Search Results for: "color"

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.

Colorado Police Officer Caught on Doorbell Camera Talking About Surveillance Powers ⇥ denverite.com

Andrew Kenney, Denverite:

It was Sgt. Jamie Milliman [at the door], a police officer with the Columbine Valley Police Department who covers the town of Bow Mar, which begins just south of [Chrisanna] Elser’s home.

[…]

“You know we have cameras in that jurisdiction and you can’t get a breath of fresh air, in or out of that place, without us knowing, correct?” he said.

“OK?” Elser, a financial planner in her 40s, responded in a video captured by her smart doorbell and viewed by Denverite.

“Just as an example,” the sergeant told her, she had “driven through 20 times the last month.”

This story is a civil liberties rollercoaster. Milliman was relying on a nearby town’s use of Flock license plate cameras and Ring doorbells — which may also be connected to the Flock network — to accuse Elser of theft and issue a summons. Elser was able to get the summons dropped by compiling evidence from, in part, the cameras and GPS system on her truck. Milliman’s threats were recorded by a doorbell camera, too. The whole thing is creepy, and all over a $25 package stolen off a doorstep.

I have also had things stolen from me, and I wish the police officers I spoke to had a better answer for me than shrugging their shoulders and saying, in effect, this is not worth our time. But this situation is like a parallel universe ad for Amazon and its Ring subsidiary. Is this the path toward “very close to zero[ing] out crime”? It is not worth it.

Microsoft Uses a Thousand Words to Justify Some New Office Icons ⇥ microsoft.design

I promise I will end the gratuitous and uncomfortable self-quoting soon, but there are so many smart replies to what I wrote about Liquid Glass that I feel I need to point you to them.

Jeff Johnson, quoting me:

“So far, Apple justifies this redesign, basically, by saying it is self-evidently good”

This *should* be the justification. In other words, you don’t really need to justify something that’s self-evidently good, only something that’s self-evidently bad. This is the problem — the badness of Liquid Glass — not the lack of justification.

I completely agree. My sentence continues “…self-evidently good for all of its platforms to look the same”. I wish it was obvious why this should be the case, not something that was preemptively defended.

Take, for example, this long article by Jon Friedman of Microsoft announcing the rollout of new application icons:

[…] That’s the paradigm shift; Microsoft 365 has always empowered productivity but the driving force of the UX was often app features or the tools themselves. Today, the driving force is the outcome you desire.

With that paradigm shift come significant changes to the UX discipline itself and how we approach product making. Longer cycles of heads-down development used to be followed by a big reveal of big changes. Today, with model capabilities rapidly emerging and our learning as UX practitioners rapidly advancing — including becoming more technical as a discipline — product evolution is happening in continuous waves. Research shows changes to iconography are almost always received as a signal for product changes and in an era of ongoing, smaller shifts, the icons should reflect that. As such, we embraced the idea of “evolution, not revolution” throughout our design process.

This try-hard justification made me think of Johnson’s post. It is over a thousand words and I do not believe I view these icons differently after finishing it. The new icons are fine — very Microsoft, in that the company has produced some spectacular-looking 3D renders and illustrations completely unrelated to the actual icons I will be seeing on my desktop when this update is released.

Setting Up a New Apple TV Is Still Not Good ⇥ sixcolors.com

Tonight, I set up a new Apple TV — well, as “new” as a refurbished 2022-though-still-current-generation model can be — and it was not a good time. I know Apple might be releasing a new model later this year, but any upgrades are probably irrelevant for how I have used my existing ten-year-old model. I do not even have a 4K television.

My older model has some drawbacks. It is pretty slow, and the storage space is pitiful — I think it is the 32 GB model — so it keeps offloading apps. What I wanted to do was get a new one and bump the old Apple TV to my kitchen, where I have a receiver and a set of speakers I have used with Bluetooth, and then I would be able to AirPlay music in all my entertaining spaces. Real simple stuff.

Jason Snell, in a sadly still-relevant Six Colors article:

The setup starts promisingly: You can bring your iPhone near the Apple TV, and it will automatically log your Apple ID in. If you’ve got the One Home Screen feature turned on, all your apps will load and appear in all the right places. It will feel like you’ve done a data transfer.

But it’s all a mirage.

One Home Screen is a nice feature, but it’s not an iCloud backup of your Apple TV, nor is it the Apple TV equivalent of Migration Assistant. It is exactly what its name suggests — a home-screen-syncing feature and nothing more.

I went into this upgrade realizing my wife and I would need to set up all our streaming apps again. (She was cool with it.) That is not great, but at least I had that expectation.

