This is turning out to be the year of immersive sports.
In January, Apple worked with Spectrum and the L.A. Lakers to debut a series of immersive NBA games. And beginning August 28, it’ll be airing a live immersive Major League Baseball game every Friday night for the rest of the Friday Night Baseball season.
Unlike the NBA games, which were limited to cable subscribers, these games are part of Apple’s own Friday Night Baseball package and will be available to all Apple TV subscribers with a Vision Pro. (In Australia, Canada, Germany, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, the UK, and the U.S., anyway.)
As with the NBA games, this will be an immersive-specific telecast with its own announcers (Paul Severino, Xavier Scruggs, Michelle Margaux), replays, and graphics. Apple says that during commercial breaks, viewers will “stay immersed in the in-stadium experience from all angles.”
As always, the details will be fascinating to see. While I thought that the immersive NBA games were pretty good, some viewers complained that there were too many changes in camera angle that broke immersion. Baseball is a very different sport, in terms of pace and in the size of the field, so it’ll be interesting to see how Apple chooses to approach its coverage.
The four immersive games on the schedule are: Red Sox at Yankees (August 28), Angels at Pirates (September 4), Padres at Giants (September 11), and Giants at Dodgers (September 18).
“Ted Lasso” is back on Apple TV, which was no sure thing after the series more or less wrapped up in May of 2023. But it’s back for a fourth season, in which—after an episode-long visit to Ted’s home of Kansas City—the football-turned-soccer coach returns to Richmond, where—as teased at the end of season 3—a new women’s team is launching and just might need a coach.
I’ve seen the first half of the season, and I’m happy to report that though the teams have changed, this is still “Ted Lasso” through and through. Thematically the first three seasons were about Ted’s journey in running away from a dissolving marriage. With season four, a whole new set of themes begin to emerge.
Yes, love ’em or hate ’em Ted’s homespun aphorisms still abound. The relationship between owner Rebecca and marketing genius Keely continues to be as strong as ever. Higgins is still doing his Higgins stuff. Mae is still tending bar. Those three fans in the pub are as random as ever. But in coaching a barely-formed women’s team that is in desperate need of players and fans, “Ted Lasso” returns to its roots as an underdog story, which helps make the whole thing feel more like the show’s first season. (There’s even a press conference scene that is disastrous for entirely different reasons from the original.)
It’s great to have series co-creator Brendan Hunt back as Coach Beard, but the addition of Tanya Reynolds (“Sex Education”) as Alice Chilton introduces a new dynamic. Chilton is the only coach who can go into the locker room without permission, she thinks she deserves the managerial job, and she’s got some serious anger control problems. Reynolds adds a lot of grit to the proceedings, preventing it from becoming too much of a sickeningly sweet reunion love-fest.
The character least served from the season, at least so far as I’ve seen, is breakout character Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein). He’s there and has some moments, but since he’s the manager of the men’s team, he’s often relegated being a gruff, bearded question mark attached to questions about his relationship status with Keeley. I appreciate the ironic turnabout of the men’s manager being an afterthought who’s only relevant in terms of his romantic storylines, but I do wonder if Roy is too strong of a character to be served in such limited doses.
Anyway, the best review I can give to season four of “Ted Lasso” is that each episode made me laugh out loud, a lot. Not only was it nice to see these familiar characters again, but the show did the most important job any comedy has—it’s funny. Welcome back, coach.
I’ve been covering Apple financial results and earnings calls for a very long time, dating back to my time at Macworld when Steve Jobs would occasionally parachute into earnings calls presided over by, among other people, Tim Cook! This week’s earnings call was Cook’s 90th and final installment, and that’s probably the most notable thing about it.
Even the fact that it was a record third quarter isn’t that notable. It’s more notable when Apple doesn’t set a quarterly record, especially given economic changes and inflation.
Still, as always, the results and the earnings call provided a few things I thought were worth pointing out. And so, powered by my second cup of tea while I’m on a summer trip to visit family (that was a late-night flight!), here are some thoughts about financial things.
It’s not a chip shortage, it’s demand
Apple is having supply-constraint problems. Maybe you’ve noticed the lack of new Mac minis and Mac studios? The Mac is the hardest-hit product line when it comes to supply, but Cook said the iPhone has also been affected, and anticipates constraints on the iPad as well.
This isn’t the whole story, of course, but it is part of it—and a part that Apple wants to crow about. Apple is limited in how many Macs, iPhones, and iPads it can sell because they are all powered by systems-on-chips that are coming off of chipmaker Taiwan Semiconductor’s most advanced production nodes. Here’s how Cook put it:
The root cause of it is not a regular supply issue. It’s a demand forecast issue, to be candid, where the iPhone and the Mac are both doing remarkably better than we thought they would do. And we had high expectations, so it wasn’t that our expectations were low, but as you can see from iPhone’s growth being 22% and Mac’s growth at 29%… these are extraordinary numbers and the supply chain just has less flexibility in it than normal. So we’ve been pulling supply ahead, and at some point there’s a limit to that. And so we’ve got a quarter that we’re going to be scrambling on the supply side, essentially.
This isn’t a partner or supplier issue. This issue is an incredibly strong… iPhone and Mac product cycle that has really yielded a demand beyond our expectation.
You can’t argue with the strong iPhone and Mac sales figures, and Apple specifically called out the MacBook Pro and the MacBook Neo, which Cook said “has been especially popular” and suggested that the company is still struggling to make them fast enough.
It’s admirable (and sensible) that Cook isn’t pointing fingers at anyone but customers who want Apple products, but the key phrase in his statement is “the supply chain just has less flexibility in it than normal.” This is an acknowledgement that while in the past, Apple might have been able to boost chip production from its partners, today the chip industry is maxed out thanks to the wild building of chips for AI applications.
Still, I do take Cook at his word: Even in a normal world, there’s only so much TSMC could do to rapidly respond to a dramatic increase in chip orders from Apple. I’m sure Apple is kicking itself for not anticipating stronger demand, especially given how tight the whole industry has gotten. And Cook’s suggestion that Apple is going to be “scrambling on the supply side” because the impact will “increase significantly” (and Cook really emphasized that word!) suggests that this may get worse before it gets better.
Oh yeah, and this isn’t just about cutting-edge SOCs. It goes for memory too. According to Cook, the price Apple pays for memory just keeps going up, and the offsetting Apple has been able to do by using existing inventory is going to be less effective as supplies run out.
As an aside, Cook also alluded to reports that Apple has tried to get the U.S. government to authorize purchase of RAM from some forbidden Chinese chipmakers, which has aroused political ire. “Obviously if there were more suppliers, that would be good, and it would help us on the supply side and perhaps the pricing side.”
How does Apple increase prices?
