvements may be small, but they add up. Every time you don’t have to go searching for an email while you’re on a call or a photo shows up faster in your library or you find exactly what you’re looking for in search, well, I’m not going to say an angel gets its wings, but you get less frustrated. And that’s not nothing. In fact, that’s everything. The goal of technology should be to work for us and make our lives easier.

As for the shortcomings, it’s worth reminding ourselves that this is a beta period. Proceed with caution. Sometimes things just don’t work, and you may have to live with it until the next build comes along. But sometimes things also improve build-to-build, and that’s the fun of being at the cutting edge. For the next couple months you get your chance to live in the future.

Let’s just get this out of the way: I liked macOS 26 Tahoe. I liked it because it marked the first time in years where Apple seemed to embrace the fact that Mac users deserve productivity improvements, not just syncing up with whatever (often useful, yes) new features were being introduced to iOS.

I didn’t like the interface changes, especially the way the redesign handled toolbars and sidebars. It actually felt like macOS dodged a bullet by being treated as an afterthought, because pouring more Liquid Glass atop macOS would have made the situation even worse. But over the last summer, I got used to the interface offenses and instead focused on all the improvements.

Turns out that at least some of my friends and colleagues decided that Tahoe’s interface offenses were too great to bear, and despite all those tasty new productivity boosts, they would sit this one out and hope that Apple came to its senses with macOS 27.

Good news for them: While they’ve spent a year without Apple’s first native clipboard history, Shortcuts automation and AI access, and an improved Spotlight, their upgrade to macOS 27 Golden Gate will net them last year’s features as well as a host of other improvements, all wrapped in an interface that is an unequivocal improvement over what Tahoe wrought.

To those folks, welcome back to the current OS version. To those of us who spent a year floating on the glassy surface of Tahoe, welcome to Golden Gate. Available today as a Public Beta and arriving on every Apple silicon-based Mac this fall, it’s an update I’m not going to have to spend a year apologizing for liking.

Design takes a step forward

The fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe design decisions were. Apple describes the design as “even more refined,” because in Apple marketing-speak, broken features are never remedied or fixed—past features are just improved. The truth is, Apple has rolled back numerous missteps and made changes to others to mitigate the issues they caused.

Floating glass sidebars inset from window edges—a choice that made sense metaphorically, but looked awful—are gone, essentially reverted to their previous design, sitting at the left edge of windows, with a darker background for contrast and colored icons to boot.

Toolbars, one of the most important interface conventions of macOS, were flattened and ghostly in Tahoe. In Golden Gate, they pick up better shading and are more legible, though (strangely) the toolbar in inactive windows offers more contrast and legibility than in active ones! In Photos, toolbars are actual bars, not horizontal areas of floating glassy buttons—which means the system no longer has to attempt to add shading behind those areas in order to improve legibility. They’re just legible.

In Golden Gate, windows generally just feel… a bit more square. Apple has made window corners more consistent, and not having the curved corners of the sidebar right inside the curved corners of the window edge also helps make it feel a little less like you’re under the tyrannical rule of the Circle King.

Icons look better across the board in Golden Gate, probably because of a new layered icon compositing approach Apple is taking across its platforms. Unfortunately, apps that dare stick any of their extremities out of the mandated squircle shape are still put in a featureless gray box of shame, which makes it harder to identify icons, especially in appearance modes like Clear and Tinted that remove color as an identifier.

To hear Apple tell it, users are split on the transparency effect of Liquid Glass: some people despise it, and some people can’t get enough of it. As a result, all of Apple’s OS 27 updates introduce a slider—it’s in the Appearances pane of Settings on macOS—that lets you customize the transparency from sort-of-mostly-transparent to sort-of-mostly-opaque. Given that this update rolls back a lot of Apple’s decisions from a year ago, I’m inclined to believe that there really are two camps when it comes to Liquid Glass. Giving users an option to adjust the setting is probably fine, though I’ve currently got the slider right in the center. We’ll see how that goes.

Siri AI takes the Spotlight

Siri has been a part of the Mac experience for a decade now, arriving on the platform five years after it debuted on the iPhone. While I’m sure that many Mac users have embraced it over the years, it has always been an afterthought at best for me. When I’m sitting at my Mac, I’ve got a keyboard and trackpad to get my job done, so I don’t generally feel the need to talk to my computer. And while you’ve been able to type to Siri for a while now… well, the other problem with Siri has always been that Siri’s results are rarely as useful as the results of typing those words into a search engine or some other tool.

