An Amazon Prime Air cargo jet ripped right past the landing zone at the Miami International Airport on Sunday afternoon, struggling to stop itself in time before overrunning the runway and crashing into a cleaning crew and a nearby SUV.

It was a tragic incident, killing five innocent people.

The Boeing 767-300 also barreled right through a chain-link fence that was protecting a highly unusual lot of vehicles: photographs of the scene show the dented nose of the airliner just a few dozen feet away from a kennel of parked Tesla Cybercabs.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has banked the future success of his EV maker on the gold-colored self-driving vehicles, which are too small to fit more than two passengers and lack both steering wheels or pedals. Their sudden appearance in a story about a deadly airliner disaster had the billionaire taken aback. However, instead of offering his condolences after the tragedy, Musk simply tweeted the word “Weird” in response.

The peculiar cameo also led to plenty of questions over Tesla’s plans to roll out the cars outside of Austin. Just last week, the Cybercabs were deployed for the first time in the Texas city, but the company has yet to announce any imminent launches in Miami.

Regulators from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration watched closely following last week’s deployment, which comes just shy of two years after Tesla first showed off its Cybercab. As Bloomberg notes, the light on details event was “uncharacteristically low-key,” offering no livestream or media coverage.

The “Cybercab event was largely a bust,” tweeted Future Fund Advisors co-founder Gary Black. “The launch offered little detail and key questions remained unanswered.”

Indeed, regulatory approval is hazy for vehicles without any traditional driver controls, a topic that’s especially pertinent to Tesla. Musk has bet the company’s entire future on the success of its Cybercabs and its humanoid robot, dubbed Optimus.

With neither showing any signs of a significant public rollout any time soon, Wall Street is bound to keep asking some tough questions.

More on the Cybercab: Tesla Loses Trademark to “Cybercab” Due to Its Own Staggering Incompetence

The post Amazon Cargo Jet Crashes Just Feet From Parking Lot Full of Tesla Cybercabs, Killing Five appeared first on Futurism.

New iPhone colors could give Wednesday’s launch an immediate visual refresh, with Dark Cherry and lighter blue finishes among the shades rumored for the iPhone 18 Pro generation. But replacing Cosmic Orange in the promotional photographs would leave an uncomfortable question behind: what happens to customers whose orange iPhone 17 Pro has reportedly turned pink?

Owners have posted accounts of discoloration on Reddit and Apple’s own community forum. Some describe receiving replacement devices; others say their requests were rejected as cosmetic issues. The reports establish a reason for scrutiny, although they do not establish how frequently the problem occurs or whether every affected phone shares the same cause.

Apple does not appear to have published a dedicated technical explanation or a general service program addressing these complaints. With another generation approaching, the company has an opportunity to explain what owners should expect from the finish on an expensive phone—and from support when that finish changes.

The iPhone Colors Expected This Week

The most consistent iPhone 18 Pro rumors center on Dark Cherry, sometimes described as burgundy or deep red, and Sky Blue, also called Light Blue. The neutral option remains disputed.

According to the latest color-leak roundup, Sonny Dickson shared an image of alleged SIM trays suggesting Silver, Dark Cherry, and Sky Blue. A separate claim from Fixed Focus Digital points to Black taking Silver’s place.

That leaves a plausible three-color lineup without agreement on all three finishes. The names also remain unofficial; a supplier’s description does not necessarily become the name displayed in the Apple Store.

The same reporting favors black and white for the foldable iPhone Ultra. A purported reddish version lost credibility after Mark Gurman identified the images associated with it as Xiaomi renders, and the post sharing them was subsequently deleted.

Cosmic Orange is absent from these leading launch rumors. Its possible departure would fit the annual rotation of signature shades, but there is no evidence that Apple is changing colors because of the discoloration complaints.

For buyers, the distinction is straightforward: a new shade may make the next phone look different. Its name cannot establish that its finish will age better.

Cosmic Orange Owners Have Described Different Outcomes

One detailed Reddit replacement account describes an iPhone 17 Pro camera plateau turning pink approximately two weeks after purchase. The owner said the rest of the phone was protected by a case and denied using bleach, peroxide, or other treatments to produce the change.

According to that account, Apple Support escalated the case and supplied a warranty replacement without initially identifying the cause. The owner posted comparison images and later said an engineer contacted them after receiving the original phone, asking questions about usage and environmental conditions.

That reported follow-up complicates any claim that Apple has ignored every customer. At least some owners describe service and further investigation.

A separate Reddit complaint about a salmon-pink camera plateau describes a less satisfactory experience. The owner said the change became noticeable after several months and continued to develop. They reported being directed toward cleaning guidance and told that assistance would be outside warranty coverage, despite saying they had used only a microfiber cloth.

These accounts are owner testimony, not independently inspected service records. Different histories or inspection findings could explain different decisions. Even so, they expose the uncertainty customers face when trying to understand whether a changing finish is considered wear, external damage, or a possible manufacturing problem.

Someone seeking help should not have to reconstruct an unofficial support policy from strangers’ experiences.

Complaints Also Appear on Apple’s Community Forum

The discussion extends beyond Reddit. In an Apple Community post about orange iPhone 17 Pro Max discoloration, an owner described color damage after approximately four months and said support had classified it as cosmetic and outside warranty coverage.

Apple Community is a customer discussion forum hosted by Apple. A complaint appearing there is evidence that an owner raised the issue publicly; replies from community participants do not amount to an official engineering finding or company statement.

The posts also cannot tell us the failure rate. A forum collects people who have a reason to speak, and the same incident can circulate through multiple websites. Counting photographs, comments, or reposts would not produce a reliable estimate of affected devices.

