If you, like me, skim through the technology headlines most days, then you’ve probably been bombarded with what feels like every other headline featuring some permutation of artificial intelligence and how it’s going to change everything.
That includes Apple. Since announcing its Apple Intelligence push back in June, the company hasn’t exactly been quiet about its AI goals. And it’s clear that the industry is likewise interested—every other question on Apple’s recent quarterly results call was about Apple Intelligence.
But it’s only now that we’re getting our first taste of how these capabilities will really integrate into Apple’s platform. Late last month, Apple rolled out the first developer beta incorporating Apple Intelligence features and even though they won’t arrive for all users until later this fall—and other Apple Intelligence features will continue to roll out over the course of the next year—we’re now getting a better sense of the philosophy that Apple is embracing. And, at present, it seems overwhelmingly…modest?
The excellent flight-tracking app Flighty has been updated to version 4.0 with a bunch of new features designed to anticipate and explain flight delays.
The new version analyzes more aviation data to understand delays caused by airport issues and late-arriving aircraft. (That covers about 65% of delays—Flighty isn’t able to explain some other sorts of delays… at least not yet.) The idea is that Flighty will be able to give you a heads-up about these issues, and explain them, perhaps quite a bit before your own airline does so.
I’ve been using Flighty for years and I’ve already seen Flighty beat the airports and airlines by quite a bit—I’ve been informed of delays, gate changes, and even gate assignments long before any push notifications from official airline apps or PA announcements at the gate. It’s gotten me the jump on changing flights and allowed me to proceed to European gates at airports that hide the gate number until the last minute. This new update should add even more data to Flighty’s toolset—Flighty’s developers say that it could be as much as six hours in advance.
Flighty isn’t cheap—it’s a $48/year subscription—but I consider it the best in its class. And it’s got a pretty sweet deal for less frequent fliers: you can subscribe for $4 for a week, so you can just use it when you’re traveling and then turn it back off.
Myke has a mostly positive Apple Intelligence experience (except for Siri), Apple results make us consider the power of Services, and the Color Czar may be up to their old tricks.
Now you can watch Ant-Man (and the Avengers) in 3-D in Iceland.
Disney+ has been at the forefront of offering unique environments on its Vision Pro app, so you can watch movies at Avengers Tower or on the Monsters Inc. Scare Floor. On Monday, the company is rolling out another one: Iceland! In conjunction with Disney-owned National Geographic, the new Disney+ environment is based on imagery from Thingvellir National Park in Iceland. In the daytime view, snowflakes fall around the rocky mountain scene. In the nighttime view, there’s a spectacular aurora above you.
According to Disney, the immersive environment was built from high-resolution 3D models captured on-site, as well as gigapixel panoramas, captured by National Geographic. Then Disney Entertainment and ESPN Technology took it across the finish line.
In addition, Disney has announced the addition of four more 3D movies to the Disney+ app: the first two “Avengers” and “Ant Man” films. This joins a fairly large collection of 3D movies already in the app, including several added over the months since Vision Pro first launched.
I think environments may be one of the very best features of the Vision Pro. It’s great that Disney has gone to the trouble of building so many—and a shame that they can only be appreciated inside the Disney+ app. I hope Apple is working on some sort of system that would allow apps like Disney+ to contribute environments to the entire system. Getting some writing done in Iceland as the snow falls would be a nice change of pace from my time among the rocks at Joshua Tree.
AI is coming to a neck near you (probably not, actually), Apple still has several arguments going on, and get ready for the fall colors! (Pro line not included.)
Friendly banter
Apple released a developer beta of iOS 18.1 on Monday, creating a separate track for those who want to test out Apple Intelligence. The beta gives access to Writing Tools, enhanced Siri, Mail features like summarization and Smart Reply, and more. If every time you have to communicate with others, you break out into a cold sweat, this update’s for you.
Speaking of having interpersonal trouble, need a Friend?
But are you ready to meet it? Friend is an AI pendant that listens to what’s going on around you and sends you messages based on your current context.
