TSMC’s first Arizona chips are now in production, and Apple is ready to be the first cab off the rank with mobile processors made using the foundry’s 5nm process.
Not sure what those A16s will be used in—maybe the iPhone SE? A low-end iPad? Apple TV? But as Culpan writes, this is a milestone in the U.S. government’s attempts to increase chip production and capability in the United States.
Here at Six Colors, we dropped our iOS, iPadOS, and macOS reviews, along with a piece about Photos, on Monday. Our good colleagues at MacStories are also busy releasing stuff that’s worth your time:
There’s a whole lot here. Federico’s review is incredibly personal (with some delightful artwork), and is always a treat to read after I’ve finished writing all of my stuff for OS release week.
Will Carroll re-joins for a mega Sports Corner episode. We discuss the power of the NFL and the future of highlights. [Downstream+ subscribers also get: sports rights, Diamond bankruptcy, Venu doom, and tangents.]
All of Apple’s new operating systems are here, and we discuss our favorite new features—and acknowledge the elephant waiting in the wings. We also spend a little time celebrating the tenth birthday of both Upgrade and Six Colors.
Left to right: The new initial Photos view, which combines the Library (top) and Collections (bottom); the new Collections area provides ample opportunity for discovery; each Collection comes with a Movie and a curated selection of photos.
One of the biggest changes to Apple’s devices this fall is the release of a new version of Photos, one that contains some pretty major interface changes—especially on the iPhone and iPad. I’ve spent the summer working on a new edition of my book about Photos and so I’ve had a lot of time to think about what Apple’s trying to do here.
Put simply, Apple continues to grapple with the fact that the Photos app serves two very different purposes.
On the one hand, the app is the definitive media library for people using Apple’s ecosystem of devices, as represented by the Library view. This is the app you go to to find an image you’ve captured, whether it was 10 seconds or 10 years ago. It’s a reference library and a utility, and if you need to quickly grab a picture you just shot in order to send it somewhere, you need to be able to do it quickly and easily.
But on the other hand, for a decade Apple has invested a lot of effort into making Photos a vehicle for discovery of the amazing stuff that is contained in those same voluminous media libraries. Apple has been using machine-learning technology, suddenly the talk of the tech world, for a decade in Photos, identifying the people and objects in photos so that it can better understand what it’s got. And then it has spent even more work trying to build systems that can organize and recommend those photos and videos to you, the person who took them.
Back when I started taking lots of digital photos (in the early 2000s), there was no way to do this. You had to go through your photos and apply tags or keywords to each one manually. Organization was by time stamp alone, and geotagging was an unheard-of concept. Thanks to GPS stamps on smartphone photos, and the machine-learning stuff in Photos, it’s now child’s play to say “show me pictures of my kids in Hawaii” and get hundreds of images within seconds.
And yet I think Apple realized that since the Photos app always launched in Library view, a lot of people had no idea that behind the scenes, Apple had built an entire curation system that was designed entirely to delight users with pictures and videos of loved ones from across decades of history. And, really, what’s the point in building a giant media library if you never revisit those photos and videos?
So the new version of Photos doesn’t launch to the Library view, with a bunch of tabs at the bottom that apparently few people clicked on. Instead, it launches to a new hybrid view (thankfully simplified and tweaked since the original iOS beta earlier this summer) that displays the familiar Library grid in the top two-thirds of the screen, with a series of Collections in the bottom third. When you scroll up, you’re in classic Library view. When you scroll down, you’re seeing the multitude of ways that Photos can automatically carve up and re-serve you the contents of your Library in ways that make sense and are pleasing.
I know that these changes made a lot of people cranky this summer, but I think the app ended up in a great place. Sure, if you are someone whose idea of using Photos is to launch it and only see the very latest items, I guess this update adds clutter. And Apple should probably let people say “I don’t want to launch in this view” and honor that request. But for the vast majority of iPhone users, Collections are a boon, a way in to your library that offers major improvements over long scrolls through the Library.
