As noted by John Gruber, a reborn Commodore is selling a “new” Commodore 64. It’s not an emulator, but a re-engineering based on the old design and modern programmable electronics.
This is, no question, a fun and cool project, and I hope it succeeds wildly. But personally, the Commodore 64 holds almost no nostalgic value for me. The Commodore 64 — which came out in 1982, when I was 9 — always struck me as cheap-feeling and inelegant. Like using some weird computer from the Soviet Union.
Gruber and I were chatting about this in iMessage last week. My first computer was a Commodore PET—which predated the “compact” Commodores and didn’t offer any color graphics—and so Commodore BASIC was the first programming I ever did.1
And like Gruber, I hold absolutely no affection for the Commodore 64. A lot of people really got into it, but by then I was deep into the Apple II and was never going to look back. And, yes, Commodore’s keyboards were bizarre—but even five minutes typing BASIC into a C-64 emulator took me back to the days of typing programs from COMPUTE! magazine into that PET. Shift-2 for quotation marks? It’s totally nutty2, but I’ve still retained muscle memory from back then, somewhere.
As Gruber noted on Tuesday, there’s also an incredibly fun piece by Drew Saur about how much he loved the C-64. I highly recommmend it, despite the fact that it contains several statements with which I disagree. Saur writes:
Even then, I could compare one of my favorite home video games between the VIC-20 and the Apple II version, and I know which one I preferred.
If you find yourself walking down the street in the 1980s and you see someone coming who prefers the VIC-20 to the Apple II, cross to the other side of the street. (That said, the VIC-20 really was revolutionary. It was by far the most affordable home computer anyone had ever seen at that point. It was laughably underpowered… but: it was only $300! They sold a million of ’em.3)
Saur continues:
Commodore 64 fans were the original “Think Different” crowd…. In the overall hierarchy of the day, it was Commodore/Atari, then Apple, then IBM. Kids of the day — programming kids of the day — adored the ’64 because it was a more thoughtful and downright fun machine to use and to program. We also thought it was adorable, well-designed, and less “corporate” than any Apple II or IBM PC. I know more people who leapt from a Commodore 64 to a Mac than I do who came from an Apple II. There’s a reason for that.
This is deranged and ahistorical, and I say that as a “programming kid of the day.” Commodore, Atari4, and then Apple? And the Apple II was… “corporate”? Nonsense. The Apple II was the ultimate counterculture computer. It was made by hippies for hippies. Certainly the people who introduced me to the Apple II were hippies. The Commodore, meanwhile, was the product of a guy in a suit and tie.
Anyway, those days are long gone. It’s all water under the bridge, no matter how much this nostalgia trip has resurfaced ancient, prehistoric platform animosities. And I love that every single one of these computers can run in a web browser, on pretty much any device, today.
Weird fact: Commodore’s origin was in importing Czech typewriters to Canada in the ’50s. Maybe that legacy of Soviet-bloc keyboards just permeated the company for decades? ↩
I’ve been informed that many European keyboards put the quotation mark there because the letter spaces are reserved for accented characters. This explains even more why Gruber got those Soviet Union vibes. That keyboard was like no American layout ever, and Commodore didn’t care. ↩
This is meant as a compliment, but some humorless Commodore fans (or do I repeat myself?) took it as an insult. There’s no accounting for taste. ↩
I love playlists for discovering new music, but sometimes I just want to listen to an entire album. Adrian Schönig’s Longplay app, which makes it fun to browse and play favorite albums, has been a favorite of mine since it debuted on iOS in 2020. At long last, Longplay is now out for the Mac and I got to take it for an early spin.
Like the iOS app, Longplay for Mac lets you view your Apple Music collection through a mosaic of album covers, sorted in any number of ways (from Addiction for favorites to Neglect for those untouched in a long time). If you carefully craft playlists1, you can opt to display those as well.
Longplay’s player interface.
The Longplay miniplayer is spare and good, with playback controls and a big square for album art. (You can even opt for a Purity mode that prevents you from skipping tracks, if you’re a masochist.) And since the app is album oriented, the Up Next queue… is for entire albums rather than individual tracks.
