This week I got an advance peek at “Bono: Stories of Surrender,” which is out today (it’s a beautiful day) on Apple TV+. It’s a movie version of the U2 frontman’s one-man show based on his book of the same name1. It’s available in a standard TV format, but also as an immersive video on the Vision Pro, which is what I watched.
I’ve been a U2 fan since “The Joshua Tree,” which dropped at exactly the right moment in my high school days, so of course I loved the content. Bono tells a version of his life story, occasionally breaking into short versions of his songs, backed by a mostly-string trio. It’s shot in black and white, but embellished with bright white-and-yellow animated drawings. I thought the presentation was quite effective, enhancing already-excellent live-action stagecraft.
(Chairs on stage represent the members of U2; a pair of armchairs and a table represent a place at the pub favored by Bono’s father. But his father appears in the chair as an animated line drawing. It’s clever and affecting.)
At 85 minutes, “Stories of Surrender” is also the longest immersive video Apple has ever released. To be clear, though, this isn’t 85 minutes of immersive video; it’s 85 minutes of video, with maybe 15 or 20 minutes of it containing immersive stage or concert footage. Several musical numbers are shot in immersive, and they’re great. The switch between immersive footage and a standard widescreen flat image wasn’t too jarring, either—it reminded me of seeing a film with “selected scenes in IMAX”, where the frame size changes, then changes back. It’s noticeable, but didn’t break me out of the experience.
I also really admire the work the filmmakers did in creating immersive versions of a lot of the animated white-and-yellow annotations that are the hallmark of the film. At several points, the annotations spring out of the traditional movie frame, or appear in front of the frame, or even mingle with items in the frame. It felt like a creative solution to the issue of being unable to shoot the entire film in a fully immersive setting, while still offering Vision Pro viewers something more spectacular than the standard version.
I have to admit, I’m still a little frustrated by Apple’s pace here. The company’s mysterious ways make it feel like it’s running to stand still, having not presented an immersive video that offers sustained immersive content at greater length. Nine minutes into “Stories of Surrender,” the credits start rolling—the opening credits. But Apple’s immersive content has so trained me to expect only bite-sized chunks, I legitimately thought for a moment that they were the end credits.
Clearly, producing this stuff is technically difficult, but this film just makes me want to see more. More immersive video, a full immersive concert experience, a full immersive theatrical experience, an immersive sports experience—something that’s even better than the real thing. I have a burning desire for that ultimate, long-form immersive video, and while “Stories of Surrender” is excellent, I still haven’t found what I’m looking for. I hope I don’t have to wait until the end of the world.
As well as a sort of homecoming, since Bono and other members of U2 have performed live at two different Apple Events. ↩
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About four weeks out from a manuscript deadline—already a month or two behind schedule—I broke my arm.
Well, technically, someone else broke it. A Muay Thai fighter, during a sparring session in a martial arts class I definitely should not have been in. The next morning, I had to call my editor and fess up: instead of hammering away at the keyboard, I’d been getting my forearm snapped like a dry twig. Now I wasn’t going to be hammering away at anything except painkillers and regret.
Did he have any suggestions?
After some colorful swearing—we’re both Australian—it turned out he did. Half an hour later, I’d bought a copy of Dragon Dictate, or whatever it was called back then. It’s gone through a few names and versions over the years. But back then, it was my only option.
I don’t think I would’ve stuck with it if I hadn’t had 120,000 words due and no other way to deliver them. The learning curve was steep. And the Mac-flavored software which I was using was legitimately regarded as inferior to the Windows version. But I was desperate. So I persisted.
And I finished the book.
Surprisingly, I even got a bit of a productivity bump out of it.1 Even with all the bugs and weirdness of early speech recognition software, it was still better than my typing, and I stuck with it.
I’ve been using dictation software in one form or another for well over a decade now. I’ve seen a lot of development, not all of it good. For a while there, I dreaded the release of new Dragon updates, because they always seemed to break more than they fixed.