In macOS Golden Gate, as with all the other OS 27-era releases, Apple has upgraded Siri to become Siri AI, with LLM-derived features that promise much better results. On top of that, Apple has finally done what it should have done long ago and merged Siri and Spotlight, so there are no longer two separate “type to find things” interfaces on the platform.

The result is… still a work in progress, at least so far. Siri AI is a beta feature inside a beta operating system. Betas within betas. First off, it’s a struggle to remember that Siri is actually useful and I should take advantage of it. Years of training myself never to consider Siri have to be untrained, and that’s going to take some time.

Thus far, I’ve found Siri AI’s responses to general-knowledge queries to be very good. But part of the appeal of Siri AI is its integration with your personal on-device data. This is where things start to fall apart, though this is not surprising—it’s an early beta, and many third-party apps will need to update to better integrate with this system. I don’t use Apple’s default calendar or email apps, which puts me at a disadvantage. It frequently failed to answer fairly basic questions about files on my system—”where’s that PDF that contains my company’s tax ID number?”—that I’d hope that a smart assistant with access to my entire Mac should be able to find.

There’s also the question of Siri/Spotlight choosing the right context. When you type Command-Space, Spotlight comes to the fore—and that’s good, because if you want to use it as an app launcher, you want instant responsiveness. When I typed a question that’s more appropriate for Siri, however, I found I needed to wait a few seconds for “Ask Siri” to appear so I could ask my query.

There’s a new Ask Siri entry that’s been added to the top of every contextual menu, and while I don’t mind the idea that Siri can act on just about any context you can think of on the Mac, I don’t love how it’s implemented. The contextual menu used to open with all of its contents down and to the right of the pointer (unless you were too far to the right or bottom of the screen); now it starts shifted down a little bit, as if the old context menu was being drawn and then an Ask Siri item was being overlaid right at the top of the menu, sticking up over it. It’s darker than the rest of the menu. If you click on it, it floats forward, the rest of the menu disappears, and you can type in the resulting box. It’s disconcerting every time I right-click on something.

The most useful actions tend to be placed at the top, and I’m not convinced that even a fully functional Ask Siri would always be the most useful command in a context. This feels more like a weird add-on to existing context menus, and all to promote the new Siri features. Apple, if a feature is good, users will use it. Distorting the geography of context menus on the Mac to promote them feels aggressive and almost desperate.

Touchscreen Macs, at last?

One of the most remarkable features of macOS Golden Gate does not really make sense if you take it at face value: Apple has given a major upgrade to Sidecar, the feature introduced in 2019 that allows Macs to use iPads as external Mac displays. As someone who always travels with a 13-inch iPad Pro, that’s a nice feature, though since the 2022 introduction of Universal Control, which lets me use my Mac’s keyboard and mouse on an iPad still running iPadOS, I’ve found very little use for Sidecar.

The big update is that Sidecar, which previously only supported the Apple Pencil, now works with the iPad’s touchscreen. Apple has updated its own apps and supplied third-party apps with the appropriate tools to support full touchscreen support. You can now scroll Mac browser windows with a finger and drag windows around on screen… but only on that iPad you’re using as an extra display.

It’s not hard to read between the lines: As numerous reports have suggested, Apple is planning on releasing its first touch-enabled MacBooks late this year or early next year. Using Sidecar as a way to demo the technology and allow developers to test their apps in advance is really clever.

Beyond that, this feature is delightfully boring. It just does more or less what you’d expect. Adding touch to macOS isn’t going to be revolutionary—it’s been on Windows for ages, and iPads have had optional trackpads and keyboards for six years now. But it’ll be a nice incremental benefit. I still use touch gestures when I’m working on an iPad in laptop configuration, because sometimes it just makes ergonomic sense. If my hands aren’t on the keyboard and I need to scroll something or tap something, a quick poke with my finger does the job. It feels natural—and once you’ve spent some time with that configuration, it’s jarring to use a Mac laptop and realize that you’re poking the screen to no effect.

After a moment’s glee in being able to scroll a Finder window with my finger, using Sidecar with touch to drive the Mac interface just became… normal. Apple has done a good job implementing the feature. Menus drop down reliably. Buttons are tappable. Scrolling works. There’s just not a lot to report, and that’s just fine. It works.

Shortcuts, reduced and enhanced

The Shortcuts app, the cornerstone of Apple’s cross-platform automation technologies, gets a notable upgrade during this cycle. Most of it is probably due to the needs of Describe a Shortcut, a remarkable new feature that lets you input some text and then watch as your device converts it into a Shortcut. As I wrote in June:

This is as close as we’ve come, across 40 years, to the original dream of putting computer power in the hands of everyone. You can literally tell your device what you want it to do, and when—”every morning show me my to-dos and calendar events for the day”—and it will generate a program to do it and a schedule to run it…

But when it works, which is most of the time, it’s magical. And perhaps its best feature is that you can iterate on your Shortcuts. If there’s something it doesn’t do quite right the first time, you can specify changes you’d like to see—”only show me items from my Personal calendar”—and it’ll rewrite the Shortcut to take those changes into account. In that way, it’s emulating the back-and-forth conversations that can make vibe coding so remarkable.

