I’ve used Zoom audio recorders for many years, including the Podtrac P4 I wrote about here a couple of years ago. I carry a Zoom H4n Pro in my backpack for radio field work. And a Zoom H6 has been my go-to in-person podcasting rig, since you can connect up to six mics, and make multitrack recordings with ease. But the display on my H6 crapped out, and the rubberized case began to suffer from what the Internet tells me is called “rubber reversion.” That means the case got all sticky. In the meantime, Zoom has released a set of new handheld recorders; the Essential series, with a couple of features I’ve been craving. So right before a big reporting trip, I replaced my H6 with the H6essential.
Yes, we live in a new world where you can get a game emulator from Apple’s App Store. If you invented a time machine and went back and tried to tell your past self from 2010 about this… well, most of the questions would have been about time travel and how the heck you learned all that physics, you’re a social media manager, Richard.
Delta is an all-in-one emulator that supports game systems including NES, SNES, N64, Nintendo DS, Game Boy, and Game Boy Advance.
Just as majestic as Apple’s Aerial screensaver, no?
Increasingly, every pixel in front of our eyes is fought over by a pool of large technology companies that are trying to squeeze fractions of cents out of ads and promotions.
There’s a lack of care and thoughtfulness about all of these moves. Instead, there’s just an assumption that as long as they can pry someone’s eyes open, “Clockwork Orange”-style, then they’ve helped activate those reluctant viewers with brands.
Last week, YouTube rolled out a new version of its app for Apple TV. It overrides the screensaver by starting a slideshow just before the Apple TV’s screensaver is supposed to come on. If you’re watching a video, it’ll be an endless loop zooming into the video’s thumbnail and fading to black. If you were just paused somewhere in the app’s interface, it’ll be stills taken from a random assortment of YouTube videos on nature, or stills from drone footage.
The YouTube logo is burned in to the upper left as a static image in white, and a graphic for the directional pad with the “up” arrow highlighted in white appears in the bottom right corner. You can hit the up button to resume that paused video (instead of just pushing play???) or, if it’s one of the heavily compressed video stills, it’ll take you to that video of drone footage and start playing it.
Fortunately, when I complained about this on Mastodon, Rob Bhalla got in touch and told me that he fixed it by changing the Apple TV screensaver timing to start at two minutes, instead of the default five. Sure enough, that makes the screensaver start before the slideshow can, because YouTube has no idea what your Apple TV’s screensaver settings are. They just guessed that most people will leave them at the default, and hard coded that timing in for their slideshow.
YouTube’s not doing this out of concern over screen-burn-in. (Those static white graphics prove that.) And they don’t have a better screensaver. YouTube’s screensaver has no settings, because this isn’t for you to control. YouTube is undoubtedly staking out real estate so they can inject advertising and promotion into it at a later date. (No, YouTube hasn’t said that the screensaver is a future home of ads, but there’s absolutely no other reason to add this feature.)
Even if you have the ad-free YouTube Premium, like I do, you’ll see the screen stealer. It seems like it was something that’s been tested for a while, with some users reporting that they saw itmonths ago, not just in the most recent app release. But now everyone I’ve talked to on the current version is being subjected to it.
Imagine a future where Roku injects ads over the YouTube app injecting ads. Will there be a cat-and-mouse game over who gets to sell access to the screen you paused when you went to the bathroom?
Meanwhile, those whiz kids in Redmond are testing out using the Windows Start menu to promote apps. From Tom Warren at The Verge:
Microsoft started testing ads inside the File Explorer of Windows 11 last year before disabling the experiment in beta versions of Windows 11. Microsoft has been experimenting with ads inside Windows for more than 10 years. There are already promotional spots on the Windows 10 lock screen and in the Start menu, so it’s not exactly surprising to see them appear in Windows 11, too.
Classy, classy stuff.
It’s hardly necessary to recount, but Amazon does some pretty sketchy stuff in its quest for money. Jason Snell and I have both removed the Amazon Echo Show from our lives because the things are haunted by noisy, intrusive offers that outweigh their utility.