But the absence of a reliable denominator should not make individual complaints disappear. A customer does not need to demonstrate that thousands of other phones have changed color before their own device deserves an inspection and a reasoned response.

The unresolved issue is how Apple distinguishes those cases and communicates the result.

Cleaning Guidance Is Not a Diagnosis

Apple’s official iPhone cleaning instructions advise against products containing bleach or hydrogen peroxide. They recommend appropriate gentle cleaning methods and warn against abrasives and several categories of household cleaner.

That guidance is useful for protecting a device. It does not establish that prohibited cleaning products caused every Cosmic Orange complaint.

Some owners expressly deny using those substances. Their statements cannot rule out every possible exposure, but a general warning cannot substitute for examining what happened to a particular phone.

Suggestions involving sunlight, chemical reactions, or variations in the finish’s protective treatment continue to circulate. None should be presented as the universal explanation without testing that connects the proposed cause to the reported changes.

A credible public response could explain whether Apple has identified a recurring mechanism, whether certain production periods require attention, and what service teams should examine. If the company concludes that several unrelated causes are involved, that would also be useful information.

The current uncertainty leaves customers debating material science when they should be able to ask a much simpler question: why does this phone no longer look like the one they bought?

A Premium Finish Is Part of the Product

Color is something Apple asks customers to choose deliberately. It receives prominent space in launch presentations, retail displays, advertising, and the ordering process. Buyers coordinate cases and accessories around it, and some wait for a particular finish to become available.

It is reasonable to expect that choice to survive ordinary use.

Normal wear exists, and no finish should be described as indestructible. Scratches, impacts, and chemical exposure can alter a device. A reported change from orange to pink, however, warrants an explanation rather than an assumption that every visible change belongs in the same category.

The financial stakes are also difficult to quantify responsibly. There is no verified public count of affected Cosmic Orange devices, no established failure rate, and no disclosed average remediation cost. Those gaps prevent a credible estimate of billion-dollar exposure.

The purchase value of potentially affected phones would not equal Apple’s repair liability in any event. A repair, replacement, refund, and lost future sale are different costs.

The more immediate commercial concern is confidence. A customer who receives a satisfactory explanation may accept a service decision even when it is disappointing. A customer who feels dismissed may carry that experience into their next purchase—and into conversations with other buyers.

New Colors Need Evidence That Lasts Beyond Launch Day

Dark Cherry could become the finish most associated with the iPhone 18 Pro. The Ultra’s rumored neutral palette could place greater attention on the foldable design itself. Neither possibility tells us how those surfaces will look after months in pockets, cases, cars, and everyday handling.

Early product photographs will help buyers judge appearance. Longer ownership will reveal whether the finish retains it.

For existing Cosmic Orange owners noticing a change, documenting the phone under consistent lighting is a useful first step. Images taken on different days can help distinguish a developing alteration from reflections or camera white balance. Photographs of the complete device can also show whether the change is limited to exposed areas.

Keeping the purchase receipt, support case number, and written inspection outcome makes subsequent conversations easier. If service is declined, the useful question is what finding led to that decision and whether the device was assessed for a possible materials or workmanship issue.

A new color announcement will not supply those answers to someone still holding the previous generation.

The post iPhone Colors 2026: New Pro and Ultra Shades Won’t Erase Complaints appeared first on AppleMagazine.

Automakers are having an increasingly difficult time convincing their customers that more in-car screens — and the often dodgy software that accompanies them — are a compelling reason to pay a major premium.

Virtually every major car company is now installing increasingly enormous screens into the dashboards of its cars, frequently stretching far beyond the driver’s seat and into the passenger area as well.

But what’s becoming more and more clear is that practically nobody actually wants any of those purported luxuries in their ride. As a new survey by consumer research firm JD Power goes to show, owners of 2026 model-year vehicles are being actively put off by the enormous displays.

Out of the 68,000 owners JD Power surveyed, over a third of them said that they never even tried to use passenger screens, while only six percent said they use them every time they get in the car. Worse yet, in its own investigation, JD Power found that the larger screens were more prone to infotainment system problems as well.

The survey made clear that the most popular consumer-facing car technologies, out of the 40 examined, were the ones that were the most easily ignored, such as smart ignition or smart HVAC. The lowest on the entire list, tellingly, were passenger console touchscreens — which have previously been linked to severe driving safety issues that were absent for traditional knobs and buttons.

“The technology customers value most is often the technology they barely notice because it simply works,” said JD Power director of customer success Doron Hikry in an accompanying press release. “Smart ignition and smart climate control make everyday driving easier without demanding the driver’s attention, while more automation and additional screens don’t necessarily translate into a better experience.”

Beyond wasted space for giant screens, owners also weren’t impressed with Level 2 Plus driver assistance systems, which allow them to drive without having to keep their hands on the wheel on certain roads, such as Tesla’s infamous Full Self-Driving feature. In its survey, JD Power found that owners preferred Level 2 systems in terms of both design and quality of experience.

“The results indicate that owners may currently be more comfortable with systems that clearly assist the driver rather than those that introduce a greater degree of automation,” Hikry added.

It’s an already familiar trend, with consumers growing frustrated with every feature getting buried in convoluted touchscreen interfaces. Some automakers have caught on to the widespread frustration, opting to fall back on easier-to-use and less distracting tactile controls for car interiors.

More on car interiors: Volkswagen Bringing Back Buttons, Knob After Touchscreen Complaints

The post It Turns Out That Drivers Absolutely Detest Those Giant Touchscreens They Put in Cars Now appeared first on Futurism.

Chris Barajas:

To spread the word, we announced SoundSource 6 on our blog and sent a mass mailing to our customer list. We also took a more targeted approach, contacting both existing and potential customers who’d previously reached out to us with specific requests. We went back to those folks to let them know about the changes that would interest them most.