Now, life is complicated. Not everyone has an easy time connecting with others, so maybe there is a market for a virtual friend for some people. It does seem like they might have a few kinks to work out, though.
“It’s very supportive, very validating, it’ll encourage your ideas,” [founder Avi] Schiffmann says.
The demo video, however, shows a Friend wearer playing a video game with some meat-based friends and the device sends him a message that says “You’re getting thrashed, it’s embarrassing!”
So supportive. Very validating.
Maybe they could run that through Apple’s Writing Tools on the Friendly setting before they ship it. That might fix it.
Applebeefs: Fightin’ good in the neighborhood
Apple is fighting back against the Department of Justice’s antitrust suit, demonstrating that all those hours of watching legal shows really paid off.
The Government’s theory that Apple has somehow violated the antitrust laws by not giving third parties broader access to iPhone runs headlong into blackletter antitrust law protecting a firm’s right to design and control its own product.
“Your Honor, some of these third parties want to alter iPhone by adding a ‘the’ to it. Now, I ask you, is that right? Is that justice?”
In other news of Apple beefs, turns out Tim Sweeney has some weird ideas.
Years ago, a kid stole a Mac laptop out of my car. Years later, I was checking out Find My and it showed a map with the house where the kid who stole my Mac lived. WTF Apple? How is that okay?!
Uh, because the laptop is yours? I don’t… what?
Maybe the attitude that “He stole it! I guess it’s his now!” isn’t that surprising coming from someone who wants Apple to loosen restrictions on its monolithic App Store so he can set up his own monolithic app store.
It’s just a very weird thing to think it’s some kind of privacy violation to have a feature that lets you find something you lost. Maybe we should take up a collection to buy Sweeney a Friend. I bet he’d love that.
I don’t know, y’all. It just seems sometimes that making people with weird ideas titans of industry wasn’t such a great idea.
Color commentary
New leaks purport to show the colors of this fall’s base model iPhone 16 lineup. Check it out.
Wow! What great colors! The blue is blue, the green is green, the pink is pink, the snozzberries tastes like snozzberries!
And, great news for those interested in the iPhone 16 Pro: they also were designed in a vast array of wonderful, bright colors! Unfortunately, due to a production mistake, they were rendered on a Classic Mac and came out grayscale.
You got your white. You got your black. And you got your in-between white and black, also known as grey. Sweet. There have been rumors of a bronze iPhone 16 Pro, called “rose titanium”, but that does not appear in these leaked images. Maybe it was dropped due to a copyright issue because, true story, I went to high school with a Rose Titanium.
(Disclaimer: not a true story.)
[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.]
Apple Pay and Apple Card are among Apple’s growing services.
Apple’s latest quarterly results were about as boring as you can get while still featuring $21.4 billion in profit and setting an all-time third-quarter record. Most categories were flat, with the exception of a one-time bump in iPad sales (amazing what actually introducing new products can do!) and the continued, relentless increase in Services revenue.
Another quarter, another record-setting total for Apple’s Services line—$24.2 billion in revenue. And yet, the more I looked at that number, the more I started to ask myself some fundamental questions about Apple’s business, today and in the future.
Service identity
Let’s start with defining what’s encompassed by the Services line, because it’s more than you think. When Apple talks publicly about its services, it really leans into the high visibility of services like Apple Music and Apple TV+. Emmy awards and Oscars are glamorous, and it’s great to be associated with beautiful, famous creative people.
But Apple’s Services line is powered by less glamorous businesses. The company’s cut of App Store revenue, AppleCare support subscriptions, Google’s payment for being the preferred search engine in Safari, Apple’s cut of Apple Pay transactions, and iCloud services are all a part of the category, and most of them contribute more to Services revenue than Reese Witherspoon and Adam Scott do.
Led by the Google deal, a lot of these services are incredibly profitable for Apple. Over the last three years, Apple has averaged a 72% profit margin on Services revenue. You can afford to lose a lot of money paying for TV+ content if you’re generating $20 billion a year in almost pure profit from Google payments.