Amazon also executed the most brazen maneuver out of all the others when they flipped the switch this year on every Prime subscriber getting ads in Prime Video unless those users paid more. A brilliant move when they have a captive audience.
Petites pommes de terre
All those companies look terrible. Not like those saints over at Apple. They certainly haven’t junked up the experience of using their devices in the pursuit of small potatoes.
Using Apple devices without Apple services is subpar, and Apple will take every opportunity to make you aware of that, on every Apple Device that you own. From their perspective this promotion is first party, and it has something that’s like truth to it. Close enough.
Let’s circle back to the Apple TV. The tvOS updates have gradually started to beef up emphasis on the TV app as place to go for your TV-watching needs. However, that’s only true if you really want to watch the Apple TV+ shows that Apple is currently promoting.
If you launch the app after an OS update, and you’re not a current subscriber, you get whisked to the Apple TV+ tab where you will get autoplaying video, and spiel about all the great Apple TV+ content you’re missing out on. This happens every time there’s a point update.
Theoretically my home. In practice, Apple’s.
If you go to the Home section of the TV app, you’ll get the same carousel sales pitch for Apple TV+ shows that you’d get if you were in the Apple TV+ section. It’s not left to stand on its own. Apple doesn’t trust you to pay enough attention to them.
TV+ isn’t playing hard to get, or trying to lure me back with mystery. It all just turns into interface noise, frustrating what I want to do. This screen real estate belongs to Apple, not to me.
Just like all these other companies shoving promotions in, Apple doesn’t think it’s a villain. It thinks it’s increasing awareness and fostering discovery! (Never mind that if you are an Apple TV+ subscriber, you’ll see shows in the carousel that you’ve already watched.)
Well, now I want to subscribe.
After all, Apple TV+ shows and movies are critically acclaimed, darlings, especially Argylle. If what you want to watch doesn’t fit into that category, that’s your problem, not Apple’s.
Left to right: A puzzling News+ ad, classy targeted ads in News, and an awfully big ad in the App Store.
Apple Music? Well, there’s not a lot to differentiate it from other music streaming services, but if you don’t sign up, good luck with the app. There don’t seem to be ad-supported plans, but promoting Music itself is the killer ad, really.
The News app that exists to promote Apple News+? That’s a harder sell, because there’s absolutely nothing critically acclaimed about News+. It might have something that’s critically acclaimed buried in the interface somewhere, but they can hardly take credit for that. They can take credit for spamming everyone about the crossword.
The only thing the News team is interested in is whether or not you’ll fork over more money. They even supplement it with really bad ads in the interface that parade around as news, like ads from The Penny Saver.
There are bad ads in the Stocks app, and Apple’s at least tested ads in Maps, but Mark Gurman’s rumor about that was from 2022, so I’m not clear if we’ll see it, or someone has been able to hold the line on keeping that out.
Speaking of bad ads, let’s not forget that the App Store needs to skim more money from developers and confound users by inserting ads into that interface as well.
Until third-party app marketplaces are really real, everyone will have to go to search for a specific app and then scroll past the bombastic ad masquerading as the first search result to get to the app they actually want. It’s a lose-lose situation for everyone, including the most valuable company in the world.
These are the tactics of companies that sell hardware at a reduced cost, like TV manufacturers, where the hardware is a commodity. Unless Apple starts arguing that they make commodity hardware that needs to be subsidized, I think they should reconsider.
Will it ever be enough?
When I complained about YouTube’s screensaver on social media, I was told to leave a one-star review on the App Store. Like that’s the leverage we have over YouTube. When I wrote about Amazon sticking ads into Prime Video, several people told me that they’d swear off Amazon. (At press time, Amazon is still doing quite well.) It’s worse than vowing you’ll never fly an airline again.