[…]

A real live person writes every email response our support team sends, and that human touch takes time. The process is helped along by text snippets, replies that we write once and then reuse and adapt to answer common questions.

[…]

To decide if an email should be sent to a customer, we checked Help Scout’s conversation history, as well as our own custom app for their order history. For example, if someone requested several features across different emails, we’d pick the one that was most impactful, then delete other drafts to avoid inundating them with multiple messages.

Previously:

• Pitching Apps in the AI Era
• Castro’s Customer Support Lessons
• SoundSource 6
• Whither Help Scout?

As work conditions go, the transition from licensed taxi cabs to the rideshare model represented a significant step backwards for drivers in the US. Stable wage jobs became “side gigs,” while human managers were replaced by labyrinthine algorithms. And forget fleet maintenance — under the new model, disenfranchised drivers were now responsible for their own vehicle’s upkeep, and all the financial burdens that come with it.

Yet with robotaxis from brands like Waymo and Tesla spreading through US cities like wildfire, even the Uber-fied gig economy is starting to become untenable for workers. Rising in its place is the “robotaxi handling” industry, bring with it contract jobs that are somehow even more grueling than the rideshare gigs they’re replacing.

A startling interview with an anonymous Waymo contractor by Bay Area Current details precisely how degrading these jobs can be. The worker, identified only as a “Robotaxi Handler,” outlines a poorly organized jobsite where incognito enforcers routinely snitch on undertrained contractors on behalf of management. Oh, and there’s poop to clean — lots of poop.

Starting off, the handler clarifies that although their work is for Waymo vehicles, they actually report to a third-party company called Transdev US, which handles the messy logistics behind the autonomous cabs. (Neither company commented on Bay Area Current‘s interview.)

Per the worker, Transdev’s hiring process amounts to a kind of Soylent Green approach to human resources, in which dozens of contractors are rounded up sight unseen, onboarded en masse, and then culled from the herd when they inevitably fall behind.

“There’s no interview process,” the worker explained. “They weed people out over time based on whether or not you can keep up with that process and adapt really quickly.”

After that rapid-fire orientation, workers can be assigned to various Waymo facilities all over their home city, with job duties rotating on a daily basis.

“Who gets placed in those specific jobs gets decided by managers the day of,” the robotaxi handler told Bay Area Current. “So your job changes every day depending on how much experience you have, how long you’ve been there, and how friendly you are with the managers.”

Sometimes those roles involve troubleshooting — updating software, cleaning sensors, and uploading Waymo data to company servers. It also includes unsticking Waymos when they clog up traffic, which is becoming a frequent occurrence in San Francisco. That can put workers in a precarious situation in which they have to choose whether to follow company orders not to interfere with a piece of tech still in its infancy.

“The policy for Transdev and Waymo is actually to let [the car] sit there and figure it out, because if we disengage it whenever there’s an issue, then the cars don’t have a chance to figure out the issue itself,” the worker explained. “But when it gets really bad, then we have to — what are you going to do? There’s 50 cars all stuck and people off the street yelling at us and threatening us.”

Other times, handlers can be assigned to cleaning tasks. This becomes especially unpleasant near the end of the week, when weekend revelers leave all kinds of nasty surprises for handlers to mop up.

“Typically that’s when there’s the most throw-up, the most disgusting things in the back,” the handler told Bay Area Current. “Even poop, there’s a lot of cleaning up poop. Way more than you think.”

“One time there were two pig heads in the backseat of the car and the cleaner had to clean it up,” the worker continued. “I assume they just went to the market to make a stew or something, but they forgot their pig heads. They were just rolling around in the back of the car.”

This worker’s arduous experience wrangling Waymos in San Francisco may just a taste of things to come as robotaxis hit the streets across the US.

More on Waymo: It Turns Out That When Waymos Are Stumped, They Get Intervention From Workers in the Philippines

The post The People Maintaining Waymo’s Self-Driving Cars Are Being Treated Horribly, Insider Claims appeared first on Futurism.

Welcome to Edition 9.09 of the Rocket Report! This edition includes an update from Blue Origin on the groundbreaking of a new Payload Processing Facility in Florida. It has been about a month since the company offered any meaningful news on its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket, which remains grounded after an on-pad explosion at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in May. The official line from Blue Origin is that the company is targeting a return to flight with New Glenn by the end of the year, but there's good reason for skepticism.

As always, we welcome reader submissions. If you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets, as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

Isar Aerospace is ready to try again. Isar Aerospace is about to make the next attempt to launch the Spectrum rocket into orbit, with a weeklong launch window set to open Friday at Andøya Spaceport in Norway, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) reports. The German launch company aims to deliver several small CubeSats to orbit with the two-stage Spectrum rocket. A test flight of the privately funded launcher failed shortly after liftoff last year, and Isar has attempted to launch the second Spectrum rocket several times since January, only to be thwarted by technical problems and the unavailability of the launch range in northern Norway.

Read full article

Comments

© NASA/Clayton Rougelot

Uber drivers and their passengers across Nigeria and Uganda were shocked on Wednesday when the platform abruptly ceased operations in the middle of the day — and, in some cases, even mid-trip.

According to reporting by the Register, the “Uber rapture,” as it’s come to be known, came with little warning — an email notice sent on the very same day.

“We are writing to share some difficult news,” Uber’s email to Nigerian users went, per a screenshot obtained by the outlet TechCabal. “After a thorough review of our business, we have made the tough decision to wind down our operations in Nigeria, effective 2 September, 2026.”