If there’s one drawback, it’s that due to some macOS limitations, you can’t AirPlay Apple Music albums directly from the app. (The workaround is to set your Mac’s audio output to the AirPlay speaker of your choice.) That’s not ideal for me, since I often listen via AirPlay, but I used the workaround and found it a little more stable than AirPlaying from the Music app.
Perhaps the most interesting new feature in the Mac version of Longplay is its wholehearted embrace of automation. Not only does it support AppleScript and Shortcuts, but it’s got a built-in MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, which means it works with AI-enabled assistants via apps like Claude and Raycast. This means that the AI can actually interact with Longplay’s scripting interface directly, using its own broad musical knowledge to build search queries, start playback, and add albums to the queue.
I tested out the MCP integration by asking the Claude app, “Can you use the Longplay app to play an album featuring a duo or group playing pop music from the 1980s?” It queried Longplay for a list of albums from my library and then started playing “Purple Rain,” while recommending a few other albums I could also consider. I told it to add “Songs from the Big Chair” to the queue, and it did so. All in all, pretty impressive—and a reminder that while Apple’s got a lot of AI integration in a lot of places these days, Apple Music isn’t one of them.
Longplay for macOS is $25, and is available on the Mac App Store and via direct purchase.
We discuss Apple’s iOS design conundrum, why Apple and F1 are wrong for each other, why it’s probably time for a changing of the guard at Apple, and some new and exciting Apple AI contretemps.
Cloud synchronization makes it easy to have a copy of your stuff everywhere, and, through optimization, to avoid filling your local storage with your least-accessed files or media, which is often the majority of those items.
But what if you want an active, up-to-date replica of these synced files? Six Colors subscriber Matthias asks:
I’d love to have a backup of my iCloud Drive/photos on my NAS. Is there any way without having a Mac constantly running in the background? If not, what would be the best way to make sure all photos are in a folder on my NAS? Just having the photos library on the share? What about iCloud Drive?
This simple question reveals the trouble with cloud-focused storage that doesn’t offer an API or other authenticated third-party access that would allow an ecosystem of products to build up around it.
The simple answer is “not exactly.” The more complicated answer is “sort of.”
Secret agents
iCloud synchronization requires a swarm of background agents or daemons that are constantly monitoring and chatting with iCloud on your Mac, iPhone, or iPad. Beyond the bits of code that manage keeping calendars, contacts, Health data, and other information up to date, specific agents watch for behavior that requires new syncing for iCloud Drive and iCloud Photos.
Did you take a picture? Did you import or edit an image? Did you modify a file on iCloud Drive and then save it? Did someone update images in a Shared Library or an iCloud Shared Album? Has a collaborator on an iCloud-shared file made a change? Immediately or shortly after any of these and related acts, data is copied in one direction or the other.
Part of the overall background management task is to ensure you don’t run out of storage. This happens through optimization, Apple’s catchall term for dumping items from local storage that have copies safely on iCloud. There’s no particular way to tune this optimization behavior: Apple makes it available or not, and uses cues like the file or media modification date or the last time you accessed something.
With “Download Originals to this Mac” enabled, your Mac has a mirror of media synced in your iCloud account.
If you’re on an iPhone or iPad, you likely have optimized storage enabled for iCloud Photos, and there’s no way to disable it for iCloud Drive, accessible via the Files app. On a Mac, you can choose optimization for iCloud Drive files.
iMazing is one of the few third-party apps that can backup iPhones and iPads—but only what’s stored on them.
So this is the conundrum when you want to back up these files. On an iPhone or iPad, Apple doesn’t offer its own “first-party” to back up everything—only the stuff that isn’t stored on iCloud.1iMazing is one of the only third-party options that lets you pull down data that Apple doesn’t let you copy separately. But iMazing is limited to what’s on the iPhone or iPad—it can’t pull down iCloud data.
