By Dan Moren

November 12, 2025 8:30 AM PT

Apple rolls out Digital ID in Apple Wallet for U.S. passport holders

If you suffer from that recurring nightmare that you’re at the airport but have forgotten your wallet,¹ fret no longer: starting today, holders of U.S. passports can create a Digital ID in Apple’s Wallet app, which can be used at TSA checkpoints across the country for domestic flights—even if you don’t have a REAL ID-compliant state ID card or driver’s license.

First announced at this year’s WWDC, Digital ID is an iOS 26 features and works along the same lines as the various ID and driver’s license systems that Apple Wallet currently offers in 12 states, Puerto Rico, and Japan.

If you hold a U.S. passport, you’ll be able to add a Digital ID by first taking a picture of the machine-readable page in your passport (the one that contains your data and photo), confirming the information by scanning the chip in your passport, and then completing a few steps that help verify that you’re really you, including taking a selfie and then making certain face and head movements. Note that if you have a passport card, you can’t use it to create a Digital ID, as there’s no embedded chip like with a passport book.

As with the existing ID cards in Wallet, using Digital ID does not require you to unlock, hand over, or even show your phone to the requesting entity. For example, at a TSA checkpoint, you’ll double click your phone’s side button to bring up Wallet, then hold it over the scanner as you would for an Apple Pay transaction. The phone will tell you what information is being requested and you’ll have to authenticate with Face ID or Touch ID to then provide that information. Once you’ve set up a Digital ID, it will also be available via Wallet on the Apple Watch as well.

Apple, as usual, stresses the security and privacy of this feature. Your information is encrypted on your device and protected with your biometric information (preventing somebody who knows your passcode from presenting or even viewing your ID card), and Apple does not itself know anything about where, when, or what information is presented. Additionally, because the Digital ID is essentially a digital version of your passport, when that document expires, the Digital ID expires as well, at which point it is automatically removed and you would have to manually add your new passport.

The system is also designed with privacy in mind, so that the least amount of necessary information is provided. For example, if you were to use your Digital ID to verify your age, the only data that would be provided would be your ID picture and a simple “Yes” or “No”. Other information, like your name or birthdate, wouldn’t even be given. That is, in some ways, an advantage over handing over your physical ID card which can not only include those, but other sensitive information like your address.

The Digital ID should be accepted starting today at more than 250 airports in the U.S., though certain specific checkpoints within those airports may not yet have been updated to support mobile IDs. Though Digital ID is based on ISO standards for personal identification and mobile documents, it’s not currently valid for international travel or border-crossing as there is not yet an international standard in place for using mobile IDs for those purposes. However, that’s not to preclude it from happening in the future, should such a standard be adopted.

While air travel is the first place you’ll be able to use your Digital ID, further applications are in the works. Apple provides APIs to allow verification of both identity and age, allowing third parties to implement these features in their apps or on the web. (Many states have already rolled out age-verification apps to work with the mobile ID standard.)

The addition of Digital ID is a clever move. Apple’s been working with states for several years to add mobile IDs and driver’s licenses for several years—the first state, Arizona, rolled out in 2022, and while adoption has been steady, it’s been a slow trickle. Using a federal document allows the company to make an end-run around states dragging their feet², helping drive adoption of the feature and hopefully encouraging lagging states to get onboard.

Updated on 11/13/25 with more details about passport cards and passport expiration.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Glenn Fleishman

November 10, 2025 8:30 AM PT

Can’t autosave? A cloud might be in the way

Your Mac mostly hides its Unix¹ underbelly. You can tap into it as you need, but it mainly drives the system. For many people—perhaps most—the Unix part crops up when you’re dealing with permissions. Permissions refers to the access that files and folders (directories) allow with respect to specific registered users, groups, and special system roles.

My friend Larry, whom I previously helped delete his email account, had a perplexing permissions problem. When he saved changes to a Keynote presentation, he was told that he lacked permissions:

For the longest time, some Keynote files will give me an error message that they can’t be autosaved (or manually saved) because I don’t have permission. I’m instructed to go to File: Get Info [in the Finder] to change permissions, but they appear correct to me.

Let’s work through this problem. (This time, I didn’t accidentally help Larry delete all his presentations.)

Motherboard, may I?