Of course, the deluge of corporate communiques delivered via email in this day and age means an important memo like this could be easily ignored, if not relegated to the spam folder automatically.

Case in point, the same-day memo did little to prepare drivers or riders for the deactivation, prompting waves of outrage on social media when the Uber app was shut off, seemingly out of nowhere.

“The Uber rapture is wild! Drivers and riders were mid-trip when it happened,” wrote Nigerian journalist Anita Eboigbe in a post on social media. “Insane!”

Another commentator wrote that a “friend of mine said they were on a ride when they got the message. She told the driver and he said ‘it’s a lie!’ The drivers who depend on it for livelihood had absolutely no idea.”

“The app shut down mid-trip,” another account located in Nigeria explained in a comment on X-formerly-Twitter. “They never gave a heads-up or hinted at them leaving the landscape. I had done a delivery that same morning and about an hour later, we all got emails saying they were leaving immediately.”

It’s a dramatic step for Uber, which had been operating in Nigeria since 2014, and Uganda’s capital city of Kampala since 2016.

“This decision is limited strictly to these two markets and does not impact our operations across the rest of the continent,” the rideshare company said in a statement to the Register. “Uber remains deeply committed to sub-Saharan Africa, where we continue to see robust growth and long-term opportunity.”

More on transit: Uber Drivers Say Waymo Robotaxis Are Driving Down Their Pay

The post Uber Abruptly Ends Operations in Africa, Abandoning Drivers and Riders Mid-Trip appeared first on Futurism.

A Tesla running one of its self-driving modes was rear-ended after stopping in the middle of a Arizona highway, Electrek reports, with the driver found dead at the scene. Grimly, it’s not the first accident of its kind.

The crash occurred on October 31, 2025. According to local reports at the time, the 2020 Tesla Model 3 was struck by an F-350 pickup around 3 AM on the eastbound Loop 202 in Mesa, Arizona. None of the contemporaneous reports made note of whether the Tesla had one of its driver-assist systems engaged.

Electrek, however, managed to match the collision to a redacted crash report that Tesla provided in its filings to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. These were shared under a Standing General Order that requires automakers to report crashes involving a driver-assist system that’s considered to have an SAE Level 2 of automation or higher, meaning that it can partially drive itself under the right conditions and with constant supervision.

The report states that an automated driving system — either Autopilot or Full Self-Driving — was “verified engaged” during the accident. The vehicle’s “pre-crash movement” is listed as “stopped – 0 mph,” indicating it stopped in the middle of the road. None of these details were shared publicly at the time of the accident.

Electrek says that this is the second time that a Tesla Model 3 with a driver-assist system engaged apparently stopped in a highway before a crash that killed its driver; it also happened in Florida, just weeks before the second one.

What happened is unclear. Tesla’s self-driving software has a well-known “phantom braking” problem that causes the cars to brake unexpectedly, but this is typically to slow the vehicle down, not stop it completely. Going from highway speeds to a grinding halt would be an extraordinary, if not unprecedented, example. It’s also possible that the driver fell asleep behind the wheel or experienced some kind of medical episode that rendered them unable to respond.

The upshot is that we’re more or less being kept in the dark. These details, and whether the car was running the now-obsolete Autopilot or its more advanced successor FSD is impossible to know, because Tesla censored that section of the crash report. It has long redacted crucial information in these reports reports under the guise of protecting “confidential business information,” a practice that is legal but rarely used to the extent that Tesla does. It has gotten in trouble with regulators for how it reports crashes, though. Last year, the NHTSA launched an investigation into Tesla for repeatedly failing to report crashes in time.

More on Tesla: Teslas Are Still Driving Into Oncoming Freight Trains

The post Tesla Driver Killed After Self-Driving Mode Stops in the Middle of a Highway appeared first on Futurism.

In November of last year, scientists warned of a “severe” solar storm, the strongest in over two decades, colliding with the Earth.

Solar storms are the result of a surge in solar activity, with the Sun unleashing a barrage of charged particles that can trigger spectacular auroras — and wreak havoc with communications satellites and radio signals — when they reach the Earth’s magnetosphere.

Beyond being ferocious enough to delay the launch of a Mars-bound NASA spacecraft, the storm wreaked absolute havoc with GPS systems back on the ground for hours at a time. As detailed in a new paper published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, a team of scientists found that global navigation satellite systems experienced “significant positioning errors” of over 33 feet during the superstorm, “large enough to disrupt precision agriculture and autonomous transportation industries” across the continental United States.

That’s enough risk to warrant a careful study on these types of events can impact human activity on Earth.

“The results underscore the importance of accurate understanding of various space weather phenomena to enhance our predictive capabilities through coordinated observations and physics‐based modeling and ultimately reducing disruptions to RF applications during space weather events,” the paper reads.

The researchers analyzed observations from several scientific instruments spread out across the US to watch the chaos unfold last November. The Aurora Oval, a ring-shaped area of pronounced activity around the Earth’s geomagnetic north pole where auroras conventionally occur, was pushed south toward the equator. This triggered a “horizontally extended band of intense density gradients” in the upper atmosphere, causing fluctuations in how long signals take to travel through it.

The result: “significant positioning errors at mid-latitudes,” the researchers noted.

The researchers also found that as the auroras became brighter, the observed irregularities became more intense, deteriorating GPS accuracy accordingly.

Fortunately, while farming equipment like GPS-equipped tractors would’ve likely been affected, the November storm occurred long after the farming season concluded.

However, that wasn’t the case for the May 2024 superstorm, which scientists estimate cost farmers half a billion dollars in damages.

“Had the November superstorm occurred during the farming season in the American sector, it could have caused significant economic losses for the American farming industry, in addition to affecting the autonomous transportation industry,” the paper reads.

