2025-07-02 07:58:53
In late 2023, Digitimes reported that Apple was developing a low-cost MacBook, kicking off a lot of speculation about what that might mean and how the company might execute on such a product.
Here’s what I wrote then:
The modern Apple strategy is to re-use older technologies to create more affordable products… Why does the M1 MacBook Air [still] exist? Because Apple wants to have a product available at a (relatively) low price point…
Now let’s imagine a world with a M3 MacBook Air in it. Does Apple discontinue the M2 model, or push it down into the $999 range? Does Apple discontinue the M1 Air at that point? In the Intel era I’d have answered yes, but the Apple silicon era is something different. The truth is, even now, the M1 is more than enough for most potential Mac users.
Just as a thought experiment, consider what Apple might do if it was planning to import the iPhone SE strategy to the Mac. It would take some older, but still quite capable technologies—say, everything that makes up an M1 Mac. The device’s parts are carefully scrutinized with an eye toward eliminating cost wherever possible, without sacrificing a basic Apple level of quality.
Today we’ve got an M4 MacBook Air, but I can still buy an M1 MacBook Air at Walmart for $649. And on Sunday that Digitimes report boomeranged back to us in the form of a post from supply-chain analyst Ming-Chi Kuo:
More-Affordable MacBook… Expected to enter mass production in late 4Q25 or early 1Q26, with an approximately 13-inch display and powered by the A18 Pro processor. Potential casing colors include silver, blue, pink, and yellow… The more-affordable MacBook is projected to account for 5–7 million units for 2026.
(MacRumors says they’ve also seen evidence for this product.)
The more things change, the more they remain the same. My thoughts about this rumor are very similar to my thoughts 22 months ago. First off, the M1 MacBook Air can’t be sold forever. I’m sure the margins on a five-year-old product are great, but Apple and TSMC surely want to stop making M1 chips at some point! So how do you make a new product that’s still well below the $999 of the (incredible value) M4 MacBook Air?
Using the same A18 Pro processor found in the iPhone 16 Pro might be a good start. Let’s look at the relative speed of the A18 Pro versus the M series found in Apple silicon Macs:
Well, would you look at that? The A18 Pro is 46% faster than the M1 in single-core tasks, and almost identical to the M1 on multi-core and graphics tasks. If you wanted to get rid of the M1 MacBook Air but have decided that even today, its performance characteristics make it perfectly suitable as a low-cost Mac laptop, building a new model on the A18 Pro would not be a bad move. It wouldn’t have Thunderbolt, only USB-C, but that’s not a dealbreaker on a cheap laptop. It might re-use parts from the M1 Air, including the display.
I like that Apple sells a laptop at $649, and I think Apple likes it, too. A new low-end model might steal some buyers from the $999 MacBook Air, but I’d wager it would reach a lot of customers who might otherwise not buy a full-priced Mac—the same ones buying M1 MacBook Airs at Walmart.
(See also: Stephen Hackett’s thoughts on this topic.)
2025-07-01 05:40:02
Why the macOS Tahoe Menu Bar is the start of something big, Apple may lower the bar when it comes to an entry-level Mac laptop, and we try to parse the reasoning behind Apple’s latest set of EU App Store rules and regulations.
2025-07-01 00:00:28
If you’ve been using Macs for any length of time, you’ve probably tried every file organization system imaginable. Color-coded folders, elaborate naming conventions, quarterly “clean-up days” that never quite stick. Sound familiar?
The truth is, most of us have given up. Your Desktop is covered in screenshots. Your Downloads folder is a mess. And your Documents folder? Full of files you haven’t touched in years.
Sparkle takes a radically different approach to file organization. Instead of requiring you to change your habits (good luck with that), it works with how you already use your Mac. Drop a file on your Desktop? Sparkle quietly organizes it. Download something for a project? Sparkle knows where it should go.
Here’s what makes it special:
The Three-Folder System
Sparkle automatically sorts your files into three intelligent categories:
It Actually Understands Your Files
Sparkle looks at your filenames and creates a folder structure that makes sense for YOU. Tax documents go with tax documents. Project files cluster together. Screenshots find their proper home. It’s like having a very patient assistant who actually understands how your brain works.