There is little in the way of taste or thoughtfulness to these things that are embedded in Apple’s shipping software. The push for pennies is inculcated into Apple’s business and culture nearly as much as the promoted apps in Microsoft’s Start Menu, Amazon’s junked-up Echo Shows, Roku’s city-for-sale, and YouTube’s screen stealer.
It’s not that advertising is evil, but taking a spot that didn’t have an ad and “innovating” by wedging an ad in there is.
I suspect that the people responsible for plastering Apple TV+ in the interface think they’re better than the people at YouTube injecting a screensaver slideshow. I’m positive everyone thinks they’re better than Amazon.
There must be people at these companies that look at this level of self-serving hackery and realize that they’ve gone too far. But for that to happen, there need to be executives who can see the value in not viewing every inch of interface as an opportunity for more revenue generation.
Is this phase of the streaming wars reaching an endgame? We discuss the fates of Peacock and Paramount+, and consider Max after a year under its new name. Also, we share more listener streaming suggestions!
Less than two weeks after Apple changed its rules on emulators, Riley Testut’s Delta game emulator climbed to the number one spot in the U.S. App Store within twelve hours of its launch. If Testut’s names sounds familiar it’s because he’s also the purveyor of the recently launched Alt Store PAL, the first third-party app marketplace in the European Union, enabled by the Digital Markets Act.
I’d go further and say it’s not pent-up but penned up. This wasn’t merely a case of waiting for a company to release a product it hadn’t gotten to yet—like when Apple released the iPhone 6 amid desire for a larger phone—but of a product that was actively withheld as a matter of policy. Nothing technical prevented Delta from running on iOS three weeks ago, or even three years ago. (To that point: Delta was already available for those iOS users who wanted to engage in the necessary circumventions.) Apple had merely decided, as a matter of policy, not to allow emulators on the App Store for its own reasons.1
The reversal was less capricious: with the launch of third-party marketplaces in the EU, of which the previously mentioned Alt Store PAL (with Delta as its marquee offering) is at the forefront, Apple is attempting to neutralize one of the biggest advantages of those competitors. Emulators like Delta are often used as an example of something that Apple wouldn’t allow in its own stores that third-party marketplaces could offer instead. There’s probably no other category of apps that replaces it in that regard.2 With emulators now available on the App Store worldwide, it will be interesting to see if there’s anything else that draws users towards third-party stores in Europe.
One view of this is that Apple allowing for emulators on its platform is competitive. And that’s true…but it’s equally true that it was dragged kicking and screaming into this competition by outside forces.
Think different, compete better
Last week, I wrote that the change of Apple’s policy was that regulation—or the threat of regulation—works. My pal John Gruber suggested that should be revised to “regulation can work” or “regulation sometimes works”. That seems to me to go without saying: not all regulation is good or implemented well any more than all business decisions are. But let me take my own shot at revising my thesis: regulation—or, more broadly, the existence of regulatory bodies—is necessary.
There are those who think that all problems in business should be solved by the market, as though envisioning a mano-a-mano, no-holds-barred, winner-take-all cage match between corporations.
But this specific case of emulators would seem to point out the shortcomings of that view. Clearly, there was plenty of demand for emulation apps—take Delta’s success as evidence—but Apple steadfastly refused to meet that demand by allowing for supply. It didn’t do so until essentially forced into it by regulatory changes in the European Union.3 Without that change, the chances that Apple would have eventually made the decision on its own is vanishingly small.4
One of John’s recurring points is that Apple is consistent: “Apple’s own needs first, users second, developers third.” An astute observation, if not particularly surprising for any profit-seeking corporation, but this situation also makes clear that no amount of combined demand from users or developers will outweigh Apple’s own needs. What makes the emulator situation particularly strange is that offering them on the App Store doesn’t actually seem to hurt Apple at all—and probably even helps it, given the evident popularity of the category. This is the rare situation that’s good for everybody.5
This is why the existence of regulatory bodies and use of regulation, even if it isn’t always universally good or correct, is a necessity to get the best out of competition—to keep the system honest, the playing field level. Checks and balances are just as important for business as for a system of government, and the bigger and more powerful companies get, the even more important it is.