I also found that while Dragon was great for fiction, where you can get into a storytelling flow, it was less helpful for writing magazine features (back when magazines were a thing that existed). Maybe magazine copy demands more precision. My agent tells a great story about Robert E. Howard, Conan the Barbarian’s creator, standing at a mantlepiece over the fireplace in his home, where he’d rigged up an early standing desk arrangement, roaring and gesticulating as he told himself the story while she typed it up.
That’s how I dictate novels. It’s fun, and good cardio, but it doesn’t work so well when you’re trying to finely craft a heartbreaking work of narrative genius for the super-picky subeditors at The New Yorker.
Anyway, long story short, I’ve always been a dictation nerd. Constantly hunting down new software. Always hoping that the next version will shave a few more seconds off the process or give me a bit more accuracy.
Recently, I switched from Dragon, which had been baked into Microsoft Word, to MacWhisper Pro, an LLM-based app for macOS. I was already trying out a writing experiment, switching from apocalyptic novels to, er, spy romances, so I figured it was a good time to try some experimental dictation, too.
I was stunned by the results.
From a roar to a Whisper
MacWhisper Pro
AI-powered dictation—at least for me—has turned out to be significantly faster and more accurate than even the best, most expensive versions of the previous generation of software.
I think of it as taking a leap from a Mechanical Turk to a probability engine.
Older systems like early versions of Dragon Dictate relied on pattern matching and statistical models like Hidden Markov Models (HMMs). You had to train the software to your specific voice, accent, and vocabulary. Over time, it would “learn” your patterns and improve.
But the actual recognition process was pretty rigid: matching sound waves to a limited set of templates, then mapping those to words using your trained vocabulary. These systems did run some probability calculations, trying to work out the most likely sequence of words from the sounds you made, but their contextual awareness was limited. They focused on individual words or short phrases. Not the broader meaning of the sounds.
Modern AI-powered tools like Whisper (the engine behind MacWhisper Pro) are a different beast. They use large neural networks—often Transformer architectures—trained on hundreds of thousands of hours of diverse audio and text. (Some of it stolen from me. You’re welcome.) They don’t need training like Dragon did. They just work, straight out of the box, for a wide range of accents, languages, and speaking styles.
As best I understand it, these models predict the most likely sequence of words from the audio input, based on the sound, but also the context of the whole sentence or even the paragraph. That allows them to handle ambiguity, background noise, and weird phrasing far better than older systems ever could.
They’re not just listening—they’re calculating. Continuously.
Which is why I think of the old systems as Mechanical Turks. They were rule-bound, brittle, and prone to failure outside their narrow training. Today’s probability engines use immense context to serve up the next most likely word. And no, it’s still not “thinking,” but the change in how it feels to use is dramatic.
For me, there are two immediate and critical differences between the old and new systems.
First, when I was writing using Dragon, I had to dictate everything—including the punctuation. Over the course of a 100,000-word novel, that adds up to thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of spoken commands: quotation marks, question marks, line breaks, paragraph breaks, ellipses, em dashes, and so on.
Every one of those was an opportunity for the software to mishear what I said and transcribe something else. A lot of the time I saved not hunting and pecking at the keyboard, I lost fixing the errors the program introduced by misinterpreting spoken punctuation.
Second, and even more powerful, is the freedom to correct yourself as you speak and just let the AI clean it up. It’s not unusual for me to get halfway through a sentence, realize I’ve butchered it, and say something like: “Ugh, that’s terrible—delete that, let’s try again.” Then I start over just like I would if I were dictating to a human taking notes.
Between those two improvements—out of what are probably a dozen major UX differences between the old-school dictation models and these newer, Whisper-based tools—the boost to my daily productivity has been astounding. What Tim Cook would call ‘blowaway.’
I used to aim for 1,500 words a day (the Antony Johnston-approved benchmark for a solid writing day), and by the end of it, I’d be wiped out. With these new tools, I regularly hit between 4,000 and 5,000 words daily, and the cognitive load feels much lighter.