More on the solar storm: Scientists Say the Largest Solar Storm in Two Decades Is About to Blast Earth

The post Researchers Alarmed as GPS Readings Suddenly Veer Off by 33 Feet, Enough to Crash Self-Driving Cars appeared first on Futurism.

Artificial Intelligence takes center stage in a few of the apps enjoying this week’s spotlight — and not the kind of AI that’s going to have you rolling your eyes or organizing a protest march against the nearest data center. No, these are actually useful AI features that take some of the busy work of daily life out of your hands so you can concentrate on other things.

AI or no, we’re always looking for top macOS and iOS apps to feature here. If you’ve got something that fits that description, drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief outline of the whats, whys, and wherefores.

Now on to this week’s selection…

Sortio

The folders on my Mac are a mess, but who has the time to make sure that everything is filed away in its proper place? AI does, according to the makers of Sortio, a macOS utility that promises to do the hard work of organization on your behalf.

Sortio taps into AI to look at file names and metadata to help it figure out where to put each file. You can also opt to let the utility read the file, sending a 4KB excerpt to your AI provider of choice for even more detailed sorting. (Sortio also offers an offline mode that uses Ollama or LM Studio to keep its activity on your Mac.) You can further refine sorting by telling Sortio to organize things by file type, project, date, and whether the file is for work or personal use..

I took Sortio for a spin, having it go through the folder of articles I’ve written but haven’t bothered to organize for myself. Sortio was smart enough to take my submissions to Awful Announcing and separate them into their own folder. Not every search is that precise — a separate sorting session had Sortio tagging an offer letter from an old employer named Purch as a financial document — but there are edit buttons to correct mislabeled and misfiled material.

You can try out Sortio for free, which gives you enough of an allowance to sort through a few thousand files to get a flavor for how the app performs. After that, you’ll need to buy a license, with the $14.99/month Pro license suitable for most individual users. There are team and enterprise options as well, and paying for an annual license lowers your monthly rate.

AskPlay

AI isn’t just for organizing your folders; it can also generate a playlist for you based on specific artists, songs or moods you’re hoping to hear. At least, that’s the idea behind AskPlay, an app that lives in your menu bar and lets you type or speak plain-English instructions on the type of music you want to listen to.

You’re going to need a few things besides AskPlay and its $1.99/month subscription to make the app work. For starters, AskPlay works exclusively with Apple Music, so you’ll also need to subscribe to Apple’s streaming service. In addition, you’ll need to provide an API key from an AI provider, with AskPlay supporting OpenAI, Anthropic, and OpenRouter.

Those requirements are likely to limit AskPlay’s appeal to some users, but having tried out the app on my Mac, I am impressed by the results. I told AskPlay I wanted to hear songs written by Stephen Sondheim, and it dutifully produced a playlist not just from cast soundtracks but also numbers by vocalists from their own albums. That said, there were a few misfires — the playlist included a song from Tick, Tick… Boom!, a Jonathan Larson musical that only refers to Sondheim, as well as a rap song that shares a title with something Sondheim wrote. Other requests like “play upbeat songs from the ’80s” proved more successful.

An AskPlay feature I appreciate was the ability to augment playlists. After generating a playlist of Merle Haggard songs, I had the app add Johnny Cash music to the queue. Then I told AskPlay to “add more songs like these,” which brought Waylon Jennings, George Jones, and more to the party.

AskPlay seems built for a very specific kind of user, but if you like thematic playlists and already subscribe to the services that make this app tick, it brings another dimension to your listening experience. In addition to working on the Mac, AskPlay is available for a range of Apple devices including the iPhone, iPad and Vision Pro.

Pocket Screen

I don’t know about you, but my workflow often requires me to jump from one window to another to perform a task — and that can often break up my workflow. I’m thinking of when I’m writing something and need to refer to notes I’ve taken in another application or a PDF I have loaded up in Preview. Jumping between apps takes me out of the flow of writing, not to mention that accurately transcribing what’s in one app to the other can occasionally be a hit-or-miss proposition.

Pocket Screen addresses some of that dilemma by creating a floating window of one app that you can keep in view when you’re working on something else. Think of Pocket Screen as a picture-in-picture feature, but for productivity. You can capture a PDF, webpage, video, chat or other kind of information and keep it close at hand in a resizable window that you can move around your desktop. The app supports up to two simultaneous views, according to its developer.

You can freely use Pocket Screen for 10-minute sessions, but true productivity mavens will likely want to unlock the app for unlimited use. That’s a one-time payment of $9.99 to remove any restrictions.

Filtre

Filtre is a Safari extension for anyone whose browsing on the Mac, iPhone, or iPad takes you to places and topics they’d just as soon not read about.

Enter keywords into Filtre, and the extension blocks articles, posts and comments that include anything you consider verboten. For instance, I typed in variations of the Washington Nationals name into Filtre to avoid being spoiled on the result of a baseball game. When I visited ESPN in Safari on my Mac, all references to the Nationals and their in-progress game had been removed from view. (A pause button accessible from the Filtre Extension in Safari’s toolbar lets you restore any filtered-out content if you prefer.)

Filtre comes from the maker of Noir, a Dark Mode-enabling extension that Six Colors has profiled before, so we’re clearly talking about someone who knows their way around Safari extensions. You can try out Filtre free for a week before the extension’s $1.49/month subscription kicks in.

LogZero

You’ve got lots of ways to track everything from calories to moods on your iPhone. LogZero offers to do it all in one place. More significantly, though, LogZero promises to keep all that logged data for your eyes only, with data never leaving your device and everything stored within the app encrypted.

