My thanks to Footnote Accessories for sponsoring Six Colors this week for the OneSnap. The OneSnap is a MagSafe-compatible wireless charger that delivers up to 15W of fast power to Qi-enabled devices and even your Apple Watch.…
Writing at The Verge (paywalled), Ash Parrish talks to Apple Arcade senior director Alex Rothman about the state of the service. It’s not the most in-depth of interviews, but it’s always interesting when an Apple executive is willing to go on the record.…
Google’s antitrust woes (or lack thereof), encounters with buggy apps in betas, camping tech, and how thin is too thin when it comes to technology.…
For more than a decade, we’ve all been wondering why Instagram doesn’t have an iPad app. I’m not sure we ever got a good answer—but earlier this year reports said one was coming, and here we are—on Wednesday Instagram released an app update that supports the iPad: When designing Instagram for iPad, we wanted to take advantage of the bigger screen to give people more features with fewer taps, while keeping it simple. …
Well, the good news is, all three hosts are here this time. Two of them are in Lex’s office. One of them is not a nickel.…
Jason and Myke preview what will happen at next week’s Apple event. What form might a thinner iPhone Air take? Will the AirPods Pro come roaring back?…
Craig Hockenberry of the Iconfactory on what troubles him about Liquid Glass in macOS Tahoe: If you’re someone who’s only using email, a web browser, and some messaging apps to get stuff done, changes to your desktop appearance aren’t going to be disruptive. …
The Ultimate 3-in-1 Charger for Life on the Go The OneSnap is a MagSafe-compatible wireless charger that delivers up to 15W of fast power to your Qi-enabled devices—and even your Apple Watch.Simply…
The Find My system lets you find lost things and alerts you when you leave something behind. But because devices (things that can contact the Internet) and items (things like AirTags that can transmit Bluetooth signals) are so trackable, it means you have valid concerns when something you own could be followed by someone you don’t know.…
John Scalzi: For the new release of the Pixel 10 Pro (and the 10 Pro XL, which is mostly the same phone, just larger), Google has introduced something called the “Pro-Res Zoom,” a process by which, once you zoom in with the camera over about 30x zoom, after you’ve snapped the photo, Google will run it through an “AI” processor, not to bring out the details that are actually there, but to make up details that seem reasonable to assume are there, based on whatever processing algorithm Google is currently using. …
My thanks to Quip for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Clipboard managers aren’t usually exciting. Most of them just capture everything you copy, then become a cluttered dumping ground.…
Every year at this time1, my pals at the Relay podcast network raise money for St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital as a part of Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.…
Apple’s OS betas are nearing completion, but not all betas for developers are OS Developer Betas: On Thursday Apple released Xcode 26 beta 7, which adds direct support for the new OpenAI GPT-5 model and lets users add existing paid Claude accounts to use Claude Sonnet 4: Claude in Xcode is now available in the Intelligence settings panel, allowing users to seamlessly add their existing paid Claude account to Xcode and start using Claude Sonnet 4… When using ChatGPT in Xcode, users can now start a new conversation with either GPT-4.1 or GPT-5, with GPT-5 set as the default. …
I appreciate what Adobe is doing with Project Indigo. It’s a free iOS camera app, but it is heavily disclaimed as being experimental with unique features you can’t find in other apps.…
John Moltz joins host Guy English to get obsessive about floors, Liquid Glass and icons.…
The read-it-later service Pocket has shut down, and with it went its integration with Kobo e-readers. Fortunately, earlier this summer Kobo owner Rakuten announced that Instapaper would replace Pocket as its new read-it-later service of choice.…
The tech we have in our vehicles, the dependable tech that just works and what might make us replace it, how often we upgrade our phones or computers and why, and which social platforms we use — including where we heard about Taylor Swift’s engagement.…
Tim Cook on stage in Chicago in 2018. Fourteen years ago this month, Steve Jobs resigned and Tim Cook became the CEO of Apple. Given Jobs’s ongoing health issues, Cook’s ascension wasn’t unexpected; he had, in fact, filled the role during Jobs’s multiple leaves of absence.…
John Voorhees of MacStories has a review of Tot 2.0, the simple Mac/iPhone/iPad/Apple Watch notes app by The Iconfactory: My favorite 2.0 feature is that Tot now supports automatic indenting. …
John McCoy (host of the Sophomore Lit podcast on The Incomparable!) used the recent kerfuffle over the Cracker Barrel rebranding (if you don’t know, he covered it in his post) to discuss a trend in corporate branding: Just because I doubt that these choices were motivated by politics doesn’t mean the detractors don’t have a point: something basic is being lost here. …
Fantastic article by Lucasfilm historian, the appropriately named Lucas O. Seastrom, on creating an extremely detailed Star Wars-themed lounge at ILM: An entirely original piece in the Hideout was an industrial-style fan in the ceiling, an idea that dated all the way back to Field’s original safehouse concept. …
