In the meantime, Steve Crocker at the University of California, Los Angeles, was working on a set of software specifications for the host computers. It wouldn’t matter if the IMPs were perfect at sending and receiving messages if the computers themselves didn’t know what to do with them. Because the host computers were part of important academic research, Crocker didn’t want to seem like he was a dictator telling people what to do with their machines. So he titled his draft a “Request for Comments,” or RFC.
This one act of politeness forever changed the nature of computing. Every change since has been done as an RFC, and the culture of asking for comments pervades the tech industry even today.
I’d always wondered where the seemingly ubiquitous “RFC” had come from. This is a good read about those earliest of days, when the number of people on the internet could be measured in…well, let’s just say “could be measured.”
The ups and downs of the tariff circus are making this writer sick, the sharks are out for Apple’s failure to deliver a smarter Siri and this last one… I’ll believe it when I see it.
I want off this ride
I’m starting to wonder if there’s any real reason to cover the tariff situation—it’s like trying to predict the end elevation of a rollercoaster by using its current position.
“Ted, we believe riders will have to be rescued by a hook and ladder truck, assuming there are no further changes to the rollercoaster’s position.”
Tariffs were on, then they were really on, then they were matched, then they got pushed back but increased… Honestly, it might change five more times before I finish typing this paragraph. This is no way to run a country. Or even a Blockbuster video in Duluth in 2010 that somehow fell off a corporate spreadsheet as the company was sliding into bankruptcy and was still getting payroll but not required to report any revenue.
Having come up on pandemic hoarding, savvy customers are now stuffing their mattresses full of iPhones. Which sounds really uncomfortable.
What is the point of all this pain and suffering? Well, glad you asked. It’s to chase the glorious dream of American workers getting repetitive stress injuries putting together iPhones in sweatshop conditions.
The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries.
Surprise! Making iPhones is complicated! And when you create a global marketplace with an intricate interconnected web of dependencies, it really messes things up when you stick your tiny hands in it and flail them all over the place.
All of someone else’s news that’s fit to print
You know the old adage about any publicity being good publicity? Well, we’re going to test the boundaries of that.
The Information details Apple’s travails with Siri of late.
Not much is known about the iPad version of Instagram, and there’s no word on when it might launch.
OK. OK. That’s great.
This doesn’t really matter to me either way, of course, because I’d rather dive head-first into a vat full of earwigs than use a Meta product, but if I were going to use something that came from Meta, it would definitely be Instagram.
Although… I bet they have a good cafeteria.
I could go for a BLT.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
Yesterday, Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information, published an outstanding story detailing the internal turmoil at Apple that led to the delay of the highly anticipated Siri AI features last month…. one tidbit in particular stood out to me: Federighi has now given the green light to relying on third-party, open-source LLMs to build the next wave of AI features….
“Using” open-source models from other companies doesn’t necessarily mean shipping consumer features in iOS powered by external LLMs. I’ve seen some people interpret this paragraph as Apple preparing to release a local Siri powered by Llama 4 or DeepSeek, and I think we should pay more attention to that “build the best AI features” (emphasis mine) line.
This is a really smart supposition: That Apple’s AI team may have considered some techniques off limits, possibly to the classic “Not Invented Here” syndrome. But AI development can be weird, and if Federighi’s team has been told that there are no sacred cows, there are ways for Apple to catch up quickly.
We make our claim as the world’s foremost Numbers-themed podcast, and then we turn to an entirely different and confusing set of numbers. [More Colors and Backstage subscribers also get to hear us talk about our solar power systems and other electrical matters.]
You know the drill: spring cleaning. It’s a useful concept to force you to do the necessary tasks you would otherwise put off, and it goes for your digital live as well. Intego is the macOS security leader and Mac Washing Machine X9 helps you easily delete unnecessary files, identify and remove duplicates, and intelligently organize your folders.
Currently, Mac Washing Machine X9 is available for only $19.99 (1 Mac) instead of $49.99, just in time for your own spring cleaning.
Mac Washing Machine X9 identifies and automatically deletes duplicate files, freeing up space, and removes junk files from your disk. But throwing things out isn’t the be-all, end-all of spring cleaning: organization matters too. Mac Washing Machine X9 can automatically sort your documents and even lets you organize your Dock or other app launchers by showing which apps you use the most.