The default top Collection, Recent Days, is remarkably utilitarian: it’s literally a way to quickly browse through recent days of images and videos, so you can jump back to that thing you shot three days ago. And then there are Collections featuring people and pets (and, for the first time, user-definable groupings of those people and pets), Photos-generated Memories and Featured Photos, collections of trips you’ve taken (applying dates and geotagging information in a smart way), and even suggestions for good images to use as wallpapers.
In past versions of Photos, Apple focused a lot of its energy on auto-generated collections called Memories, which collected together photos and videos on somewhat random subjects (“at the park!” “pet friends!”) on a somewhat random basis. They were pretty sophisticated collections, offering an automatically generated slideshow movie and a curated view of photos rather than every single item that matched the theme.
Memories still exist, but what Apple has done is taken the entire Memories concept—a slideshow movie and a curated collection of items—and applied it to every single Collection in the Collections view. So whether you’re looking at a Recent Days collection of last Tuesday, a Trips view of your summer visit to the shore, a People & Pets group, pretty much whatever, it ends up in a Collection view, complete with that slideshow movie. It’s a pretty rich collection of stuff, and just as important, it’s a consistent interface, which Photos lacked before.
Apple has also boosted Search in Photos again. You can still search for keywords and locations and dates, and it’ll work. But if you just want to natural-language search for “Julian at the beach in Oregon,” that’ll do the trick. It works really well.
Perhaps more than any of Apple’s other operating systems, iOS is about balance. For many people, their iPhone is their primary computer—in some cases, their only computer. Every year, Apple rolls out new features to the platform, but it wants to do so in such a way that it enhances the experience of using its phones without getting in the way of users who rely on the device.
This year’s update, iOS 18, walks that line carefully. There are new improvements that range from those that won’t really affect you unless you seek them out (big changes to home screen customization, for one) to those that will impact every single person who uses a phone (a brand new interface for Photos). The good news is that most of these features also come to the iPad too.
Perhaps the strangest part of this year’s update, however, is what’s not there. Apple has spent several months talking up Apple Intelligence, its suite of generative AI features that do everything from help enhance your writing to create imagery for you, and lots of other stuff in between. It even launched several ads about the features last week. But Apple Intelligence won’t start rolling out until iOS 18.1 arrives in October—which means, yes, I suppose we’ll be back to talk about them when they do eventually show up.
While those features—or their lack—might overshadow some of the other announcements in iOS 18, when you strip them away, you’re still left with a nice—if not mind-blowing—set of updates. At this point in the iOS life cycle, there’s nothing wrong with some modest improvements. And the benefit of lots of smaller features means that there’s a little something for everybody in iOS 18.
Handwritten notes can now be edited, copied and pasted, and more (left). Writing out math equations is easy (right).
This year, there’s good news on the iPadOS front: A bunch of features that in recent years might have been limited to iOS are also available in iPadOS 18! For example, the ability to customize home screens is going to change the look of iPad screens—and iPad users won’t have to wait until the fall of 2025 to get what iPhone users got the year before. I like this trend. (See Dan’s full review of iOS 18 for more on the full details of that release.)
Unfortunately, there’s not a whole lot that’s special for iPad users. There are really only a handful of new features. They’re interesting, and very iPad, but there aren’t a lot of them. And, of course, the iPad joins the iPhone in waiting for Apple Intelligence features, whenever those arrive.
When I go to concerts, I always feel bad for the opening acts. No matter how good they are, no matter how hard they try, they’re just not the reason the audience is there. At one memorable show in my hometown music venue, the opening act asked the people at the bar to kindly keep their conversations down a little bit while she was performing. (They continued to ignore her.)
What I’m saying is, macOS 15.0 Sequoia is here, but all anyone wants to know about is version 15.1. As with iOS and iPadOS, this fall’s release is the one that will begin to deeply integrate machine-learning models, dubbed Apple Intelligence, throughout the operating system. But the point-oh versions entirely lack those anticipated features, which won’t arrive until point-one.
