2025-12-30 06:45:02
It’s time for the 12th Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2025, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.
2025-12-30 01:00:42
PowerPhotos is the ultimate toolbox for Photos on the Mac. It works in conjunction with the Apple Photos app, filling in missing features that Photos itself doesn’t provide.
PowerPhotos allows you to work with multiple Photos libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. Split up your giant library into smaller ones by copying photos and albums with a simple drag and drop, preserving metadata such as descriptions and keywords along the way. You can free up space on your laptop’s drive or save space on iCloud while still keeping all your photos handy in the Photos app.
Or, if you already have multiple libraries, use PowerPhotos to merge them together while weeding out duplicates along the way. PowerPhotos also features a powerful duplicate photo finder, batch photo metadata editing, multi library search with nested search terms, advanced export, and more.
PowerPhotos 3.0 can be downloaded for free from https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/powerphotos and offers many of its features for free. Purchasing a license at https://www.fatcatsoftware.com/store will unlock advanced features such as library merging, deletion of duplicate photos, and unlimited photo copying, metadata editing, and exporting. Existing users of PowerPhotos 1 or 2, or iPhoto Library Manager can use their license key to upgrade for 50% off the regular price, and Six Colors readers can use the coupon code SIXCOLORS26 to receive a 20% discount for both regular and upgrade orders.
2025-12-30 00:40:30
It seems like everyone—hackers, governments, corporations—want to track everything we do online and in the physical world. Apple has a multi-year history of rolling out new methods of deflecting, deterring, or blocking new forms of unwanted tracking. One that may have slipped under your radar could affect how your devices connect and stay connected over Wi-Fi at your home or office and while using hotspots on the ground or in the air.
Called Private Wi-Fi Address by Apple, it’s really just one example of a more generic kind of networking component that dates back decades, tracing its roots to Ethernet addressing over local networks. Network interfaces need a way to identify themselves, so that when one device wants to send information to another, it can stamp a data packet uniquely so that the recipient device will receive it.
On local area networks, or LANs, that method is a MAC: Media Access Control address. The MAC is one of several layers in a network model. The important aspect of this model is that each layer is “responsible” for a different task. The lowest layer in the simplest model covers the physical interface, like Wi-Fi or Ethernet, and how data packets are addressed to traverse that layer.1
The MAC address—distinct from a Mac’s address—defines a network interface uniquely. If you have several interfaces on your device, like Ethernet, Wi-Fi, Ethernet-over-Thunderbolt, and so forth, each has its own MAC address.
For fixed devices, like desktop computers and routers, having an unchanging MAC address doesn’t give much away, because the MAC addresses can only be seen on a LAN. That address is stripped when traffic is routed over the Internet, which uses Internet Protocol (IP) addresses, which operate at a higher network layer.
The emergence of laptops and, more so, mobile devices like phones, tablets, and oodles of other gear that connects to Wi-Fi whenever they can means that it’s far easier for people and organizations to sniff the MAC address of a device. Whenever that device connects successfully to a wireless LAN (WLAN), its MAC address is exposed.
Now, that doesn’t sound so bad. Except that people with insidious goals—criminal or marketing—who have access in the LAN and to Web sites can associate your MAC address with certain activities you might perform. This requires the collaboration (or subversion) of companies offering Wi-Fi access with marketers who infer individuals’ identities by actions they connect. This might allow them to know who you are, where you are, and some of what you’re doing.
As Apple explains it, “If the device always uses the same Wi-Fi MAC address across all networks, network operators and other network observers can more easily relate that address to the device’s network activity and location over time. This allows a kind of user tracking or profiling, and it affects all devices on all Wi-Fi networks.”
Private Wi-Fi Address provides a deterrent effect by taking that fixed, unique MAC address, and changing it from time to time.
Long before Apple introduced this option—I think back in the early 2000s—I remember reading up on how Linux and Windows users had utilities that let them change the MAC address on their Wi-Fi adapters for improved anonymity. Having that process automated as a privacy feature feels like a big step up.
However, it can bite you, as you don’t always want to appear like a unique device every time the MAC address shifts over. Apple offers controls that can help.
For starters, with your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, Apple automatically generates a unique private MAC address for two kinds of Wi-Fi networks:
This prevents tracking across networks that attempt to associate your behavior. In the two cases above, the default setting for Private Wi-Fi Address is Rotating: the MAC address changes about every two weeks. Apple offers Off, in which your actual physically assigned MAC address is used, and Fixed, which creates a MAC address for a network and then never changes it.
