Search Results for: "color"

Elevation Lab Pulls Its AirTag Silencing Product ⇥ elevationlab.com

Not too long ago, Apple accessory company Elevation Lab released a product designed to silence the noises made by AirTags when they are out of range. That is a reasonable idea for an AirTag installed in something someone might steal. It is also a dangerous product in the hands of someone who might want to stalk or harass another person, a distressingly well-documented use of AirTags.

Elevation Lab, today:

We have removed the product and will use our patent on it to prevent anyone else from making one in the future.

This is excellent news — a necessary correction for, as the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Eva Galperin put it, “the mindset that things are more important than people”. Kudos to Elevation Lab for doing the right thing.

Silencing AirTags Enables Stalkers and Domestic Violence ⇥ sixcolors.com

Glenn Fleishman, writing at Six Colors:

ElevationLab has released an AirTag product I find appalling, and I strongly urge they immediately withdraw it from sale and recall all inventory. The AirTag Silencer is a simple device: remove the back panel and battery from an AirTag, position the Silencer’s highly engineered pin over the speaker, tap the pin with a hammer, and the AirTag’s speaker is destroyed. This prevents it from emitting an alert in three circumstances, only one of which is triggered by an owner. The other two scenarios aid stalkers and perpetrators of domestic violence, among others. I will not link to it.

News stories of AirTags allegedly being used to facilitate stalking and harassment appear regularly: I found lawsuits or cases in California, Illinois, Louisiana, Michigan, and Oregon, in the last two months alone. In the U.K., the Independent filed a freedom of information request of police in England and Wales and found the use of location trackers in stalking cases had risen from 57 in 2018 to 568 in 2024. Not all of those involve AirTags, but as a discreet and inexpensive option — remember what the FBI used in 2011? — it seems designed for abuse.

Why enable that predictable consequence?

‘Mark’ ⇥ colossus.com

I think Meta is a perversely interesting company which means this week I watched, as I do every year, its Connect presentation. It is once again a glimpse into what Meta aspires toward — Apple-quality hardware matched with Google-quality services — compared to what it actually does: track users’ digital and physical activities to sell ads.

Said hardware this year was interesting. In addition to a whole smattering of eyeglasses that look like slightly chunkier versions of classic glasses styles, there are now models without a camera.1 In an interview with Joanna Stern, Mark Zuckerberg avoided answering a question about whether they were created in response to overall privacy concerns about cameras on faces by turning it into a question about whether they were developed in the past two months to address recent criticism. But questions about the ethics of wearable cameras in normal-looking glasses have been around since they were released three years ago.

Meta also showed off a much slimmer and more normal-looking virtual reality headset; Zuckerberg compared the glasses’ approximately 100-gram weight to that of Apple’s Vision Pro. They will apparently ship in “Spring” for $1,300 USD, which means you could buy three of them for only a little more than a single Vision Pro. (For what it is worth, in a recent interview with Nilay Patel, Mark Gurman said he still thinks Apple’s glasses are coming next year.)

Finally, there was a prototype gadget that looked a little bigger than the body of an Apple Watch and which Zuckerberg says is designed to live on a keychain. It supposedly allows you to use the company’s Muse A.I. assistant in something that is not its glasses or a smartphone — the latter because Meta does not have a smartphone operating system and, I guess, does not want to develop a companion app exclusively for Japan. I feel like I have seen this before.

But as I watched the presentation, I was mainly thinking of Jeremy Stern’s very long profile of Zuckerberg in Colossus. Specifically, this part, a summary of Stern’s conversations with Meta Superintelligence Labs’ “competitors and investors who agree to speak to me on background”:

AI is not, in fact, God. Instead, it does math and solves a limited set of problems humans face, and is otherwise simply useful and cool. Anthropic, and to a lesser extent OpenAI, have trouble ever accepting this fact. Zuckerberg does not. He has not spent a decade comparing his company to the Manhattan Project, and thus he is not above pushing the frontier of AI to help people book airline tickets, make dinner reservations, and edit photos. He will use it to drive down the cost of serving his users to zero, and to drive up his revenue by improving ads. He will use cash from the ad business — and his ownership of data centers, chips, and other infrastructure that Anthropic and OpenAI have to pay to rent — to undercut them on price. The potential install base for his AI is 3.6 billion people, who don’t care whether a given model is six months behind the frontier.

If AI commoditizes, then Anthropic and OpenAI go to zero, and value accrues instead at the complements Meta already dominates, like distribution, attention, personalization, and commerce. If it doesn’t commoditize, then at least he is not his competitors’ prisoner the way he’s been with Apple, and all he has to do is remain within six months of the frontier, which he’s already close to. Heads, he wins; tails, he wins.

I cannot see myself buying anything Meta releases; as curious as I have become with the company, I find it fundamentally repulsive. This part of the article from Stern, though, is a perfect encapsulation of why, regardless of having little success outside its core advertising business, Meta will keep going. My interpretation of this is that Meta has somehow harnessed controversy as a positive. Not only will people continue using its services regardless of how many bad news stories Meta endures, those very problems mean it is underestimated, so it can keep trying stuff and seeing what works.