Recent comparisons of Apple to Boeing may not be entirely apt, but here’s one place where I think there is some similarity: Boeing operates in an industry where it is (in the U.S. at least) the market share leader, and together with its largest rival, Airbus, dominates the field as an effective duopoly. As of 2018, the two manufacturers accounted for about two-thirds of all commercial airlines in use in the U.S.; those numbers go even higher if you’re talking about just larger airplanes like jumbo jets—or perhaps we could call them “performance aircraft.” I don’t think anybody would argue that Boeing’s in need of less regulation.
Or, if I can be permitted another analogy, much as we get mad at the umpires for bad calls, they’re on the field to keep the teams honest and to provide impartial accountability. John and I would probably both find a game between the Red Sox and the Yankees without any umpires to be entertaining, but I’m not sure either of us believe it would show off the real spirit of competition.6
The success of Delta illustrates that perhaps it’s time for both Apple and the App Store to evolve. Despite our fond memories of the team that once hoisted a pirate flag over its campus, a trillion-dollar corporation is not a bunch of maverick upstarts. The idea of Tim Cook putting up the Jolly Roger on the roof of Apple Park7 is not only risible in the extreme, but displays a lack of self-awareness for the current state of affairs. Let’s not root for Apple to win—let’s root for Apple to do better.
Perhaps for avoiding the appearance of impropriety? But emulators have been widely available on the Mac for years. In fact one of the landmark cases about emulation, Sony Computer Entertainment, Inc. v. Connectix Corp., was about a game emulator that ran on the Mac. ↩
The biggest other draw (probably larger than all of emulators as a category) is probably a single app, Epic’s Fortnite. ↩
I’ll give the company the barest amount of credit for making that change worldwide; it certainly could have restricted emulators to use in the European market, but I think that would have made US customers even angrier—and rightfully so. ↩
As always, an exception to the rule: For decades I played ultimate frisbee, which thanks to its hippie roots, is famously self-refereed. Official play often uses “Observers” though, who don’t have ref powers but can be appealed to as impartial. However, the professional North American leagues do have refs. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
In 2021, device-management startup Kandji approached Six Colors to commission a new entry in our Report Card series focusing on how Apple’s doing in large organizations, including businesses, education, and government. We formulated a set of survey questions that would address the big-picture issues regarding Apple in the enterprise. Then we approached people we knew in the community of Apple device administrators and asked them to participate in the survey. We are especially grateful to the members of the Mac Admins Slack for their participation.
This is our fourth year doing the survey. Over the last few weeks, we took the temperature of 128 admins, roughly half of whom report that they manage more than a thousand devices. They rated Apple’s performance in the context of enterprise IT on a scale from 1 to 5 in nine broad areas.
Below, you’ll see the survey results, plus choice comments from survey participants. Not all participants are represented; we gave everyone the option to remain anonymous and not be quoted. Though Kandji commissioned this survey—and we thank everyone there for doing so—it had no oversight over the survey results or the contents of this story, which was compiled by me, Jason Snell.
Overall scores
As it did last year, Apple’s strongest scores came in hardware—Apple silicon Macs are a big winner—and in the company’s commitment to security and privacy.
In most categories, our panel’s view of Apple in the enterprise was on an upswing. The company made large gains in the categories of deployment (which had taken a big hit last year) and macOS identity management. The only categories to show score drops, albeit small ones, were the top scorers—hardware reliability and security/privacy—which both dropped 0.1.
We also asked a few questions outside the traditional set. For the third straight year, we asked about the pace of operating-system adoption. And for the second straight year, the sense that OS adoptions were happening quicker than usual was up — from 37% in 2022 to 51% in 2023 to 56% this year.