For Mac users, as long as optimization is enabled, there’s no way to locally back up files or the iCloud Photo Library in full. The only files that can be copied are the ones fully cached. If you have enough local storage, you can disable optimization and keep files and media stored on your own volumes. But that limits your cloud-stored totals to the startup volume or startup volume plus an external volume for the Photos Library, obviating one of the key advantages of having cloud storage in the first place!
Let’s consider what alternatives could let us meet Matthias’s criteria:
Not keeping a Mac always on
Allowing NAS or similar networked storage
A wake-up call to action
If the goal is to have an up-to-date, local, networked copy without a continuously active Mac, there are several ways to go about this. The first couple of options require enough locally attached storage to have optimization disabled, so that a complete copy of your iCloud drive, Photos library, or both is stored locally on a Mac.
Since your Mac can probably keep up with background archiving of files stored locally to a NAS over modern Wi-Fi or Ethernet, you could use archiving software that runs continuously or at frequent intervals without imposing a heavy load. Since the only items that need to be scanned for iCloud are the iCloud Drive folder and the Photos Library, that may work well enough.
Instead of keeping that Mac on all the time, you can automate its power settings via the macOS Unix command pmset, a rough abbreviation of “power management settings.”2 You can enter a command in Terminal to have your Mac wake and sleep at specific intervals. If you wanted to power up and down your Mac during the day, but ensure the network sync occurred, you could schedule it to wake up for an hour every night.
To have your Mac wake or power up at 2 am each day and then shut down at 3 am, you would enter the following in Terminal, plus your administrative password when prompted:
You can make sure the schedule was set as expected by entering pmset -g sched to see:
Repeating power events: wakepoweron at 2:00AM every day shutdown at 3:00AM every day
(To reset this command, enter pmset repeat cancel.)
This approach has drawbacks:
You cannot set your Mac’s Energy setting to allow sleep; having the display power down is fine. If the Mac is in sleep mode, it can’t be shut down via pmset.
If someone is sleeping near the Mac that’s powering up daily at 2 a.m., you should mute its sound to avoid the startup chime causing a disturbance.
Cloudy with a chance of competition
You could opt out of the Apple ecosystem at least in part to achieve some or all of what you want. iCloud Photos is the bigger lift because of how deeply Apple has integrated media in its operating systems from the Photos Library and iCloud Photos. There’s no good way to back up an optimized Mac library in full, but if storage is an issue, you can relocate the Photos Library to an external volume.3 (That’s what I’ve done: I have a relatively inexpensive 2 TB SSD that uses 10 Gbps USB 3 to hold my Photos Library. It’s plenty fast for my purposes.)
Whether stored on an internal or external volume, you could use a cloning or archiving tool to copy your Photos Library to a NAS device with Arq Backup, Carbon Copy Cloner, or ChronoSync. (You can also have external volumes backed up locally or over the network using Time Machine.)
That might solve iCloud Photos for you, but what about an out-of-the-iCloud-box though for iCloud Drive: Use a competing cloud-storage system. Most cost the same or less (particularly with annual discounts) for the same storage as Apple’s iCloud+ paid tiers. And Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft OneDrive have direct Finder integration. If you have enough local storage on your startup volume or an external volume—something iCloud doesn’t allow—you could use one of the backup apps above to archive files to a NAS.
However, if you have to or want to store only some of your cloud-synced files, you’re not out of luck: because Dropbox, Google, and Microsoft offer developer access for third-party apps, your NAS may already have built-in support where it can directly download a full copy of all files and keep it up to date. For instance, the popular Synology brand offers those three cloud services and pure cloud storage flavors, too.
I do wish Apple would provide an API for its cloud services, which feels against the Apple ethos but could help provide a rich ecosystem for third parties to backing up from and to iCloud.
For further reading
If you’re looking for deeper dives on the above topics, consider the following Take Control Books titles:
My Take Control of Apple Screen and File Sharing digs into Dropbox, Google, and OneDrive as alternatives or supplements to iCloud Drive, including comparing file and folder sharing and linking options.
