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.
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.”
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.
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.
Compare and contrast macOS Tahoe (top) and macOS Golden Gate (bottom): Windows are a little less rounded, toolbars float a little more clearly and buttons are more defined, and sidebar icons are colored.
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.
Compare and contrast macOS Tahoe (top and middle) and macOS Golden Gate (bottom): The Photos toolbar is back, and there’s no longer a distracting fade effect between two different button styles depending on the content scrolling underneath. You can also see the reattached toolbar to the left.
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.
Ask Siri has been welded onto the top of contextual menus. It feels wrong and seems needy.
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.
Shortcuts will analyze and describe any of your shortcuts, but that right pane needs to be hideable.
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.
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 added people, scaffolding, and trees to this shot. (Original frame inverted for reference.)
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 file name suggestion based on the file’s content.
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.
It’s worth noting that Apple’s changes to the menu bar seem to have broken compatibility with existing menu bar utilities. They’ll need to be updated. If you rely on them and want to jump into the Public Beta, be warned. ↩
OpenAI has not been shy about teaming with former Apple employees.
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.
Jeremy White of Wired has a great tip that also serves as a reminder that amazing things can be found in accessibility settings:
Surely there must be a way to set up an iPhone as the perfect dumb phone for children—one with access to only the apps you deem appropriate, no internet browser, but with all-important tracking and navigation abilities—without having to pay another company to make it work? Well, there is. It’s been hiding in the iOS Accessibility menu the whole time. And, inexplicably, it’s a feature Apple barely talks about.
It’s called Assistive Access. Introduced with iOS 17, Apple designed it for those with cognitive disabilities. If you’ve never encountered or stumbled across it, it’s a distinctive iOS experience: fewer options, more focused features, easier to navigate. The aesthetic is ideal for kids: large, friendly tiles for the apps replace the smaller icons of the “normal” Apple interface.
It’s kind of beautiful. And absolutely the sort of thing you might want to give to a younger kid.
[Via Andy Ihnatko, who also detailed his own use of accessibility features to make streamlined workflow automations.]
EveryMac is a site with a comprehensive set of specs for Mac models, current and historic, that’s celebrating an anniversary today:
On July 2, 1996, EveryMac.com launched.
Thirty years is a long time — and a great deal has changed since then — but what has not changed is that EveryMac.com has been there to provide you with detailed info on every Mac from the original 128k to the current line. Thank you very much for your support through the years.
Back in 1995 I worked on a project for MacUser magazine called the Mac Catalog, which was a FileMaker-based spec database much like EveryMac’s. I was the person who brought the Mac Catalog to the web for the first time, in fact! The Mac Catalog died along with MacUser, but it makes me happy to see that EveryMac has survived.
On Monday Apple released 26.5.2 software updates for its platforms that don’t follow the company’s usual pattern, suggesting some interesting things about how it reacts to releasing security fixes.
This update delivers security fixes that were first made available in the iOS 26.6 and iPadOS 26.6 betas.
In other words, the security fixes in 26.5.2 are based on the security fixes that were rolled into the 26.6 betas, the first of which was released publicly on May 26. That means that everyone in the security world, including bad actors, has had more than a month to analyze all of Apple’s forthcoming fixes—which still haven’t rolled out to the broad user base because 26.6 is still in beta.
With 26.5.2, Apple has decided not to wait for the entirety of 26.6 to ship to get its included security fixes out into the world. Now everyone can update to 26.5.2—and Apple recommends it—and take advantage of those security fixes immediately.
These days, reporting on security issues immediately brings up the topic of AI—on both sides. Apple says it uses frontier models to find and discover issues on its platforms, but of course, AI can also be used to analyze the changes in a beta release and deduce what bugs it’s fixing. In the AI era, the lifecycle of a beta OS release may end up being longer than Apple is willing to wait to roll out fixes.
Of course, individual bugs aren’t exploits. According to Apple, attackers need to chain multiple bugs together to create a functional exploit. Each closed bug reduces the overall attack opportunity, but Apple says none of the bugs fixed in 26.5.2 have been used in any attacks, nor was 26.5.2 released in response to any emergent security issue.
My thanks to Mojave Paint for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Mojave Paint is a new macOS image editor for power users that will feel really familiar (in the best possible way). If you use layers, masks, channels, selections, adjustments and filters all in the same editing session, Mojave Paint might be for you.
There’s so much you can do with Mojave Paint. Make pixel art. Clean up document scans. Design a flyer. Create App Store screenshots. Crop and resize photos. Do some basic photo retouching. Remove a background.
Mojave Paint is powerful, but it’s also got a simple, uncluttered UI reminiscent of the best software of the 1990s. Yes, it’s retro—but it’s also practical, since hard-edged 1x pixel graphics are high contrast and communicate precision.
Rogue Amoeba’s Paul Kafasis is encouraged by the interface improvements Apple is making in macOS 27, but points out that there’s still one huge issue from last year that needs to be resolved, namely forcing all Mac icons to be trapped inside a single, uniform shape:
Apple’s prohibition on shapes is a step backward for both usability and creativity in app icons. Icons are now harder to distinguish because they’re no longer allowed to be distinctive. But there’s no technical reason for it. Apple could, and should, once again allow icons to take on a wide variety of shapes.