  1. Zuckerberg underscored how important it was for glasses to be fashionable and have a range for different tastes and different faces. It occurred to me this is not something he could have credibly presented back in his hoodie-and-ill-fitting-jeans days, which is probably one reason for his rapid sartorial makeover. ↥︎

Apple Releases Its OS 27 Updates ⇥ sixcolors.com

Apple is very excited about all its software updates, naturally, but I am particularly appreciative of MacOS 27. While it does not hit the thoughtful design highs of the pre-Yosemite era, Apple has corrected a bunch of problems it introduced in last year’s Tahoe release and, as a matter of fact, from the past decade of releases.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

The fact that there are more design changes in macOS than any of Apple’s other 27 updates speaks volumes about how broken many of the Tahoe design decisions were. Apple describes the design as “even more refined,” because in Apple marketing-speak, broken features are never remedied or fixed—past features are just improved. The truth is, Apple has rolled back numerous missteps and made changes to others to mitigate the issues they caused.

I will go further: if you crank up the opacity of Liquid Glass under System Settings, Appearance, it is a downright promising visual interface language. Yes, I still have criticisms — of course I do — but these changes have made me feel excited for MacOS from a design perspective in a way I have not for years. Or maybe this is just such a relief from Tahoe that I am deluding myself. Either way, thumbs up.

Snell:

The Shortcuts app, the cornerstone of Apple’s cross-platform automation technologies, gets a notable upgrade during this cycle. Most of it is probably due to the needs of Describe a Shortcut, a remarkable new feature that lets you input some text and then watch as your device converts it into a Shortcut.

There is a similar function for making Safari Extensions, which I have not yet tried. I have tried the Shortcuts implementation a few times, though, and I love it because I am awful at making Shortcuts the old-fashioned way. This new version is so much less intimidating as a starting point.

I have to say, though, I was a little bit annoyed when I asked for a shortcut that validated my Markdown reference links. I now have one that works way better than the one I used to use, but instead of being an AppleScript or a shell script, it basically offloads the instructions I typed to a cloud A.I. model after adding a text input action. So, less intimidating, but it is now sometimes the case that a Shortcut is impenetrable magic on the business end. It would be better if it prioritized building local scripts because then, at least, I could learn something.

iOS 27 is pretty good, too. I feel a little bad every time I give Apple’s software quality two points out of a possible five in the annual Six Colors report card. It is only because I know Apple ought to be doing better. My experience with these releases has been far from perfect and there are still longstanding and embarrassing bugs I run into daily. But they seem more reliable and dependable than Apple’s operating systems have felt for years, though all I really know are MacOS and iOS.

Society Runs on Stimulants ⇥ currentaffairs.org

Alex Skopic, at Current Affairs, wrote about the functional use and abuse of stimulants by people who are overworked. I stumbled upon it by way of the latest issue of Web Curios, and I think the general thrust of the article is something I find noteworthy enough to link to it. Alas, it is sloppy in the details.

The second paragraph is a good place to start. Skopic dumps a litany of numbers about declining affordability and the difficulties of modern life; among them:

[…] And according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 21.6 percent of Americans now work longer than 40 hours a week, with a beleaguered five percent working as many as 60 hours. […]

The way this is phrased — “now work longer than 40 hours a week”, emphasis mine — may give the impression this figure is a new high, either historically or at least in recent memory. But it is not. This figure has been declining for at least twenty years. In 2005, the BLS reported 27.9% of people employed in nonagricultural jobs in the U.S. worked 41 or more hours; by 2015, that was down to 24.8%, compared to 21.6% in 2025. The same drop is also present for workers committing 60 hours per week or more: 7.2% in 2005, 6.3% in 2015, and 5.4% in 2025.

I am not selectively quoting here. I picked ten and twenty years ago for comparative convenience, but you can check the intervening years and find a clear trend. The misuse of this data point is a poor choice when there is perhaps an interesting narrative in reconciling the declining percentage of overworked U.S. adults with the proliferation of highly caffeinated beverages, mysterious energy shots, and powders and supplements of questionable substance.

This is the kind of sentence that made me begin searching up all kinds of stuff in this article. It raises doubts, making me do the kind of work all of us should probably do any time we read something, but do not because we decide we have better things to do. Well, I decided this is what I was going to do today. I am going to skip past the health claims because they are not in my wheelhouse — double-checking easily verified numbers is something I am more comfortable with — and I will jump to this part:

Monster Energy, for instance, seems to think it owns the word “monster.” In 2009, the company threatened to sue a small brewery in Vermont for selling a beer called the “Vermonster,” claiming it infringed their trademark rights. That was at least a beverage, but in 2020 they did the same thing with video game company Ubisoft, forcing them to change a game’s title from “Gods and Monsters” to “Immortals Fenyx Rising.” In 2023 they once again targeted the gaming industry, this time over an independent game called “Dark Deception: Monsters and Mortals”; according to the developers, the drink company wanted them to “agree to never use a green & white logo on a black background for any game we ever make. So they own the colors green & white too apparently.” In all of these cases, Monster’s legal claim is shaky at best — but with a revenue of $7.9 billion in 2025, they have enough money to bankrupt anyone who tries to take them to court, so it doesn’t matter.

