2026-04-14 23:05:57
Today Amazon.com, Inc. and Globalstar, Inc. announced that they have entered into a definitive merger agreement under which Amazon will acquire Globalstar, enabling Amazon Leo to add direct-to-device (D2D) services to its low Earth orbit satellite network and extend cellular coverage to customers beyond the reach of terrestrial networks. In addition, Amazon and Apple announced an agreement for Amazon Leo to power satellite services for iPhone and Apple Watch, including Emergency SOS via satellite.
This deal had been recently rumored. Amazon acquiring Globalstar gives it a leg up in its attempt to take on Starlink, which is the biggest player in this space. But Apple previously sank a billion-dollar-plus investment into Globalstar, whose system underpins its satellite features.
That stake seems to have bought Apple some assurances, including support for not only current but future devices. The ongoing question for Apple’s satellite features is whether users will ever end up paying for them, something that the company has been happy to continually kick down the road. It’s possible the deal is structured in such a way that Apple doesn’t have to pass on the cost to its users, at least for some period of time, but we’ll see what happens this year when the latest round of iPhones comes out.
As for Apple getting in bed with one of its competitors, Amazon is hardly the only other major tech company that Apple now has a close tie to: we know it’s using Google’s Gemini for its forthcoming AI models and, of course, it’s long depended on components made by Samsung. As tech companies get larger and larger, it’s harder and harder for them not to be collaborators.
2026-04-14 06:00:22
Is it possible that Apple could run out of MacBook Neos? What’s Apple’s smart glasses strategy, really? We tackle both questions, discuss Jason’s new UWB smart lock, consider the shape and name of the folding iPhone, and more!
2026-04-14 00:30:34
Time Machine used to be a mess. I would try it with each new macOS release, get frustrated, and give up. My incoming email from readers was sometimes dominated by Time Machine problems, particularly when Apple transitioned from HFS+ to APFS as the Mac’s default startup volume file system. At one point, Time Machine volumes had to be formatted as HFS+ even after APFS became the default startup volume format.
Which is why I’m so pleased that Time Machine generally—generally, mind you—now performs as I would expect as part of my backup-and-archive systems.1 I use Backblaze for encrypted Internet-hosted backups, Carbon Copy Cloner for nightly local clones, and Time Machine for continuous archiving and backups. I also use Dropbox and iCloud Drive for nearly all of my documents.
Often, however, I want to exclude something—or a lot of somethings—from Time Machine. A file or folder is too big (like Parallels virtual machines), a volume contains a clone of another volume (and thus should be ignored), or some data changes so frequently that it’s not ideal to archive using Time Machine.
Here’s how you can control what Time Machine archives.
Open System Settings and go to General: Time Machine. Click Options. The Exclude from Backups list shows everything you’ve added, and anything Apple has included. You can drag items in or click the + (plus) icon to open a file or folder (or volume) selector. Select an item and click – (minus) to remove it.
As you can see from my list, I have many external volumes, and all of them are excluded from Time Machine—all external volumes are added to this list by default, and I’ve left it that way. After many, many hard disk drive failures, including a mirrored RAID, I no longer own enough local capacity to back up all my volumes. I put less-critical files on external volumes and rely on Backblaze.
You may also note that a couple of external volumes have Time Machine icons. Those are excluded from Time Machine by default, and if you select one, the – (minus) icon is grayed out. Typically, the only entry besides those volumes Apple automatically includes is /Users/Shared/adi, which is related to Apple’s digital commerce—that folder can be removed from exclusions, but I don’t know any good reason to.
If you’re comfortable with the command line, you can also get to know tmutil, which provides text-based control over the same features presented in the Time Machine settings, plus quite a lot else. (In all of these examples, replace /path/to/item or similar with the actual path, of course!)
For instance, if you want to exclude a file or folder, but also may want to move that item later, use:
tmutil addexclusion /path/to/item
Wherever you relocate that item to, the exclusion follows. Or, if you want to use a fixed path and make sure it is invariant, same as the Exclude from Backups, use
sudo tmutil addexclusion -p /absolute/path/to/item
The sudo command will prompt you to enter an administrative password because it requires elevated system privileges. The -p flag forces the absolute path.
A neat tip, if you didn’t know it: you can use the Finder to copy absolute paths for items:
The Clipboard stores a path that can be quite short for a local volume, or verge on the absurd for files or folders on iCloud Drive, Dropbox, Google Drive, or other cloud-accessible systems. For instance, take a gander at:
/Users/glenn/Library/Mobile\ Documents/com\~apple\~CloudDocs/Aperiodical\ Projects\ \(iCloud\)/Flong\ Time\ No\ See\ Book/Figures/01\ Flong\ Time/flongs-per-year-chart.png
If you’d like to use the command line to check on items that are excluded or included, you can use:
tmutil isexcluded /path/to/item
You can use shell-based wildcard expansion, too, so if you did a lot of fussing with inclusion and exclusion in nested folders, you can enter the first part of the path, like ~glenn then use ./* to get a list with [Excluded] or [Included] before each directory at that level of the path, like tmutil isexcluded ~glenn/*.2
Joe Kissell has written loads about Time Machine in Take Control of Backing Up Your Mac, including strategies, complements, and alternatives.
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
tmutil. ↩
2026-04-14 00:00:00
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2026-04-11 00:00:56
My thanks to Clic for Sonos for sponsoring Six Colors this week. Clic for Sonos is the fastest native Sonos client for iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple Watch, Apple TV, and visionOS. It’s easy to get set up and get going, whether you’re playing to a single device or grouping multiple speakers together.
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2026-04-09 02:44:03
Keeping our email under control, how we pick our cellphone plans, whether we use noise-canceling headphones, and the things we do low-tech.