Given that macOS explicitly stated that this was a permissions problem, I went in assuming that this was the case. Here’s a quick way to troubleshoot this problem:

• Check if it’s an external drive. This can often crop up if you’re using a volume other than the startup volume. (That volume could be configured as part of an internal or external physical drive.) The startup volume assigns permissions based on roles, like administrators, and accounts, as for each user and for the guest account (if enabled). All other volumes are generally available to every macOS user. However, unless you have a specific reason to restrict access, it’s best to avoid problems: in the Finder, select the volume, choose File: Get Info, click the lock icon and authenticate if required, and check the box “Ignore ownership on this volume.”
• Check the enclosing folder. It’s possible that an enclosing folder for a file has different permission settings than the file within it. Select the folder in the Finder, choose File: Get Info, and examine the Sharing & Permissions section. Are you shown as “name (Me)” with Read & Write next to it? Terrific. If not, add yourself by clicking the + sign at the bottom of the window or using the Privilege pop-up menu.
• Check the file. Repeat the process above by selecting the file and choosing File: Get Info. Check permissions and fix if needed.

(A tip: You can bring up a contextual Get Info window that reveals whatever is selected in the Finder by pressing Command-Option-I. If you need to examine a lot of file, folder, or volume information, and don’t need to compare the contents of different Get Info dialogs, it’s more efficient.)

However, Larry found his permissions were correct in all three cases. There was one more thing to check: could it be an app-based restriction? While access permissions are tied to files, folders, and volumes, macOS also imposes limits on how apps interact with stored files that are outside a few defined areas, like the Documents folder in your Home folder.

Go to System Settings: Privacy & Security and check to see if the app getting an autosave error is listed in Full Disk Access.[^full] If not, you can click the + icon at the bottom and select the app from the Applications folder, then enable its switch. (This may require quitting and relaunching the app if it’s already running.)

(Another tip: Most apps don’t require access to everything on all your volumes. However, Apple offers only the distinction between allowing access to a limited set of folders and any removable volume, or the entire set of available volumes.)

That didn’t help, either. Something else was at work. Could it be… the cloud?!

Murky actions by some cloud-hosted volumes

When I started down this path with Larry, I didn’t realize that he was storing the files on his Google Drive. This didn’t seem like it should be a problem, because you can autosave to Dropbox and iCloud Drive. (I haven’t tested Microsoft OneDrive’s Finder cloud volume or other companies’ offerings.)

Apparently, Google is an outlier. Because of how Google recognizes files stored on Google Drive, the incremental autosave snapshots interfere with Google’s file management. Or at least that’s the theory—Google doesn’t document the problem or offer advice.

The only way around this is to choose a “nuclear” option, which is to disable autosave in all your apps. Apps with support for autosave will continuously write snapshots (or “journals”) to locally mounted volumes formatted with HFS+ or APFS. (Windows-compatible volumes lack the support needed.)

To change autosave behavior, go to System Settings: Desktop & Dock: “Ask to keep changes when closing documents.” This setting is disabled by default, which allows autosaving incremental changes. You use File: Revert To for stepping back to earlier revisions. If you enable it, files are saved only explicitly when you choose File: Save or click Save when closing a document or quitting an app.

The solution for Larry was to lose the Google sync—a useful option for him—and save to a volume that supported autosave.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Jason Snell

November 5, 2025 7:00 AM PT

I’ve upgraded my house’s holiday lights for the last time

Living in a suburban neighborhood brings certain unspoken expectations. Walk down these streets during the last few months of the year and you’ll see inflatable monsters and turkeys and snowmen, giant skeletons, and more. There’s a house down the block that’s had an inflatable monster of some sort for weeks. Another house around the corner has a half-dozen of them. And, of course, the lights. Spooky orange vines dangling from my neighbor’s trees in October lead to sparkling Christmas lights everywhere in November and December.

While there’s no law to force participation, if your house is not decorated during this time of year, it really stands out. I resent the requirement to participate, but not as much as I hate being known as the guy who doesn’t participate.

For years, I hung string lights around the roof line of our house and screwed a color-changing bulb in our front door lamp. But after about a decade, I just got tired of it. I told my wife that if she really cared about this, she’d need to take over for me. Which she did, for a few years. But the cheap LEDs were constantly failing, the little plastic hangars to string them up with got brittle and shattered, and it ground her down, too.

This is when I decided that if we’re in for a penny, we’re in for a pound. Permanent holiday lights. Could it be done?

My goals were the ability for me to install them myself, for them not to be too expensive, and for them to last. Not the cheap stuff from Amazon, but professional-grade systems designed to last. Ideally, the lights would also be programmable so that they could serve us throughout the year, not just during the holidays.

Fortunately, some dude on Reddit made a Google spreadsheet of the pros and cons of all the major permanent Christmas lights that are available. There were nearly a dozen options.

This led, of course, to the detail questions: What’s the style? Do they point down or outward? Are they pucks or strips, or pixel lights? What voltage is required? What software controls them?