We asked about Vision Pro adoption, understanding that a large portion of our panel is from outside the U.S. and therefore unable to deploy Vision Pro right now. Still, it was interesting to see that 10% of respondents said they were deploying Vision Pro today.
We also wanted to see how organizations were embracing next-generation technologies designed to eliminate passwords, such as Passkeys. A full third of our panel said they’re already deploying those technologies.
Finally, we asked about the current state of in-office, hybrid, and remote work in our panel’s organizations. Nearly half reported a mostly-hybrid organization and an impressive 81% reported some degree of hybrid work. Two smaller groups, both around 10%, reported either being all-in on office work or in organizations that are entirely remote.
Here’s what Tom Bridge of the Mac Admins Podcast had to say about this year’s results:
“It’s interesting to see the slight declines in security and hardware innovation. I wouldn’t have expected either. Neither is a substantial loss, but I suspect security may come down to the increased number of software updates to cover security issues.
“Deployment getting a boost is a pleasant surprise, likely owing to structural changes in the automated device enrollment framework released in Sonoma. I have the same reaction to the improvements in the identity management scores. With January’s updates to Apple Business Manager, any IDP with OpenID Connect, Shared signals framework and SCIM can power managed Apple IDs.”
Read on for category-by-category scores and comments from participants.
Early web nostalgia and memorable online experiences, the most disappointing tech product we’ve owned or reviewed, our persistence in troubleshooting tech, and the oldest piece of technology we still use.
Last week, my family and I—like so many others in the U.S.—hopped in a car to try and catch sight of a total eclipse. And, like so many other parents, I planned to distract my kid for some part of this lengthy adventure with an iPad.
As my kid is still under two, there hasn’t been a lot of time spent with screens, aside from occasionally “playing” a game on our phones or watching some videos of trains. This marked the first time I planned to actually hand over a whole device—albeit still with the idea of just watching some downloaded videos—and I found as I set up the iPad what likely a legion of parents before me has also discovered: setting up an Apple device for a kid is kind of annoying.
I’ve been covering Apple for almost twenty years, so you’d be forgiven for thinking this wouldn’t shock me, but the simple truth is that, not unlike the Matrix, this is something you have to experience for yourself. Ultimately, the conclusion I reached was that Apple should really improve this experience for all of us time- and attention-strapped parents in a variety of ways.
Everything is permissible
Let’s start by saying that Apple does have an extensive set of parental controls baked in to its operating systems, all now collected under the aegis of Screen Time. Ostensibly this set of features not only allow parents to monitor how much time their kids spend using devices, but also control the limits of which apps can be used, which settings can be changed, and so on.
All to the good, but as I—again, a veteran technology journalist of almost two decades—embarked upon setting this all up, one thing quickly became clear: it is a pain. By default, everything is on and allowed, even when the iCloud account you login to is a child’s account (more on which in a bit).
One thing that would be helpful here is some kind of kids profile, where permissions are locked down by default, allowing parents to selectively enable features they want kids to have access to. This also makes sense from the perspective of enabling more features as kids get older. It’d also be handy if it was an ad hoc mode you could go into, rather than having to spend the time setting up all the various permissions, the same way that Netflix has a kids profile that you can log into with just kids content. Reduce the friction by removing all the fiddling.
That’s not to say such a feature would be enough, but it would be a good jumping-off point.
Skepticism about the future of the Vision Pro and brutal reviews of the Humane Ai Pin make us discuss misguided expectations and the power of the smartphone duopoly. We also attempt to decode reports of new M4 Mac chips.
We answer your questions about leaks, EVs, and the eclipse. [Members at the More Colors and Backstage level get an extra 20 minutes with questions about the Humane Ai Pin, how we generate enthusiasm and energy for our podcasts, WWDC coverage plans, the future of visionOS, and our current HomeKit strategies.]
I’m not bullish on the Humane Ai Pin, the clip-on device whose first reviews arrived with knives out this week. The thing feels like a commodity product from 2026 that escaped back a couple of years—a basic hardware conduit for cloud AI models that will soon be available ubiquitously. I wouldn’t be surprised if my Apple Watch had most of its functionality later this year.
