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

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

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

[stares directly into camera]

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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.]

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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.

If that fact makes you happy, too, you can become an EveryMac supporter.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Joseph Cox at 404Media reports on a hole in Hide My Email’s security:

A vulnerability in Apple’s “Hide My Email” tool lets almost anyone discover a person’s real email address that is supposed to be hidden by the feature, and Apple has failed to fix it for more than a year, according to a security researcher and 404 Media’s own tests.

This information originates with Tyler Murphy, who runs EasyOptOuts, a service that aims to help you remove your private information from the web. Cox says he confirmed the issue by creating a new Hide My Email address and providing it to Murphy, who returned the associated private iCloud email in about five minutes.

According to Murphy, he reported the vulnerability—the full details of which neither he nor 404 are disclosing—to Apple a year ago, and as of the end of May, the company said a security update was due “in the coming weeks”, though it still had not been patched as of the story’s publication.

While it’s hard to determine without the exact details how serious this vulnerability is, Murphy and Cox’s demo and Apple’s response do suggest that it is of concern for those relying on the feature, which is part of Apple’s paid iCloud+ service.

The company recently announced that it would be shifting all new anonymous addresses for both Hide My Email and Sign in with Apple to a single subdomain, a move that some critics say would make it easier for services to block using those addresses specifically. Previously, that would have required blocking all icloud.com addresses, which would obviously be untenable.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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.

The key is right at the top of Apple’s document about the issue:

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.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Smart home reporter Jennifer Pattison Tuohy at The Verge reports that parent company Assa Abloy has folded Level, which it acquired in 2024, into its Kwikset brand and removed the company’s founders:

The Verge obtained exclusive details from a person familiar with the restructuring who requested anonymity as they were part of the layoffs. They shared an audio recording of a meeting in which Peter Boriskin, CTO for Assa Abloy North America, and Kimberly Cummins, head of North American HR, informed the staff that their positions had been eliminated, effective immediately, as “a part of a larger restructuring of the Level business.” A LinkedIn post from a now-former employee corroborates the layoffs.

As an owner and daily user of three Level locks, this news is certainly worrying. An Assa Abloy spokesperson told The Verge that the company will “continue to develop and sell the Level Lock platform and hardware” but given that the majority of the engineering team seems to also be out, there are certainly questions around it.

On the upside, all of Level’s products now support Matter, which means that at least basic functionality ought to continue working for some time to come. But this is still potentially a disappointing move for a unique product.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

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, let the Mac app icons be free.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

I stumbled on this post via Bluesky, in which Jason Hazeley was utterly baffled by this section of a printed book:

The movement takes the place of a scherzo and is mainly constructed [of] the welcome datacompordinary major scale with the four lower notes shifted a semitone upward.

In the photo of the book passage, (presumably) Hazeley’s finger is pointing at the phrase “welcome datacompordinary major scale.” He wrote, “Absolutely stumped. Have never seen this term, can find no definition anywhere, and can’t parse it.”

Fortunately, Jacob Haller saw the post and pointed out that he wrote about it back in 2004:

Some Mac third party keyboards used to (or maybe still do for all I know) have a little feature where if you didn’t type anything for a while they would themselves type ‘welcome datacomp’. Here’s a nice little rant by someone who got caught by this.

That linked post is from 1994. In it, Chris Tate describes being baffled by a third-party ADB (the predecessor to USB) keyboard:

This past weekend, while trying to get some text-editing work done, I had to leave the computer alone for a while. Upon returning, I found to my horror that the text “welcome datacomp” had been inserted into the text I was editing. I was certain that I hadn’t typed it, and my wife verified that she hadn’t, either. A quick survey showed that the “clipboard” (the repository for information being manipulated via cut/paste operations) wasn’t the source of the offending text.

That story includes a cameo from John Norstad, the creator of the definitive free Mac antivirus app, who had apparently been contacted by numerous people assuming it was a virus:

Yes, we have heard of this. It’s a practical joke in the ROM code in some third-party keyboards. The only solution is to get your bad keyboard replaced.