Intego is also offering a bundle, the Intego Mac Premium Bundle X9, which includes Washing Machine, the VirusBarrier antivirus app, a firewall, a VPN, a backup solution, and parental controls, starting at just $39.99.
Recently, I appeared on Allison Sheridan’s podcast for one of the most exciting conversations you will ever hear about using computers to visualize data. Now, rule number one about using self-built tools that become a vital part of your production process is to never actually reveal how those tools work to the general public. Personal tools are messy and idiosyncratic. When I build a personal tool, I rarely do it the right way. I do it in the most expedient way, which generally means using familiar tools that allow me to expend the least effort possible, so I can get on with my real job, which is not automating things like chart generation.
On Allison’s podcast, I broke rule number one. While I’m happy that not all of my techniques were deemed ridiculous, I did reveal that every single quarter I have to expand my data table and then edit every single one of my charts, clicking between Numbers tabs and moving various selections to reflect the addition of a new quarter and the removal of the oldest trailing quarter. It’s the biggest bit of drudgery left in my otherwise fairly well automated process.
Well, wouldn’t you know it: I heard from several people who said that they thought I could make this process easier on myself. It would just require me to do a little bit of rearchitecting of my Numbers document, and the use of some Numbers formulas I’d never touched before.
Whether we use a docking device with our main PC or Mac, feelings of algorithm fatigue and if it’s enough to leave Spotify, the software we geek out over like Numbers, and if rising prices due to tariffs might stop us from buying a new phone this year.
Apple is one of the world’s most valuable and powerful companies, offering some of its most popular products. And yet, with the stroke of a sharpie, a raft of U.S. tariffs threatens its entire business. Life comes at you quick.
There are a lot of suggestions that the prices of Apple products are headed up. Apple Stores are crowded with buyers who are trying to beat the anticipated price increases. But while prices are probably going up, that’s only one of the many levers Apple can pull in order to deal with the tariff situation. Here’s a look at what the company might do to mitigate the tariff issue as much as possible.
Fortunately reader Neil came to the rescue: using the Internet Archive’s Wayback machine, he retrieved an older version of Apple’s list of functions and compared it to the new version, thus isolating all the new functions. Well done, Neil, and thanks for passing them on.
Here, then, is a list of all the new functions in the latest update, organized by Apple’s categories and linked to their documentation. Now, fellow Numbers enthusiasts, we at least know what we have at our disposal.
Since 2021, Six Colors has been compiling an annual report card focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise, and we ask them every year.
If you’re part of the Apple IT community and would like to participate in this year’s survey, it’s just a click away. Results will be posted at the end of the month.
The truth is that, assembled in the U.S. or not, the iPhone is a truly international device that is full of components manufactured all over the world and materials mined from dozens of different countries. Apple has what is among the most complex supply chains that has ever been designed in human history, and it is not going to be able to completely change that supply chain anytime soon.
It’s not one thing, it’s a whole stack of things that have evolved over a couple of decades at least. There aren’t enough trained American workers. America’s standard of living is higher, so wages would be higher, making expenses higher. Not a lot of Americans are interested in working brutal hours on factory assembly lines. The list goes on and on.
There are moves Apple can make to start mitigating its risk in terms of international assembly and U.S. tariffs (more on that from me soon), but even for mitigation we are talking about a long game, measured in decades.
How did the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg get added to that Signal group about military action in Yemen? It might have been a helpful suggestion from iOS. Hugo Lowell of The Guardian writes:
According to the White House, the number was erroneously saved during a “contact suggestion update” by [National Security Adviser Mike] Waltz’s iPhone, which one person described as the function where an iPhone algorithm adds a previously unknown number to an existing contact that it detects may be related.
The White House claims that during the campaign, Trump spokesperson Brian Hughes was forwarded an email from Goldberg requesting a comment for a story, and that Hughes texted Goldberg’s email (including his contact info) to Waltz. The presence of contact info in a text message then led iOS to infer that Hughes was sending his contact information to Waltz, which it then helpfully suggested adding to a new or existing contact.
I’ve seen a lot of people doubt this report and suggest that Waltz was secretly leaking stuff to Goldberg and that’s why he was in his iPhone to be added to the Signal chat, but the explanation that it was an unthinking “tap yes to add” tap that led to a ticking time bomb in Waltz’s contacts file rings true to me.
It doesn’t really change anything about using insecure smartphones and an external messaging platform to discuss military plans in advance, rather than the approved secure government pathways for those communications, but it does seem like a plausible explanation for how Goldberg got added to the Signal group.