One of the analysts on the earnings call asked a question about Apple’s recent price increases, which was a great opportunity for Cook to explain Apple’s pricing philosophy.
It started out pretty normal, with Cook pointing out the price increases were done “reluctantly” and only because it’s “a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing.” But then it got more philosophical:
In terms of our philosophy on dollars or percentages, we look at units, revenue, and margin, and then come to a business judgment as to how to handle that. And so it’s not a mathematical formula that gets us to a specific result or just looking at one dimension of that. We look at all three dimensions and think about it over the long term instead of a 90-day clock. Hopefully that helps.
Yep, that helps, Tim. Three-dimensional pricing. Imagine pricing as a cube, and you’ll finally see the Matrix.
Soft Services stories
Services revenue, while up year-over-year, was (shockingly?) not up sequentially for the first time in more than three years. Apple laid most of the blame at various foreign-exchange rate “headwinds,” but CFO Kevan Parekh also tried to blame the softness on a few other factors:
Theatrical gross from “F1: The Movie” last year
“Headwinds in mobile gaming”
Changes to the App Store business model worldwide, mostly driven by regulation
The U.S. court order allowing developers to link out of Apple’s payment model without penalty
It felt like a real stretch, and more of an opportunity to complain about the App Store being regulated and litigated. But I will admit that a softening in mobile gaming, which obviously drives a lot of App Store revenue, is an interesting data point. And it’s more interesting that Apple felt it was worth sharing.
But, Parekh went on to say, “Despite this, the App Store did set a June quarter revenue record.” So… maybe not the reason for the softness after all?
Apple is an EGOT
Did you know that Steven Spielberg just won a Grammy award, which made him an EGOT? Winning an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony is a pretty rare accomplishment that any individual should be proud of.
But did you know that large corporations are also keeping score? It’s true.
“It was wonderful to see Apple TV earn the industry’s top honors, adding Tony Awards this year to its Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar wins,” Cook said Thursday. “We reached that milestone faster than any streamer in history.”
I wonder which marketing person at Apple had the job of figuring out how quickly every other streamer became an EGOT. Also, thanks to cancelled series “Schmigadoon” for the Tony. Maybe do everyone a solid and bring it back?
This was Tim
Through the earnings call, financial analysts showed their softer side by thanking Cook for all his years of service and revenue generation. Cook made a point of thanking them all individually before answering their questions, which I thought was a nice, and human, touch. He also made a final farewell statement designed to warm Wall Street hearts:
Thank you to all of you, from our shareholders, particularly our long-term shareholders who have put their trust in us for so many years, to the analysts who have followed our company so closely. As you know, this will be my final earnings call, and John will lead these calls going forward. The transition is going seamlessly, and I am beyond excited for John to step into his new role and lead Apple into its next era. He is truly one of a kind and there is no better person to take the helm of the company.
Oh! The new guy! I didn’t even mention it, but John Ternus was on the call the entire time, and didn’t say a peep. At least, not until Wamsi Mohan of Bank of America decided to devote one of his two questions to him. He threw him a softball about how the competitive landscape is changing overall.
Ternus did not pick up the ball.
“Well, thank you for asking,” Ternus said, rousing from his call-long slumber. “I guess I would just reiterate what Tim said, there is so much opportunity for us with everything that’s happening in this space, and we’re just really focused on our plans and very excited about it.”
Deferring to the big guy and not letting Wamsi Mohan bait you into stealing Cook’s moment. That’s future CEO thinking right there, pal.
For the 90th and final time, Apple CEO Tim Cook hopped on a conference call with financial-industry analysts to detail the quarter gone by, give a peek at what’s to come, and maybe take one final victory lap. CFO Kevan Parekh and incoming CEO John Ternus were there, too.
This is Six Colors’s complete transcript of the call for July 30, 2026.
Tim Cook’s introduction
Thank you, Suhasini. Good afternoon, everyone, and thanks for joining the call. Today, Apple is pleased to report $109.4 billion in revenue, up 16% from a year ago and a June quarter record. We were able to achieve this despite supply constraints and sequential foreign exchange headwinds.
We continue to see enormous customer enthusiasm for our most popular lineup ever, with iPhone revenue growing 22% from a year ago to reach a June quarter record. We saw so much excitement around the best Mac lineup we’ve ever had, growing a strong 29% to achieve a June quarter revenue record. Services also set a June quarter record with $30.7 billion in revenue.
We achieved June quarter revenue records in every geographic segment. We were pleased to see strength across the board with June quarter records in the U.S., Latin America, Western Europe, India, China mainland, Japan, and Southeast Asia. We also achieved June quarter revenue records in both developed and emerging markets and saw double-digit growth in most emerging markets.
This year’s WWDC was a wonderful showcase of our latest innovations. We were tremendously excited to unveil the all-new Siri AI, a completely reimagined version of Siri that is profoundly capable, deeply personal, and integrated seamlessly across our platforms. And we’ve been absolutely thrilled by the response who’ve been using Siri AI in the developer and public betas. The reviews from early users have been phenomenal, and it’s been so wonderful to hear from people who are excited about the capabilities we’ve built. And it underscores our philosophy that building AI that is private and based on personal context can change how users find information and get things done with our products in a way that truly enriches their lives. We really couldn’t be more excited about it, and we are feeling incredibly enthusiastic about the impact it’s going to have.
At WWDC we also announced new tools to help parents keep kids safe online and we were pleased by the overwhelmingly positive reaction. New child safety features like Ask to Browse and Time Allowances will help parents encourage kids to develop healthy digital habits. These new tools integrate guidance from leading clinical and child development research, including the American Academy of Pediatrics. Our goal is to make it easier for parents to manage what their children see, who they interact with, and how and when they can use their devices. We’re looking forward to bringing these new capabilities to users this fall, in addition to amazing new updates across our operating systems.
Now let me turn to the results for the quarter, beginning with iPhone. iPhone revenue for the June quarter was $54.3 billion, up 22% from a year ago. We achieved June quarter records in every geographic segment, and set a June quarter record for upgraders. According to IDC, we gained share globally during the quarter. As I’ve said before, this is the most powerful and most popular iPhone lineup we’ve ever had. More people are relying on iPhone every day for AI, powered by the outstanding performance of A19 and A19 Pro. Across the lineup, iPhone continues to deliver the performance, battery life, durability, and camera capabilities that people count on every day. Whether it’s the extraordinary camera system of iPhone 17 Pro and Pro Max, the remarkably thin design of iPhone Air, the balanced performance and durability of iPhone 17, or the exceptional value of iPhone 17E, there’s an iPhone for every customer.