But even the “promising” parts of the setup experience did not work for me. When I brought my iPhone near the new Apple TV, it spun before throwing a mysterious error. After setting it up manually, it thought it was not connected to Wi-Fi — even though it was — and then it tried syncing the home screen. Some of the apps are right, but it has not synced all of them, and none of them are in the correct position.

Then I opened Music on my phone to try and AirPlay to both Apple TVs, only to find it was not listed. It turns out that is a separate step. I had to add it to my Home, which again involved me bringing my iPhone into close proximity and tapping a button. This failed the three times I tried it. So I restarted my Apple TV and my phone, and then Settings told me I needed to complete my Home setup. I guess it worked but somehow did not move to the next step. At last, AirPlay worked — and, frankly, it is pretty great.

I know bugs happen about as often as blog posts complaining about bugs. This thing is basically an appliance, though. I am glad Apple ultimately did not make a car.

Liquid Glass Pours Out to Apple Devices Today ⇥ wired.com

Craig Grannell, Wired:

Apple revealed Liquid Glass as part of its WWDC announcement this June, with all the pomp usually reserved for shiny new gear. The press release promised a “delightful and elegant new software design” that “reflects and refracts its surroundings while dynamically transforming to bring greater focus to content.” Today it launches globally onto compatible Apple devices.

If you haven’t encountered it yet, brace yourself. Inspired by visionOS — the software powering the Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset — Liquid Glass infuses every Apple platform with a layered glass aesthetic. This is paired with gloopy animations and a fixation on hiding interface components when possible—and showing content through them when it isn’t.

Grannell interviewed several developers for this piece, which is ultimately quite critical of Liquid Glass.

I, too, have thoughts, but life got in the way of completing anything by today’s release. Luckily, there is no shortage of people with opinions about this new material and the broader redesign across Apple’s family of operating systems. I trust you will find their commentary adequate, and I hope you will still be interested in mine whenever I can finish.

In the meantime, I think a chunk of Dan Moren’s iOS 26 review, for Six Colors, is quite good:

Apple has designed extensive rules to try and minimize some of the most distracting impacts of Liquid Glass. For example, if you’re viewing black-on-white content and suddenly scroll past a darker image, the UI widgets will only flip from light to dark mode based on the speed of your scrolling: scroll past it quickly and they won’t flip; it’s only if you slow down or stop with the widgets over the image that they’ll shift into dark mode.

While clever, this also feels remarkably over-engineered to work around the fundamental nature of these devices. It’s a little reminiscent of the old apocryphal story about how the American space industry spent years and millions of dollars designing a pen that could write in space while the Soviets used a pencil. Perhaps they should have used a design that doesn’t require adjusting its look on the fly.

Also, Federico Viticci has published his extraordinary annual review. In addition to the section on design, I am also looking forward to his thoughts in particular on iPadOS 26. Lots to read and lots to discover.

Yet Another Article Claiming Music Criticism Lost Its Edge, With a Twist ⇥ newyorker.com

Kelefa Sanneh, the New Yorker:

[…] In 2018, the social-science blog “Data Colada” looked at Metacritic, a review aggregator, and found that more than four out of five albums released that year had received an average rating of at least seventy points out of a hundred — on the site, albums that score sixty-one or above are colored green, for “good.” Even today, music reviews on Metacritic are almost always green, unlike reviews of films, which are more likely to be yellow, for “mixed/average,” or red, for “bad.” The music site Pitchfork, which was once known for its scabrous reviews, hasn’t handed down a perfectly contemptuous score — 0.0 out of 10 — since 2007 (for “This Is Next,” an inoffensive indie-rock compilation). And, in 2022, decades too late for poor Andrew Ridgeley, Rolling Stone abolished its famous five-star system and installed a milder replacement: a pair of merit badges, “Instant Classic” and “Hear This.”

I have quibbles with this article, which I will get to, but I will front-load this with the twist instead of making you wait — this article is, in effect, Sanneh’s response to himself twenty-one years after popularizing the very concept of poptimism in the New York Times. Sanneh in 2004:

In the end, the problem with rockism isn’t that it’s wrong: all critics are wrong sometimes, and some critics (now doesn’t seem like the right time to name names) are wrong almost all the time. The problem with rockism is that it seems increasingly far removed from the way most people actually listen to music.

Are you really pondering the phony distinction between “great art” and a “guilty pleasure” when you’re humming along to the radio? In an era when listeners routinely — and fearlessly — pick music by putting a 40-gig iPod on shuffle, surely we have more interesting things to worry about than that someone might be lip-synching on “Saturday Night Live” or that some rappers gild their phooey. Good critics are good listeners, and the problem with rockism is that it gets in the way of listening. If you’re waiting for some song that conjures up soul or honesty or grit or rebellion, you might miss out on Ciara’s ecstatic electro-pop, or Alan Jackson’s sly country ballads, or Lloyd Banks’s felonious purr.