Before you ask (because I know you’re thinking it): Sparkle only sends filenames to process organization—never file contents. Filenames are temporarily stored for performance optimization and deleted after 30 days.
Built-In Duplicate Finder
Sparkle’s built-in Duplicate Finder deserves special mention. It scans your entire folder structure—including deeply nested folders and external drives—to instantly identify identical files. With one click, you can clean up these duplicates and reclaim valuable disk space. For anyone who’s accidentally saved the same file multiple times or has collections of “Screenshot (1)” through “Screenshot (47)”, you know how much space these duplicates waste.
Sparkle solves a real problem without requiring behavioral change. Sparkle’s not going to suddenly make you an organized person. But your Mac can be organized anyway.
Sparkle works with any folder on your Mac, including external drives and cloud storage (Google Drive, Dropbox, Box). Once you set it up, it runs quietly in your menu bar, doing its thing while you do yours.
Sparkle offers a 14-day free trial on their monthly and yearly plans.
For Six Colors readers, this week only: Visit makeitsparkle.co and use code SIXCOLORS for 20% off the lifetime plan.
Because life’s too short to spend it hunting for files. Let Sparkle handle the organization while you focus on the work that matters.
2025-06-30 23:30:26
Apple has intended the Apple Watch to be a nifty complement to your iPhone from its release; interaction with the Mac came later. (With an iPad? Well, it’s not entirely neglected.)
One of the key ways you can use your Apple Watch with a Mac is to unlock it. Two different readers have expressed frustration with how that’s working.
Six Colors subscriber HiddenJester notes:
It’s always had some limitations, where sometimes the screen says the wireless signal is too weak or it occasionally demands a password, but it generally works pretty well. Except … it quit working for me last week, and no amount of toggling the switch off and back on again works.
I noticed this morning while I was looking at the password prompt that it occasionally flashed “Unlocking with Apple Watch …” underneath the password field, but it immediately goes away.
They have tried rebooting their Apple Watch and Mac and are still locked out.
A similar report came in from Six Colors reader Coach Mike via Mastodon:
Any thoughts/ideas on how to fix an Apple Watch that suddenly stops unlocking a Mac?
Rebooted Mac couple of days ago; rebooted Watch this morning. (And yes, Watch is “unlocked, on my wrist and powered on”.)
Why would a convenient feature stall out? My suspicion is that has to do with how Apple manages to bypass using macOS account passwords (or encrypted versions of them) while also ensuring that your Apple Watch remains under your control.
To enable this feature, called Auto Unlock in Apple’s documentation, you first need to meet these requirements:
(Update: Continuity features like Auto Unlock sometimes require devices are on the same Wi-Fi network; Auto Unlock doesn’t explicitly list this as a requirement. However, Coach Mike discovered after this article first appeared that his watch had shifted to the Guest network at his house. He used Settings on the Apple Watch to change back to his primary network, at which point Auto Unlock worked again!)
With all of that in place, you go to System Settings > Touch ID & Password on a Mac with an integrated Touch ID sensor or with a Magic Keyboard with Touch ID2, or System Settings > Login Password if there’s no Touch ID sensor attached. You can then enable the switch under the Apple Watch label at the bottom to let your wearable unlock your Mac, as well as unlock applications like Password or allow autofilling passwords and verification codes. (The full text reads “Use Apple Watch to unlock your applications and your Mac.”) If you have more than one Apple Watch, such as a day and night watch, you can enable them separately.
As with general Mac password security, every time you restart your Mac, shut down and power it back up, or log out of an account and back in, you must re-enter the account’s password—you cannot use Auto Unlock until after that point.
Now, you just tap a key on the keyboard, move a mouse, or tap a trackpad, and your Mac automatically unlocks.3 This won’t work if a remote device is controlling your Mac’s screen or, peculiarly, if you are using Internet sharing, where you use your Mac to pass an Internet connection or one or more Mac hard-wired interfaces or via Wi-Fi.