Because sometimes you want to keep the address the same over time, you might switch from Rotating to Fixed or even Off. Public networks often track you over time not for nefarious purposes, but because they’ve added your MAC address to their approved list and you don’t have to authenticate again! If you trust the network, you may want to change the setting for it to Fixed. I believe that some airline Wi-Fi is quite sensitive to MAC addresses, and setting those networks to fixed can keep you connected and prevent session expiration.3
Here’s where to make the change:
On an iPhone or iPad, open the Settings app, tap Wi-Fi, and then tap the info (i) icon to the right of a network in the main Wi-Fi list and change the MAC rotation from the Private Wi-Fi Address menu.4
Note that the Wi-Fi/MAC address appears below the Private Wi-Fi Address menu in each of these views. If you need to provide a MAC address to a network administrator, after setting it to Fixed, copy that address. If your address is set to Fixed on your own network, or you change it to Fixed, most routers let you use a MAC address to assign a specific local private IP address—or, for kids, control their access to the Internet!
I address (sorry) private Wi-Fi addresses and many other practical and security issues in two books:
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
2025-12-27 01:00:54
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.
Let’s start with the entire concept of the iMac. Back in the day, you could repurpose a non-retina iMac as an external monitor via a feature called Target Display Mode. When the iMac went to 5K in 2014, that feature got dropped because a retina display has a lot of pixels, and we just didn’t have the technology to connect a 5K display to an external device.
But we do now. My MacBook Pro can drive an 8K display and two 6K displays at 60Hz. It can drive a 240Hz 4K display. It can drive three 6K displays and a 4K display at 60Hz. This is a solved problem. And yet modern iMacs still can’t be repurposed as external displays.
The Apple silicon era is great, but there is no doubt that a modern M4 iMac will become slow and outmoded long before its 4.5K display wears out. As I wrote a couple of years ago:
It’s already a little painful to think about how wasteful an all-in-one computer can be, given that displays can have lifespans vastly longer than the computers they’re attached to. Apple could assuage a lot of that frustration if it would engineer the iMac to double as a display for another device. Given the company’s commitment to the environment, perhaps it’s time to build a new Target Display Mode.
I’ll point out that the Studio Display, Apple’s nearly four-year-old 27-inch 5K display, is powered by an A13 Bionic chip running a version of iOS. Apple should absolutely be able to design any all-in-one Mac it sells with the ability to be placed in “display mode” and accept Thunderbolt input. Surely any modern Apple silicon processor could handle running the same software that’s in the Studio Display.
And as John Voorhees pointed out, the Studio Display itself is not so hot. Voorhees wanted a display that could do more than just display the contents of a Mac. His ASUS display might be a little lower-resolution than a Studio Display, but it accepts HDMI and DisplayPort input, allowing him to hook up a gaming PC, console, or Apple TV as well as his computer.
Anyone who has tried to use the Studio Display for literally anything other than hooking it up to a Mac or iPad will tell you that it’s a nightmare. Why is such a display—still too expensive, and long surpassed in specs by numerous other displays—so inflexible? I’d be much more inclined to buy a new Studio Display if I knew it could be used by other devices. Or if it supported AirPlay. (Yes, you can AirPlay to a Mac—but that’s a really limited use case.) If these displays are going to be powered by iPhone-class processors, they should be more capable!
I’ve bought two Studio Displays. There are a lot of advantages to using an Apple display. But this is an area in which Apple is doing its own brand dirty. The next Studio Display needs to be more flexible, and if Apple introduces a big-screen iMac that can’t ever be used by any device other than its own embedded, non-upgradeable Mac, that will be a tragedy.
2025-12-25 00:30:53
Think back to the end of 2024. It was a more innocent time. Sure, after unveiling Apple Intelligence with great fanfare at WWDC in June, it hadn’t actually shipped much (other than a raft of TV commercials featuring nonexistent features). But surely the company wouldn’t let us down. 2025 was truly going to be the year Siri got fixed and Apple Intelligence took flight.