My guess is that this wasn’t a practical joke as much as some sort of firmware test gone awry, but regardless, “welcome datacomp” managed to appear in numerous publications, as Haller’s post details. Someone finding it in a printed book in 2026 just shows you how the weird tech quirks of the past can just keep echoing long after they’ve gone.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Basic Apple Guy has a rundown of the new icons in Golden Gate compared to their Tahoe predecessors:

The colours are much bolder, several icons have been adjusted, and the refraction in the Liquid Glass effect has changed significantly, especially in icons like Journal.

There’s also a noticeable sharpness to the icons, along with a flattening of the Liquid Glass effect. I’m not sure yet whether this is simply an early-beta artifact or the intended final look. For example, while I really like the redesigned Finder icon, the sharp black edges around the nose currently feel a little unrefined.

It’s not just Golden Gate: upon installing the beta, I immediately noticed the improvement on iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 as well. The changes are mostly pretty subtle and, without having the side-by-side comparison, they’re hard to define. But if I had to chalk it up to one element, it would be “sharper.” Look at the edges on Books or the popsicle sticks on the App Store, for example: they are less fuzzy than the 26 version, by far.

Apple’s screens have always been among the best in the business, and given how great the Retina (and up) displays are, it feels in retrospect like a tremendous flaw on the part of the 26 year updates to make have prominently blurry/fuzzy/diffused icons on screens renowned for their sharpness.

But again, I return to the point that even very subtle changes can tremendously improve the experience and just make the icons feel better. That’s good design.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

In an exclusive with the Wall Street Journal, Tim Cook announced that Apple will be raising the prices on its products¹ as a result of high prices for memory and storage worldwide:

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”….

“There’s less supply at a time when consumers want devices and the memory guys are passing along huge price increases,” said Cook. “We definitely need memory pricing and supply to return to reasonable levels for consumer products. That’s the bottom line.”

Cook called the current supply situation, driven by wild buying in the AI industry, “a hundred-year flood,” and that he had “never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”

I do wonder how Apple will raise prices. An informal guess is that a lot of cheaper base configurations will vanish, that new models will start at higher prices, that Apple’s rumored OLED touchscreen MacBook Pro models will set all-time high starting prices, and that Apple will do everything it can to keep a lid on the prices of its base models across the board. The big question is, will the MacBook Neo jump up in price, and if so, by how much?

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

James Chang has built a project that upgrades the file-sharing stack on Apple’s long-discontinued Time Capsule hardware so that it will work on modern OS versions:

This is a modern Samba setup that runs directly on the Time Capsule itself; macOS 27 can connect to the Time Capsule as a network share, and use it for Time Machine backups…

You get the full Apple experience reproduced: after you install this, you do not have to worry about it again, even if the device IP address changes. It will show up automatically in Time Machine in settings app, and it will use mDNS/Bonjour so it will work fine even if the IP address is not static and gets changed.

It’s a clever piece of work that uses a very specific version of Samba and some other software running on a tiny RAM disk with other files stored on the device’s storage partition. I don’t have a Time Capsule to test this myself, but if you have one and have been lamenting its retirement, think again!

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Adam Engst at TidBITS took the time to extract every item on the WWDC 2026 keynote slide that captured our attention last week. Even better, Adam grouped the changes into operating systems, apps, and other categories. While the 27 OSes dominate the list with improvements and revisions, you can also note how many changes Apple is making to Photos and Shared Albums, Find My, Music, and a number of other across-the-ecosystem tools.

Then Marcin Wichary used Adam’s post to slice the data in a different way, counting the number of times the slide used words like fast (59 times) and reliable (22 times). Marcin reasonably argues that speed is the easier problem to attack, while reliability is fuzzier and much harder to pin down.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

This soundbite has been making the rounds this morning, from an interview with Craig Federighi and Greg Joswiak on the show Mostly Human:

I mean, the way that we have designed Siri, Siri really wants to say ‘Listen, that’s not what I’m here for, right? I’m here to help you. I can help you get things done. I can help you learn about the world.’ But if you try to engage Siri as a romantic partner, Siri’s not up for that. Siri’s 100 percent not into that.

This jibes with what I heard from my conversations with Apple this week, namely that Siri is designed to act as your helpful personal assistant. It’s further borne out by the poking around that folks like Federico Viticci have done in what they can find of Siri’s prompts.