Here’s what Apple CFO Luca Maestri said about Services in Thursday’s conference call with analysts:
We continue to have great momentum in Services as the growth of our installed base of active devices sets a strong foundation for the future expansion of our ecosystem, and we see increased customer engagement with our Services offerings. Both transacting accounts and paid accounts reached a new all-time high, with paid accounts growing double digits year over year. Also, paid subscriptions showed strong double digit growth. We have well over one billion paid subscriptions across the services on our platform, more than double the number that we had only four years ago. And we’re constantly focused on improving the breadth and quality of our services. From critically acclaimed new content on Apple TV+ to new games on Apple Arcade and the many latest features we previewed during WWDC for iCloud, Apple Pay, Apple Cash, Apple Music, and more.
Even if a quarter of the Services revenue is just payments from Google, and a further portion is Apple taking its cut from App Store transactions there’s still a lot more going on here. Apple is building an enormous business that’s based on Apple customers giving the company their credit cards and charging them regularly. And that business is incredibly profitable and is expected to continue growing at double-digit percentages.
What about products?
Most people still consider Apple a products company. The intersection of hardware and software has been Apple’s home address since the 1970s. And yet, a few years ago, Apple updated its marketing language and began to refer to Apple’s secret sauce as the combination of “hardware, software, and services.”
My reaction the first time I heard that was shock, but for years now Apple has been pointing out that it expects explosive growth from Services, and it hasn’t been wrong. Consider how large Apple’s Services business has become:
In the most recent financial quarter, Apple generated $24.4 billion in revenue from Services. The Mac, iPad, and wearables categories together generated just $22.3 billion. Only the iPhone is more important to Apple’s top line than Services.
But what about the bottom line? While Apple’s Services gross margin was 74% last quarter, products was only a measly 35%. (I’m kidding—35% margin on hardware is actually a really great number. It just can’t compare to Services, because hardware has some fundamental costs that services just don’t.)
Let’s look at total profits:
Last quarter, Apple made about $22 billion in profit from products and $18 billion from Services. It’s the closest those two lines have ever come to each other.
This is what was buzzing in the back of my head as I was going over all the numbers on Thursday. We’re not quite there yet, but it’s hard to imagine that there won’t be a quarter in the next year or so in which Apple reports more total profit on Services than on products.
When that happens, is Apple still a products company? Or has it crossed some invisible line?
Remember where you came from
Look, I don’t want to overplay this. Apple is still a hardware company, fundamentally. It continues to grow its installed base across all its products, and every time there’s a major new iPhone buying cycle—the arrival of Apple Intelligence will probably prompt another round of purchases, and there are rumored slim and foldable iPhones coming in the next few years—there’s a huge spike in revenue that Apple manages to convert into a new plateau of sales.
Wall Street wants to see growth, and Apple’s Services line gives the company’s executives something shiny to point at, even when hardware sales are growing very slowly.
But let’s make no mistake about where the strength of the Services business comes from: Apple’s hardware. Services work because Apple has succeeded at growing its installed base, selling more Macs and iPads and iPhones, getting users into the ecosystem so they can buy all the different hardware products on offer and tie them all together with Apple services.
Without good hardware and software, Apple’s services would be irrelevant. I hope everyone in a position of authority at Apple understands that. Services are a way to help make Apple’s hardware even more profitable than it already was. But services can never, ever take precedence over Apple’s hardware. If Apple ever begins to see its hardware as merely a vessel for selling more subscription services, the game will be over.
We’re back as promised, with talk about travel tech. (Our 45-minute-long YouTube discussion of Apple’s finanical results from Thursday night appears at the end of this episode.)
It’s that time again — Apple CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri spoke on a conference call and took questions from financial analysts. Here’s our complete transcript.
On Thursday, Apple announced results for its financial third quarter. Total company revenue was $85.8 billion, a record for its fiscal third quarter, which is traditionally the company’s quietest quarter. Services revenue reached an all-time revenue high of $24.2 billion.
iPhone revenue was down 1%, iPad revenue spiked 24% after major new product releases, and Mac revenue ticked up 2%.