Mac delivered its best June quarter yet, with $10.4 billion in revenue, growing an impressive 29% from a year ago despite significant supply constraints. This revenue growth was driven by the incredible strength of our latest lineup, with MacBook Pro and the all-new MacBook Neo. According to IDC, we gained share globally. We also set a June quarter revenue record in developed markets and an all-time record in emerging markets with particular strength in Greater China, where we had an all-time revenue record. In addition, we achieved all-time records for upgraders and customers new to Mac.
With the power of Apple Silicon, the Mac lineup delivers outstanding power-efficient performance, massive memory bandwidth, and next-level AI capabilities. Mac continues to be the ultimate AI powerhouse, excelling at high throughput, on-device inference, and creation across a broad range of AI workloads. And we’re seeing customers increasingly put those capabilities to work, from using Mac Mini as a powerful platform for agentic AI to deploying clusters of Mac Studio systems to run frontier-class models locally.
Across the lineup, customers continue to embrace the Mac family. MacBook Neo has been especially popular, with its distinct design and excellent value resonating with customers around the world, and we’re continuing to work hard to meet demand. MacBook Air, the world’s most popular laptop, continues to deliver the portability and performance customers love with M5. And MacBook Pro, powered by M5 Pro and M5 Max, remains a go-to choice for professionals tackling the most demanding AI, development, and creative workflows.
In iPad, revenue was $6.2 billion for the June quarter. iPad continues to be the ultimate go-anywhere, do-anything device for students, entrepreneurs, and creators of all kinds, thanks to its incredible power, portability, and versatility. The addition of M4 to iPad Air has made it even more capable, delivering a significant performance boost for everything from personal productivity and immersive learning to advanced creative workflows. Together with a remarkable performance of iPad Pro, the amazing value and versatility of iPad, and the ultra-portable iPad Mini, we’re offering customers our strongest iPad lineup ever.
Revenue for Wearables, Home, and Accessories was $7.9 billion, up 6% from a year ago. We grew in every geographic segment and achieved a June quarter record for upgraders for Apple Watch. Our Apple Watch lineup brings together the most comprehensive set of health and fitness features we’ve ever had. We’re delivering useful features backed by research to enable users to better understand their health and wellbeing. It’s gratifying to receive almost daily reminders of the meaningful impact Apple’s health innovations are having for users all over the world—changing, even saving lives.
Meanwhile, we continue raising the bar across our AirPods lineup, whether it’s the immersive listening experience of AirPods Pro 3, or the premium listening experience and exceptional active noise cancellation of AirPods Max 2. And with live translation powered by Apple Intelligence, people are crossing language barriers and connecting like never before.
As I mentioned earlier, we’re excited about the work we’re doing on the next generation of Apple Intelligence, including Siri AI and the AI features we’re developing across our platforms. These experiences are intuitive and useful, while also deeply integrated in a way that’s personal and private, with the latest models running on device and on servers using Private Cloud Compute. We began laying the groundwork for users to have the best possible experience with AI when we introduced the Neural Engine in 2017. Ever since then, we’ve innovated and invested deliberately in silicon, systems, and scalable unified memory architecture designed with AI at their core.
What sets Apple apart is the unique combination of massive unified memory bandwidth, industry-leading power-efficient performance, and deep on-device intelligence, all built around the customer experience from the ground up. The result is that Apple has created the world’s best hardware to experience AI, whether using Apple Intelligence, including Siri AI, or third-party offerings. That’s why developers and researchers are increasingly using Apple devices to build ever-more advanced tools and models.
Turning to services, revenue was $30.7 billion, a June quarter revenue record and up 12% from a year ago, despite significant sequential foreign exchange headwinds. We also set an all-time revenue record in developed markets and a June quarter record in emerging markets. Apple TV continues to leave audiences spellbound with new releases like Widow’s Bay and Cape Fear alongside returning favorites like Silo and Sugar. And next week, we’re excited that Ted Lasso is back for its fourth season.
It was wonderful to see Apple TV earn the industry’s top honors, adding Tony Awards this year to its Emmy, Grammy, and Oscar wins. We reached that milestone faster than any streamer in history. We’re also looking forward to this year’s Emmy Awards, where Apple has landed a record 89 nominations, leading all networks in both the major drama and comedy series categories with three outstanding drama series nominations and three outstanding comedy series nominations. Widows Bay also stands out as the year’s most nominated new program, earning 19 Emmy nominations. In the six and a half years since launch, Apple TV has earned more than 850 wins and nearly 3,800 nominations.
In time for the World Cup, we expanded Apple Sports to include more than 170 countries and regions worldwide and made it easier than ever for fans to follow every moment of the tournament from the opening game to the final whistle. At the same time, we’re halfway through an unforgettable year of F1, and Apple TV subscribers have been tuning in all season to follow their favorite drivers and teams.
In retail, we were pleased to announce Apple Upgrade this week for customers in the U.S. Apple Upgrade is a new hardware leasing program launched in partnership with Klarna and makes it even easier for customers to get their hands on Apple’s latest products with a plan that’s right for them.
In all of our work, we’re thoughtful and intentional in how we show up for our users and across our communities. That means innovating to protect user privacy with the next of Apple Intelligence or helping parents keep kids safe, as I mentioned earlier. In honor of Global Accessibility Awareness Day, we unveiled new features to help users get more out of the products they use every day. New intelligent capabilities are coming to VoiceOver, Magnifier, Voice Control, and Accessibility Reader to make them more useful and intuitive. We’re also using on-device speech recognition to generate subtitles for video content without captions. And Apple Vision Pro is adding a feature for power wheelchair users to control drive systems using just their eyes. All of these features were born out of Apple’s longstanding commitment to ensuring that the benefits of technology are shared with everyone.
As we continue to develop new capabilities for users around the world, we’re also doing our part to invest in innovation close to home. Last year, we made a $600 billion commitment to the U.S. over four years, and now, as we said before, we plan to reinvest the tariff refunds we’ve received into the U.S.
We’re pleased with the progress we’ve already made advancing the American supply chain. Earlier this month, Apple announced a new agreement with Broadcom to design and produce custom silicon components and cutting-edge wireless connectivity technologies. The new, multi-year agreement with Broadcom, which is part of Apple’s American Manufacturing Program, is expected to exceed $30 billion. This marks our largest-ever American Manufacturing Program commitment. It’s also an important step forward in our work to build an end-to-end silicon supply chain here in the U.S.
We’re excited for the upcoming opening of the Apple Advanced Manufacturing Center in Houston. The center is located in a facility where we currently assemble advanced AI servers. Later this year, we’ll make Mac mini there, too. The center will teach students, supplier employees, and business of all sizes, the same innovative processes we use to make our products. The goal is to empower American manufacturers to take their work to the next level and strengthen the entire advanced manufacturing ecosystem.