Here we are in 2025 and a bunch of the best-reviewed records in recent memory are also some of the most popular. They are well-regarded because critics began to review pop records on the genre’s own terms.

Here is one more bonus twist: the New Yorker article is also preoccupied with criticism of Pitchfork, a fellow Condé Nast publication. This is gestured toward twice in the article. Neither one serves to deflate the discomfort, especially since the second mention is in the context of reduced investment in the site by Condé.

Speaking of Pitchfork, though, the numerical scores of its reviews have led to considerable analysis by the statistics obsessed. For example, a 2020 analysis of reviews published between 1999 and early 2017 found the median score was 7.03. This is not bad at all, and it suggests the site is most interested in what it considers decent-to-good music, and cannot be bothered to review bad stuff. The researchers also found a decreasing frequency of very negative reviews beginning in about 2010, which fits Sanneh’s thesis. However, it also found fewer extremely high scores. The difference is more subtle — and you should ignore the dot in the “10.0” column because the source data set appears to also contain Pitchfork’s modern reviews of classic records — but notice how many dots are rated above 8.75 from 2004–2009 compared to later years. A similar analysis of reviews from 1999–2021 found a similar convergence toward mediocre.

As for Metacritic, I had to go and look up the Data Colada article referenced, since the New Yorker does not bother with links. I do not think this piece reinforces Sanneh’s argument very well. What Joe Simmons, its author, attempts to illustrate is that Metacritic skews positive for bands with few aggregated reviews because most music publications are not going to waste time dunking on a nascent band’s early work. I also think Simmons is particularly cruel to a Modern Studies record.

Anecdotally, I do not know that music critics have truly lost their edge. I read and watch a fair amount of music criticism, and I still see a generous number of withering takes. I think music critics, as they become established and busier, recognize they have little time for bad music. Maroon 5 have been a best-selling act for a couple of decades, but Metacritic has aggregated just four reviews of its latest album, because you can just assume it sucks. Your time might be better spent with the great new Water From Your Eyes record.

Even though I am unsure I agree with Sanneh’s conclusion, I think critics should make time and column space for albums they think are bad. Negative reviews are not cruel — or, at least, they should not be — but it is the presence of bad that helps us understand what is good.

Apple Releases Public Betas for Its ‘26’ Operating Systems ⇥ sixcolors.com

Andrew Cunningham, Ars Technica:

As promised, Apple has just released the first public beta versions for the next-generation versions of iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and most of its other operating systems. The headlining feature of all the updates this year is Apple’s new Liquid Glass user interface, which is rolling out to all of these operating systems simultaneously. It’s the biggest and most comprehensive update to Apple’s software design aesthetic since iOS 7 was released in 2013.

I have been using the iOS 26 beta since WWDC, and the MacOS Tahoe beta for a couple of weeks. Though I have been getting better battery life than I had expected, I am finding enough bugs and problems that I would recommend against participating in the public beta builds, at least for one or two more versions.

However, if you have a spare Mac or are comfortable setting up a dual-booting situation — and you like doing Apple’s quality assurance without pay — please try MacOS Tahoe and report as much feedback as you can.

Jason Snell, Six Colors:

The result of this feels more like a work in progress than a finished design, and since this is a beta, that’s fair enough. But I get the sense that this really is a design that’s been thoroughly considered for iPhones, is similar enough on the iPad to be in the ballpark, but that has not really been thought through on the Mac. At least, through the first few developer beta releases, there are signs that Apple is making progress adapting this design to the Mac. I hope it continues, because it’s still in a state of disrepair.

My experience has mirrored this almost exactly. There is a lot to like in the technical and feature updates in Tahoe, but the U.I. changes are disappointing. Even with Reduce Transparency switched on, I find myself distracted by elements with poor contrast and clunky-looking toolbars. Tabs look bizarre.

I am not an outright hater; there are many places where I find Liquid Glass joyful or, at least, interesting in iOS. I see what Apple is going for even in places where I think other choices would have made sense. But the changes in MacOS Tahoe are worrisome knowing this is pretty close to what I will be living with for the next year or longer.

Ryan Christoffel, 9to5Mac:

Apple has launched its first ever public beta for AirPods firmware, bringing forthcoming iOS 26 features to AirPods users ahead of their fall launch. Here’s everything new.

No Liquid Glass here.