David Smith joins Jason to discuss how Apple will respond to U.S. tariffs, AI Apple health rumors, the release of iOS 18.4, and Jason’s stressful family trip to the Apple Store.
I get that maybe most people don’t get as excited about an update to Apple’s spreadsheets app, but I am, frankly, a Numbers enthusiast.1
So when I saw that this past week’s update to Numbers 14.4 added “over 30 new functions”, I was intrigued to see what was available2—and, more to the point, if there was anything that could fill in some gaps in functionality.
The newer functions like SORT, FILTER, and LET certainly won’t blow away any Excel users, who have had those—and more—for some time, but as a Numbers user, I’m just glad to see them join the party.
And, as it turns out, a couple of those do help me resolve some longstanding issues with one of my spreadsheets. Specifically, the freelance accounting sheet that I’ve been using for almost a decade.
The median is the message
One of the sheets in my Numbers file breaks down my income and expenses on a monthly basis, with some aggregate information like totals, minimums, maximums, averages, and medians. But because I create the table with the entire twelve months of the year, I have to make sure to discount some of the data or else it causes problems.
For example, telling me that my lowest monthly income in 2025 was the $0 I logged for October isn’t useful if it’s currently April. Likewise, having those zeroed out months can throw off the calculations for averages and medians.
Previously, for both the minimum and average I was able to use the MINIFS and AVERAGEIF functions respectively, keyed to a hidden field that said whether the month in question had passed or not.3 The MEDIAN ended up being more complicated, though, since there is no corresponding MEDIANIF function. I ended up just manually adjusting the cells it was looking at every month or two when I checked these tables. But because I had it on three separate tables (gross income, expenses, and net income), that was a bit of a pain.
Just include the figure in the median calculation if the month has already happened (or is happening). It’s that easy!
Fortunately, the addition of the FILTER function solves this problem by letting me simply ignore months that haven’t happened yet, and instead just run my calculations on the subset of applicable values. I was not only able to create a median measurement I never have to update, but I could also remove that hidden month field and replace the AVERAGEIF function with a simpler filtered version too. All of that saves time and means less manual tweaking of the sheet.
While Numbers still doesn’t have a way to link to a file, I set up an automatically-generated receipt ID, which I use as the file name for my receipts stored in Dropbox. (The ID is created when you check the related Receipt box.) It’s formatted as Year-Month-Day-First Five Characters of Expense Name-Amount in the hopes that I’ll never spend the exact same amount at the exact same vendor on the same day
It’s true that Numbers still doesn’t let you include a link to a file, even though it has long had a HYPERLINK function that can make text into a clickable link. That, however, seems to primarily be aimed at including a web URL or a mailto: link and it doesn’t let you use a file:/// URL.4
However, it occurred to me that I could use a URL scheme to run a shortcut. And surely I could create a shortcut that could simply open a specific file?
They called me mad at the academy!
While I didn’t, strictly speaking, need any of Numbers’s new powers to do this, the LET function ended up being a timesaver, since it let me avoid having to do lengthy operations either in a separate, hidden field, or repeated within in a single cell.
I was thus able to drop my old naming formula into the new construction and use LET to define it as a variable called receiptname. Then I could not only display that value in the field itself, but also pass it to the shortcut I’d created, without having to write all those pesky functions a second time.
As for that shortcut, I actually made two versions: the first was a native one, but I discovered that every time I ran it for the first time on a specific file, it would pop up a privacy dialog box to approve the action. No thanks.
For my second crack at it, I switched to just using the Run Shell Script action to open the file via the command line, which bypasses the privacy dialog.5
I subsequently combined those two versions of the shortcut into one that detects which platform you’re on, using the shell script action if you’re on macOS while otherwise relying on native controls. That way it does at least work on iOS, even if you still have to contend with privacy warnings.6
Before I could declare victory, however, I discovered the need one final tweak: though the formula for my receipt file name already explicitly filters out spaces as well as the other characters caught by Numbers’s CLEAN function, I’ve had to replace ampersands with their URL-encoded equivalents.7 Since I’m using the URL scheme to pass the filename to Shortcuts, ampersands are a big no-no (they’re interpreted as part of the URL syntax) and I found that filenames that included them were routinely being truncated on their way into Shortcuts.