What excites me about the Ai Pin is what it represents for the future of computing, namely, eliminating a whole lot of drudgery from our lives. Computers have already reduced dramatic amounts of drudgery—they’re really good at it; it’s basically their best thing—but in eliminating all that analog drudgery, they’ve managed to create a small but still significant amount of digital drudgery. AI constructs have the potential to reduce that, performing tasks for us in seconds based on a single command that we’d otherwise spend a minute on by swiping and tapping.
But the more I think about the Ai Pin, the more sad it makes me… and not for the reason you might think. (If we were to play a word-association game and you prompted me with AI, my response would be “overhyped, but still world-changing.”) No, I’m sad about the Ai Pin because it—and a similar AI hardware product, the Rabbit R1—shows just how much potential innovation is strangled by the presence of enormously powerful tech companies, most notably the Android-iPhone duopoly.
I’m looking forward to Apple’s new AI efforts, which it’s likely unveiling this summer at its developer conference and rolling out to everyone in the fall. I really do expect that at some point soon my cellular Apple Watch will have capabilities in line with those of the Humane Ai Pin. So will my iPhone, iPad, Mac, Vision Pro, and maybe even Apple TV? It’s gonna be everywhere.
The problem is that I’m dismissing the Ai Pin and looking forward to the Apple Watch specifically because of the control Apple has over its platforms. Yes, the company’s entire business model is based on tightly integrating its hardware and software, and it allows devices like the Apple Watch to exist. But that focus on tight integration comes at a cost (to everyone but Apple, anyway): Nobody else can have the access Apple has.
Humane’s Ai Pin has its own cellular account and uses its own cloud services. My Apple Watch shares a cellular account with my iPhone and syncs data with my iPhone apps, with watch apps that are based on Apple’s platform, and with the same cloud services that my other iPhone, iPad, and Mac apps use. It’s a huge advantage for the Apple Watch.
It seems like we’re at the point where even the most groundbreaking hardware device simply can’t succeed in a world where it’s unable to deeply integrate with either the iPhone or Android. (And really, in the U.S. especially, it would need to integrate with both.) This is why the Ai Pin and the Rabbit and similar products are not going to succeed. Instead, Apple and Google will integrate everything that the Ai Pin does into iOS and Android, and those will be the best-in-class implementations, and that’ll be it for Humane and anyone else who wants to create an AI-powered hardware dingus.
This is not a lament for Humane or its business model. It’s a lament for all of us. So many innovative products will never get funded or never launch a product because if they can’t connect deeply with the smartphone, they’re at an impossible disadvantage. And if one such product somehow did make a mark, what are the chances that it would survive rather than just being acquired by Apple, or Amazon, or Google, or Microsoft, or Facebook? What are the chances that those companies would just build a me-too product that was vastly more functional because they were able to tightly tie it into the ecosystems they control?
I’m not making a legal argument here. (Which is good, because I am not a lawyer.) I’m just observing that the smartphone has become so central to life that if your product can’t offer deep connections to the smartphone, you’re stuck. And yes, Humane could do a better job integrating with phones than it has done—its entire conception as a replacement that frees users from the most successful tech product ever seems misguided—but I’d expect that any integration they built would be largely unsatisfying. They don’t own the phones, so they can’t play that game.
That’s what troubles me about where we are right now. I love my iPhone—I really do. And I appreciate the hardware Apple makes that is tightly integrated with its other products, which is why I own a vast amount of Apple hardware. But it sure does feel like it’s increasingly unlikely that any sort of revolutionary hardware is going to come from anyone not named Apple or one of the big Android hardware partners, if not Google itself.
If the world’s tech giants have gotten so big and so powerful that nobody else can even afford the table stakes, we all lose. And the existence of that dumb Humane Ai Pin is just a reminder of that.