Our house, built on the cheap in a suburban post-war tract in California, is weird. It’s a single story, which simplifies things, but the fascia at the roofline is a flat board. There’s no gutter, and many lights assume you live in a house with gutters at the roofline.

This limited my options. I decided to go with Everlights, which were in the middle of the price range for these things, and offered a DIY option that appeared manageable for someone like me.

The Everlights starter pack came with a bunch of thin, six-foot-long aluminum pieces, color-matched to my off-white fascia. Each piece featured a channel for the lights themselves, strips of four well-insulated wires connecting substantial plastic LED rectangles. These were solid, almost rugged—and the wire set even includes one wire that is simply a backup in case the primary data channel fails.

The LEDs themselves have threaded protrusions that are meant to be pushed through holes drilled in a gutter, then held in place by clear plastic nuts that you screw in. It’s clever, but I don’t have gutters. The aluminum pieces Everlights provided did fit when mounted just behind the wood fascia, except for the fact that every few feet, the fascia is connected to support beams.

The solution involved cutting the flat mounting portion where beams crossed, folding it back, and sliding the aluminum behind the roof line. Where beams interfered, I notched out the aluminum (so thin I could use a pair of scissors), leaving only the light channel visible from the street. I spent a few hours on a ladder, marking the aluminum pieces with a pencil, cutting them with my scissors, fitting them behind the fascia and around the beams, and screwing them into place.

When I was finished, the whole roofline of my house, when seen from the street, had the aluminum channel with Everlights LEDs facing out. The Everlights system features a wireless transmitter that connects to Ethernet inside my house, and plugs into an exterior outlet that I had my electrician install. I had to do some wire stripping and crimping, and used a butane torch for some heat sealing of waterproof connections, but as someone with a strict “no soldering” policy, it was entirely within my capacity as a vaguely unqualified suburban homeowner.

To control the Everlights, I use their iOS app, which is what I would call functional, if not good. It doesn’t behave like a proper iOS app, but once you get the hang of it, it’s relatively easy to control. I can set the lights to come on at sunset and stay on until whenever (I generally choose 11:30 p.m.), and to come on early in the morning and stay on until sunrise. The lights can be programmed to change color, appear in patterns, and animate. Everlights provides quite a few lighting patterns, and you can program your own, which I have. You can also program multiple patterns to cycle through for a few minutes on any given day. It’s a surprisingly flexible set of options.

This has led me to consult various websites like the Empire State Building lights calendar and San Francisco City Hall to see what color themes might be fun for various holidays. When it’s not a special holiday, I’ll just program a theme for several weeks at a time. I built a Hanukkah sequence that shows one more light every night. I’ve got a custom Cal sequence that I program for game days. And of course, Halloween and Christmas are now well covered.

It’s been a year since I installed the lights, and they’ve been solid the whole time. I have received my Suburban Dad Gold Medal, and our neighborhood lights FOMO is at an end. In fact, now the neighbors compliment us on our festive lights.

Am I causing them FOMO? Sorry, neighbors, I guess this is how arms races happen. I promise never, ever to put an inflatable monster or Santa or snowman in our front yard. My Tube Man—who once again stunned and enthralled trick-or-treaters this Halloween—will appear on major holidays, briefly. But that’s where I draw the line.

By Jason Snell

November 4, 2025 8:15 AM PT

Apple’s fiscal 2025 in charts

On October 30, Apple announced its fiscal fourth quarter results, setting an all-time quarterly revenue record and closing its record fiscal year off with a bang. I made some charts to illustrate the thing, as I tend to do.

Being that Apple’s fiscal 2025 has now concluded, it’s time for a second set of colorful financial charts, ones that take the longer view and show the changes in Apple’s business over an entire year.

Let’s dig into the charts, starting with the big one, overall Apple revenue for the last 27 years:

I don’t know what I’m more impressed by, the enormous leap in fiscal 2021 (probably due to a combination of sales egged on by the pandemic and the arrival of Apple silicon), or the fact that fiscal 2022 tacked on $28B in growth on top of that. The two following years gave a little bit of that growth back, but with 2025’s $416B in revenue, Apple is back on a record-setting track.

Continue reading “Apple’s fiscal 2025 in charts”…

By Dan Moren

November 3, 2025 11:37 AM PT

The App Store now has a pretty sweet solution for the web

It only took 17 years, but the App Store is now accessible on the web. Apple launched the new interface on Monday, allowing you to browse, search, and share apps from a web browser.

The site lets you access all of Apple’s platform stores, including iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, tvOS, and visionOS. You can view the full App Store entry, including screenshots, ratings and reviews, release notes, and more. You can also see various sections of the App Store, like the Games section or Arcade, as well as browse by category.