One obvious sign of this: I’m taking fewer naps in the afternoon. I’m just not as wrecked by the day as I used to be.
I’ve been using MacWhisper Pro for about six months now, so I feel confident saying the changes I’ve seen are deep and structural. This isn’t a novelty bump. It’s a genuine shift in how I work and how much I can produce without burning out.
It means I’m likely to be more productive in the next twelve months than I have been in the last four or five years.
Bots off my words
I’m really looking forward to writing more books.
I’m not, however, looking forward to the holy war that feels like it’s coming.
Because there’s a second step to getting a good, clean copy out of a dictation rig like MacWhisper Pro: You have to feed the transcript to an AI like Claude or ChatGPT and ask it to clean it up for you.
The prompt I used for this piece, for instance, was: “I recorded this blog post using a speech recognition AI, so it rambles around a bit and is full of transcription errors and artifacts. Can you clean it up while keeping as close to my intended tone and content as possible?”
It’s not generative writing. It’s not even close. But for a lot of writers, it’s too much. The fear and loathing of AI is already so profound that any touch of the bots on your copy is anathema.
I wrote tech columns for ten years before I wrote novels, so I guess I’m less given to fear and loathing of our silicon friends. But I understand why my fellow writers feel that way. Part of the reason these models are so good at accurately interpreting not just what I said, but what I meant, is that they have consumed every word I ever published. They did it without my permission, and the billionaires who own and run these companies say they can’t possibly afford to pay for any of it.
So I understand the fear and loathing.
But to me, these things feel like jet engines. They’re incredibly fast and powerful, and they do amazing things. It’s just best not to think about where they came from.
Unlike Jason and Dan, who are world-class touch typists, I’m not. My typing skills are, shall we say, newspaper native, a two-fingered hunt-and-peck style at best. ↩
Good morning and welcome once again to Apple Park! We’re so pleased to have you with us to celebrate our annual Worldwide Conference. Did I forget a word there? Oh well, it probably wasn’t one of the important ones.
Today’s announcements mark the beginnings of a big week for Apple. We’re delighted to share with you our latest updates for iOS, macOS, watchOS, and some other OSes that I’ve probably forgotten about but still see once a year at the holidays.
First up, we’ve got a brand new design language that stretches across all our product lines, inspired by our blockbuster Apple Vision Pro—a device so popular its sales made this last quarter a tough compare—and we think you’re going to love it. We’re calling it Solarium, because it’s like the heat of a thousand fiery suns are searing right into your retinas. Dark mode? There is no dark mode. ALL IS LIGHT.…
Thirty years ago, the first Mac clones rolled off an assembly line in Austin, Texas.
If you’re not of a certain age, you might not even believe that there were once Mac clones. For most of its existence, Apple has been a singular company, selling products that were a fusion of custom hardware and custom software.
But for about three wild years in the 1990s, Apple defied its own nature and allowed other companies to build computers that ran the Mac OS and compete directly with Apple. It was an era that made some long-standing contributions to the history of the Mac, but also one that Steve Jobs dramatically ended pretty much the moment he returned to power at Apple.
The next Apple operating systems will be identified by year, rather than with a version number, according to people with knowledge of the matter. That means the current iOS 18 will give way to “iOS 26,” said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan is still private. Other updates will be known as iPadOS 26, macOS 26, watchOS 26, tvOS 26 and visionOS 26.
I’ve been waiting for this change for iOS 18 years.
Apple Inc. is planning a dedicated app for video games on its devices, seeking to sell gamers and developers on the idea that it’s a leader in the market.
The company will preinstall the app on the iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV set-top box later this year, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The software will serve as a launcher for titles and centralize in-game achievements, leaderboards, communications and other activity, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plans haven’t been announced.