Describe a Shortcut is limited, but it really works quite well. I hope it continues to grow and improve, because it lowers the bar for user automation across Apple’s platforms in a delightful way.

For those of us still building Shortcuts with our own fingers like animals, some of the other improvements will help that work get done. There’s a new Otherwise If statement that can be added to If-Else blocks (you get to it by control-clicking on the Else block and then choosing Add “Otherwise If”), making the structuring of branching shortcuts logic much, much simpler.

There’s also support for persistent data storage, which is kind of huge. You can save data, which syncs via iCloud and is accessible across your devices, and Shortcuts can both access it and update it! That will make Shortcuts capable of behaving more like other apps, all without having to rig up other ways of storing data in iCloud Drive or elsewhere. (Yes, this canonizes Simon Støvring’s Data Jar in Apple’s OS, and that’s a good thing.)

The arrival of Describe a Shortcut has unfortunately distorted the Shortcuts interface in some unfortunate ways. On the Mac, there’s a new three-paned interface, where the third pane is a giant preview of a shortcut’s color, icon, and (this is fun) an AI-generated summary of what the shortcut does. The pane exists because of the text box at the bottom, which lets you type input to Describe a Shortcut to make changes to whatever shortcut you’ve got selected. Which is fine, except it’s an enormous amount of screen space devoted to something that may be entirely irrelevant. Somehow, Shortcuts won’t let you hide this pane.

New horizons for Photos

During WWDC week, I wrote about the changes to Photos this year, but just to reprise:

Apple has finally updated its Shared Albums feature, which had been compromised since it launched because it didn’t offer the ability to share full-resolution images. Over the years, Apple added other methods of sharing groups of photos via iCloud, and those could include full-resolution images, but this one prominent feature felt stuck in the past.

Now it’s getting a proper upgrade, with support for full-resolution images and allowing for full collaboration with people on other platforms so that everyone can contribute to a shared photo album. I’m relieved that I will soon have to stop explaining the differences among the various ways to share items in Photos and warning people away from Shared Albums.

As for the three AI-powered features in Photos, they’re a mixed bag. I have high hopes for a much improved Clean Up, which was already okay but could be a lot better. The new version is much more adept at artfully clipping unwanted items out of an image and filling those areas with in-context imagery, though of course it’s not perfect.

The other two features, Extend and Spatial Reframe, require the use of an advanced diffusion model that’s only available via Private Cloud Compute, and as a result, they take time to execute, since Photos will need to upload your photo, wait for a result, and then download the result.

Extend feels like a good feature, since there are plenty of scenarios where your image needs just a little more headroom or width. It’s also going to be great for straightening images, since Extend can fill in the slivers of unknown image that are exposed when you rotate, which otherwise require that your image be cropped as you rotate.

However, every pixel you expand the selection increases the jeopardy that what’s going to be generated is weird or fake. Everyone’s mileage may vary, but I found that I was much more comfortable expanding a photo a little bit to gain some headroom than doing it a lot, forcing the AI system to invent more objects or scenes. I was occasionally frustrated that I couldn’t slightly extend the bottom of some images, where subjects’ legs or feet were cut off. Also, you have to be aware of incredible fabrications—extending a graduation photo added a gigantic floating tassel and an invented piece of furniture, and extending a stadium shot added a roof where there isn’t one. Judicious use, carefully analyzed, is my advice.

Then there’s Spatial Reframe, which brings together a load of existing Apple technologies, including the spatial scanning algorithm it used to create spatial photos on Vision Pro. This feature works by scanning your photo locally using that algorithm, inferring a depth map that is then used to build a 3-D version of the image that you can pivot a bit, up and down, and left and right. This is the effect that allows you, on the Vision Pro, to feel like you can move your head and see parallaxes shifting, even though, if you look closely, the exposed content behind a subject is just a simple generative fill. It all happens so quickly, and in service of a live 3-D effect, that it’s often not noticeable, and even when it is, it’s not that big a deal.

The bar is a lot higher for a fixed, 2-D photo at full resolution. So after you use Spatial Reframe to slightly move the perspective of a shot, all the data is sent up to Private Cloud Compute, where a new version of your shot is rendered—including much more advanced generation of all of those pixels that are revealed by parallax or at the edges of the frame.