LogZero is a one-stop app for keeping tabs on food intake, meditation breaks, exercise, to-dos, and medications. You can also chart your mood and weight. If that sounds like a lot to keep track of, you can toggle off the items you’re not interested in logging, and they’ll disappear from the interface.

It’s worth downloading the free iOS app to see if it fits your tracking needs, though a paid subscription gives you access to more analytics features plus personalization controls. A monthly subscription costs $5, while the annual rate is $35.

The South African airline Airlink is defending its dramatic flyover of two full sized passenger jets that passed just yards above a packed stadium in Cape Town.

Footage of the ambitious stunt consumed social media, with multiple angles showing how closely the aircraft — two Embraer SA passenger jets — passed within the rooftop of the 55,000 capacity venue. It was a tight enough call that many saw it as a near-crash rather than a piece of precision maneuvering. 

In response to the backlash, Airlink, which is backed by Qatar Airways, is reassuring that the flyover was super carefully planned and as safe as it could be.

“Airlink notes the concerns,” its statement began, in near perfect parody of corporate non-apologies.

“The two aircraft were flown by highly-experienced crew, with each comprised of three senior captains operating in the roles of commander, co-pilot and safety/technical officer,” it added, per multiple reports.

It insisted that the stunt “demanded careful planning and rehearsal” because of the low altitude and speed, stressing that it was approved by the South African Civil Aviation Authority and the Air Traffic Navigation Services. 

look how low this flyover looked. two airlink passenger jets just flew over dhl stadium in cape town ahead of the springboks vs. all blacks match. pic.twitter.com/5r5nB1j9ti

— Michael Rusch (@weeddude) August 29, 2026

Be that as it may, aviation experts were aghast at what they saw. The flight tracking platform Flightradar24 calculated that one of the planes flew within less than 50 feet of the stadium’s rooftop, where a rugby match between South Africa and New Zealand was being hosted. One of the planes also appeared to be flying much lower than the other, which could cut against the airline’s claims of how tightly controlled the stunt was.

“Hundreds of professional aviators around the world have looked at those images and expressed concern,” wrote Scott Bateman, a professional aviator and author, on X. He added that while the stunt may have been carefully planned, a “mature safety culture” should still be capable of admitting that “perhaps the margins were tighter than they needed to be.”

Keith Tonkin, an Australian aviation consultant, said that the Embraer SA passenger jets weren’t designed to fly that low.

“The bigger picture is that a benchmark has been established and others may expect to do something similar, and that’s not going to end well,” Tonkin told  The Associated Press. Unexpected turbulence or a bird strike, he warned, could’ve been disastrous.

More on aviation: Paramedics Now Rolling Up to Medical Emergencies in Flying Hovercraft

The post Airline Defends Decision to Fly Two Full Sized Passenger Jets So Close to a Packed Stadium That They Nearly Grazed the Roof appeared first on Futurism.

In the August 2026 MacVoices Update, Chuck outlines how a little time off slowed down some projects, reviews new episode artwork designed to better communicate each show’s subject, discusses why feedback is so important to what you hear and see, and delivers the Support Report form the month.  http://traffic.libsyn.com/maclevelten/MV26245.mp3 Show Notes: Support: Become a MacVoices […]

💾

Uber and Lyft drivers in Atlanta are fed up with Waymo robotaxis.

The Atlanta Rideshare Drivers Union is claiming that drivers have reported lower pay, longer waits between rides, and fewer fares since Waymo began offering its service in the city last June, Axios reports. 

As such, the union is calling on city and state leaders to curb Waymo’s expansion — and to consider some measures to easen its disruptive effects on their livelihoods. 

Liza Ramsey of the ARDU proposed a particularly bold measure to Atlanta City Council members on Wednesday. Rideshare drivers, Ramsey claimed, wanted to create a robotaxi impact fee of between $0.50 to $1.00 that would be added to each ride.

The money from this would go into a “driver transition fund” to help drivers find a new calling with job training and other assistive programs.

“If corporations profit from replacing human workers with automation, they should contribute to helping those workers transition to the next opportunity,” Ramsey said, per Axios.

The union also wants to ban robotaxis from picking up people from the Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. Airports, historically, have always been a reliable place to pick up passengers.

Ramsey said that the union hasn’t collected any hard data proving the decline in income, but cited widespread complaints from drivers who share screenshots of their earnings in a group chat.

Since launching in June 2025, Waymo’s Atlanta service has logged more than 5.4 million miles of fully autonomous rides. (It hasn’t always been smooth sailing, with residents complaining about the vehicles’ strange habit of congregating in suburban neighborhoods and repeatedly plunging into flooded stretches of road.) It also hasn’t had an antagonistic relationship with Uber: to help it get a foothold in the area, Waymo partnered with the rideshare app, allowing passengers to hail a robotaxi directly through its app as they would a human driver.

It’s not the only city where Uber and Lyft drivers are disgruntled about automation. In January, rideshare drivers protested against Waymo vehicles in San Francisco, demanding tighter regulation of the industry. Similar protests have taken place in New York City, Los Angeles, and Seattle.

ARDU is also not the only union going on the offensive against autonomous vehicles. Earlier this month, the California branch of the Teamsters union sued state lawmakers for pushing out new regulations friendly to the autonomous vehicle industry, which they allege didn’t consider the devastating impact of self-driving trucks on their jobs.

More on self-driving vehicles: Former Lyft Drivers Now Doing Menial Tasks for Their Waymo Overlords

The post Uber Drivers Say Waymo Robotaxis Are Driving Down Their Pay appeared first on Futurism.

Welcome to Edition 9.08 of the Rocket Report! Some major news this week from the state of Louisiana, previously associated with space due to NASA's aging Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans. Now the state has a chance to become the epicenter of SpaceX's Starship program as the company plans to invest up to $100 billion to construct factories and multiple launch pads for the super heavy lift rocket. It would utterly transform coastal Louisiana.