Neil Long of Mobilegamer has a new report about a survey of Apple Arcade game developers that paints Apple as slow to respond, clueless about tech details, and generally not paying enough attention to the service:
Two other sources told us that they had been approached by Apple to make a Vision Pro game but were offered no compensation to make the title, and no guarantees it would be promoted or marketed in any way. Unlike Meta, which funds a lot of VR development, Apple offers indies no financial incentives at all to develop for Vision Pro – an approach a source described as “utterly baffling”.
Like Dan, I’m also back from a trip to Scotland. His piece covered most of the issues regarding the life of a modern international traveler, but I had a few bonus observations to share.
The best thing I did for this trip was track it all in a single note in Apple Notes. I created the note back in February, shared it with my wife, and began sketching possible itineraries (with the help of Rick Steves) in the note. Lauren and I would talk and then I’d revise, finally coming up with a day-by-day itinerary that made sense.
When it came time to implement the plan, I put flight information in the note, and then began adding hotel reservations beneath every day. (Including information about the one B&B that wanted us to pay in cash.) The rental car details went right under the information about our arrival at Inverness airport.
At some point, I sought hiking advice from David Smith, who has spent a lot of time hiking in Scotland. His response, sent via Slack, went right under the day I had reserved for walking around the Isle of Skye.
When our tour company sent me bus and ferry tickets for the Isle of Mull as PDFs, I inserted those into the note at the day we were taking the tour. And later on, when Lauren made a few dinner reservations in advance, those details also went into the Note.
The final detail before we left was also the final detail I used when we returned: our parking space at the off-airport parking lot at San Francisco airport.
Oh, and to facilitate quick access, I added a Notes widget to my home screen, and set it to point to my specific 2024 UK Trip note, so I had one-tap access to everything in that note, without any messing around inside the Notes app.
A few additions
Dan mentioned USB charging, and I did find a lot of it—in hotels, in the rental car, and on our airplane. Without fail, all of the USB ports I saw were USB-A—which is a tragedy, given that I’ve fully converted to the USB-C lifestyle. Fortunately, I had enough foresight to bring an inline USB-A-to-C adapter (sort of like this one, but not that actual model). I’m going to be packing these in all my traveling bags going forward, because while my house is no longer Dongletown, the larger world certainly is.
On the advice of the tour company we used at Mull, I also brought an external battery—and used it a couple of times at the end of a long day when we weren’t anywhere to plug in. The problem was that all my available batteries at home charge via micro-USB and offer power via USB-A. I packed a cursed micro-USB and used the inline adapter and managed to make it work, but I think I’m going to pick up a modern USB-C based battery for next time.
I share Dan’s frustration with using an international eSIM with Messages. eSIMs are great (all our data was covered for $20 when our American cellular carrier would’ve charged us $240), but it wreaks havoc on iMessage. People with their numbers attached to Contacts were constantly identified by their phone numbers. Why?! So frustrating.
Finally, with both of my kids out of the house, Lauren and I traveled alone for most of the trip and therefore we didn’t need to use FaceTime as a conduit for a baby monitor, as Dan’s family did. That said, we did find a bittersweet use for FaceTime on this trip. At about 4 a.m. in Glasgow, our daughter rang us on FaceTime. Her elderly cat was suddenly, unexpectedly injured and Jamie and a friend were going to need to make the hard decision pet owners have to make sometimes. Even bleary-eyed and thousands of miles away, we were able to give her some support and wisdom in a difficult time, live, via FaceTime. I’m glad we were able to have that conversation, as difficult as it was.
What else? I paid for everything (except the B&B that demanded cash!) with Apple Pay via my Apple Watch. It was my first time using Apple Pay with Transit for London, and tapping to enter and exit the turnstiles was special. Apple Maps excelled at letting me navigate around London, including which lines to take, which trains to board, and which station exits to take.