Monster Energy is an aggressive litigant when it comes to protecting its trademarks, but it does not always succeed. Glowstick Entertainment, makers of “Dark Deception: Monsters and Mortals”, fought and won its trademark case. Also, I think it would have been useful for Skopic to cite cases where Monster Energy lost — or likely would have lost — but the defendant went out of business anyhow. For example, in a 2022 case against a store with “Monster” in its name, the energy drink company would have been unlikely to prevail (PDF). Even so, a search of state records showed the company was ultimately dissolved. No matter whether this was directly connected to the litigation, it is a stronger argument for having “enough money to bankrupt anyone who tries to take them to court” than this evidence-free article.

Also, it is kind of weird that Coca-Cola — a company which owns 21% of Monster Energy after the latter acquired Coke’s energy drink portfolio, has a line of teas and coffees, and whose namesake beverage used to contain cocaine and still contains caffeine — goes entirely unmentioned in this piece. Perhaps it is too obvious, or feels like too much of a stretch. But it is strange to dedicate a paragraph to Monster’s trademark battles, which has nothing to do with the thesis of this piece, and leave the Coca-Cola stone unturned.

I wish an editor took another pass on this article as I think there are points that could be clarified, facts that desperately need checking, and interesting narratives that could be teased out. Skopic notes, for instance, the supposed incompatibility of sleep with an economy based on relentless production and consumption. It is true that we cannot make or buy things in your sleep, nor can we provide revenue-generating services, but sleep itself is an enormous business. We are encouraged to spend thousands of dollars on beds and mattresses because less expensive options are insufficiently rest-promoting, and then we should spend more money to wake up and keep ourselves alert throughout the day.

I find all of this baffling, even as — perhaps especially as — a daily coffee drinker. I get that people have different relationships with caffeine and alcohol, so do not take this as anything greater than my feelings-based vibe, but I have never really understood these as functional products. Coffee, when made well using the kinds of beans that I like, is a delicious beverage regardless of its effects. Wine is sort of similar to me. They both have effects, of course, but I think of those as a kind of warning sign: if I have consumed so much coffee or wine that it noticeably changes how I feel, I have probably had too much. This makes them, unlike energy drinks, a delicious treat for me. Your mileage may vary.

Flock and Ring Are Champions of the Privatized Surveillance State ⇥ engadget.com

Tim Cushing, Techdirt:

Even if you truly believe the company you work for is capable of doing this, perhaps read the room a bit before offering up this sort of insane assertion to a journalist:

Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S. 

That would be Flock Safety CEO (and co-founder) Garrett Langley speaking to Thomas Brewster of Forbes. Flock Safety has grown a lot over the past few years, following paths paved by Amazon’s doorbell surveillance camera acquisition, Ring, and other upstarts in the public/private surveillance mesh network field.

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff made a similarly unsubstantiated claim to Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of the Verge. The reality, however, is that cameras from companies like Flock and Ring are giving a sheen of authority to false accusations made by law enforcement.

In September, for example, Chrisanna Elser of Colorado was falsely accused of theft by a police officer using Flock’s cameras. The entire exchange was recorded on her doorbell camera. 404 Media obtained body camera footage which showed the officer refused to see exonerating evidence, in the form of cameras on her Rivian truck and a Ring camera at her tailor’s house. This is just a mass surveillance race to the bottom. The officer in question was required to complete additional training for politeness as a result.

Joel Feder, the Drive:

On an otherwise normal Sunday afternoon in late June, I’d decided to take the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing that week out to run some errands with my wife. Little did I know that choice would complete a technological chain linking surveillance cameras, AI, and law enforcement that led to me and my wife being surrounded by police, hands on their guns, in a Kohl’s parking lot in suburban Minnesota.

Without spoiling this story too much, this was the result of a typo that affected several more vehicles than the one Feder was driving.

Max Miller, Engadget:

Although Flock cameras are often referred to as license plate readers, that’s reductive. Reading license plates is their primary task, but they can be used to track just about anyone or anything. Even without a license plate, law enforcement officers can search for things such as, hypothetically, “green sedan with American flag bumper sticker,” or, “pickup truck with paint scratches on left side and dirt bike in truck bed.” Reducing Flock ALPRs to license plate readers is a bit like calling your own eyes “Engadget article readers” simply because that’s what you’re using them for at this particular moment. The company also offers AI surveillance cameras which do track individuals.

I keep thinking about Elser’s story. The way she was implicated was thanks to a network of cameras surveilling her every public move, and the way she was exonerated was because of documentary evidence from a bunch of cameras surveilling her every public move. It was not very long ago that U.S. media was freaking out about the number of CCTV cameras in the U.K., but the U.S. has quickly caught up. There are hundreds across Canada, too.