What you can’t do is install or update those apps on your devices. At least some of that is because there’s no link to your Apple account: instead, this is really just a catalog. If you’re browsing the App Store for the device you’re on, you can easily jump to the app you’re looking at in the actual App Store app.¹ In other cases, the usual “Get” or “Buy” link has been replaced with a Share button.

As someone who’s written about apps for years, this does get rid of one longstanding frustration where you would put a link to an app in your story, but it would force you to open the App Store app to see all the details of the program. But it would be really nice if I could queue up apps to download on devices that aren’t in front of me, as other devices like game consoles let you do. Maybe in another 17 years.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors, as well as an author, podcaster, and two-time Jeopardy! champion. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His next novel, the sci-fi adventure Eternity's Tomb, will be released in November 2026.]

By Glenn Fleishman

November 3, 2025 9:25 AM PT

Making a Scene: When Apple Home gave me lemons, I went bananas

You might wonder why I have an Apple Home scene called Banana Room and another called Lemon Room. I wonder this, too.

It all started late last year, as we planned to be away from home for a few weeks, and thought it was a good time to test automation and smart devices. We have had a very slow household adoption of such, and stick to HomeKit-compatible devices.

Our thermostats were HomeKit-connected, as were a couple of smart bulbs. We upgraded our deadbolt to a smart lock, as we might have needed to let people in remotely while out of town. We also installed some simple smart outlets.

While this generally worked as expected, there’s a binary problem with groups of devices we keep encountering. I developed a strategy to work around the problem of what “turning off” really means in an Apple Home context.

A contradiction in terms

Apple Home calls smart home items accessories, and you can organize accessories into collections called scenes, with each accessory having an assigned action. Accessories can be placed into rooms. So our Living Room has several accessories, which include a porch light (light bulb), four smart outlets (all lights), the smart lock, and our Apple TV. (Apple Home is now Apple’s user-facing branding for interacting with HomeKit-compatible devices, and you use the Home app to access and configure smart home stuff.)

A scene has actions it takes on accessories. When you add an accessory like a light, you can set it to be on or off. (If the light is already on and set to be on, it remains on; same with off.) If a light offers intensity and color options, you can adjust them, too. This lets you create scenes that modify lighting rather than toggle lights.

Because we don’t turn on all our living room lights at once most of the time, I created a scene called “Main Living Room.” That was probably a bad idea. Siri doesn’t always interpret requests the same way. When I would say, “Turn on Main Living Room,” Siri would sometimes use the scene name and turn on my selected three lights, but other times it would activate all five lights in the Living Room scene.

Also, if I said to Siri, “Turn off Main Living Room,” Siri would respond, “You can’t turn off scenes.”

This is a weird thing for Siri to tell me because a scene’s button in Home is a toggle; you can also add scenes to Control Center. When the scene is active, after you’ve turned it on—either verbally or by tapping the button—it changes from a gray background with white type to a white background with an orange icon and black type.

Tap or click that button? The scene is…turned off. All the accessories are activated or switched to their previous state. Apple’s documentation on that part is mute, noting only, “To turn on a scene, tap or click it, or ask Siri.” What about off, Apple? What about off?

[ Joe Rosensteel wrote about Krampus visiting him for Christmas in 2023, noting this scenes problem in the context of a set of greater HomeKit woes that Apple has, largely, still not improved or fixed. ]

Rearranging the scenery

If you’ve read this far, you might be yelling, “Glenn, why didn’t you just rename Main Living Room Lights to something unique!” Stop yelling! I did. But it didn’t solve the Siri problem, as explained above.

To work around both Siri’s ambiguity with the name and its limitation of “turning off” scenes, I renamed the “on” scene to Banana Room and the off scene Lemon Room. Banana Room has the three lights I want to turn on via their connected outlets; Lemon Room, their corresponding off state. Why those names? Because they are so distinct, Siri wouldn’t mistake them for anything else.¹

I found that Siri still has some clarity issues. If I said, “Activate Banana Room” or “turn on Banana Room,” it might try to play a song with that name in Music. Now I say, “Activate Banana Room in Home” and “Activate Lemon Room in Home.” This feels vaguely like something a cut-rate James Bond villain might utter.

Because Apple is Apple, I noticed something happened to these two scenes when the other was active. Scene buttons reflect whether the current state of the accessories selected for them is exactly as defined in the scene. If so, the scene’s button deactivates. When I activate Banana Room, if Lemon Room is shown as active, its button state changes to inactive, and vice versa.

The whole thing drove me lemons, but now I’ve made banana bread.

[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]