When you’re in a regular Mac session and Touch ID or an administrator password is requested, you also receive a notification on your Apple Watch and can double-press the side button to approve it.4
That should be the beginning and end of it. However, as our two readers note and I have seen myself, sometimes it just breaks.
This may be due to the layered security that enables this to happen at all.
Auto Unlock isn’t just about letting your Apple Watch unlock your Mac. The same technology allows your iPhone to unlock your Apple Watch after it restarts or starts up, or when it loses a connection with your body, such as after you’ve charged it and put it back on your wrist. (Go to the iPhone Watch app > Passcode > Unlock with iPhone.) It’s also used in some cases when you’re wearing a mask to let you unlock your iPhone with your Apple Watch.
Auto Unlock doesn’t involve storing or revealing passwords. Instead, setting up a connection between your devices allows them to pass secrets that prove their identity to each other coupled with proximity detection to ensure your devices are near one another. When this system fails, intentionally or not, it provides unuseful feedback—or none at all.
When you turn on Auto Unlock features, Apple creates an end-to-end encrypted tunnel using what it calls a Station-to-Station (STS) protocol. One set of long-lasting keys gets created when the feature is turned on to allow STS to work over time. However, the protocol doesn’t simply rely on that. Instead, it generates a unique session key to use whenever Auto Unlock is invoked. Because this feature works with Macs without the Secure Enclave5, the end-to-end tunnel uses Secure Enclave at both ends when available, but can also terminate on earlier Macs at the Mac’s kernel (its core operating system component).
This operation relies on Bluetooth—in particular, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE). It also relies on peer-to-peer Wi-Fi, which is used to let two devices roughly calculate the distance between them, helping deter longer-range cracking attempts. Those attempts are themselves highly unlikely to succeed due to the layered encryption employed: all transactions over both networking types are separately encrypted.
The initial secret is sent by a “target”: the device that will allow itself to be automatically unlocked, such as a Mac to an Apple Watch. This secret passes over the STS tunnel using a BLE connection. When an unlock request is triggered, a new peer-to-peer Wi-Fi connection is established, and the distance is calculated. If the two devices are close enough to each other—seemingly a few feet, but it’s not documented. (Apple describes this as your Apple Watch being “very close to your Mac.”)
If the conditions are met, the unlocking device sends the target back the unlock secret it previously received. The target sends a new challenge that the unlocked device solves. Voila! The target unlocks, and transmits a new secret for the next go-round.6
There could be a few things going wrong that result in a silent failure or a failure with the wrong error message:
There’s one way around it.
The key problem—pun definitely intended—is that enabling Auto Lock sets a trigger that’s later released. Disabling the Auto Lock feature deletes associated keys, including breaking the STS tunnel. The correct order of reset is:
If you haven’t tried this sequence in precisely this order, now is the time to do so. If you have and it hasn’t worked, try it again. We all know that repeating the same actions with computers shouldn’t produce a different outcome. Yet, like rotating a USB Type-A plug three times to get it to fit, some parts of the technology world defy explanation.
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
2025-06-28 23:47:47
Last year Sandwich streamed The Talk Show from WWDC in its Theater app for Vision Pro. This year, it did so again, but also recorded three different angles of the show and assembled them together to create an interactive view from within the Theater app:
You’re not just watching the show, you’re attending it. Sit in the front row with other fans and direct your own experience by switching between cameras in real-time, getting up close to the conversation on the stage… VR filmmakers have always struggled with where to put the cut. We give that agency to the viewer, and the effect is unexpectedly magical.
I was sitting in the front row of the theater off to the far left, right behind Sandwich’s capture camera, and Theater remarkably replicates that experience. When you swipe to move between cameras, you also move locations in Theater’s immersive venue, maintaining geographical sense and the illusion of watching John Gruber and his guests on stage. It’s not immersive video in the way Apple has defined it, but it’s 3-D video playing on a stage inside an immersive environment, so it’s pretty close!
According to Sandwich, “the production uses a combination of stereoscopic 6K cameras and iPhones with AI 3D conversion.” There are more details on how it was all put together in a video by Adam Savage and Tested.
2025-06-28 00:00:51
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