To state the obvious, this ubiquitous surveillance has not eradicated crime. What it has done is give police the false confidence to accuse random people of crimes they did not commit. It has also allowed police to stalk people for personal reasons, despite major investors Andreessen Horowitz claiming critics “overlook the vigilant protections in place to ensure that Flock cannot be used for surveillance or to violate privacy”. That is nonsense — perhaps a lie, similar to those told by Flock. But it is not a lie any greater than the idea that we can eradicate crime if we just have more cameras with A.I. features.

The Claude Aesthetic ⇥ newyorker.com

Kyle Chayka, the New Yorker:

As Claude Design catches on among Anthropic users, a generic-design aesthetic is emerging that’s as noticeable as text-based A.I. tics such as overenthusiastic em-dash usage or “not X … but Y” constructions. In slide decks and on website interfaces, there’s a predominance of beige- and cream-colored backgrounds, rusty orange-hued accents, and large serif typefaces that are italicized and highlighted in zealous attempts to emphasize. Subheadings are often “tracked out,” in design parlance, with spaces between the letters, and there’s an inexplicable prevalence of ticker-like text bars, as if the website were a cable-news show. […]

An off-white background? Rusty orange accent colours? Well, darn.

Naz Hamid:

I paused to think about what I found inspiring at this time, and what feels fundamentally me. The answer lay in a mix of blueprints, indigo dyes, and selvedge denim. Add in some mid-century Americana via compartmentalized typography, and here we are. In hindsight, I’ve used shades of blue a number of times with Weightshift, but had left it behind. The blues are back.

Nick Simson:

I am choosing to see myself as someone who is not competing with A.I. I can’t anyway, on either price or so-called “efficiency.” I probably didn’t want that kind of work anyway. I find myself being more deliberate in design decisions, and writing too, so my work resembles something made, not generated.

Now that a method of mass production has reached the knowledge work sector, it is interesting to see a whole class of people try to find and eradicate any whiff of A.I. from their work, regardless of whether it was put there by human or machine.

Jason Snell Ends His Macworld Column ⇥ macworld.com

Jason Snell, Macworld:

A new pivot point for Apple? Seems like a good time for a new pivot for me, too. This year has been full of milestones for me, from appearing on “Jeopardy!” to reviewing David Pogue’s book about Apple for The Wall Street Journal, to crowdfunding a new podcast about Apple history. Along the way, I’ve had to say goodbye to some longstanding projects.

That’s my long way of saying that this is my last More Color column at Macworld. […]

Snell would likely not appreciate it if I mentioned how old I was when I first read his byline, so I will not, but I will point out that I continue to love what he is doing independently at Six Colors. My congratulations for an amazing run.

Apple Announces Forthcoming Price Increases ⇥ wsj.com

Rolfe Winkler, Wall Street Journal:

Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

During its holiday quarter, Apple’s profit margin on hardware was 40.7%; in its most recent quarter, that dropped to 38.7% — a remarkable figure for physical products. It is these high margins that led to analysts like Ming-Chi Kuo to claim Apple would keep prices more-or-less stable and offset the additional costs through its even higher-margin — 76.7% — services business. The launch of the MacBook Neo and iPhone 17E a few months ago convinced some that Apple would hold steady.

That Cook is pre-announcing these increases suggests to me this will not be a modest bump coming with the release of new products later this year. It indicates the current lineup will cost more, and products launching later could cost a lot more — partly because well-funded A.I. companies are pre-purchasing production capacity, and partly because Apple Intelligence features have a new RAM floor. All I know is this — plus the gangbuster sales of Mac desktop models — really throws a wrench in my personal purchasing plans.

Apple’s List of Features Coming in Safari 27 ⇥ webkit.org

Apple’s WebKit team has lots of news about what to expect in Safari 27, and maybe the best is customizable Select:

Customizable select is coming to Safari 27. With this technology, developers can fully control the appearance of <select> elements — custom arrows, option layouts, color swatches, icons, full visual styling — without the need for JavaScript libraries or an endless parade of <div> elements. And because it’s a built-in control, you don’t have to compromise on keyboard navigation or accessibility semantics.

If you have ever tried to build a really nice-looking site-specific <select> menu, this is probably a huge relief. It certainly is to the me of a past life, back when I did a lot more front-end development day-to-day. Support for the base-select value began rolling out to other browsers last year.

That Was Tim, This Is Ternus ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell:

Oh, and Cook will apparently be taking one very specific job with him to the boardroom, according to the press release:

Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.

It doesn’t take a magnifying glass to read between those lines. Cook is keeping one of the stickiest jobs he’s had to do the last decade for himself, for now: connecting with the representatives of various governments in ways that advantage Apple, whether that’s easing China’s worries about Apple’s focus on diversifying its supply chain, or convincing the Trump administration that Apple is investing in the U.S. while also needing tariff relief. Not only does Cook have the personal connections there, but it’s a messy business that perhaps Ternus is best insulated from — for now.