This is not to say that there aren’t a bunch of new Mac features in macOS Sequoia 15.0. This release contains some classic Apple moves, like adding a feature found in third-party Mac utilities for years, but with a simplified “now it’s for everybody” feature set. It’s got some surprising (to me, anyway) and useful integrations with the rest of its ecosystem that make the Mac and iPhone work together like never before. A useful OS feature has gotten promoted to a full-fledged utility app, hopefully with the end result of more people using it. One of my favorite Messages features, left for years to dry on the vine, has finally gotten a long-deserved expansion. Safari has received a bunch of updates that should help users cut through the distractions and confusion of the Web.
And this release also features Apple’s continued ratcheting up of its macOS security and privacy procedures—which isn’t a bad thing on its own, but comes with associated degradations of the user experience that Apple doesn’t seem appropriately concerned about mitigating.
There’s a lot here, even without Apple Intelligence. And those features—modest though they’ll be, at least to start—will be along soon enough. The rock star is back stage, diving into a bowl of green M&Ms. But you bought the ticket, you’ve got a drink in hand, and this opening act is going to sing its heart out for you.
Anyway, here’s “Wonderwall”—er, I mean, here’s macOS Sequoia 15.0.
Apple’s new sleep apnea detection feature has received clearance from the Food and Drug Administration — and Watch Series 9 or Watch Ultra 2 owners can use it starting today.
This comes on the heels of the FDA’s approval of AirPods Pro 2’s hearing features. As in that case, Apple was clearly very confident these features would get signed off on. As the company is planning to roll out the apnea detection in 150 countries, however, it may take a while before it shows up in every locality.
I did find it interesting that these features are apparently available now; as far as I can tell, the hearing health features of AirPods Pro 2 aren’t available yet (at least on my devices).
Flying home. Taken with an iPhone 6, a few hours before Six Colors launched.
Ten years sure seems like a long time.
Ten years ago the iPhone got physically big for the first time. (In the ensuing decade, iPhone revenue has doubled.) Ten years ago Apple announced the Apple Watch.
Ten years ago I found myself without a job for the first time.
After leaving IDG (which, along with two predecessor companies, had offered me continuous employment for more than 20 years), I really should have taken some time off. But in their infinite wisdom, IDG’s bosses decided that the right day to lay off a huge chunk of staff was the day after an Apple event. (Well, technically they wanted to lay people off the day of the event, but I helped convince them that it would be a stupendously terrible idea.)
The iPhone event was then, as it is now, the biggest single Apple event of the year. And after it was all over, after we crammed into the Flint Center in Cupertino, and saw Bono touch Tim Cook’s finger as they gifted a U2 album to everyone whether they wanted it or not, and went out into the temporary building where Stephen Fry—Stephen Fry!—was admiring new Apple stuff, I was summoned into a back room and Apple’s PR folks gave me an iPhone 6 briefing and handed me review units under embargo.
“So, there’s something I need to tell you,” I said to my Apple PR contact. She knew immediately, and very kindly expressed shock and dismay. I told her we’d work something out and the phones would get reviewed somehow, and in the end I made a deal with the editors back at IDG to write them a review so long as they’d link to my first post at Six Colors, which was a supplement to the review. Apple got the Macworld review they expected, and I got promotion for my new thing.
But what it meant was that there was no way I was going to take time off. The truth is, the best time in the Apple sphere to launch anything new is probably iPhone time, because it’s the peak of attention for the entire year. So I took the phones, wrote reviews, recorded the first episode of Upgrade, went off to the XOXO Festival, and flew back home on September 16, 2014 to wish my wife a happy birthday and press the button that put Six Colors, the site I’d been working on in the background for about a month, into the world. (The next day, my past and future collaborator Dan Moren made his first post.)