As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.

ESA announces big launch challenge contracts. The European Space Agency said Thursday it signed contracts with a handful of European launch startups to help them continue development of their vehicles. "The European Launcher Challenge is ESA’s initiative to expand European launch service supply and ensure more robustness in Europe’s access to space," the space agency said of the award, which supports the development and operation of small launch vehicles in Europe. For some of these firms, the funding will provide a key lifeline.

Read full article

Comments

© ESA

For the first time in decades, NASA has rolled out one of its iconic astronaut training aircraft with a bold, new look.

The space agency debuted a new livery on one of its T-38 jets in celebration of its program to return astronauts to the Moon. The Artemis design retains nods to what made the "white rocket" immediately recognizable, but adds a new colorway and painted graphics to make clear where NASA is headed.

"This new 'Artemis' livery has a black and white paint scheme with blue and red stripes that separate those two paint schemes," said Sean Brady, who proposed and designed the new livery while serving as the T-38 project pilot in NASA's Aircraft Operations Division (AOD), part of the Flight Operations Directorate at Johnson Space Center in Houston. "The Artemis program logo in the back and a picture of the Moon is on the left and right side of the rear fuselage."

Read full article

Comments

© NASA/James Blair

We’ve got a pair of apps that help you get a little reading done, albeit with two different approaches. Still, whether you prefer having someone else read the articles to you or if you just prefer a cleaner feed of articles, there’s something for everyone in this week’s App Report.

If there’s something you think belongs in our weekly look at promising macOS and iOS apps, just drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description of the app in question. We can’t reply to every email we get, but we’ll certainly take a look at any and all apps for a future column.

Listen Later

Six Colors readers may be familiar with Listen Later, which has provided a way to turn articles you’ve been meaning to read into podcasts that you can listen to at your convenience. Recently, there’s been an expansion in the ways you can access the service, with both an iOS app and a Safari extension giving you new ways to send URLs and PDFs to Listen Later so that they can be converted into a podcast.

In the iOS version of Listen Later, a Submit tab offers a field for pasting text, HTML or links; there’s also an optional button for uploading PDFs to the service. I’m able to link Listen Later to my podcatcher of choice — in this case, it’s Overcast — and a new episode featuring the content I’ve submitted shows up in my feed after it’s been converted to audio form.

The Safari extension for macOS works much the same way, only there’s a button next to the search/URL field that I tap when I want to submit something to Listen Later.

Both the Listen Later iOS app and Safari extension for macOS are free downloads, with $2 in credits for new users. If you like what you hear, you’ll need to purchase additional credits through Listen Later to cover the cost of AI processing and audio generation.

PageFeed

Reading articles on your iPhone can be a delight, but scrolling from the start of the article to the end can take some of the pleasure out of the process. If that’s a problem for you, PageFeed comes to the rescue by adopting a more book-like format for a news reader. Instead of scrolling, you tap to turn the page to make your way through an article.

The idea, PageFeed developer Brad Moss says in the description for the iOS app, is to add some degree of calm to reading through your news feed. You can select the sources and topics you want to read about. A share sheet can also send articles you find elsewhere to PageFeed for a scrolling-free experience.

You can download the app to your iPhone or iPad for free and use it for 14 days to get a feel for PageFeed’s approach. After that, a one-time $10 fee unlocks the app for good.

Tansei

It would be unfair to describe Tansei as kind of a universal clipboard for your Mac, even if that’s what this utility does, at least in a broad sense. But Tansei is really a storage space for anything. Besides text and URLs, it can hold images, screenshots and even colors, keeping them in a shelf on the side of your display for you to access whenever you need.

In my testing, Tansei has already proven its worth for a weekly newsletter I put together every week. I include a lot of links in that newsletter, and previously, that meant keeping an open text document where I could copy down URLs to articles of interest for use when it came time to put a new issue together. With Tansei running on my Mac, all I have to do is copy the URL, and it shows up in Tansei’s shelf automatically. I can also drag-and-drop items into Tansei, and hide the app off to the side when I want an uncluttered screen.

I wish there was a way to exert a little more control over what gets copied. For example, while moving the newsletter text into the publishing site I use, every block of text I copy over appears in Tansei. At least the app offers a bulk management feature that I can use to delete unnecessary items in one fell swoop.

You can buy Tansei for a one-time payment of $7, though a three-day trial lets you use the app for free without restrictions.

WidgetScreen

The release of macOS Sonoma three years ago brought desktop widgets to the Mac. WidgetScreen now pulls off the same trick for your Mac’s lock screen, letting you add weather forecasts, calendars and other bits of information that remain visible even before you’ve unlocked your computer.

Specifically, WidgetScreen includes widgets for weather, clock, stopwatch, reminders and battery. You can also add a Now Playing widget that controls music playback or a Pomodoro widget for when you want to focus or take breaks. A $10 Premium purchase unlocks additional widgets, such as Live Lyrics and News, while giving you greater customization powers over your lock screen.

Not everyone is going to want to bring the widget experience to their Mac’s lock screen, but if you’ve ever wanted to replicate the iPhone’s widget capabilities, WidgetScreen feels like a simple way to do that.

MailTwin

I’m not fully sold on the value of AI-powered writing tools at this point in time, though that could be the professional writer in me talking. For people who don’t mash sentences together for a living, every little bit of writing assistance helps, especially when it comes to dashing off emails.