The Tim Cook story at Apple is an almost poetic arc. Upon arrival, he fundamentally overhauled the way its products would be made, primarily by moving manufacturing to Japan, Taiwan, and China. This groundwork is what allowed him to transform the company when he arrived as CEO, growing it into a global behemoth and working within China to create the best and most precise electronics manufacturing chain anywhere. And that became a problem for him. The Chinese government was able to use that as leverage, and the tie-up became politically untenable in the United States, too. Cook’s precise supply chain management directly led to his appeasement of strongmen.

Apple’s Supposed A.I. Strategy Shift Is the Company’s Normal Strategy

Mark Gurman, last week in Bloomberg:

Apple Inc. plans to open Siri to outside artificial intelligence assistants, a major move aimed at bolstering the iPhone as an AI platform.

The company is preparing to make the change as part of a Siri overhaul in its upcoming iOS 27 operating system update, according to people with knowledge of the matter. The assistant can already tap into ChatGPT through a partnership with OpenAI, but Apple will now allow competing services to do the same.

This is not unexpected. In the Apple Intelligence introduction at WWDC 2024, Craig Federighi said “we want you to be able to use these external models without having to jump between different tools”, and that they were “starting” with ChatGPT. Gurman points this out and also notes Federighi’s teased Google Gemini integration. Tim Cook, in an October 2025 earnings call, said much the same. (Gurman also notes that this integration is “separate from Apple’s work with Google to rebuild Siri using Gemini models”, but “the news initially weighed on shares of Google”, which I am sure is exactly the reason for them dropping 3.4% and nothing to do with an existing weeklong slide but, then again, I do not work at Bloomberg so who the hell am I to say?)

Gurman, in his “Power On” newsletter over the weekend, further explored what he calls Apple “doubl[ing] down” on a “revamped A.I. and Siri strategy”:

That reality is shaping the company’s new approach, set to be unveiled at the Worldwide Developers Conference on June 8. Rather than engaging in an AI arms race, Apple is focusing on its core strengths: selling highly profitable hardware and making money off the services that run on it.

Historically, Apple’s software — iMessage, Maps and Photos, for example — has been about driving product sales rather than generating revenue in their own right. Rivals, in contrast, are aggressively monetizing AI through subscriptions and premium apps. Apple understands that few, if any, users will pay for Siri or its other AI technology. The opportunity to turn Apple Intelligence into a moneymaker has effectively passed.

What would have been more newsworthy here is if Apple’s A.I. strategy were anything other than building software exclusively for its proprietary hardware. This does not sound like a “revamped” strategy; it sounds like Apple’s whole deal. If it can use Apple Intelligence or Siri in the future, it certainly might; it is putting ads in Apple Maps after all. Services is a money-printing machine with less risk. But it is still a hardware company.

This part made me double-take and wonder if I missed something. In February 2024, following Apple’s cancellation of its car project, Gurman predicted that hardware would continue to be Apple’s primary business “for now”, as though that will change in the near future. This has been constant since Apple Intelligence was announced at WWDC that year.

What one could argue has been a change of strategy is the rumoured development of a chatbot; Gurman called it a “strategic shift” when he broke the news. But that, too, is somewhat inaccurate in two ways: Gurman’s description of it is as an overhauled version of Siri that will let people do normal Siri stuff — setting timers, end of list — plus some of the features Apple announced in 2024 but has not yet shipped which, confusingly, were also first set to ship in an update to iOS 26 without the wholly new version of Siri but also depending on Gemini. Got it?

But even that is not much of a strategy shift. Gurman tweeted in May 2024 — before WWDC and the debut of Apple Intelligence — that “Apple isn’t building its own chatbot but knows the market wants it so it’s going elsewhere for it. It’s the same playbook as search.” So, again, it is just borrowing from its ages-old playbook. It will continue to have proprietary stuff that ostensibly works seamlessly across a user’s Apple-branded hardware, allow installation of third-party add-ons, and rely on Google for some core functionality. How, exactly, is this a “revamp”?

Anyway, here is what Gurman wrote in January after the Gemini announcement and before the first build of iOS 26.4 was released:

Today, Apple appears to be less than a month away from unveiling the results of this partnership. The company has been planning an announcement of the new Siri in the second half of February, when it will give demonstrations of the functionality.

Whether that takes the form of a major event or a smaller, tightly controlled briefing — perhaps at Apple’s New York media loft — remains unclear. Either way, Apple is just weeks away from finally delivering on the Siri promises made at its Worldwide Developers Conference back in June 2024. At long last, the assistant should be able to tap into personal data and on-screen content to fulfill tasks.

Apple today shipped the first build of iOS 26.5 to developers without any sign of those features. While they may come in a later build, Juli Clover, of MacRumors, speculates they have been kicked to iOS 27.

Does not seem like much has changed at all.