Ten years ago I took a leap into working for myself, not working in corporate media. For most days since, I’ve worked in my garage, writing articles for my site, recording podcasts, and writing the occasional piece for other places (including my former employer, which I couldn’t ever have predicted). Lauren and I agreed we’d spend six to nine months giving it a try before judging if it was a success or a failure, but it all started succeeding so quickly that we never really even got to the point where we needed to have the conversation. All of a sudden, Six Colors and Upgrade were my primary jobs… and they still are, here in 2024.
A lot of the assumptions I made in 2014 don’t apply in 2024. It became clear pretty quickly that relying on advertising alone wasn’t going to work, and so we added memberships for Six Colors a year later. These days, direct support from readers and listeners makes up a very large proportion of my salary. Thank you all for helping me continue to do this. I honestly can’t imagine working for someone else.
I’m doing exactly what I dreamed of doing ten years ago. I got to be home when my son was in middle school and when both my kids were in high school. I get to collaborate on projects with all sorts of great people, including Dan, Myke Hurley and Stephen Hackett, and the entire Incomparable gang.
My last few years in corporate media were deeply unhappy. The last year of my father’s life, he would keep asking me how my new job was going, and I told him it was fine—but I was lying and I think he could tell. Over the years I had shouldered more management burdens because I wanted the challenge and because I figured somebody had to do it, but by the end I had given up too much of what I got into this business to do, save the occasional new Apple product review. I should have walked away earlier—I even tried once, and was talked into staying by people who incorrectly thought things would get better.
What I’m saying is, my last ten years in this business have been entirely happy. I didn’t need to take time away to go from purely miserable to happy. That iPhone 6 review, which was originally just a way to keep myself connected to the one work thing I actually liked, transformed into the whole thing. It connected directly to my first post here, and to the first episode of Upgrade. I have been moving forward on its momentum ever since.
I’m happy to be here. And happy you’re reading this. Thank you for the last ten years. Here’s to thousands of new posts and links and podcast episodes to come.
Matt Birchler ran a lot of battery tests and found that the conventional wisdom that Chrome kills Mac battery life just doesn’t hold up:
Using Chrome would leave you with 54% of your battery remaining, and Safari would leave you with about 50% left in the tank. Is that a difference? Sure, but if I work all day and see my battery is at 54% or 50%, I’m impressed either way.
I’ll be interested to see if others try to do more comprehensive tests and validate or invalidate these claims, but if Matt is correct, blaming Chrome for battery drain seems to be more received folk wisdom than reality.
Another year, more iPhones, Watches and AirPods. When will it ever end?! Wait, I don’t want that. What am I saying? One Apple product largely bites the dust as Apple picks up a very large tab.
Sweet 16
Apple announced most of what we expected on Monday, most notably the iPhone 16 and 16 Pro line, all with a new Camera Control button. Also on hand were the Apple Watch Series 10, now even bigger; new AirPods; and, in a startling surprise, an all-new haircut for Craig Federighi. Even Mark Gurman’s late-breaking addendum to his event predictions didn’t foresee that.
Existing products got some love too, with the Watch Series 9 and Ultra 2 picking up the same sleep apnea detection coming with the Series 10, and the AirPods Pro 2 getting a hearing aid feature, which has now been approved by the FDA. A little something for everyone. Everyone who happens to own those products already.
What didn’t we see that we thought we might? Several things, including the Apple Watch SE 2 and Watch Ultra 3, although Apple talked up the Ultra 2 so much you’d be forgiven for thinking it was introducing a new member of the line. As great as the company apparently still thinks the Ultra 2 is, it couldn’t help itself from noting the Series 10 has a larger screen and longer battery life.
But you should totally spend the extra $300 for the Ultra. It comes in black now.
Apple also introduced a mess of new watchbands. But one accessory did not get such great treatment.
The final woven
Pour one out for FineWoven cases. Just don’t actually pour it on a FineWoven case as it will probably ruin it, somehow even if it’s a glass of water? How is that possible?