Our fearless leader, Jason Snell, has a long-running title, Take Control of Photos, which tells you everything you want to know about using that app.
Local and networked digital storage of all kinds, including NAS, gets a good luck in Jeff Carlson’s Take Control of Digital Storage.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
As Apple puts it, “iCloud backups include all the information and settings stored on your device that don’t already sync to iCloud.” A Mac or Windows backup from an iPhone or iPad excludes “Data already synced and stored in iCloud, like iCloud Photos, iMessages, and text (SMS) and multimedia (MMS) messages.” ↩
Apple once offered a graphical interface for scheduling using pmset in Battery/Energy settings. Now it documents how to use the Unix command. ↩
If you need step-by-step instructions on moving your library to an external volume, consult Apple’s support note or my Macworld column from 2021. Apple discourages using a networked volume. ↩
Apple executives are on the move and so is the opacity level of Liquid Glass. And, look, if you don’t want to read the third section, I won’t blame you.
Tech exec tectonics
They say that an executive in motion stays in motion unless acted upon by an outside force.
I mean, presumably someone says this.
Apple saw several executives on the move this week as one was poached by Meta for big bucks.
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been offering AI engineers massive pay packages to poach them from other companies…
Before you complain about Meta’s predatory practices, have you tried the poached executive? It’s delicious.
Ruoming Pang, who manages Apple’s foundation models team, is moving from Apple to Meta. … Meta lured Pang with a deal worth tens of millions of dollars per year.
The language models aren’t the only things that are large in AI.…
Twenty years ago, Mac OS X Tiger introduced us to a search feature that would stand the test of time: Spotlight. And while at the time I found myself ambivalent about its many quirks, some of which were maddening, with the benefit of hindsight, it’s hard not to be impressed by how far Spotlight has come.
Almost every year, Apple has made Spotlight a little better, and macOS Tahoe is its biggest and most impressive upgrade ever. So let’s celebrate Spotlight for what it was, what it is, and what it’s about to become.
Join me on a journey through the first twenty years of Mac’s control panels.
Just an amazing walk through history with a designer’s eye and a remarkable collection of interface demos powered by the also-amazing Infinite Mac, which is now embeddable in websites.
Merri and I had little kids when I went out on my own; our youngest son was born a month after Relay launched…. Today, we’ve got two teenagers and a 5th grader. I’ve been able to attend more school programs, go to more doctor appointments, and be present for more everyday moments than would have been possible had I stayed in a traditional job. Those things add up to something special. To be clear, I have prioritized work over family life way too many times over the last decade, just like other parents, but I like to think that when my kids reflect on their upbringing, memories of Merri and me both being present will be at the forefront of their minds.
If you’re just a fan of Relay, you may not realize that Stephen has made some very serious changes to his “one job” over the years—most independent creators don’t have a single job that brings in enough income, so we end up working five or six different ones instead—most notably becoming the co-host of Mac Power Users and working with David Smith on his stable of apps.
Back in my days at IDG, your tenth anniversary got a dinner with the Chairman and a fancy pen set. Being an indie gets you moments of reflection about your life, some congratulations from friends (Congratulations, Stephen!), and a hearty pat on the back—if you’re flexible enough to reach.
macOS Tahoe is ending support for FireWire, formerly Apple’s high-speed transfer bus of choice. Stephen Hackett put in the work to confirm things:
It has been reported that macOS Tahoe doesn’t include support for FireWire devices. To see for myself, I dug out an old FireWire 800 drive I used to use in my Apple service tech days….
On my Sequoia machine, the volumes all appeared in Finder and System Information app, under FireWire. When I moved the drive over to my MacBook Air running macOS Tahoe, it was a very different story. With the dongles in place, I held my breath, but it was in vain.
Stephen’s adapter chain was a FireWire 800 cable to a Thunderbolt 2 adapter to a Thunderbolt 3 adapter to a MacBook Pro. A while back I did something similar, but I took it all the way back to a digital camcorder from Thunderbolt 3 to Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 to FireWire 400 to a Sony iLink cable.