Apple’s New Studio Displays, Plural ⇥ 512pixels.net

In hardware terms alone, Apple has been delivering an incredible run of Macs arguably since 2020, and easily since 2021. There are quibbles, sure — the display notch still bugs some people, the keyboard material wears poorly, and repairability has declined — but these are, overall, pretty sweet machines. The Macs announced this week seem like they will continue that hot streak.

I happen to be in the market for a new Mac, perhaps this year, and I should be spoiled for choice. I kind of am — the Mac Mini and Mac Studio are both alluring. But I am sadly attached to the room offered by my beloved 27-inch iMac, and Apple’s new lineup of displays is a sore point.

Stephen Hackett, 512 Pixels:

Yes, those are two different products, but they both feature 27-inch, 5K displays in the same enclosure as the previous Studio Display.

Starting at $1599, the new Studio Display is a slight upgrade to the 2022 model.

[…]

The much more interesting of the pair is the $3299 Studio Display XDR.

Those prices are, respectively, $2,100 and $4,500 in Canada. I am not a stranger to spending a lot of money on a screen — I bought a Thunderbolt Display at $1,000 — but that is a lot of money for even the basest of base models, especially since I have no idea whether the sketchy firmware issues have been resolved.

It is not that these displays are bad — far from it — but it is extraordinary that we are ten years removed from 27-inch Retina iMacs that started at just $200 more than the Studio Display is today. Only recently are we seeing more choice in 27-inch 5K displays at considerably lower prices, though without Apple’s very nice stand and quality of materials. At least the XDR has a seemingly new panel.

Three of the seven models in the Mac lineup require an external display. Apple has two choices: one really advanced one that costs as much as a generously-specced Mac Studio, and another that feels like it is stumbling along.

Anyway, here I go again looking for a sick deal I will not find on a Pro Display XDR. Those things really hold their value. Pity.

On Software Quality

Jason Snell has published the results from his annual survey of a panel of Apple observers and, as I expected, there seems to be wide agreement that the company’s software quality is not up to scratch thanks primarily to Liquid Glass. This year’s average score of 2.7 for operating system quality and 3.1 for first-party app quality is a decline from the average score of 3.4 and 3.5, respectively, last year.

But look back a little further and the grades for Apple’s software quality have been hovering at a similar level for a while: 3.6 in 2023, 3.4 both years prior, and 3.5 in 2020. This is well below the average hardware reliability ranking which is a full point higher, and does not match the typical grades given to the Mac and iPhone in the same time frame. Snell converts the software score to an average letter grade of B to B–. Is Apple satisfied with shipping a consistently B product?

I confess the grade I have given has been lower than this average. My experience with Apple’s software for the past several years has been markedly less than fine. Given that my scores have deviated from those given by many others, I started to question my own fairness — which, given that I am merely A Guy giving my opinion about a multi-trillion-dollar corporation, is a little silly. Then again, software is made — mostly — by people, and the intent I have in participating in the Six Colors survey is that a person working at Apple might possibly read my feedback.

When I think about the quality of something, I put my expectations in context. If I were thinking about the quality of a restaurant meal, for example, it is not enough to merely provide sustenance. It must taste good, should look good, and ideally be more interesting than the individual ingredients suggest. The balance is different in software. The most important factor is whether the features I use perform as expected. If it does so with unique design and flair, that is a welcome bonus, but it must be built on a solid foundation.

In short, the way I think about software quality is the amount of meaningful problems.

I use three of Apple’s platforms across five devices: an iPhone 15 Pro, a 14-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro, a 27-inch iMac 5K, and two generations of Apple TV. Each of these is running the latest capable software — all OS 26 except the iMac, which is stuck on MacOS Ventura. I use iCloud to sync a bunch of stuff. I can set aside Liquid Glass and related design decisions for now because there are more fundamental concerns. Even in this limited set of products, I stumble constantly into the kinds of bugs that impact core parts of the system.

There are problems in Finder — resizing columns, renaming or deleting files synced with a FileProvider-based app, and different views not reflecting immediate reality. There are problems with resizing windows. AirPlay randomly drops its connection. AirDrop and other “continuity” services do not always work or, in an interesting twist I experienced a couple days ago, work fine but display an error anyway. The AirPlay and AirDrop menus shuffle options just in time for you to tap the wrong one. The translation button loads in Safari on the opposite side of the address bar from where you can actually open translation options. On my iMac, the scroll bar in Safari no longer reflects the scroll position of the webpage. The Contacts app on MacOS barely works. The Apple Pay handshake between a Mac and my iPhone is unreliable. My iPhone does not always set aside software update space, but it also refuses to purge cached iCloud-stored photos. I have to confirm I trust my own iMac nearly every time I plug in my iPhone to sync. One word: Siri. Okay, let me expand on Siri with a more recent bug: when I tell it to pause music, it sometimes asks me to confirm I want to pause by tapping the screen, and the only time I ever do this is because I am cooking and my hands are full or dirty. These are just some of the bugs I experience regularly — some are papercuts, while others are a throbbing migraine.