Alas, FineWoven, we barely knew ye. At the company’s event Monday, Apple discussed only the Clear and Silicone cases, which appear to now be the only cases the company offers. (Unless you also count the cases that Beats is apparently making? Who is running things over there? Why do they keep making products that Apple already makes? What’s next, FileMaker designing a keyboard?)
During Apple’s iPhone 16 unveiling earlier today, the word ‘FineWoven’ wasn’t uttered at all.
Joining the words “TouchBar”, “AirPower”, and “Scott Forstall”. Also, for no particular reason, “moist”, “vibraphone”, and “kleptoparasitism”.
The last FineWoven product standing is the MagSafe Wallet, which the company presumably feels is small enough that no one will notice the staining.
This week on “Billions”
It wouldn’t be another week in Apple without some kind of EU-related action, would it? Apparently not.
That’s a lot of scratch, but as Dan noted, the money is already in escrow, leading me to wonder “Where is this ‘Escrow’? How securely is it guarded? How quickly can I assemble a team of elite misfits to infiltrate ‘Escrow’? Do I have to go to the airport to convert euros to dollars? Where do you do that now?” etc.
Ireland says it doesn’t even want the money, as it considers it a worthwhile incentive to get companies to invest in the country. Whether Apple’s investment in Ireland is worth €13 billion is up for debate.
For its part, Apple says it is always happy—nay THRILLED—to pay all the taxes it owes… as it continues to lobby to not owe a dime and organizes itself into a labyrinthine series of holding companies in order to avoid paying anything at all.
Likewise I am always thrilled to play games I have rigged so that I win. I’m just that much of a sportsman.
[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.]
We talk about this week’s Apple announcements, and preview our work on our forthcoming OS reviews. (And for More Colors and Backstage members, this episode also contains our hourlong September Q&A!)
My thanks to 1Password for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Imagine if you went to the movies and they charged $8000 for popcorn. This is something like what IT and security professionals feel when a software vendor hits them with an outrageous premium for Single Sign-On (SSO), often by lumping it into a product’s enterprise tier.
So the enterprise tier is priced only for large companies… but companies of all sizes need access to SSO. In a world where compromised credentials are the number one culprit in breaches, SSO reduces the number of weak, reused passwords flying around. It’s also critical to onboarding and offboarding, since IT only has to manage a single on/off switch, instead of managing access separately for every application.
Until outraged customers can shame vendors into getting rid of the tax, many businesses have to figure out how to live without SSO. For them, the best route is likely to be a password manager like 1Password, which also reduces weak and re-used credentials, and enables secure sharing across teams. To learn more about the past, present, and future of the SSO tax, check out 1Password’s blog post.
We got together with Backstage pass members live on Zoom earlier today to discuss all sorts of stuff related to this week’s Apple media event. We’ve embedded the video below, or you can watch it on YouTube.
Today, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration authorized the first over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aid software device, Hearing Aid Feature, intended to be used with compatible versions of the Apple AirPods Pro headphones. Once installed and customized to the user’s hearing needs, the Hearing Aid Feature enables compatible versions of the AirPods Pro to serve as an OTC hearing aid, intended to amplify sounds for individuals 18 years or older with perceived mild to moderate hearing impairment.
No surprise: a multibillion dollar company is not going to announce a feature like this unless it’s really confident that it’s essentially all signed off on.
Of the health-related announcements at this week’s Apple event, this was the one that I find the most intriguing. Both my parents have some form of hearing loss and while these features probably aren’t enough for them, I have to imagine it might be in my future as well. I’m also interested in seeing how the broadening of hearing aid technology to over-the-counter options in the U.S. will put pressure on makers of traditional hearing aids, devices that are generally much more expensive than, say, a pair of AirPods, even if they are more capable.
How we open our phone cameras, our post-Apple event spending plans, whether we want a robotic smart speaker, and what a new iPhone button of our dreams would do.