So in that sense, I can see the use case for MailTwin, which promises to help you draft emails using a voice drawn from the messages you’ve previously sent. Even more helpfully, MailTwin can differentiate between different email accounts if you keep your personal and business correspondence separate, so that the messages it generates aimed to be tonally appropriate depending on context. Replies are generated in a separate window, and you can paste the results into a draft in macOS’s Mail app if you’re satisfied.

MailTwin can tie into eight different AI providers, including the Apple Intelligence that’s already on your Mac. The data only passes between your Mac and the AI service, with nothing ever winding up on a MailTwin server.

You can try out the app for free. After 30 days, you’ll need to pay $20 to unlock the app, though that’s a one-time fee.

Clearly, creating Mac apps that make the most of your voice continues to be a focus of developers — at least based on the offerings coming across my radar lately. Following last week’s profile of two different takes on on-device transcription software, we’ve got yet another voice-powered app to take a look at, with this macOS download supporting dictation that you can then paste into other apps.

But other apps are finding different ways to make some noise, including a pair of simple-yet-satisfying utilities and an old favorite that’s learned some new tricks. If you’ve got an app that you’d like to bring to our attention, let us hear about it at apps@sixcolors.com, adding a brief description on what the app does and what devices it supports.

And now, on to the business at hand. Or at voice, as the case may be.

Lesskeys

Some times, it’s better to dictate than to type, and Lesskeys looks to make that process as simple as possible. With the app running in your menu bar, just hit a hotkey — it’s Option-Period by default — to start recording your dulcet tones. As you speak, your words are captured in a clipboard that you can copy and paste into any app once you stop recording by tapping the hotkey again. Alternatively, you can also hold down the hotkey to jot down quick thoughts with the recording stopping once you release the keys.

Lesskeys’ bag of tricks extends beyond just dictation. There’s a command for recording phone calls made through your Mac, and you can also import audio and video files to be transcribed. Additionally, the app boasts the ability to identify speakers when you record conversations. Power users will also appreciate how Lesskeys lets you set up different configurations for different apps, such as a different language, model or prompt when a particular app is in the foreground.

Lesskeys is free to download, but you’re limited to 5 minutes of dictation per day, along with five audio and video transcriptions each. That should be enough of a ceiling to test out the app and decided whether it’s worth the one-time $49.99 Pro license to remove any restrictions.

PeekNote

If you’re like me, you put the Mac’s clipboard through quite a workout, copy and pasting various text snippets, URLs and other captured material into different apps. And if you’re even more like me, you wind up using a lot of the same snippets and URLs over and over again. PeekNote is a handy macOS utility that keeps frequently used snippets close at hand.

Essentially, PeekNote is a floating window where you can stack multiple bits of text to paste into any window on your desktop. As I’m applying for a lot of jobs at the moment, I can use the PeekNote window to stash links to articles and other parts of my profile that I frequently use in cover letters and web forms.

Pay a one-time $9.99 fee, and you unlock the full app, which includes the ability to create 22 different tabs for organizing related text blocks. The unlocked version of PeekNote also lifts any limitations on the number of blocks.

If I had a suggestion for PeekNote, it would be to make it easier to shrink the app window so that it only expands when you need access to one of the text blocks you’ve got stored in there. But otherwise, it’s a fine utility when you want frequently used links and snippets to be right at your fingertips.

Carrot Weather

If you’ve looked beyond the built-in Weather app on your iPhone, you doubtlessly have some familiarity with Carrot Weather and its… unique take on delivering the forecast. The app, which works across a host of Apple devices including the Mac, Apple Watch and Vision Pro, tells you the weather with attitude, using a sliding snark scale that you can adjust to your liking. Additionally, as you can see from this 2023 Six Colors profile, developer Grailr has built some other high-end capabilities and customization features into the app, the more intriguing of which are positioned behind a paywall.

Carrot Weather is worth revisiting these days thanks to an added feature that arrived over the summer — a trip planner capability for the iPhone version that lets you track the forecast for any upcoming getaways. I’ve got a trip to Detroit in my immediate future, and when I head over to the Locations section of Carrot Weather, I can see that I had better pack an umbrella for the thunderstorm that’s forecast on at least one day of my trip.

The 6.7 update to Carrot Weather also introduced new custom notifications that alert you when a data point hits a certain threshold — say, a temperature drop or a rise in UV index levels. Both the Trip Planner and custom notification features require a Premium Ultra subscription that costs $9.99/month.

SmartTracker

With holiday shopping ramping up in the next few months, you’re going to want to stay on top of pricing to make sure that you’re paying the best price for anything on your wish list. Certainly, there are websites where you can do that — CamelCamelCamel is one of the better ones in my opinion — but an app like SmartTracker can pull off the same task while keeping your search data entirely on your Mac.

Enter a URL into the SmartTracker app, and it will do the watching for you; you’re even able to set a target price and get a notification should the object of your desire hit that magic number. Several other features such as home screen widgets, Siri shortcuts and collections for grouping items together will appeal to power shoppers.

SmartTracker runs on macOS, iOS and iPadOS, though I only looked at the Mac version of the app. You can track up to five items and manage three collections when you download the app, but paying $6.99/year (or a one-time $19.99 payment) gets rid of those limits.

TuckBar

Utilities don’t come any simpler than TuckBar, which performs one task but does it well. You use the macOS utility to hide away the menu bar on displays of your choosing, only to bring it back the moment you move back toward the top edge of the screen.

That’s going to be welcome functionality if you use multiple displays and want to keep some of them truly uncluttered, while letting you keep the comfort of the menu bar on (presumably) your primary display. TuckBar mimics the appearance of your desktop wallpaper to obscure the menu bar, or if you prefer, the utility features a slider to turn down the menu bar’s brightness.

Normally, TuckBar costs $3 to download, though at time of writing, the app was free as part of a limited-time promotion.