Now I just need to remember that macOS Sequoia is the latest OS that I can use if I ever need to reach back to a FireWire device again…
Apple today announced Jeff Williams will transition his role as chief operating officer later this month to Sabih Khan, Apple’s senior vice president of Operations as part of a long-planned succession. Williams will continue reporting to Apple CEO Tim Cook and overseeing Apple’s world class design team and Apple Watch alongside the company’s Health initiatives. Apple’s design team will then transition to reporting directly to Cook after Williams retires late in the year.
The “long-planned succession” bit is intended to ease speculation that Williams was forced out. Khan, Williams’s longtime lieutenant, certainly has his work cut out for him at a time when Apple’s supply chain is under intense scrutiny all around the world, but most notably by the White House.
Also interesting is that Williams, like semi-retired Apple execs Luca Maestri and Phil Schiller1, will retain a smaller portfolio (at least for a while)—in his case, the design team and Apple Watch. Fans of Apple products who don’t pay attention to the executive minutiae of Apple will probably know Williams best as the face of Apple Watch introductions.
Stephen Hackett pointed out to me that Schiller became an “Apple Fellow” and Maestri’s announcement never used the word “retire.” So perhaps Williams will actually entirely escape the ring eventually! ↩
Fueled by charts, we compile our wish list for a new, low-cost Mac laptop. Will it be a recycled M1 Air or something new? And how disappointingly high will the price be? Also, Apple tries to balance product priorities with its internal teams.
I’ve long been someone who enjoys a change of scenery: working out of a coffee shop or library to give myself a break from the home office. So this past week, I’ve spent some time mixing it up in a bunch of different places: the beach, the lake, even the desert.
Are you getting it? These aren’t three locations: it’s just one. Still my office. But thanks to the Apple Vision Pro, I’ve been able to get the feeling of working in novel, exciting places without ever leaving the comfort of my desk.1
This is the most time I’ve spent with the Vision Pro since its release: I got to try the initial in-store demo back when it first launched, as well as a short, mostly guided experience with Apple in a briefing last year, but thanks to Apple sending me a unit to try out for the next few months, I’ve finally gotten the chance to really put it through its paces.
Apple added optimized charging for iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS about five years ago, with iPhone and iPad support coming a little earlier than the others. Optimized charging should extend the battery life on your various devices by preventing certain kinds of wear.
However, Six Colors reader Dan says he’s not seeing this with a new iPhone. After upgrading from an iPhone XR to an iPhone 16 Plus, Dan set the maximum charging to 80%. He had previously avoided using “smart” charging in Settings:
I never go through [80%] in a day. That being said, periodically, after having my phone wirelessly charging next to my bed all night, it shows 100% charge. There’s been no change in my settings, so I’m a little confused if this is an Apple Intelligence snafu. Or?
Why would his iPhone ignore his attempts to limit charging? We need to dig into how Apple balances battery safety and reducing wear against our stated preferences.
(As always, you can skip ahead if you’d like to bypass the exposition.)
Mmm…donuts
Homer to donuts is like a lithium-ion battery to electrons.
Charging a lithium-ion battery resembles a classic segment in “The Simpsons” in which Homer sells his soul to the devil. While waiting for a trial over his fate, the devil temporarily sends Homer to hell, where a demon feeds him endless donuts. Homer, delighted, swells in size as he says, “More!” (The demon: “I don’t understand it. James Coco went mad in fifteen minutes!”)
While Homer’s insatiable donut need led him to grow in size without consequence, if he were a Li-ion battery, the calories (electrons) in the donuts would have led to an out-of-control thermal reaction, and he would burst into flames. (He was already in hell—would it have mattered?)
When you connect a power system drawing juice from line voltage or a battery pack to a device with a Li-ion battery, the device’s power management circuitry essentially stuffs donuts—er, electrons into a body (the internal battery) that has both limited capacity and parameters that require careful stuffing.