But those features aren’t all coming in one big drop: rather, Apple has elected to issue them in dribs and drabs, like a stream of ice cream rolling down a toddler’s chin. Which means that though we may now get to try out exciting things like Siri’s ability to understand you even when you trip over your own words or summaries of mail messages that are themselves longer than the original, we’re going to have to wait longer for some of the more compelling features to come later this year—or perhaps even next. The good news is I’ve got a preview of some of the most anticipated Apple Intelligence features still waiting in the wings.
Image clean-up: Sure, anybody can take an unwanted person or stray power line out of a photo—we’re looking at you, Google—but what about when you want to add in that one family member who couldn’t make it? Or when you need to convince your friends that you really do have a partner who goes to school in Canada? That’s where the new image generation tools really shine, eh?
AI-generated crossword puzzles: Apple News+ has only recently added puzzles, but frankly, sometimes you just go through them too quickly. Which is why you’ll now have the option to play infinite crosswords generated by AI.1 Although you’ll only really need one after you spend several hours just trying to figure out a six-letter word for a flightless bird.2
Apple Pay credit card roulette: Yes, Apple Pay can already generate different numbers every single time you use it for security, but this new machine learning features takes it even further by randomly generating a card number belonging to someone else in your contacts. Just don’t ask which credit card number they’re using.
Non-tifications: Yes, Apple’s trying to apply machine learning to notifications by alerting you to priority messages and reducing interruptions from those that might not be as important. But a new feature takes that even further by simply burying notifications, sometimes because you simply should never see them in the first place—like that late-night text from your ex—and other times because, in a page borrowed from iCloud’s invisible spam filters, it just doesn’t feel like delivering them. Like that notification that your account has been compromised or that you’ve finally been selected to go on Jeopardy! Consider it a stress reduction feature: why worry about something that you’ll never know about?
Wicked good Siri: While Apple’s tried to represent a diverse group of accents and pronunciations for Siri, its latest version will finally capture that elusive but iconic accent: Bostonian. Not only will it be able to inform you, thanks to integration with Apple Maps, that parking your car in Harvard Yard is likely to result in a ticket, but also exactly how much it does, in fact, like these apples. Just don’t go the wrong way in the rotary or cut in line at the bubbler, ya jamoke.
[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.]
And we're back! After a week and a half abroad, I've returned, with that weird combination of tired and wistful that always seem to accompany the end of a trip. It's good to be home, but I'll miss traveling.1
As I looked back over the last couple weeks, I found myself thinking about the ways that technology has improved the travel experience over the past many years.
There have been a lot of changes in tech since my first trip abroad in 2000, where I lugged along a PowerBook G3 and a relatively early Olympus digital camera. (I had to struggle to even find a compatible memory card reader when I was getting ready to leave!) These days, I rarely leave home without an iPhone and an Apple Watch, and for longer trips, I take either an iPad or MacBook along for the ride. Not to mention a slew of associated apps and accessories.
Overall, I think technology has helped make travel smoother and more pleasant, but that said, there are always a few things that remain a bit tricky. I figured it might be interesting to take a look at what I learned from this most recent adventure.
Good news: I have to go back to the UK in another week. 😅 ↩
In the nearly ten years since Apple first unveiled the Apple Watch, it’s become clear that the product excels at being a health and fitness accessory. Apple has added new health sensors over the years and is rumored to be working on more, and every watchOS release seemingly adds new health features on the software side.
And yet, a decade in, it’s worth considering that maybe the Apple Watch can’t carry the full load of Apple’s health ambitions. It may be time for other accessories—some already in existence, others yet to be devised—to join the Apple Watch in a larger family of health-related Apple products.
After recapping their excitement about the Relay 10 event in London, Jason and Myke discuss the arrival of Apple Intelligence in a surprising beta release and imagine some interesting new directions for the iPhone product line.
If you’ve been looking forward to injecting a little intelligence in your Apple devices, the time is now. Apple on Monday rolled out developer beta releases of iOS 18.1, iPadOS 18.1, and macOS Sequoia 15.1, which include access to several—but notably, not all—of the company’s previously announced AI-powered features.