We have an exciting fall ahead and an incredible future beyond. Our road map is phenomenal, and we are so excited about the way Siri AI will enrich our users lives. Throughout all of it, we will remain guided by our North Star: building the best products and services to enable people to do magical things. It’s a special privilege to be part of people’s lives in lasting and meaningful ways, helping them to create, connect, and experience the world around them. I couldn’t be more excited to watch our phenomenal story of innovation continue to unfold, and I’ve never been more confident that the best is yet to come. With that, I’ll turn it over to Kevan.
Kevan Parekh’s opening remarks
Thanks, Tim, and good afternoon, everyone. Here’s a quick rundown of our key financial metrics. Our revenue of $109.4 billion was up 16% year over year, a June quarter revenue record. We saw strong performance around the world with double-digit growth in every geographic segment despite supply constraints. Products revenue was $78.7 billion, up 18% year over year, driven by double-digit growth on iPhone and Mac, both of which set new June quarter records.
Our installed base of over two and a half billion active devices has reached another all-time high across all major product categories and geographic segments. Services revenue was $30.7 billion, up 12% year-over-year. We set revenue records in every Services category, including all-time records in cloud services and payment services. Company gross margin was 50.1%, up 80 basis points sequentially. This included a benefit from tariff refunds, which had a favorable impact of approximately two percentage points. When you remove this favorable impact, we would have been at the midpoint of the guidance provided last quarter.
Products gross margin was 40.1%, up 140 basis points sequentially. This also included a benefit from the tariff refunds I just mentioned, which had a favorable impact of over 2.5 percentage points. Services gross margin was 75.6%, down 110 basis points sequentially, driven by a different mix. Operating expenses came in at $19.1 billion, up 23% year-over-year, driven by investments in R&D. Net income was $29.8 billion. Diluted earnings per share was $2.02, up 29% year-over-year, and included 11 cents of favorable impact from tariff refunds. Operating cash flow was very strong at $34.4 billion. All three of these metrics set June quarter records, even when excluding the tariff refund benefit.
Now I’m going to provide some more details for each of our revenue categories.
iPhone revenue was $54.3 billion, up 22% year-over-year, driven by the iPhone 17 family. We grew double digits in the vast majority of markets we track and reached June quarter revenue records across both developed and emerging markets. The iPhone active installed base grew to an all-time high and set a June quarter record for upgraders. According to a recent survey from Worldpanel, iPhone was a top-selling model in the U.S., urban China, the U.K., France, Australia, and Japan. We were thrilled with the response to the iPhone 17 family. Customer satisfaction in the U.S. was recently measured at 99% by 451 Research.
Mac revenue was $10.4 billion, up 29% year-over-year, a new June quarter record, driven by the strength of MacBook Neo and MacBook Pro. We grew in both developed and emerging markets, with strong double-digit growth in markets like Latin America, India, and Southeast Asia. The customer reception to MacBook Neo has been incredible. We continue to attract new customers to the product around the world. As Tim mentioned, Mac had its best quarter ever for customers new to the Mac and for upgraders worldwide, including in the U.S., China mainland, and India. And in the U.S., customer satisfaction for Mac was recently measured at 95%.
iPad revenue was $6.2 billion, down 6% year-over-year, driven by the continued difficult compare against the launch of the A16 powered iPad in the prior year. At the same time, the iPad installed base reached a new all-time high, and over half of the customers who purchased an iPad were new to the product. And 451 Research recently measured customer satisfaction at 98% in the U.S.
Wearables, Home and Accessories revenue was $7.9 billion, up 6% year-over-year, driven by strength in wearables and accessories, and we saw growth in both developed and emerging markets. The wearables installed base reached a new all-time high. We set a June quarter record for upgraders on Apple Watch, and over half the customers purchasing an Apple Watch during the quarter were new to the product. And in the U.S., customer satisfaction on Apple Watch was reported at 95%.
Our Services revenue reached a June quarter record of $30.7 billion, up 12% year-over-year, despite significant sequential FX headwinds. For the total services business, we saw a double-digit growth in the vast majority of markets we track. We set records in every category, with June quarter records in advertising, App Store, AppleCare, music, and video, as well as all-time records in cloud services and payment services. We are optimistic about the long-term future of our services business. With our large installed base of over two and a half billion active devices, we have an incredibly strong foundation for growth opportunities. Our services continue to attract more customers, and we have now surpassed $1.5 billion in paid subscriptions. Both transacting and paid accounts reached new all-time highs in the quarter, with double-digit growth for both in emerging markets. And we continue to improve and expand our services offerings, from powerful updates to Creator Studio to exciting new features we’re bringing to services later this year, like splitting bills with Apple Cash using Visual Intelligence.
Turning now to enterprise and education, organizations are using the Apple platform to drive AI innovation and empower the next generation of students. Starting with Enterprise, Morgan Stanley has deployed over 20,000 iPhone 17 devices globally as part of a shift from employee-owned to corporate-owned devices for liability and security. More companies are choosing Mac for on-device AI advantages, including lower costs, better performance, and enhanced privacy and security. At Disney, creative teams are increasingly turning to Mac for on-device AI workflows that reduce overall cloud token costs and keep their IP secure. And Credit Agricole, France’s leading retail bank, is using on-device AI and MacBook Pro to streamline regulatory workflows, reducing manual processing time by over 80%. Our newest addition to the Mac lineup, MacBook Neo, is reaching new enterprise users in many environments, from bank branches to retail storefronts.
In education, MacBook Neo continued to accelerate adoption of Apple products, with many districts leveraging Apple financial services to deploy at scale. Pinellas County Schools, one of the largest districts in Florida, is transitioning 25,000 students from Windows devices to MacBook Neo across its 18 high schools. In Washington, Peninsula School District 401 moved over 8,000 students from Chromebooks to MacBook Neo. And in Oklahoma, Midwest City-Dell City School District purchased over 6,000 MacBook Neos to become an all-Apple district for students. In fact, in the last quarter, about half of the MacBook Neo large purchases by U.S. education institutions displaced Windows and Chromebook devices.
Let’s turn to our cash position and capital return program. We ended the quarter with $147 billion in cash and marketable securities and $84 billion in total debt. During the quarter, we returned $33 billion to shareholders. This included $4 billion in dividends and equivalents and $25.8 billion in share repurchases.
As we move ahead into the September quarter, I’d like to review our outlook, which includes the types of forward-looking information that Suhasini referred to. Importantly, the color we’re providing assumes that global tariff rates, policies, and their application remain in effect as of this call, and the global macroeconomic outlook does not worsen from today.
We also expect our September quarter total company revenue to be impacted by two main factors. First, we expect foreign exchange to be a sequential headwind of about 2.5 percentage points to the year-over-year total company growth rate from the June quarter to the September quarter. Second, we expect the impact from supply constraints to increase significantly sequentially. The projected supply constraints in the September quarter affect iPhone, Mac, and iPad. As a result, we expect our September quarter total company revenue to grow between 9% and 11% year-over-year.