Charging is a process of moving electrons at some density and speed from one place to another, where they can be stored for later “retrieval.” In a lithium-ion battery, charging forces lithium ions to move out of one end of the battery (the “cathode”) and migrate physically across it to be packed neatly into graphite layers at the other end (the “anode”). (The actual electrochemistry is far more complicated than that—and far more than I can explain!) Think of it like airplane baggage handlers needing to efficiently pack luggage into an airplane’s hold.
This graphic shows a high-level view of the nitty-gritty electrochemical process. (Source: Argonne National Labs.)
When a battery is discharging to power a laptop or handheld device, the process happens in reverse: the lithium ions unpack themselves from the graphite layers and migrate back across the battery, while electrons flow through the external circuit to power the device.
This sounds very orderly and neat, but there are significant safety risks. With a battery depleted of electrons, the initial charging must be slow to prevent the battery from being destroyed or overheating. This is like trying to rehydrate a dried sponge: pouring water on it quickly just causes the liquid to spatter everywhere. Now imagine that the sponge could burst into flame, too!
There’s a long, moderate pace of charging between empty and full when charging can happen very quickly as there is enough free chemistry in the battery to absorb energy safely. This is the sweet spot where Apple offers its fast charging option on newer devices, adding a 50% charge in about 30 minutes.1
Fast charging takes advantage of the sweet spot where electrons can be pushed the fastest into the battery chemistry. (Source: Apple)
As a Li-ion battery reaches full, charging slows dramatically. Packing the battery full of energy can break down layers within the battery and cause a thermal runaway. While electronic devices have safeguards against this, something like a phone being crushed in an airplane seat or a faulty component in a battery is why you’ve seen videos of phones on planes and electric cars on car carriers suddenly emitting gouts of fire.
This all sounds dangerous. Why does the worst rarely happen?
It’s a numbers game
I know you have suspected that the “empty” line on your gas gauge means there’s still something left in your internal-combustion engine’s reserves. True! Most cars can drive dozens of miles after that. The same is sort of true of lithium-ion batteries.
A truly depleted battery may become unusable, as the chemistry and structure inside can no longer accept a charge. So a battery stops releasing power, and a connected electronic device shows 0% remaining, when it still has a healthy 10% reserve that you can’t tap but which prevents its demise.
Apple’s advice when storing your equipment for a long period without it being plugged in for weeks to months is to charge it 50%. The company notes, “If you store a device when its battery is fully discharged, the battery could fall into a deep discharge state, which renders it incapable of holding a charge.” Even powered down, a lithium-ion battery slowly gives up a little energy over time, so Apple recommends recharging to 50% every six months.
If the battery is depleted somewhat but not too much, “…it may be in a low-battery state when you remove it from long-term storage. After it’s removed from storage, it may require 20 minutes of charging with the original adapter before you can use it.” You may have seen this when there’s a red outline of a battery and your device won’t power on at all. It has to bump the battery to its minimum level before it boots up.
At the other end of the scale, “100%” is probably 80–90% of the stuffed-to-the-gills capacity of a battery. Having that extra overhead provides a safety margin. (Modern batteries and charging circuitry have many other safety precautions.) That “100%” decreases as a battery ages, and some of its internal chemicals have “aged” in Apple’s terminology.
Knowing these extremes helps us understand what Apple offers with battery optimization controls. Before optimization, circuitry would charge an iPad, iPhone, Mac laptop, or Apple Watch to 100% if it was plugged in long enough to an energy source. It would also continue to top up to 100% as the battery consumed power through normal use.
Starting about a decade ago with Macs and a few years later with other hardware, Apple engineered passthrough AC power. If the battery is charged to the optimized level or 100%, depending on the operating system version and battery settings, the device draws power from a connected AC adapter, which, again, reduces wear on the battery.
To adjust charging behavior on an iPhone, go to Settings > Battery > Charging.2 On the last several models of iPhone, you can enable Optimized Battery Charging or use a slider from 80% to 100% to set a charge limit.3 Using the slider disables Optimize Battery Charging. If you slide back to 100%, a dialog appears letting you choose among Allow Until Tomorrow, Set Limit to 100%, or Cancel. If you choose Set Limit to 100% and try to re-enable Optimized Battery Charging, you can then choose Turn Off Until Tomorrow, Turn Off, or Cancel.