Some results are more synthetic than others. Unlike Extend, Spatial Reframe changes the entire perspective of the picture, which requires everything visible to be re-rendered at full quality. The result sometimes feels artificial. Again, my first impression is for people to use this feature with care and caution.

There are a handful of other nice, new Photos features, including new Captured By Me and Identity Documents sections (quick, find that photo of my passport!), and a triumphant return of star ratings for individual photos.

Wait, there’s more…

There are so many small enhancements in Golden Gate that it’s hard to mention them all, and every time I turn around, I keep bumping into more of them. Keeping in mind that we’re entering the long cruise to the fall release of the final version, here are some other highlights so far:

• Apple has added some light menu-bar management, specifically to deal with items that overflow the notch on some MacBook models. I’m glad that it’s taken this tentative step, though I wish it were more—it’s okay, Apple, you can sherlock all those menu-bar-management utilities out there¹—and of course, it should’ve happened back when the notch first appeared (checks notes) nearly five years ago. Better late than never, I guess.

• Safari’s now got an AI-driven tab organizer, so if you’re someone who keeps a zillion tabs open, you can have Safari group them into smaller, more navigable clusters. I’m not a zillion-tabs person, but I noticed that this approach is also being applied to the Start Page, where recently viewed pages also now appear clustered by topic.

• The Passwords app gets an injection of agentic AI through a new feature that offers to change your compromised or easy-to-guess passwords for you, navigating various websites and generating new, high-security passwords automatically. It’s a clever idea, but the most unfinished of any feature in the beta. It managed to change three of the 39 passwords it attempted. If you were trying to break into my Ikea account, well, you’re going to need to order more Kallax shelves on someone else’s dime now.

• Both Finder and the document save option in the menu bar will scan the contents of a file and offer up naming suggestions. I didn’t love the suggestions it offered, but your mileage may vary. I’d like to see this feature applied to auto-generated filenames like screenshots, though!

A note about stability

This summer, the vibe has been that Apple’s 27 releases are very stable for betas, which is not surprising since improved stability and reliability have been key Apple goals. And I would agree, I’ve been running the developer beta on my main Mac since the week after WWDC, and it’s been mostly fine.

But don’t be fooled: These are betas, and they will do weird stuff. I have to occasionally reboot my Mac to get things working normally. Shortcuts just stop working, and then start working again, willy-nilly. Third-party apps frequently quit unexpectedly, or refuse to quit at all and hang out in my Dock forever! And as I mentioned above, my menu bar manager is busted, though the developers are working on it.

If you’re willing to put up with the quirks in exchange for a glimpse at the future of the Mac, jump in. If you refused Tahoe entirely, you are in for an extra treat. And if you’d rather just wait… relax. Fall will be here before you know it.

Inside Apple’s OpenAI lawsuit: How do trade secrets conflict with expert knowlege, was there a concerted effort to steal secret documents to kickstart OpenAI hardware, and how does Apple’s own vulnerability inform the whole situation?

Go to the podcast page.

💾

I had a simple task that involved Apple Home. If you use Apple Home, you know what happened next. Tears, frustration, the arrival of batteries, paperclips pushed into hard-to-reach holes, many online searches, and—if you are lucky, as I was—success.

Siri, am I lazy?

My goal was straightforward: can I know if the garage door is open without going to look? Early in the pandemic, we occasionally forgot to close it. While there was a locked door between the garage and the house, it still felt like we were playing with fire, as someone could steal a bike or other lesser goodies from the garage.¹ The garage is on our basement floor (ground level on one half of the house), and the last thing I enjoy doing at night is walking downstairs before bed to check the door.²

I purchased an Eve Door & Window Contact Sensor to have this capability reported by Apple Home, joining a growing set of HomeKit devices, including our front-door deadbolt. Because of our old-style single-piece swing-up garage door, I had a heck of a time finding the right place and right adhesive to stick the sensor where it was close enough for the two components to register.

I spent enough time on the vagaries of physics and materials that I was probably more frustrated than I needed to be when I tried to make a workflow with the danged thing. An Automation wouldn’t work because I wanted an alert, not for the sensor to trigger other Home devices. A Shortcut should have worked, but after many hours of trying over weeks, I was unable to get anything reliable to happen. The Automation was quite simple: at 9 p.m., check the state of the sensor, and send me a message if the sensor shows Open rather than Closed. I left it in place and walked away for literally years.

After recently installing a back-driveway camera, I was determined to get this sensor online.³ First, I replaced the battery, which had died during my period of disinterest. The Eve sensor uses a weird, tiny battery: a 3.6V 1/2 AA (ER14250). After that arrived, using some better adhesive—thin-film 3M 468MP—I positioned the sensor pieces in a better location and more securely.