These are the products and features I actually use. There are plenty others I do not. I assume syncing my music collection over iCloud remains untrustworthy. Shortcuts seems largely forgotten. Meanwhile, any app augmented by one of Apple’s paid services — Fitness, News, TV — has turned into an upselling experience.

I am somewhat impressed by the breadth of Apple’s current offerings as I consider all the ways they are failing me, and I cannot help but wonder if it is that breadth that is contributing to the unreliability of this software. Or perhaps it is the company’s annual treadmill. There was a time when remaining on an older major version of an operating system or some piece of software meant you traded the excitement of new features for the predictability of stability. That trade-off no longer exists; software-as-a-service means an older version is just old, not necessarily more reliable.

The most incredible thing is that this software is shipping on hardware that feels damn near bulletproof. I am frustrated by the unitary quality of these devices, unable to be upgraded post-purchase, and I quibble with some choices made over the years. The butterfly keyboard fiasco was notable because it was such an outlier. There is a clear expectation for what Apple considers acceptable to ship in aluminum and glass, and it does not apply to bits or GET requests.

Yet, if you were to ask a Mac user whether they would be happier with Windows on a high-spec MacBook Pro, or MacOS on some gaming pc, I bet they would rather give up the hardware than the software. I would. Similarly, I bet most people would prefer iOS on some run-of-the-mill Android hardware. Software is hard, and frequent over-the-air updates mean it is possible to meet a launch deadline even if some problems will be solved later.

What I expect out of the software I use is a level of quality I simply do not see. I do not think I have a very high bar. The bugs in the big paragraph above are not preferences or odd use cases. They are problems with the fundamentals of the operating system and first-party apps. I do not have unreasonable expectations for how things should work, only that they ought to work as described and marketed. But complaints of this sort have echoed for over a decade and it seems to me that many core issues remain unaddressed.

People buy hardware, and it shows. People subscribe to services. But people use software. This is not solely an Apple problem. Many of us spend our time fighting with tools that feel unfinished and flawed; it seems to have become the norm. But it is particularly glaring when the same attitude is taken by Apple, a company that ships some of the nicest hardware in the business. I would love to see the same tolerances for what is shown onscreen as Apple has for how the screen is made.

User Agency and Updates ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors, in December:

Apple generally tries not to leave behind users who haven’t updated or can’t update to the latest OS version. Apple also usually offers security updates for past OS versions, and indeed, the company also released iOS 18.7.3 to address the same issues.

Unfortunately, there’s an ugly catch: Numerous iPhone users have reported that if your iPhone is capable of running iOS 26 but you’re still back on iOS 18, you won’t be offered iOS 18.7.3. Instead, the only update option you’ll be given is iOS 26.2.

As Snell writes, Apple created versions of iOS 18.7.3 for newer iPhones, but withheld those builds from public release, following a pattern of pushing users to the newest version of iOS after about the x.2 release.

It is a good reminder that the iOS adoption rate is not solely motivated by individuals, or even primarily so. Apple requires people to install the newest major version, even if they have automatic updates turned off, if they wish to install patches for security vulnerabilities. With automatic updates switched on, even stragglers will eventually find themselves using the new version anyway as long as their device is compatible. My wife’s iPhone was updated overnight to iOS 26 this week. She is not a Liquid Glass fan.

Wishing for a More Flexible Apple Display Strategy ⇥ sixcolors.com

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

I’ve been thinking about Apple’s relationship with computer displays lately. Maybe it was the report that the iMac Pro might somehow return, combined with John Voorhees of MacStories detailing how he gave up the Studio Display for an ASUS monitor? And, of course, there’s the prospect that we may be seeing new Apple-made standalone displays in 2026.

I don’t want to go back to a world where Apple no longer makes standalone displays. But that said, I think the company’s approach to display technology needs a serious upgrade.

Co-signed. When I bought my iMac 5K in early 2019,1 it was the only big desktop display Apple sold. Now, as I think about an update, I am dismayed I will not officially be able to use it as an external display, though it seems like Luna Display might be worth a shot over Thunderbolt 3. If that does not work, it is gutting to me that I will have to effectively re-purchase this same 5K panel for my desk. And then there is the question of what I should do with my otherwise-good-just-outdated iMac.

I have been keeping an eye on Michael Tsai’s posts about displays, particularly those regarding non-Apple 27-inch 5K models. I know I have to adjust my expectations. Even so, these all look pretty tacky. Imagine being from Asus or ViewSonic and thinking I want to look at an ugly logo all day long. Still, a near-thousand-dollar difference is hard to dismiss, especially since Apple’s expensive display continues to have software problems.

And, of course, the only other display Apple sells is a 32-inch model that is over-engineered for most people, costs nearly eight thousand dollars in Canada with a stand, and has not been updated in over six years. Asus’ comparable 6K display is under $2,000, though it is not as bright and it looks pretty tragic.