Well, about that…
2025-12-24 02:38:00
‘Tis the season to be harried. There’s a work thing, a friend thing, some poor sucker has a birthday in December, shopping for food, shopping for presents, donations, shopping for food again because you forgot something… The list of things to do is endless. So when you do get a gift lined up for a loved one, and it’s something from a premium electronics brand like Apple, you might feel like you’ve done your job. The recipient will be so excited to open that new Apple Watch for the holidays, but remember that they may not really be prepared for a multi-part setup process.
I’ll share a slightly cautionary tale of giving myself an Apple Watch Series 11 as a combination Christmas and “It’s too bad my birthday is close to Christmas” gift.
The battery on my Apple Watch Series 7 was no longer lasting the day, and that is the primary reason to upgrade an Apple Watch these days. Whomever you’re gifting an Apple device to is probably in a similar situation, where it’s mostly the battery or physical damage, so it seems like a straightforward gift.
First of all, the new Watch paired with my iPhone just fine, but it needed to download and install watchOS 26.1. That took forever, and it lacked an accurate estimate of when user intervention would be needed again.
Sure, there are several spans of time that are mentioned, but it might as well be a random number generator. I just kept checking my iPhone over and over by unlocking it, and waiting for the interface to refresh to tell me what cryptic step it was on.
That’s a really crummy experience, since the iPhone and the Watch need to be near each other, and the Watch needs to be on a charger. Keep in mind that a charging cable is included with the Watch, but there’s no power adapter. You might want to have a charging block on hand, and potentially the means to keep their iPhone charged, too, if you don’t want to have to keep leaving your holiday celebrations to check on the installation, pairing, and restore process.1
Don’t merely hand a boxed Apple Watch to your loved one before you walk out the door, or they hop on a plane. Part of your gift is this annoying setup.
Second of all, after watchOS 26.1 was installed, the pairing process froze. I needed to back out of it on my iPhone, complete with a dire warning that my Watch would be reset to factory settings. There was little choice, so I resigned myself to it. This got the iPhone in a state where the Watch app said it was unpairing with my Watch for about 10 minutes. Once that was finished, the iPhone and Watch were able to start the pairing process again, but did not have to redownload and install the latest watchOS. In total, this was an hour and a half of my time.
Third, even though it’s supposed to migrate your data and settings from your old Watch, it doesn’t do that in its entirety.
Reauthorizing credit cards for Apple Pay means taking out each credit card and entering the security code information. Also, as it turns out, you need to make sure the default credit card for Apple Pay doesn’t get changed, and confirm that express transit is set to the correct card. Neither was correct for me when I upgraded from Series 7 to Series 11. I spent a couple of days using another card that was the same color as my default card before I realized it was wrong.
There’s no way to skip some of the helpful onboarding dialogs, even if the person is migrating from a recent Apple Watch. My old watch was running watchOS 26.1, but I still got the whole walkthrough about how the Digital Crown works, and the Workouts app still wanted to explain the “new” Workouts app I had already been using. These are minor annoyances that require no guidance from you, but rest assured that Apple just doesn’t care if someone has already gone through these steps.
I have the Tips app set to never, ever, ever give me tips about anything, and yet that was reverted to helpful pings about how Apple Watches work. If the person you’re gifting an Apple Watch to finds these useful, then that’s fine, but if they don’t, they will really appreciate it if you dig into the Watch app’s notifications tab for them.
After the watch was allegedly ready to go, my Modular watch face was missing all of my complications, and there didn’t seem to be any way to force it to reload them. They did appear when I checked again an hour later, but nothing is reassuring about it. If you notice something is missing, then preemptively tell the person that you’ll leave it on the charger for a little bit and wait for it to finish doing some background tasks. Again, adding to that hour and a half to two hours you might have already spent.
The final thing that will spring up on their new Apple Watch are permissions authorizations. Those are not restored from the old watch, and they don’t happen during the setup process. They reveal themselves only if something is invoked that requires those permissions.
For example, when I got into the car and used Siri to pull up directions in CarPlay, my wrist buzzed that Maps wanted access to my location information. It was not safe for me to fiddle with my wrist watch while I was driving on the freeway, so I didn’t get any of the helpful little wrist buzzes for turns. It’s not a huge deal, but maybe just pop Maps open for them before they go out into the world.
Remember that as a technology enthusiast, your gift giving is not the money you spend on the gift, or physically wrapping and handing them a box, but in supporting them to actually enjoy their present instead of being frustrated by some of the technical hiccups. If you’re not ready to go through with helping them set up Apple products, maybe get them some pears from Harry & David instead?