If that sounds a lot like Apple’s Game Center well…yes, yes it does. Gurman says the app will replace Game Center, which, okay. It’s not as if Game Center is really a destination these days; it was long ago demoted from app to system feature offering a framework for developers to hook into, but there’s no there there. Given that, I can’t fault Apple for wanting to throw out something with little to no brand equity in favor of something new and, hopefully, more compelling.
But if I seem skeptical about all of this, it’s because it feels like I’ve been writing about Apple and gaming for twenty years.2 There’s nothing new here: every few years, like clockwork, Apple gets excited about games again, which is code for “remembers what a lucrative market they are.”
In all my time covering Apple, I have never seen Tim Cook, or, frankly, any Apple executive get up on stage and talk about games in a way that makes me believe they play games or are passionate about gaming. Which is surprising, because we’re talking about video games, not dental surgery. Chances are somebody high up in Apple management plays games regularly, beyond Wordle, right? To suggest otherwise seems as implausible as saying that nobody in Apple’s management watches movies, or TV shows, or listens to music. Or reads books.3 And yet it feels more likely to find somebody on Apple’s leadership page who’s excited about Klingon opera.4
Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Gurman’s report also says this new app will feature promotional tie-ins to Apple Arcade, because of course it will: that’s a $7/month subscription and, despite a lack of hard data on subscriber numbers, I’m going to go ahead and assume there’s plenty of headroom to grow it and, consequently, Apple’s Services revenue.
I remain skeptical that this new app will move the needle significantly for Apple in gaming. The hardcore gamers who want to see more triple-A headline titles are not going to get them as a result of this, and there’s a lot of competition in this “game marketplace” category from the likes of Steam and Xbox (which would still like to make its own game streaming app for the iPhone if Apple can get out of the way, thank you very much). Even with Apple’s game porting toolkit, which remains an impressive piece of technology, the gaming floodgates haven’t exactly opened wide in the last couple years.
If I have any hopes for this latest endeavor, it’s the comment that “Apple is also planning a Mac version of the app that can tap into games downloaded outside of the App Store.” But honestly it would be silly of Apple not to do this, since a lot of games on the Mac are not available via the Mac App Store. Even if the company hates the idea of reminding you that you can ever buy software outside of an App Store.
Still, despite everything, the iPhone remains an incredibly popular gaming destination, in no small part because it is one of two major platforms in the most significant consumer electronics device category, and people like to play video games, which continue to only be available on electronic devices.5 But the more times Apple tries to make gaming on the Mac happen, the more it looks like Steve Buscemi toting a skateboard.6
I considered paying the $20 to get doesapplegetgamingyet.com, but I’m not sure even that’s worth it for a single-serving website that just says “no.” ↩
[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.]
According to Rich Siegel of Bare Bones Software, publishers of BBEdit, the inspiration for the new Workspaces feature was actually the app’s mechanic that restores settings more generally. He realized that same mechanic could be used to save and restore different states, so for instance, if you’re switching between projects or clients or types of work, you can now save your existing workspace and load a new one, with a completely different set of open windows. When you’re ready to switch back, you just load the old workspace and the current set of open windows disappears, replaced by the other workspace. It’s a simple concept that will make life easier for a lot of people who use BBEdit in many different contexts.
Another highlight of this release is a bit more subtle, but will be especially noticeable to people who do a lot of text search in BBEdit. Siegel says the BBEdit team updated a lot of its multi-file search-and-replace functionality to more modern code (keep in mind that some of that code might be as much as 40 years old!), doing a deep dive that allowed them to identify “hot spots” and optimize them to run faster. Siegel says those changes have sped up numerous BBEdit features, including not just search but processing lines and scanning HTML.
As usual, the change log is long and detailed, and includes dozens of items, including support for FTPS transfers (in addition to the existing FTP and SFTP support), more prominent highlighting of parentheticals (I’ve found this very helpful in my python scripts), the ability to strip diacriticals from text, a Window menu that supports the standard macOS facilities for moving and resizing, improvements to Git support, and previewing of delimited text files (despite the fact that BBEdit is still not a spreadsheet).