It’s clear that some people within Apple recognize that the transition to Liquid Glass introduced mistakes. They also appear to have the authority to fix those mistakes. Refinements to Apple’s own icons in Golden Gate are a welcome course correction, as is the much-celebrated Liquid Glass opacity slider. It’s time to correct the mistake of banning icon shapes as well.
Kafasis makes the important point that uniform shapes make it more difficult for users, especially those with vision issues including color deficiency, to differentiate between icons. He also references an argument from TidBITS’s Adam Engst that the uniformity sabotages Apple’s own clear and tinted icon formats.
[Apple] plans to debut a base M6 processor as early as this year for entry-level Macs, according to people with knowledge of the matter. But in a first, the company will skip higher-end versions of that chip, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans are private.
Apple instead aims to introduce its next Pro and Max chips with more advanced computing and graphics power in 2027 as part of a new M7 generation, according to the people.
According to Gurman, Apple has decided to shift gears in order to fast-track the tech in the M7 chips, which is better suited to “meet growing demand for on-device AI capabilities and more graphics-intensive software.” In other words, Apple looked at its chip roadmap and felt it didn’t want to wait for M7 and didn’t want to bother shipping M6 Pro and Max.
As weird as this seems, I’m actually encouraged by Apple’s willingness to change its chip and product plans in order to better serve the technical needs of its customers. If Apple has a chance to push its advantage when it comes to on-device AI processing, it should do so, even if it means ripping up plans and calling an audible.
Of course, this decision has knock-on effects. For example, Gurman’s been reporting for ages about Apple’s forthcoming MacBook Pro models with OLED touchscreens—but the chips they were meant to ship with, the M6 Pro and M6 Max, have just been cancelled! So… now what?
Apple is already conducting advanced testing of the follow-up models with M7 Pro and M7 Max chips, according to the people. Those laptop models are planned for as early as the end of 2027. Apple is also planning a Mac Studio refresh with M7 Max and M7 Ultra chips in 2028.
Releasing new models with familiar chips is probably not ideal, but if the alternative is delaying the OLED MacBook Pro until late 2027, I can see why Apple would choose to go ahead and roll out a new and improved MacBook Pro powered by the M5 Pro and M5 Max. The laptop is apparently just about ready, so there’s no sense waiting. The weirdness of it launching with an old chip is just collateral damage from Apple’s larger decision to be more aggressive when it comes to its high-end chip plans.
A result from the Describe a Shortcut feature in macOS 27.
Since the very beginning, it’s been clear that computers provide incredible power to those who know how to use them to get work done. The challenge has always been how small the group of “those who know how to use them” has been.
The Apple II included support for BASIC, a simplified programming language that was intended to let new computer users write programs. “In my opinion, the real thing [the Apple II] is doing right now is to teach people how to program the computer,” a young Steve Jobs told the New Yorker in 1977. The first computer programs I wrote were in BASIC.
There was also the Logo language, which helped introduce beginners to programming concepts through the manipulation of a virtual robot called a “turtle.” In the ’80s, HyperCard tried to broaden the programming community through its use of HyperTalk, another language designed to speak to beginners.
The (still!) current examples of this on the Mac are AppleScript, which used a format based on English-language sentence structure; and Automator and Shortcuts, two automation tools designed to create flow-chart-based programs.
The goal is always the same: To give regular people the ability to harness the power of computers. And we’ve never, ever been closer to the goal than we are today.
No, I’m not talking about vibe coding apps, mostly because that requires a level of focus and detail that most “regular people” are not going to want to provide. Show a civilian Xcode and watch how their eyes instantly glaze over.
I’m talking about Shortcuts—specifically, Apple’s Describe a Shortcut feature in the forthcoming macOS 27, iOS 27, and iPadOS 27.
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.
A look inside a shortcut created by Describe a Shortcut.
Yes, there are lots of limitations. Describe a Shortcut doesn’t work with third-party apps, only Apple’s own stuff (at least, for now). It can sometimes get confused, especially with complex queries. And it has an interesting tendency to kick things to the Use Model action—why am I not surprised that an AI model likes to build Shortcuts that themselves use AI models?
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.
I was also impressed with the fact that Shortcuts created with this method are… just Shortcuts. With one click, you’re looking at the actual Shortcut blocks that the feature has assembled for you. You can edit them as you see fit. They’re not special in any way, other than that they were built with an actual English-language sentence, not a line of code that resembles one superficially.
I’m sure that future developments will make it even easier for us to tell our devices what to do. But this particular advance feels especially big to me, like we’ve crossed some invisible line of demarcation. We are entering the era where the computers program themselves—and, for the most part, are able to understand what we’re asking them to do.
My first day on the job at Macworld, Apple was perilously close to going out of business. It was the fall of 1997, and Steve Jobs had returned to Apple and engineered the ejection of Gil Amelio as CEO, but there was no iMac yet, no visible turnaround in terms of products at all. Beyond the release of the iconic “Think Different” ad campaign, there was nothing.