On iPhone, we expect to continue to see high levels of demand; however, we do expect iPhone revenue to be impacted by these foreign exchange headwinds and supply constraints. Therefore, we expect the September quarter reported growth rate for iPhone to be mid-teens year-over-year. For Services, we expect September quarter year-over-year reported growth rate to be largely similar to what we reported in the June quarter after removing the negative sequential impact of about two and a half percentage points from foreign exchange that we just described.
We expect gross margin to be between 47 percent and 48 percent. This includes an expected benefit of approximately one percentage point related to tariff refunds. We expect operating expenses to be between $19.1 billion and $19.4 billion. We expect OI&E to be around $350 million, excluding any potential impact from the mark-to-market of minority investments, and our tax rate to be around 16.5 percent.
Finally, today our Board of Directors has declared a cash dividend of $0.27 per share of common stock payable on August 13, 2026, to shareholders of record as of August 10, 2026.
Before we take questions, let me turn it back over to Tim.
A farewell from Tim
Thanks Kevan. Before we get into questions, I just wanted to take a moment to say thank you. Thank you to all of you, from our shareholders, particularly our long-term shareholders who have put their trust in us for so many years, to the analysts who have followed our company so closely. As you know, this will be my final earnings call, and John will lead these calls going forward. The transition is going seamlessly, and I am beyond excited for John to step into his new role and lead Apple into its next era. He is truly one of a kind and there is no better person to take the helm of the company.
As I’ve said, I couldn’t be more confident in his leadership, in our executive team, and in the extraordinary people at Apple who are determined to enrich the lives of our users all over the world. We have a bright future ahead, and I truly have never been more optimistic. So thank you all, and now Kevan and I will be happy to take your questions.
Analyst Q&A
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Tim, best of luck. It’s been a pleasure working with you over the years. Maybe to start with, if I think about the 9 to 11% sort of growth that’s guided for September, it’s about a 500 basis points or so deceleration versus what we’re seeing really in June quarter, even through this year, I would say. Can you just talk about how much of this decel is really supply constraint versus other factors like FX? And if you could just flesh out what these supply constraints are, broadening beyond these advanced SOCs you talked about last quarter as well.
Kevan Parekh: Amit, this is Kevan. How are you doing? Why don’t I start with just kind of describing the sequential change, and then I’ll let Tim jump in for kind of a bit more color around the supply constraints. So I think as I mentioned in my prepared remarks, we expect the September quarter total revenue to grow by 9% to 11% year-over-year, and then we expect that to be impacted by two main factors. So first, when we look at going from the June quarter to September quarter, we expect foreign exchange to be a sequential headwind of around 2.5 percentage points to the year-over-year company growth rate. And then the second impact is that the impact from supply constraints, we expect that to increase significantly when we go sequentially from June to September, and that projected supply constraint in the September quarter will affect the iPhone, Mac, and the iPad. And really, when you combine those two factors, we get pretty close to the June overall total company growth rate.
Tim Cook: Yeah, Amit, it’s Tim. First of all, thank you for your comments. During the June quarter, we did experience supply constraints primarily on the Mac and to a lesser extent on iPhone and iPad. These were driven by very high levels of demand, and as we’ve said before, we are seeing less flexibility in the supply chain than normal, and were primarily driven by the availability of the advanced nodes that our SOCs are produced on. If you look forward then into the current quarter, the September quarter, we continue to expect high levels of demand. However, with less flexibility in supply chain, we expect the impact from the supply constraints to increase significantly sequentially. The projected supply constraints in the September quarter, as Kevan said, affect iPhone, Mac, and iPad. And so, we’re seeing some very significant constraints currently, with limited flexibility in the supply chain to remedy it.
Amit Daryanani, Evercore: Got it. That’s really helpful. Thanks a lot for that. And then, Tim, I just have a memory question for you. Apple has historically, I think, done a really excellent job about delivering capability and utility to customers without really making them pay disproportionately more. The stagnant memory inflation seems to challenge that equation for you folks right now and there are reports that suggest that you’re seeking greater sourcing flexibility for memory. Can you just talk about, is this sourcing options really about ensuring that you have supply and it’s a way to mitigate memory inflation, or is more to preserve the value proposition for your customers. Just any light you could shed on this would be helpful. Thank you.
Tim Cook: Yeah, let me back up and talk about memory in general, ’cause I know this is a subject on many of your minds. As I’d said on the last call, we paid more for memory in the March quarter than the December quarter. And then, as I alluded to last quarter, we expected to pay significantly more in the June quarter than the March quarter, and that is what happened. It was partially offset by the benefit of carry-in inventory. For September, we expect to pay even higher memory costs. And we’re able to offset partly by a few factors, and let me walk through kind of what they are.
The first is, as you would expect, we have a benefit from some carry-in inventory in the September quarter. However, we believe this will see decreasing benefit from this over time, beyond the September quarter. The second is, we’re expecting lower costs on certain non-memory components that are in our BOM, and then if you look beyond September, we see the market pricing for memory continuing to increase, which could drive an increasing impact on our business, and we’re continuing to evaluate this.
In terms of the sources of supply, you know, primarily the DRAM market has three suppliers, and obviously if there were more suppliers, that would be good, and it would help us on the supply side and perhaps the pricing side. It’s unclear on the pricing side, but it could help on the supply side, and so, we’re evaluating all options.
Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs: Good afternoon. First, Tim, congratulations on the extraordinary run and [inaudible] on these earnings calls. In terms of my questions, I have two as well. First, on the Apple Upgrade program, could you talk a little bit about the expected adoption rates across your 2.5 billion device installed base in success? Do you see it shortening the replacement cycle for iPhone, or also having an equal impact to Mac and iPad, which may have not have benefited from device subsidies in the U.S. like iPhone has historically.
Tim Cook: Michael, first of all, thank you for your comments. I really appreciate that. If you look at the upgrade program, what it’s all about is making it easier for for customers to get their hands on our latest products with a leasing plan that’s right for them. And of course, as you know, the residual values on Apple products are generally much higher than the residual value on several of our competition, and so it’s a way to get into a product on a fairly affordable basis, particularly for those customers who want to upgrade on some kind of schedule, and so we’re very excited about it. It is offered in our retail stores, and so it’s not widely offered in all channels, and so we’ll see what the customer uptake is, but the early feedback on it is quite positive.
Kevan Parekh: Yeah, Michael, I just mentioned that it’s only available in the U.S. right now as well.