Apple Intelligence was undeniably a central push at the Worldwide Developers Conference in June. But Apple also said at the time that many of these features wouldn’t ship until later this year, and sure enough when the first beta releases rolled around, they were conspicuously absent.
Not all features, as I said, will be available to try out in this release. Among those included are the systemwide Writing Tools features to help proofread and rewrite text; inbox prioritization, summaries, and smart reply in Mail; the new Reduce Interruptions focus mode; natural language search for photos and videos as well as the ability to create Memories movies on demands; summaries for transcriptions; and, perhaps most enticingly, improved Siri functionality, including the ability to move between voice and typing, more resilient requests for when you stumble over your words, and answering questions about Apple products.
As for what you won’t find here, don’t expect the contentious image generation features like Image Playground, the ability to clean up and remove unwanted details from photos, and integration with ChatGPT. It’s unclear if those will appear in future builds of these betas, or as subsequent updates after public release. Also unclear is whether there will be a public beta of these versions down the road for non-developers.
Apple previously said that these features would require and iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max or an M1-based iPad or Mac, and those requirements stand for this beta. Once you install the beta, you’ll also have to opt in by joining a waitlist—due, presumably, to manage demand on the servers running Apple’s Private Cloud Compute. Apple says it expects the wait to be only a matter of hours, though times could vary.
Releasing a second set of betas for its platforms before the release of a new major version is unusual for Apple—I don’t recall having seen it in my almost two decades of career—but it certainly speaks to the demand and interest these features have clearly generated. Moreover, giving developers time with these features before their release helps make sure they and their apps are prepared.
This move isn’t without its risk: like any beta, these releases are still in active development, meaning that there may be bugs and other issues—particularly a challenge when it comes to AI-based features. Expect to see plenty of attempts to challenge and subvert any guardrails Apple’s put in place to try and ensure these features live up to their standards.
[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.]
AppleVis is shutting down. The site has been a crucial resource for blind and visually-impaired Apple users since iOS accessibility was new, though it’s always covered all Apple platforms. It’s a news site, an informed but opinionated blog, a place to track OS releases and their accessibility features, an accessible app directory, and a lively community forum. AppleVis has long served newer Apple users along with those of us who own the moniker “power user.”
In a post on the site on Saturday, AppleVis founder David Goodwin said he is no longer able to keep the all-volunteer project going.
Maintaining AppleVis has essentially been a full-time responsibility for me since I founded it in 2010 — a commitment I’ve undertaken entirely on a voluntary and unpaid basis. This level of dedication has demanded countless hours of work encompassing nearly every aspect of AppleVis’ operations, often starting or ending well outside what many would consider a typical workday. While I’ve been largely happy to make this commitment, driven by our mission and the positive impact we’ve had on the community, it has come at significant personal cost.
Goodwin also wrote that moderating the site’s increasingly volatile forums had become a challenge he wasn’t able to surmount. He also said the technical demands of a site with such a broad mandate had become too much.
AppleVis doesn’t look flashy—it was designed to meet the needs of people who do not primarily rely on vision to gather information. But it has always been important. If you needed to know whether an app was accessible to VoiceOver before buying it, the AppleVis app directory could probably tell you. If you wanted a full list of feature updates and bug fixes in the latest macOS beta, AppleVis had it, relying on a tenacious team of in-house sleuths, and sometimes a bit of encouragement from within Apple. And the site’s community-driven approach meant that accessibility bugs and limitations got a public airing when they needed it. In recent years, AppleVis took inspiration from Six Colors’ annual Apple report card to develop its own community-driven Apple Vision Accessibility Report.
The community of blind Apple users has been mourning the loss of AppleVis on social media and on podcasts. The site is currently in read-only mode, and as of August 31, it will go offline, taking 14 years of archives with it. Though several individuals have come forward to propose ways of saving it, Goodwin and his team haven’t yet indicated that they’re open to a rescue.