As usual, BBEdit is free to download—and has an awful lot of functionality for no cost. Additional features are unlocked with purchase direct from Bare Bones, which is $60 (discounts for previous version owners available), or via a Mac App Store subscription for $5/month or $50/year.
According to Apple, beginning Thursday the company will offer support for repairs on iPad Air (M2 and later), iPad Pro (M4), iPad mini (A17 Pro), and iPad (A16), covering displays, batteries, cameras, and charging ports. The program, which already covers the U.S. and Europe, will expand to Canada this summer, Apple said.
Cook could announce plans to begin assembling some iPhones in the U.S. within three years, and lay out a detailed road map to make more of them… That would give Trump a tangible win: Apple devices would effectively say, “Assembled in the USA.”…
The analogy in manufacturing, often made by industry experts, is that “American-made” often means “American-assembled,” using global components. This is a crucial distinction and, depending on Trump’s mood, a palatable one.
“Depending on Trump’s mood” is doing a lot of work there, but yes, if you can’t make iPhones in the U.S., can you perhaps come up with a program to create U.S. factory jobs for last-stage assembly that would allow the White House to declare victory?
On top of that, perhaps the smart move is for Apple to also announce an investment in getting U.S. workers up to speed so that more manufacturing can be brought home:
Apple could also announce a public-private partnership to invest in skilled workers in the U.S…. “Manufacturing costs and skilled labor to produce the iPhone are the real obstacles. It’s not just a Trump threat and a snap of the fingers that’s going to make this happen,” [Wedbush Securities analyst Dan] Ives said. “The U.S. government needs to play a role to make this herculean strategic move a reality.”
If we accept that Apple can’t make iPhones in the U.S. anytime soon (and every expert agrees that it’s impossible), this sounds like a reasonable way forward. But if the President of the United States refuses to accept that reality, it’s unclear if there’s any move Tim Cook can make that will satisfy him.
“We love Sneaky Sasquatch and are excited that the 2-person RAC7 team has joined Apple to continue their work on it with us,” an Apple spokesperson tells Digital Trends. “We will continue to deliver a great experience for Apple Arcade players with hundreds of games from many of the best game developers in the world.”
Several interesting things here. First of all, RAC7 being a two-person shop indicates that this isn’t really a huge acquisition—certainly not on the level of buying a triple-A game studio. As Colantonio says, this seems more like a one-off than part of a revamped strategy for Apple and gaming.1
Sneaky Sasquatch is one of the more popular Apple Arcade games, and dates back to 2019, when the service launched. The game isn’t available on competing platforms, which means that this could be a strategic move to keep it—and subsequent titles from the developer—exclusive. But I also can’t help but feel that if Apple really wanted to make Arcade a success, it would have been taking moves like this years ago when it first announced the service. In 2025, it feels like too little, too late.
“Never bet on Apple in gaming” is second only to “Never go in against a Sicilian when death is on the line.” ↩
Myke and Jason debate the merits of Jony Ive and Sam Altman’s big announcement and what it means for Apple, Tariffs continue to threaten iPhone sales, and Apple may have committed to smart glasses after all.
Six Colors reader Philip asked some specific networking questions that centered on this dilemma:
How does the choice between using Ethernet vs. Wi-Fi get made? Does one particular transaction solely use Ethernet or Wi-Fi, or can it be a mixture of the two?
Home, home on the range of choices
The Network settings pane shows all your active interfaces, including VPN and Firewall settings.
One of the joys of the modern Mac is that you can attach all sorts of networks to it, and macOS just figures it out. Gone are the days of installing drivers or digging deep into network configuration settings. Just plug a cable into the right jack where the other end is connected to an Ethernet hub, an iPhone with Personal Hotspot enabled, or even another Mac. You can add Wi-Fi to the mix, too. (This is called multihoming.)