Michael Ng, Goldman Sachs: Great. Thank you. That’s very helpful, and then my second question, just on iOS 27 and Apple Intelligence. Went into public beta earlier this month. Could you talk about learnings from the public beta? Will the new Siri AI be a demand driver for iPhones this holiday? How does the Apple Intelligence usage to date in the open beta inform how you’re thinking about compute costs and the ability to recover some of those costs through iCloud Plus.
Tim Cook: Yeah, thank you for that. First of all, we are off the charts excited about Siri AI. We had a great reception from WWDC. We released the developer beta immediately after the keynote. The developer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. The feedback from reviewers and so forth have been overwhelmingly positive. We released it to the public for a public beta a few weeks ago and the continued feedback is really, really great. I think it’s a very big idea have AI that’s private, that’s based on your personal context, and that’s integrated across the operating system, and so we couldn’t be happier with how things are going. In terms of what it means for compute cost, it’s obviously early going for us, and so I don’t want to say that we have a complete plan for that. We do believe there will be people that want to use it a lot, and so we will have some kind of upgrade possibilities on iCloud Plus where people can buy up the stack on iCloud Plus, and we’ll see how the pickup for that is. But we could not be more excited about where the product is.
Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Hey, guys. Thanks a lot for the question, and obviously, Tim, known you a long time, I’ll really miss you. I wanted to ask about the supply constraints again, and I think people are just trying to make sense of it a little bit this way, is that the Street had you at 12% growth for the quarter of September, and so you could argue that to get to the 10% you guided, that’s just the FX, and then in the first quarter, which is December, the Street has been decelerating quite a bit, to like 8% to 9%. So I think what we’re struggling with after hours here is how much these supply constraints really hit you in December and impact that because, you know, the Street did a pretty good job of taking that number into the higher single digits. You know, is there any guidance you can give us there as you see it, Tim? And we’d really appreciate it. Thanks.
Tim Cook: Let me talk about the constraints a little more and then Kevan can weigh in on the guidance for revenue. As I had mentioned before, the primary issue is advanced nodes that we run our SOCs on. That’s the primary supply constraint now, and the root cause of it is not a regular supply issue. It’s a demand forecast issue, to be candid, where the iPhone and the Mac are both doing remarkably better than we thought they would do. And we had high expectations, so it wasn’t that our expectations were low, but as you can see from iPhone’s growth being 22% and Mac’s growth at 29%, and the iPhone is 22% year to date as well, that these are extraordinary numbers and the supply chain just has less flexibility in it than normal. So we’ve been pulling supply ahead, and at some point there’s a limit to that. And so we’ve got a quarter that we’re going to be scrambling on the supply side, essentially. And Kevan, you want to add on the revenue guidance?
Kevan Parekh: Yeah. Yeah, thanks, Tim. Ben, let me jump in here. The dynamics Tim mentioned combined with the foreign exchange impact I mentioned earlier sequentially is really what’s built into the 9 to 11 percent guidance we’re giving for the September total company revenue year on year growth rate. Beyond September, we’re not providing any color. At this point I think you mentioned December, so we’re not providing any kind of color or guidance beyond the September quarter.
Ben Reitzes, Melius Research: Ok. And then, if I could just ask, and you guys know what’s in the press all the time. But there’s this little company that is also building a fab in Arizona that you guys have been speculated you guys could work with that could potentially alleviate some, at least your silicon constraints. Is there any possibility that you guys broaden out your silicon providers in a reasonable time frame to alleviate these so we feel better about supply?
Tim Cook: Yeah, let me stress again, this isn’t a partner or supplier issue. This issue is an incredibly strong… it’s a great issue in some ways. It’s an incredibly strong iPhone and Mac product cycle that has really yielded a demand beyond our expectation. In Arizona, we do source over 100 million components this year out of Arizona. And so, it is part of our $600 billion commitment to the U.S., and we could not be more pleased with how that fab has ramped and is producing for us.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Thanks so much for taking my questions, guys, and Tim, just echo what everyone is saying, it’s been a pleasure working with you. Hope to still talk to you in the future. I want to maybe focus on pricing here, Tim, and kind of unprecedented for you to take pricing in the ways that you have. I guess two related questions… Is it your intention to pursue some of these multi-year LTAs with your suppliers just to ensure access to supply at pre-agreed prices? And when you approach product pricing in this environment, is it your intention to protect product gross profit dollars? Is it your intention to protect product gross margins? We’d just love the kind of thought process behind the pricing.
Tim Cook: Yeah, on the pricing front, we reluctantly raised prices, I would say. And we did it because we’re in, what I would characterize as a hundred-year flood on the memory pricing with exponential increases in memory prices, and so that was the rationale for it. In terms of our philosophy on dollars or percentages, we look at units, revenue, and margin, and then come to a business judgment as to how to handle that. And so it’s not a mathematical formula that gets us to a specific result or just looking at one dimension of that. We look at all three dimensions and think about it over the long term instead of a 90-day clock. Hopefully that helps.
Eric Woodring, Morgan Stanley: Yeah, yeah, no, that does help. Thank you, Tim. And then just maybe a quick follow-up. I guess, Tim or Kevan. 12% services growth was just a bit below your guidance. I imagine FX maybe played a role there. I think the fiscal 4Q guidance assumes another deceleration. I think the math would imply below 10% year-over-year as reported. So can you maybe just help us understand the kind of function factors underlying that deceleration? And if that’s App Store, which I think some third-party data sources would suggest, is that a function of AI maybe reprioritizing time away from parts of the App Store? I just want to make sure we understand the moving pieces on services, please. Thank you so much.
Kevan Parekh: Hey, Eric. This is Kevan. I’ll take that one. So, let’s walk from kind of the 16 percent in our fiscal second quarter to kind of the 12% that we just talked about in the June quarter that you referenced, and we look at that, relative to the March quarter, foreign exchange was the main driver for the change in the year-on-year growth rate sequentially, and also a couple other factors to keep in mind. One is we had the theatrical release of F1, which is one of the highest grossing sports films in history, and this year we didn’t have a theatrical release. So that had a favorable impact on both the June quarter and also the September quarter in the year ago. We also had some factors that impacted the performance of the App Store. We did see some headwinds in mobile gaming, and then keep in mind, we also made some changes to the App Store business model in certain countries, and in the U.S., we do continue to operate under a court ruling impacting the link-out transactions. But we’re pleased the Supreme Court will hear our appeal. Despite this, the App Store did set a June quarter revenue record. So if we take a step back, there are several positive trends in the services business, and during the June quarter, we saw strong double-digit growth in categories like cloud services, video, payment services, and advertising, and we set revenue records in every category, with June quarter records in advertising, the App Store, AppleCare, Music, and Video, where Apple TV viewership reached an all-time high in the quarter. And then we also set all-time records in cloud services and payment services, where Apple Pay saw a record level of users in both developed and emerging markets. And services also had a June quarter record in emerging markets. And as we outlined in the prepared remarks, you know, our services continue to attract more customers, and we now have surpassed one and a half billion in paid subscriptions, and our transacting and paid accounts hit an all-time high, with double-digit growth in both those two and emerging markets.