Apple is nothing if not consistent. That announcement we all expected might happen today, happened today: Apple is giving the world two weeks’ notice that its next media event (which we all know is an iPhone launch event, though Apple never admits that) will be on September 9 at 10am Pacific.…
After an era of stability, Apple may be about to mix things up with the iPhone, including a bunch of new models and even a change to the traditional fall roll-out cycle.…
Clipboard managers aren’t usually exciting. Most of them just capture everything you copy, then become a cluttered dumping ground. Quip takes a very different approach. Quip is a supercharged clipboard manager and text expander for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, designed to feel like a natural extension of the OS.…
Tear those epaulettes off one of your admin accounts in macOS. It knows what it did! And what’s that? It’s just too darned powerful. An account marked as an administrator can carry out nearly every operation—probably every operation—on your Mac during an active session.…
Wait, Moltz is on vacation this week? Who allowed that? Dan, did you give Moltz the go-ahead? Great, Dan’s not even answering. I know, it’s long past Miller Time on a Friday in Boston, but you never know.…
The Bluesky social network has decided to block all devices from the state of Mississippi due to its far-reaching law that has some exceptionally broad requirements in the name of protecting children.…
ESPN has left the exclusivity of the cable bundle at long last, and we break down what it all means. Also: TV Picks and your letters!…
Guy English joins us to talk about Lex’s guilt-inducing new Mac purchase that he sacrificed his morals for. We talk about refurbed Macs and Vision Pros, Dan’s new Folder Automations, iCloud woes, and the reality that Apple just needs to stop doing things.…
Whether we’ve used tech to build habits lately, if we edit Wikipedia, our approach to software updates, and if we blog or have any blog recommendations.…
We imagine how Apple would tier list its own products, and discuss what kind of personality might work for a tabletop “robot” from Apple.…
The passkey was introduced with some excitement by Apple and varying degrees of hurrahs from Microsoft and Google a few years ago.1 This humble method of combining strong encryption, avoiding password entry, and adding the best aspects of second-factor authentication seemed like a winner.…
My thanks to Clic for Sonos for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Clic for Sonos is the fastest native Sonos client for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and visionOS.…
Setting up a folder Automation in macOS Tahoe. One of the most exciting additions in macOS Tahoe is Shortcuts automation, which (among many other things) allows Shortcuts to act when things move or change in the filesystem.…
Apple Newsroom: Apple will introduce a redesigned Blood Oxygen feature for some Apple Watch Series 9, Series 10, and Apple Watch Ultra 2 users through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update coming later today. …
Our display setup and window management; which legacy online component should be sunset after AOL dial-up; whether new Shortcuts and Apple Intelligence automation appeals; and views on YouTube’s AI age verification and the best and worst ways to do it.…
We talk presidential participation awards, Perplexity’s bid for attention and removing the notch.…
Apple’s product lines follow a very specific pattern: start small, and then grow into something bigger and more complex. There was originally one Mac, one iPhone, one iPad, one Apple Watch.…
I do love it when I reference Dr. Drang on Upgrade and he responds with an entire blog post: As Jason said on the show, he’d probably need a kayak that’s a bit bigger and more stable than mine because of the choppier water he’d encounter in his bay. …
At the MIT Technology Review, my old colleague Mat Honan has a great piece about the simultaneous promise and overpromise of AI: In some ways, the AI hype cycle has to be out of hand. …
Blind ranking bad Apple products, hope for a cheaper MacBook, the perils of Siri automation, and apparently Tim Cook took a trip to Washington D.C. for some sort of meeting?…
If you use Sonos hardware you deserve the best. Clic for Sonos is the fastest native Sonos client for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and Vision Pro.…
I recently wrote about duplicating iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos to a network-attached storage (NAS) system. This struck a nerve for folks who want to keep full-resolution backups of their Photos Library when they don’t have enough local storage.…
Jim Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13 and one of three men to have gone around the moon twice, died on Thursday: The plight of Apollo 13 in 1970 transfixed Americans. …
My thanks to Magic Lasso Adblock for sponsoring Six Colors this week. With over 5,000 five star reviews; Magic Lasso Adblock is simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone, iPad and Mac.…
To celebrate our 100th episode, we draft streaming services!…
Back in May on MacBreak Weekly, Andy Ihnatko recommended an incredibly clever project called pico-mac-nano, a seemingly impossible complete emulation of the original Mac in a case only 2.4 inches/62mm high.…
Jason joins Stephen and Myke to talk about hard drives, window management, and charts.…
Our approach to cable management at home, the tech we pack for inflight entertainment, the devices and chargers we bring on quick trips, and our go-to strategy for international phone data plans.…
Dan is away but Lex and Moltz are here to discuss AI slop, Apple’s comments on its enhanced Siri efforts and goings on in the podcast industry.…