There are reasons you might want multiple connections configured:
You prefer the performance of Ethernet in your home or office and plug in a laptop (or luggable Mac mini) when you’re in a fixed location. When you detach the cable for travel or another location, Wi-Fi kicks in.
Your Internet connection is flaky, and you want to have a backstop in place, like keeping your iPhone connected over USB.
You use a lot of bandwidth over the local network, and multiple interfaces increase your maximum throughput.
Philip noted a particular case: his household Wi-Fi works fine for nearly all purposes, but when they try to use Zoom or other live video sessions, they often receive a message about an unstable connection.
First things first
You may recognize the Network settings options as a gear (many years), a More … icon (more recently), or a dropdown More … button (latest).
Fortunately, you can prioritize which network connection gets used via Set Service Order. You may have never used this option or find it hard to find due to reorganization over the years. It’s always been in the Network pane in System Preferences or Settings Settings, but the icon used to access it has shifted from a gear under the left-hand interface list to a More … button in the same location to its current System Settings More … button to the right and below the interface list.
Here’s how you use this old feature:
Go to System Settings > Network.
Control-click/right-click any network interface or click the More button under the interface list.
Choose Set Service Order from the menu.
In the Service Order dialog, you see a list of all network interfaces. Drag these into the order you want them used.
Click OK.
The Service Order dialog lets you prioritize which network interface is used in what order.
Note that VPN and Firewall appear in the Network settings pane, but because they aren’t network interfaces, they do not show up in the Service Order dialog box.
What you’re telling macOS through this ordering is which network interface to consult first. It doesn’t take into account which of them are currently active. Nor is it precisely responsive to flakiness: an unreliable network set first, as long as it appears to have an active connection, will still be the preferential destination of your data packets.
You can shut down a flaky connection via the Network pane, too: Control-click/right-click an interface and choose Make Service Inactive. Use the same process to Make Service Active when you want it back in the fray.
If you’re curious about how much data passes through your various multihomed interfaces, you used to be able to do so via Apple’s included app Network Utility. Unfortunately, that app has been discontinued, but DEVONtechnologies created its own version called Neo Network Utility, which packages the same Unix network tools behind a friendly interface.
Neo Network Utility reveals that 98% of the traffic on my multhomed network is from Ethernet (top); the remainder is over Wi-Fi (bottom).
In NNU’s Info tab, you can choose an interface from the popup menu and then look at the Transfer Statistics sections to see how much data has transited in and out. (I believe this is reset whenever you restart your Mac.) In my case, as you can see in the figures, the Ethernet connection carries the vast majority of all data from my machine—under 2% passed over my Wi-Fi link.
For more in-depth details, you might like
I have written extensively about networking, particularly for the Mac, for decades. Most recently, I’ve kept three Take Control Books up-to-date:
Veteran developer Brent Simmons is retiring, but on his way out the door he wrote a really great blog post about his assumptions about corporate app development (he spent the last five years working on Audible’s iOS app) and the teams who build those apps:
With retirement imminent — this is my last job, and June 6 is my last day (maybe I’ve buried the lede here) — I want to thank my team publicly for how they’ve made me a better engineer and, more importantly, a better person. From the bottom of my heart.
Good news: Brent says he’ll have more time to devote to NetNewsWire, his open-source RSS reading app, as well as other open-source, not-for-profit programming projects.
A hearty “job well done” and best wishes for a great retirement to Brent.
If you were worried about Jony Ive’s financial solvency since leaving Apple, well, you can now rest comfortably. Ive’s AI company io (they had to make the “i” lower case because the moons of Jupiter are very litigious) was acquired by OpenAI for a whopping $6.5 billion. That’s a lot of scratch, even if it’s in the form of phony-baloney money like shares of OpenAI. A few more tariff announcements and the deal could be worth only $5 billion. It should also be noted that OpenAI already owned part of io, so it is in effect paying itself but please don’t sully this beautiful technological marriage by calling it money laundering.…