You can force a charge limit (left). When you raise it back to 100%, iOS prompts you for how to implement that.
I still haven’t answered Dan’s question! But now you have all the backstory.
You have the power!
When battery optimization is enabled, Apple tracks your pattern of battery usage over time. It uses this—and potentially other clues—to charge your device’s battery past 80% to 100% only when you’re plugged into power and the algorithm’s analysis expects you will be unplugging it within the next few hours. The operating system uses that time to charge you to 100% so that you have as much power as possible at the point in time when you’re most likely to want to have as much battery life as possible.
Otherwise, your device stops charging its battery at 80% and will use AC power preferentially. If the battery drops below 80% by some margin, it will try to charge you back to 80%.
What Dan appears to be experiencing is what Apple describes as an “occasional” override: your iPhone charges to 100% when the charge limit is set for it to recalibrate how it calculcates the percentage of your battery used. This detail is in a footnote at the “About Charge Limit” support page. “Occasionally” might be more like “regular” for someone who only plugs in once per day with an 80% charge limit set. I understand why Dan wondered if Apple Intelligence could be involved, since Apple has intertwined it throughout its operating systems, but the analysis for optimization uses plain old machine learning.4
Now back to determining the maximum number of donuts I can fit into a cell phone battery.
Update: Two readers pointed to the footnote cited a couple of paragraphs above as the likely culprit. I thought Apple might mean a much longer period by “occasionally,” but this is likely the answer unless a bug in the charging algorithm remains the culprit.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
Using fast charging puts more wear on the battery, but battery optimization reduces it, a neat balancing act on overall lifetime. ↩
This option isn’t available on iPad—either in iPadOS 18 or 26’s current beta. A Mac’s options are currently limited to disabling optimization altogether or disabling it “until tomorrow” via System Settings > Battery and clicking the info button on Battery Health. ↩
The current iOS 26 beta displays different options and uses a different visual presentation. It’s not clear how optimization settings will appear in the final release. ↩
Machine learning is absolutely a form of what’s called “artificial intelligence.” It involves using training sets of data that are marked for an algorithm to analyze and then produce weighted results. While this might be a billion images to help a deep-learning algorithm to tell you whether or not there’s a cat in a photo, here it’s comparing some large set of usage patterns—perhaps even artificially created—and then comparing them against yours. It uses scoring to determine when you’re most likely to be a few hours away from needing 100%. ↩
You’re going to have to wait a while to fold an iPad, Apple explores its AI options, and cheap MacBooks? In this economy?
Apple folds
Bad news for folding tech fetishists. (Weirdos.) While we are still expected to get a folding iPhone next year, its larger sibling will not be joining it.
My thanks to Sparkle for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Sparkle is a utility that uses AI power to organize your files and clean up your Mac. Most of us try to be good, but with all the work we’ve got to do, it’s hard to find the time to throw out those old files and clean up your folders.
Drop a file on your Desktop? Sparkle quietly organizes it. Download something for a project? Sparkle knows where it should go. Sparkle automatically sorts your files into three intelligent categories: Recents, AI Library (older files organized in a smart folder structure based on the files themselves), and Manual Library (for stuff you don’t want Sparkle to touch).
Sparkle looks at your filenames and creates a folder structure that makes sense. Tax documents go with tax documents. Project files cluster together. Screenshots find their proper home.
Here’s how Sparkle handles privacy: it never sends the contents of your files off your device, only the filenames. Filenames are temporarily stored for performance optimization and deleted after 30 days.
Sparkle solves a real problem without requiring behavioral change. It’s not going to suddenly make you an organized person, but your Mac can be organized anyway.
You can try Sparkle for 14 days for free on their monthly and yearly plans. For Six Colors readers, visit makeitsparkle.co and use code SIXCOLORS for 20% off the lifetime plan. Because life’s too short to spend it cleaning up your Downloads folder.