So I think when I step back, if I look at, you know, kind of how we landed versus our expectations that we had outlined in the March quarter, for the June quarter, I would say that we roughly met our expectations, but we did see a bit more softness on mobile gaming in the App Store. As we go into the September quarter, what I would say is we expect foreign exchange will continue to be a headwind, and in fact this is a theme that’s impacting the services business moreso than the total company. We expect foreign exchange to drive about a 5 percentage point headwind to the year-on-year growth rate from the March to September quarter. So if we look at the sequential change from the June quarter, the 12% services we reported, to what we’re guiding for the September quarter, we are going to see another 2.5 point sequential headwind.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Thanks for taking the questions and also best wishes, Tim. I guess I want to… maybe it tethers with the memory pricing dynamic, but as you look at the demand that you’re seeing right now, I’m curious of how you assess whether or not you’ve seen any pull forward of demand either from the consumer or even the enterprise and education markets, and whether or not you’re factoring that into your views as we look forward at all.
Tim Cook: You’re talking about on iPhone, I assume, in general. We’ve been running at this 22% growth rate for the last while, for this cycle has been a 22% increase year to date, and so it’s not obvious in the data that what you’re asking is true. Obviously, we’ve now had to increase prices on iPad and Mac, and the price elasticity there, it’s just too early to come to a definitive conclusion of what happens there. Because it takes a little while for the channels to adjust since there’s channel inventory and it takes a while for the consumer to respond, and so we’ll understand that more in the weeks ahead.
Aaron Rakers, Wells Fargo: Very helpful, and then as a quick follow-up, maybe more longer-term thematically, as AI proliferates towards the edge and more consumers utilize AI, I’m curious, Tim, if you see AI opening up additional opportunities. I can appreciate that you’re not going to give us specifics, but do you see other kind of addressable markets evolving from AI over time?
Tim Cook: Yes. I think there are enormous opportunities for Apple moving forward in AI. And I’m so excited about Siri AI and kind of where it is and where it’s going, and I’m excited about the feedback that we’re getting there, and of course, the ability to run some percentage of requests on device is also very strategic and sort of a competitive weapon, if you will. So I could not be more excited about the opportunities there.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Yes, thank you. Tim, first, congrats on your tenure as CEO. You joined back in 2011 when Apple reported $108 billion in revenue and you just delivered a quarter of $109 billion. So just an amazing journey.
Tim Cook: Thank you for that, I really appreciate it.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: Yeah, sure, Tim, it’s been a pleasure. For my question, first on Siri AI, Do you expect that Siri AI would change the capital intensity of Apple, despite the fact that you have the ability to do so much differentiated workloads on device and you have this distributed compute? You do have some requests that go into the backend, both in your own first party cloud as well as third party. So is it right to think that the capital intensity of Apple will change in the future because of Siri AI?
Tim Cook: We use a hybrid model, as I know Kevan has reviewed with you earlier, and so we use some third-party cloud and we do our own data centers, and so there will be a mix. But generally speaking, as you know, we have been growing our OPEX and spending more in AI in general. Quite a bit more. And there are other locations on the P&L other than OPEX, like OCOGS, et cetera, that also have AI expenditures, and so we’ll see what Siri AI does from the cost side of it. But there’s also the ability when people use it a lot for them to move up on an iCloud plan as well, and so what the balance of that is, is a bit uncertain at the moment.
Wamsi Mohan, Bank of America: And John, since you’re on the call, congrats on the new role. I’d love to get maybe just a high-level take from you if you think that the competitive landscape here is changing, especially as you hear about, potentially, companies like OpenAI building an AI-enabled competitive device or SpaceX AI potentially having a phone that could bypass some of the typical carrier tax. Just would love your high-level thoughts on how you see the competitive landscape evolving and Apple’s position there.
John Ternus: Well, thank you for asking. I guess I would just reiterate what Tim said, there is so much opportunity for us with everything that’s happening in this space, and we’re just really focused on our plans and very excited about it.
Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Hi, thanks for squeezing me in here and Tim, best wishes from my side as well. Maybe just for my first one, if I go back to WWDC when you announced Siri AI, you also did mention along with the rollout that probably we won’t have the initial rollout in China and Europe, so just wanted to get your thoughts on that front and any more color in terms of what hurdles you need to cross to be able to launch it in those regions.
Tim Cook: Thank you. Yeah, thanks for the question. Let me take them individually. If you look at the EU, we’re working closely with the Commission. Obviously, our complete desire is to launch everything everywhere at the same time. That’s always the philosophy that we have. We have not been able to do that in the European Union, but we’re working closely with them to try to get to something that would allow us to offer Siri AI there. It is offered, or will be offered for the Mac there, because the Mac is not covered by the same regulations as the iPhone and the iPad. So, net-net, we’re working with them, and hope to reach some sort of solution. If you then look at China, last week we received approval to ship sort of the original features of Apple Intelligence. Things like Clean Up and so forth, and so we’re working now through the rollout of those, and there will be more work required down the road for Siri AI, but we’re at the front end of that.
Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Follow-up, Kevan, just not to beat sort of this FX thing to death here, but if I look at the gross margin, you delivered 48% in the quarter without the tariff refund benefit. You’re guiding to like 46 and a half. Any way to walk us through the sequential driver there and how much of that is FX impacting it versus maybe like increased commodity costs that’s driving that sequential moderation because it does seem a bit more atypical than your normal sort of years.
Kevan Parekh: Yes, that’s a good question. So let me walk through kind of what’s impacting our gross margins. We look at our gross margin change from the 49.3% we had a total company level for the March quarter, and as you mentioned, the 48.1% adjusted for the tariff refund in the June quarter, that hundred and twenty basis point change, if you look at the drivers of that, more than 100% of that can be explained by the memory cost change that Tim outlined. While FX was a factor, really the main driver was really the memory cost impact, and as Tim outlined earlier when we talked a bit about the dynamics around the memory cost, is we did see some partial offsets from things like the benefit of carry-in inventory, reduction in non-memory component costs, and some favorable mix. We are seeing the same dynamics when you go from the 48.1 that we printed in the June quarter to the 46.5 midpoint you referenced of our range without the tariff refund impact. That 160 basis point change is also… more than that is explained by the change in memory costs, and we had partial offsets, again, from things like the benefit of carrying inventory, lower cost and non-memory components, and as well favorable mix. I think that FX was a pretty minimal impact when you look at that versus the memory, and so generally, the sequential change from the March quarter to the 46.5 you referenced is really driven by memory.