Apple’s had a rough start to 2024 but it’s not like everything’s peachy for either its competitors or the thorns in its side.
M-vy
Turn your mind back to the heady days of 2008: Barack Obama was running for president, the modern smartphone and the MCU were brand new, and all computers ran on Intel processors.
16 years later, it looks like someone flipped the game board over.
Apple, of course, makes its own computer processors now and is the one to beat in performance per watt, amperage, electrojule, what have you. This naturally has everyone else in a tizzy because it’s not the way things are supposed to be so there’s a certain amount of running around trying to do something about it.
Anything.
Google, gearing up for the wonderful new future where AI makes art and writes novels while we keep doing our taxes and digging ditches, is making its own chips.…
Scores are only part of what a good sports app is about. Sports apps are used not only when you can’t watch a game and want to be kept plugged in, they’re also used—even more often used, I think—to give you background information on the game you’re currently watching. Announcements during a broadcast are ephemeral, but a sports app can tell you how many fouls Nikola Jokić has at any time. And this is where Sports falls down.
His critique of the poor presentation of basketball box scores is pointed and accurate. It definitely feels like an app that was launched with “I just want to get the damn score of the game” as the guiding premise now needs to expand to provide better presentations for literally every other portion of the app.
My thanks to Kolide for sponsoring Six Colors again this week.
Kolide wants your business to be secure. Think of it like airport security: there are two lines, one to verify your identity and another to scan your carry-ons. In enterprise security, the first line is user authentication. The second line is scanning the devices themselves.
That second line doesn’t get nearly the same level of attention. The average solution is like eyeing a bag and listening to hear if there’s a ticking sound. And that’s assuming there’s a second line at all. Kolide’s Shadow IT report found that 47% of companies let unmanaged devices access their resources, and authenticate via credentials alone.
Unmanaged devices can be infected with malware, full of personally identifiable information, or even belong to a bad actor using phished employee credentials. Companies need device trust solutions that block devices from authenticating if they don’t meet minimum security requirements. That’s what you get with Kolide’s device trust solution: a chance to verify that a device is both known and secure before it authenticates.
Without a device trust solution, all the security in the world is just security theater. Kolide can help close the gaps.
In the days of Classic Mac OS, that was accomplished using the infamous Desktop Database, which recognised files and apps by means of their Creator and Type, two codes consisting of four characters each. A great deal has changed since, for the better. This process now relies on a chain of information to work out which app to launch to open any file. Although that chain can go wrong, in general it’s far more reliable now and seldom needs any user intervention or maintenance.
As much as I initially missed the old Type/Creator system, and as much as a dislike relying on file extensions (and keep them hidden by default on my Mac!), I do love being able to arbitrarily command that all files of a given type open in my preferred app, all right from Finder’s Get Info window.
Mark Gurman of Bloomberg has another one of his excellent chip scoops, this time about the future of the Mac:
The company, which released its first Macs with M3 chips five months ago, is already nearing production of the next generation — the M4 processor — according to people with knowledge of the matter. The new chip will come in at least three main varieties, and Apple is looking to update every Mac model with it.
Apple’s moving through Mac chip generations fast—the M3 was introduced six months ago, but Gurman suggests that it will only be about a year before the cycle begins again.
Gurman’s report suggests that the biggest picture is what you might expect: There will be an M4 chip (code-named Donan) in the MacBook Air, low-end MacBook Pro, and low-end Mac mini; and an M4 code-named Brava in the high-end MacBook Pros and high-end Mac mini.
More intriguing is the destination of the Mac Studio: Gurman suggests that Apple is testing versions with both a “still-unreleased” M3 chip and a variation of the M4 Brava processor. This one’s tough to parse—it’s unclear if the M4 Brava chip is actually referring to both the Pro and Max class chips, or if there’s something changing in the product line. Gurman also doesn’t say if the Mac Studio might get an M3 Max and Ultra update this year followed by an M4 update next year, even though the idea of Apple offering a new model in both M3 and M4 variants seems pretty out of pattern.