Apple’s survival hung by a thread. Steve Jobs asked everyone to trust him. At Macworld Expo, he had enlisted Bill Gates—Bill Gates, of all people!—to help him instill belief in the world that Apple would find a way to survive.
The world was skeptical, to say the least. My family asked what job I thought I’d get once Apple went out of business. The magazine I had worked at for four years, MacUser, had been folded, and some of us had been transferred over to our rival, Macworld, presumably to publish issues until Apple finally gave up the ghost and died. We existed to minimize the loss exposure of our respective publishing companies.
1997 was weird, folks. And that’s how my tenure at Macworld started.
Jason returns to John Gruber’s podcast for a look back at WWDC 2026, and a look ahead to Designed in California, Jason and Myke Hurley’s upcoming 50-episode Apple history podcast.
I stumbled on this post via Bluesky, in which Jason Hazeley was utterly baffled by this section of a printed book:
The movement takes the place of a scherzo and is mainly constructed [of] the welcome datacompordinary major scale with the four lower notes shifted a semitone upward.
In the photo of the book passage, (presumably) Hazeley’s finger is pointing at the phrase “welcome datacompordinary major scale.” He wrote, “Absolutely stumped. Have never seen this term, can find no definition anywhere, and can’t parse it.”
Some Mac third party keyboards used to (or maybe still do for all I know) have a little feature where if you didn’t type anything for a while they would themselves type ‘welcome datacomp’. Here’s a nice little rant by someone who got caught by this.
That linked post is from 1994. In it, Chris Tate describes being baffled by a third-party ADB (the predecessor to USB) keyboard:
This past weekend, while trying to get some text-editing work done, I had to leave the computer alone for a while. Upon returning, I found to my horror that the text “welcome datacomp” had been inserted into the text I was editing. I was certain that I hadn’t typed it, and my wife verified that she hadn’t, either. A quick survey showed that the “clipboard” (the repository for information being manipulated via cut/paste operations) wasn’t the source of the offending text.
That story includes a cameo from John Norstad, the creator of the definitive free Mac antivirus app, who had apparently been contacted by numerous people assuming it was a virus:
Yes, we have heard of this. It’s a practical joke in the ROM code in some third-party keyboards. The only solution is to get your bad keyboard replaced.
My guess is that this wasn’t a practical joke as much as some sort of firmware test gone awry, but regardless, “welcome datacomp” managed to appear in numerous publications, as Haller’s post details. Someone finding it in a printed book in 2026 just shows you how the weird tech quirks of the past can just keep echoing long after they’ve gone.
Mojave Paint is a new macOS image editor. If you use layers, masks, channels, selections, adjustments and filters all in the same editing session, Mojave Paint might be for you. If you loved using Photoshop but don’t love today’s Adobe, Mojave Paint might be for you.
There’s so much you can do with Mojave Paint:
Make pixel art
Clean up document scans
Design a flyer
Create App Store screenshots
Crop and resize photos
Do some basic photo retouching
Remove a background.
Here’s what Mojave Paint doesn’t do:
Stick AI features into every corner of the product
Mojave Paint is powerful, but it’s also got a simple, uncluttered UI reminiscent of the best software of the 1990s.
“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”….
“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” said Cook. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”
Cook called the current supply situation, driven by wild buying in the AI industry, “a hundred-year flood,” and that he had “never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”
I do wonder how Apple will raise prices. An informal guess is that a lot of cheaper base configurations will vanish, that new models will start at higher prices, that Apple’s rumored OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro models will set all-time high starting prices, and that Apple will do everything it can to keep a lid on the prices of its base models across the board. The big question is, will the MacBook Neo jump up in price, and if so, by how much?
That’s an Apple News+ link. Here’s the web version. ↩
James Chang has built a project that upgrades the file-sharing stack on Apple’s long-discontinued Time Capsule hardware so that it will work on modern OS versions:
This is a modern Samba setup that runs directly on the Time Capsule itself; macOS 27 can connect to the Time Capsule as a network share, and use it for Time Machine backups…
You get the full Apple experience reproduced: after you install this, you do not have to worry about it again, even if the device IP address changes. It will show up automatically in Time Machine in settings app, and it will use mDNS/Bonjour so it will work fine even if the IP address is not static and gets changed.
It’s a clever piece of work that uses a very specific version of Samba and some other software running on a tiny RAM disk with other files stored on the device’s storage partition. I don’t have a Time Capsule to test this myself, but if you have one and have been lamenting its retirement, think again!
My thanks to Unite Pro for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Safari web apps and PWAs are a nice start, but they’re limited. Browser tabs are messy. And most tools for turning websites into apps still feel more like wrappers than real Mac software.
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What makes Unite Pro special is how much control it gives you. You can remove distractions, force dark mode on sites that don’t natively support it, apply custom scripts and styles, and shape each app around the way you actually work — while keeping sessions, cookies, and permissions separate from your browser.
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