Samik Chatterjee, J.P. Morgan: Great. Thank you both for taking my questions. And congrats again, Tim.
Tim Cook: Thank you so much for saying that, I appreciate it.
On Thursday, Apple announced record third-quarter earnings, with total revenue of $109.4B, up 16 percent from the year-ago quarter. iPhone revenue was up 22%, Mac revenue was up 10.4%, Services revenue was up 12%, and Wearables revenue was up 6%. iPad revenue was down 6%.
Shortly thereafter, Apple execs spent an hour on the phone with financial industry analysts, and we’ve got our usual complete transcript, including many farewells to Tim Cook.
And now, to help you visualize what Apple just announced, here is our traditional barrage of charts and graphs:
On Thursday afternoon, Apple will announce the results of its third fiscal quarter for 2026. It will presumably be the last appearance of Tim Cook on the post-release earnings calls, which he’s been doing for ages. In fact, today’s call will be his 90th. That’s more than two decades of talking on the phone once a quarter to financial analysts. He’s probably earned a break.
As usual, Six Colors will be here to report on the whole thing. Around 1:30 pm PDT, the company will release its financial reports and we’ll be on the scene with our usual load of colorful charts and some analysis. At 2pm PDT, it’s that hour-long phone call with analysts that I’ll also transcribe. Due to summer travel, we’ll be foregoing our usual post-results live stream (and there’s no Six Colors podcast this week, either), but you can tune in to the Upgrade podcast on Monday, where Dan will join me to break down all the results.
Back in February I wrote about an Apple-related revelation I had while washing my hands on vacation:
We stayed at a nice hotel rather than the less-nice-but-cheaper VRBO condo rental we usually do. Because I’m me, I started thinking about Apple. Like Apple, the nice hotel’s brand promise is that it’s a nice hotel. If the hotel didn’t clean its rooms well, didn’t provide soap that smelled nice, didn’t maintain the in-room refrigerator, didn’t clean the swimming pool, it would probably decrease its expenses and increase its profit margin. But over time, it would lose its niceness and become a lousy, overpriced hotel.
Earlier this month, John Gruber wrote about how he hopes incoming Apple CEO John Ternus can perform a bit of a reset on Apple’s advertising strategy. In recent months Apple has announced that it’s adding ads to Apple Maps, and (as John has documented) it’s allowed incredibly low-quality, scammy ads to infest Apple News.
While Apple can spin adding ads to Apple Maps as a revolutionary new way for businesses to be discovered, it’s telling that its initial announcement was hidden inside a press release about an entirely different product, and introduced as “Enhanced Discoverability in Apple Maps.” Those choices show that this isn’t something Apple is actually proud of—and that the people in charge of communicating and explaining Apple’s decisions to the world are at odds with those who are making the decisions about expanding revenue.
Apple also recently expanded App Store ads, creating more clutter at the top of App Store search results. It similarly pitched this as an opportunity for developers—but of course, it’s really an opportunity for developers to take a portion of the money they make from the App Store after Apple’s cut and hand it right back to Apple so that their apps don’t become invisible. What a racket.
But Apple’s approach to grinding out additional revenue doesn’t stop with advertising. The recent release of Apple Creator Studio should’ve been a highlight, because it groups a bunch of useful creative apps in one place for a reasonable price. Instead, its launch was marred by the inclusion of Apple’s free productivity apps in the bundle, requiring users to download new versions and (at least initially) display aggressive subscription promotions in the Numbers, Pages, and Keynote interface.
To this day, you’re confronted with an ad for Creator Studio every time you create a new document in those apps, and their default toolbars contain buttons that won’t work unless you subscribe to the bundle. As a result, Apple has essentially turned its free productivity suite—software that was designed to enhance the inherent value of Apple’s products—into a freemium package with upsell to a creative professional subscription bundle that’s irrelevant (and a terrible value!) for most of its existing users.
There are many more examples. Using notifications to promote subscriptions and badging the Settings app to push AppleCare plans are among the ways Apple has chosen to intervene in the user experience to drive revenue. I’m actually not opposed to the idea that Apple should communicate opportunities for its customers to get more out of their devices—but it should be careful not to cross the line into actively annoying those customers. If someone doesn’t want to see what you offer, you need to accept that and go away—not keep needling them. Apple often falls on the wrong side of that line.
Which brings me back to the hotel soap.
Apple’s most valuable asset is its brand. Not its real estate, not its intellectual property, not even any particular product. Even the mighty iPhone has no value if, over time, the traits that differentiate it from competitor products are erased. Apple’s brand has always stood for higher quality products—you pay more, but you get more. Apple has never wanted to be the low-price leader. It didn’t put stickers on the first Intel Macs to get some marketing dollars from Intel. It doesn’t load up new Macs with loads of lousy bundled third-party software like so many PCs do.
Those are choices Apple has made that cost the company revenue, but they’ve got a bigger purpose. They reinforce the brand.
Opting not to add more revenue to the bottom line is a difficult choice for anyone working at a profit-driven corporation. I used to be in that position at my former employer, defending the overall product against a constant stream of advertising and biz-dev deal proposals that would add incremental revenue. Believe me, arguing to corporate executives that we should leave money on the table is a deeply uncomfortable role to take on—but it’s vital if you care about the bigger picture.
How many companies out there have made the wrong decision, time and again, and taken the easy shot of increased revenue at the expense of their product?
It makes me wonder if the people making these decisions at Apple have lost track of the Apple brand and what it stands for. I know for a fact there are people at Apple who understand these points—the sheepish marketing we sometimes see from them is quite the tell—but clearly those people are not influential enough to counter those empowered to push these initiatives forward.
Nice hotels have lots of ways of generating revenue. They charge resort fees. They charge for parking and wi-fi. The drinks are expensive. The room service is expensive. But what those hotels have learned is that there is a fundamental level of quality that you diverge from at your peril. If you don’t buy the nice soap, the good shampoo, and the soft mattresses, if you don’t clean the rooms properly, if you allow your grounds to get shabby, you are in danger of losing your status as a nice hotel, and just becoming an expensive cheap hotel—and nobody wants to stay at one of those.
This is the opportunity Apple has during this leadership reset: To remind itself of what the Apple brand represents in the market. I’m not making an innocent touchy-feely request for Apple to just be better, gosh darn it! This is serious business.
People buy Apple’s products because they are nice and work well and are not lousy in a lot of ways the cheaper competition is. Apple’s revenue-grubbing approach to the user experience in its products and services threatens to erode the Apple brand, and once lost, it can be hard to recover. No amount of incremental revenue from lousy ads and nagging upsells can counteract long-term brand damage.
Always choose the good soap. And empower the people who will push back against those who want to tell you how much money can be saved by giving the customer cheap, lousy soap instead.
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.
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