So, I’ve now fixed all the major problems with my accounting spreadsheet which means surely fame and fortune awaits! Any day now.
My wife, meanwhile, is a die-hard Excel fan, but reconciling your differences is what marriage is all about. ↩
Alas, I could not find a full list of exactly which functions are new. Apple lists all the functions available in the app, but only broken down by type, not by when they were added. ↩
As I revisited these, I wondered why I’d needed that hidden field at all, since it was possible to do the month check in one, but hindsight, etc. ↩
Probably for well-founded security concerns, since that would in theory let you run an external app or program. ↩
Is this a security risk? Technically, yes, but since I’m the only one using it, I’m not too worried. 🤫 ↩
I also had to add a simple Apple Script to tell the Shortcuts app to quit at the end of the Shortcut, because when you’re using the URL scheme, it apparently forces the app to launch. Fun times! ↩
[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.]
Apple gets caught in the middle of a trade war like Maoi Madakor; if you have to ask how much the foldable iPhone will cost, you can’t afford one; and you might need to settle your Apple tab with a new card company.
On the tumble cycle
Good news, everyone! Everything is about to get a lot more expensive for no good reason! Also, you now have less money literally overnight.
Look, this is all super frustrating and very stupid and pointless, so I’m just going to jam a bunch of references in here and try to speed run to the end, OK?
Remind me again what, exactly, Tim Cook got for that $1 million contribution to Trump’s inaugural fund? Was it a commemorative plate? Because it certainly doesn’t seem like it curried him any favor. Possibly Tim’s parents never read him If You Give A Mouse a Cookie as a child and he didn’t realize that currying favor is a full-time job.
“Tim, son, if yah give a mouse a cookie, that’ll be the end of it.”
OK, Tim’s dad.
Don’t worry about Tim’s dad’s son, though. That guy cleverly cashed out some spending change right before the Trump stock market crash (well, this Trump stock market crash, look for more coming soon to a stock market near you).
As far as screen sizes go, the foldable iPhone is rumored to be an iPhone mini in the streets and an iPad mini in the sheets.
Depending on how you use your iPhone, I guess. I’m not here to judge.
Except for you, Karl. Gross.
Ming-Chi Kuo suggests the foldable iPhone will have a 5.5-inch screen on the outside and a 7.8-inch screen on the inside.
Do you know what this means for long-suffering iPhone mini fans?! Absolutely nothing because the human body does not contain enough kidneys to sell in order to afford one.
Balance forward
At least that balance you won’t be able to pay off might be on a brand new shiny Apple Card from another credit card company. That… that’ll be fun, right?
$100 million? That’s just 100 Trump Inauguration Collectible Plates.
American Express is also reportedly making offers for the Apple Card business but seems to be a bit of a dark horse since it’s not usable everywhere like Visa is, particularly at Costco.
But, let’s face it, news in general just seems to be of lesser and lesser quality these days so don’t be surprised if it does end up being American Express. And there’s an annual fee. And a punch in the gut.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]
It’s under-remarked upon, but Apple, to a point of almost obstinance, considers pricing part of the brand for its products. They tend not to raise or lower prices with the ebbs and flows of the world economy or even the obvious constraints of simple supply and demand. Throughout the entire COVID crisis, I don’t recall them changing their prices for anything.
We talked about this a bit today on the latest episode of the Six Colors Podcast (for members only, you should sign up!), also in regards to the tariff situation.
In his piece, Gruber particularly calls out the trashcan Mac Pro sticking at $2999 throughout its existence, but I think an even more striking example is the iMac. Introduced in 1998 at a base price of $1299, today’s infinitely more powerful iMac M4 starts at…$1299.
Granted, with inflation, those prices would be a little different. In researching the details, I came across this great piece from PerfectRec charting the iMac’s price history over the years, including adjusting for inflation. Impressively, while the iMac’s base price has dipped as low as $1099 in all that time, it’s never gone over $1299.
The biggest risk to Apple in pricing is, of course, the iPhone, and at least the company has a few months before it really needs to make a decision about whether or not it’s going to raise the price, eat the difference, or some combination of both. Or, who knows, the situation could be totally different by then.
[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.]
Dan and Jason navigate complicated spreadsheets; we bring a penguin to a knife fight as we ponder what Apple’s approach to new major tariffs on its products might be. [More Colors and Backstage subscribers also get to hear us discuss Apple Health+ rumors—it’s like AppleCare for your body.]
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