  1. Arguably the worst time in modern Apple history to be shopping for a new Mac. Butterfly keyboards in all the laptops, stale desktops, and on the verge of the last batch of Intel-based Macs. ↥︎

Four Winners and Losers of Apple’s 2025 ⇥ 512pixels.net

I truly love end-of-year lists, and Stephen Hackett sure has a good one: what are the highs and lows from Apple’s 2025? This is not what you would call comprehensive — look out for the Six Colors report card early next year, I am sure — but it is better for being concise.

Congratulations to Hackett for the final high point on his list.

From 2022, on Google’s Account Locking Practices ⇥ nytimes.com

In August 2022, Kashmir Hill reported for the New York Times on two fathers who had, in separate cases, captured photos of their toddlers’ genitals for medical documentation on Android phones, and subsequently had their Google accounts locked. Both accounts were erroneously flagged for containing child sexual abuse materials, a heinous accusation that both fought — unsuccessfully, as of the article’s publication.

I wrote about what I learned from that article and a different incident affecting a Gmail account belonging to Talking Points Memo. But I never linked to a followup article from December of the same year, which I stumbled across earlier today as I was looking into Paris Buttfield-Addison’s Apple account woes, now apparently resolved.

Hill:

In recent months The Times, reporting on the power that technology companies wield over the most intimate parts of their users’ lives, brought to Google’s attention several instances when its previous review process appeared to have gone awry.

In two separate cases, fathers took photos of their naked toddlers to facilitate medical treatment. An algorithm automatically flagged the images, and then human moderators deemed them in violation of Google’s rules. The police determined that the fathers had committed no crime, but the company still deleted their accounts.

I do not know if either of these accounts were restored. I have asked Hill on Bluesky and I hope to hear back. (Update: Hill says neither parent recovered their account, though one was able to retrieve some account data that was turned over to police.)

Hill:

It took four months for the mother in Colorado, who asked that her name not be used to protect her son’s privacy, to get her account back. Google reinstated it after The Times brought the case to the company’s attention.

This is well after Google says all the account data should have been deleted, which raises more questions.

Fault and Responsibility

The surprise departure of Alan Dye announced a week ago today provoked an outpouring of reactions both thoughtful and puerile. The general consensus seemed to be oh, hell yeah, with seemingly few lining up to defend Dye’s overseeing of Apple’s software design efforts. But something has been gnawing at me all week reading take after take, and I think it was captured perfectly by Jason Snell, of Six Colors, last week:

So. In the spirit of not making it personal, I think it’s hard to pile all of Apple’s software design missteps over the last few years at the feet of Alan Dye. He had support from other executives. He led a whole team of designers. Corporate initiatives and priorities can lead even the most well-meaning of people into places they end up regretting.

That said, Alan Dye has represented Apple’s design team in the same way that Jony Ive did ever since Jony took over software design. He was the public face of Liquid Glass. He has been a frequent target of criticism, some of it quite personal, all coming from the perspective that Apple’s design output, especially on the software side, has been seriously lacking for a while now.

This nuanced and careful reaction, published shortly after Dye’s departure was announced, holds up and is the thing I keep coming back to. Snell expanded on these comments on the latest episode of Upgrade with Myke Hurley. I think it is a good discussion and well worth your time. (Thanks to Jack Wellborn for suggesting I listen.)

Cast your mind back to two days earlier, when Apple said John Giannandrea was retiring. Giannandrea, coming from running search and A.I. at Google, signalled to many that Apple was taking the future of Siri seriously. For whatever reason — insufficient support from Apple, conflicting goals, reassignments to questionable projects, or any number of other things — that did not pan out. Siri today works similarly to Siri eight years ago, before he joined the company, the launch of Apple Intelligence was fumbled, and the features rolled out so far do not feel like Apple products. Maybe none of this was the fault of Giannandrea, yet all of it was his responsibility.

It is difficult to know from the outside what impact Giannandrea’s retirement will have for the future of Siri or Apple Intelligence. Similarly, two days after that was announced, Dye said he was leaving, too, and Apple promoted Stephen Lemay to replace him, at least temporarily. From everything I have seen, people within Apple seem to love this promotion. However, it would be wrong to think Lemay is swooping in to save the day, both because that is an immense amount of pressure to put on someone who is probably already feeling it, and because the conditions that resulted in my least favourite design choices surely had agreement from plenty of other people at Apple.

While I am excited for the potential of a change in direction, I do not think this singlehandedly validates the perception of declining competence in Apple’s software design. It was Dye’s responsibility, to be sure, but it was not necessarily his fault. I do not mean that as an excuse, though I wish I did. The taste of those in charge undoubtably shapes what is produced across the company. And, despite a tumultuous week at the top of Apple’s org chart, many of those people remain in charge. To Snell’s point of not personalizing things, and in the absence of a single mention of “design” on its leadership page, the current direction of Apple’s software should be thought of as a team effort. Whether one person should be granted the authority to transform the taste of the company’s leadership into a coherent, delightful, and usable visual language is a good question. Regardless, it will be their responsibility even if it is not their fault.