This isn’t to say that Siri doesn’t still occasionally dip into the kind of AI speak that we’ve grown accustomed to from chatbots; I’ve definitely seen it. But I’ve also noticed, anecdotally, that Siri is quick to acknowledge mistakes and, crucially, ask for more followup information rather than doubling down. If nothing else, that feels like a key difference that I want to see from my AI interactions.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Here’s a beautiful essay by Federico Viticci about covering WWDC for 10 years:

I look at the content creators who are possibly experiencing their first WWDC, and realize: how am I still here, and still taking notes on an iPad, while these younger folks are shooting videos that millions of people will watch? I’m in between changes again, but I don’t mind it. The challenge still feeds me. I’m more comfortable now, but – miraculously – I don’t feel cynical or jaded. Some people are into that sort of attitude; I’ve always preferred to put in the work to be critical and enthusiastic about the things I like. In a world of complaints, optimism is a skill.

This was, um, 30 years of me covering WWDC. If Federico is now a veteran, please do not tell me the word for what I am. But I really enjoyed his reflections and the ongoing (yes, even for me) challenge of adapting to change, seeing things with fresh eyes, and appreciating the people who are experiencing these events for the first time.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

Nice overview from Jonathan Reed at MacStories of Apple’s watchOS 27 updates. Like some of Apple’s other platforms—cough, cough, tvOS—the Watch didn’t get a huge amount of time during the keynote, but there are some good tweaks there.

It’s not a total surprise that watchOS 27 isn’t a huge release, but there are still some very welcome features. The first is Siri AI, which, thankfully, is heavily integrated into the Apple Watch. I had wondered how much the Apple Watch would support this new LLM-backed assistant, but it seems that many of its key abilities available on iOS are also accessible on watchOS. That’s great to see.

However, the downside for me is that my beloved blue Series 7 Apple Watch will not be supported by this update, which requires at least a Series 9. Here’s hoping Apple adds some more color options in this year’s models.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

I’m a bit in awe of Parish Khan’s Mac Cable Bandwidth Calculator, an interactive web site that lets you visualize the combination of cable and Mac you need to drive particular displays, based on their resolution, color depth, and refresh rate. Even better, the site packages it in an appealing way. Parish built this tool due to frequent questions from the site’s visitors, the same thing that led me to write several columns at Macworld—particularly about connecting legacy displays and modern Macs.

Parish sending me a link to the site led me to do some final tweaking on a project I’ve had brewing for a while: the much less fancy Apple Specs Database. I built this site to help me figure out which hardware appears on given Apple devices, and which features are present in operating systems across Apple’s platforms. It lets me answer questions like, “What’s the oldest iPhone that supports MagSafe?” This is almost the inverse of the long-running MacTracker, which is organized around devices.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.

In an absolutely horrible development for users and historical tech, Microsoft will let perfectly functioning old software suddenly break due to an expiring certificate. Tim Hardwick at MacRumors reports:

Microsoft has actually renewed the suite’s certificate, but the fix can only be delivered through a software update. That means users of Microsoft 365 and Office 2021 are in the clear – they’ll receive the update, so neither will be affected. However, Microsoft stopped offering support for Office 2019 on October 10, 2023, and the suite has received no updates since. As such, it won’t be updated to version 16.83, which is the release that includes the renewed certificate….

Some critics have argued that Microsoft’s deadline is effectively self-imposed because the company renewed the certificate but chose not to provide the update to Office 2019 users. For example, JimmyTech, the IT consultancy that spotted the change, has argued that using the expiry to retire older software rather than quietly renewing it “amounts to a choice.”

Microsoft’s messaging on the subject hasn’t done it any favors, either. Its end-of-support page for Office 2019 for Mac, originally posted in October 2023, once told owners to “Rest assured that all your Office 2019 apps will continue to function.” A revision now dated May 15, 2026 has dropped that line, replacing it with a note that their data “can be accessed in a supported Microsoft 365 or Office product.”

Old software becomes incompatible. It’s a fact of life. But to build it so that it just suddenly stops working one day, and to take no steps to ameliorate that situation, is pretty disgusting. Shame on Microsoft.

Go to the linked site.

Read on Six Colors.