Now it should work! Except that after adding it, I saw Characteristic in red text on a pink background in Shortcuts. Some online research led me to reset the sensor by inserting a paperclip into a hole I hadn’t noticed. After re-pairing the sensor, I was in business! Or was I?! The sensor wasn’t responding, despite recent status updates.

Threading the sensor through the house needle

This led me to the next culprit: the garage is too far away (one floor and the other end of the house) from my Apple TV, which acts as a Matter controller, while the Eve sensor relies on Thread as its communication protocol. What’s a Matter controller?⁴ And what’s Thread?

Matter is an overarching standard, painstakingly developed even as low-power sensing devices and other equipment proliferated in silos. Matter enables Amazon Alexa, Apple Home, Google Home, and Samsung SmartThings devices to communicate across a network, regardless of the network transport medium (Ethernet, Thread, or Wi-Fi). This prevents you from needing ecosystem-specific hubs and lets manufacturers build to a common standard.

Thread fits into this mix as a low-power, wireless networking standard for sensors, allowing them to communicate their status without rapidly draining their batteries, as would happen with Wi-Fi.⁵ Apple initially supported Thread with a proprietary standard, HomeKit-over-Thread, and later added direct Matter support. The Eve sensor was just old enough that it was running on the older standard, but the Eve app allowed me to apply a firmware upgrade. I could then migrate the sensor to Matter, which seems to be more reliable.

Apple made things a little confusing here, too. The 1st-generation Apple TV 4K supports Matter, but lacks a Thread radio, so it can’t work with Thread-based devices. The 2nd generation added that radio, so you can do Matter over Thread. But then, with the 3rd generation, Apple bifurcated Thread hardware support: the 64 GB Wi-Fi only model lacks a Thread radio; you have to spend the now-whopping $249 for a 128 GB Wi-Fi + Ethernet version if you want to use Thread.

Failing an Apple TV 4K with Thread, you can use a Thread border router (TBR), which sometimes comes with sensor kits. This plugs into your network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet and bridges to the Thread network, allowing the Apple TV’s Matter controller to work with the Home app on your devices for automations, notifications, and so forth.

It’s that easy, folks. Sigh.

I do own a 3rd-generation Apple TV 4K with Wi-Fi + Ethernet, because I am a fancy man and a big spender, but I really wanted the reliability of plugging it into my Ethernet network. Yet, I couldn’t get the Eve sensor’s Thread radio to reach across my house to talk to the Apple TV. I bought a TBR, thinking it would solve the problem.

By the time the TBR was delivered, however, the garage door sensor magically connected via Thread to the Apple TV and has been rock solid. The TBR that arrived, on the other hand, I was unable to pair and get working, so back it goes for a refund.

Now my nightly Shortcut works! The only fly in that ointment is that the sensor status reports as Closed or Open in iOS and iPadOS, but as 0 (closed) or 1 (open) in the macOS Home app, in both macOS 26 and the beta of 27. I can live with running the Shortcut from my phone.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

Back in May, OpenAI was rattling its saber about thinking about talking to lawyers about possibly considering a lawsuit against Apple for not treating it right when it came to ChatGPT integration.

What a misdirection! Instead, Apple has sued OpenAI—and it’s alleging that the hardware program it’s been building with Jony Ive and company is being fueled by the theft of trade secrets.

Here’s the statement Apple supplied to various news outlets on Friday:

At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously. Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple’s secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes, and products. We will always defend our teams’ hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so.

There’s a lot more in the court filing. As summarized by Chance Miller at 9to5 Mac:

The complaint, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, alleges that [former Apple designer Tang] Tan used insider knowledge of Apple’s confidential projects to grill job candidates in interviews. Additionally, Tan directed job candidates still working at Apple to bring actual Apple hardware components and samples for “show and tell” sessions.

Furthermore, Apple says a candidate began “screenshotting and downloading files relating to a highly confidential Apple project” hours before interviewing with Tan, who then “solicited more information about that same Apple project” once the interview started. This became an “established pattern,” Apple says.

The list of bad behavior by former Apple employees goes on, including distributing internal Apple documents to new hires, evading security procedures, downloading confidential files from Apple after they had departed, coaching new hires about what confidential documents to study before leaving Apple, and lying to Apple partners to get them to disclose confidential information.

It’s… a lot to process. All that bubbling-under-the-surface tension between Apple and OpenAI is now out in the open! I’m fascinated to see where this story goes.

Go to the linked site.

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