On the topic of the Mac Pro, Gurman says it’s “set to get the new Hidra chip,” a “top-end” version of the M4, next year. Is that the Ultra, or is something different? Reply hazy, ask again later.
And for RAM fiends out there, Gurman also reports that Apple is considering a new memory ceiling of 512GB, up from the current high-end maximum of 192GB.
Generally Gurman’s reports are accurate, but of course he’s operating with limited information—hence the lack of clarity on some fronts. Regardless of the details, though, it seems that we might be seeing another generation of Macs starting this fall.
Lately you can’t throw a digital camera without hitting a story on the various regulatory and legal challenges Apple’s been facing. While some have decried these actions as interference in the internal operations of a company, there’s one salient detail that I think those opinions often overlook.
Regulation works.
Here are just a handful of examples from the past few months of Apple changing its policies due to regulations—or, in some cases, the mere threat of regulation:
Late last week, Apple changed another of its longstanding App Store rules by allowing “retro game console emulator apps”. Interestingly, one of the only other announced third-party marketplaces coming to the EU is AltStore, the marquee title in which will be Delta, a Nintendo emulator developed by AltStore proprietor Riley Testut.
Just today, Apple announced that it would it relax rules around used parts for repairing iPhones. Apple’s Self Service Repair program, which was put into place to comply with Right to Repair legislation passed in some states, launched in 2021. But critics pointed out that Apple’s initial foray still required a restrictive “parts pairing” process that made third-party repairs more limited and more expensive, and Oregon recently made a law that bans the approach. Today’s change effectively undoes that process, though it does still include provisions to prevent stolen parts from being used.
Apple is unquestionably a behemoth in the technology industry, one of a handful that dominate our lives. And while there are places that those companies butt up against each other and compete, it’s also apparent that corporations of this size are not subject to the same degrees of competition that much smaller players might be. Their core businesses are relatively stable, even if they skirmish around the edges: Apple and Amazon can, for example, squabble over the (relatively small) market of smart home speakers, but Apple’s no more likely to come up with a killer retail site that unseats Amazon than Amazon is to make a world-class smartphone.1
More to the point, these handful of tech companies are so large that the chances of being upset, or even threatened, by small upstarts is vanishingly small. (And in the rare cases where it might happen, it’s a simple matter for the large companies to simply acquire the smaller ones.)
That means the only entities powerful enough to impose any sort of pushback against the companies are government bodies.2 Apple details this in its annual 10-K filing, which lays out risk factors to the company’s business. One entire heading in that section is “Legal and Regulatory Compliance Risks”, which includes the follow sub-heading:
The Company is subject to complex and changing laws and regulations worldwide, which exposes the Company to potential liabilities, increased costs and other adverse effects on the Company’s business.
The simple fact is that, without some sort of threat, Apple was never going to change any of its business practices, because there was absolutely no reason to do so. Apple would happily have never offered a self-service repair program or allowed emulators or changed its policies about game streaming—we know because there were literally years of people asking for these changes without the company lifting a finger—until governments got involved.
It’s not just Apple, either. Broadband companies weren’t about to start giving customers clearer and more accessible information about their plans without regulatory intervention from the FCC.
The absence of meaningful challenges breeds complacency. And complacency leads to the temptation to collect increasing revenue without corresponding innovation because, well, it sure is a lot easier, isn’t?
Much as some might pooh-pooh government intervention in the market, these regulatory and legal threats are ultimately efficacious because Apple ended up changing its behavior. In some cases, it may take months or years for the impacts on the consumer to be felt—and, in some cases, as detractors point out, it may not happen at all if users decide they don’t want these capabilities or alternatives. And you know what? That’s totally fine—because then it’s users choosing to stick with the status quo, as opposed to having no other option than the one that they’re given.
There are still other external risk factors that affect everybody, of course, like foreign exchange rates and, say, pandemics. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the supernatural detective story All Souls Lost, is out now.]
