2026-04-09 01:08:44
Every morning, I start my day with breakfast, a cup of tea, and my iPad. This is the latest version of a ritual that began years ago with an actual newspaper that an actual human being left in my driveway. For the last five years, it’s all been mediated by my RSS reader, but it’s an experience that integrates newsletters and RSS feeds together in one place.
Still, I can’t help but feel that the whole experience is not quite as good as it should be. It’s a feeling that was stoked further by Terry Godier, whose essay Phantom Obligation served as an explanation for what motivated Godier to create Current, a newsreader app that tries to escape the tyranny of unread counts and reading debt and other pressures that turn reading from a pleasure into a chore.
Godier’s approach lets you treat different media sources in different ways, which is very clever. A breaking-news firehose might fade away after a few hours; a site devoted to thoughtful longform articles a few times a week or month would have more staying power.
It all makes sense to me, which is why I was surprised that when I tried Current, I bounced right off of it. I realized that the premise of Current is that it’s providing a gentle way to fade out the noise and allow users to focus on what’s important, whether it’s based on time or voice. It’s an app that seems meant for people who check their RSS readers several times a day, perhaps on their phone whenever they’ve got downtime. Makes sense to me—but that’s not me.
I’ve been so proud of my reading workflow, using Feedbin as a repository for all the newsletters I get, that I missed the other important part of that workflow: I open ReadKit once a day, read the items in my story list that interest me, and then close the iPad and go about my day. I am not looking for updates throughout the day, or using the app as a read-later service—in fact, my default view only shows me items from the past 48 hours—but as the true successor of that old morning newspaper.
This makes me realize that, rather than being frustrated that so many of my news sources these days offer newsletters but not RSS feeds, I might actually be better off subscribing to more newsletters, and unsubscribing from the equivalent RSS feeds of those sources. Yes, I’m frustrated that the San Francisco Chronicle doesn’t offer RSS, but it offers several daily newsletters that pop up in my newsreader in the morning, featuring links I can tap on to read stories in its app or on its website. Maybe that’s… better?
Similarly, I’ve started to look at some of the RSS feeds I subscribe to and realize that they’re just not important enough to drop multiple items in my feed over the course of a day. I’d actually rather have their posts collected into a bundle, whether that’s via a newsletter, my reader app, or some sort of script I write that turns the source’s new posts into a list of links.
That’s not quite the same thing as what Godier is trying to do, but it’s similar, because it suggests that the big-list-of-posts interface for RSS readers might not be quite right. If my RSS reader offered me the ability to select certain RSS feeds and display them as a single summary item with links to the stories, that would probably fit better into my reading approach. (And again, I can probably code up a simple script that generates these newsletter-like summaries and sends them to Feedbin.)
While I didn’t end up clicking with Current, I really like how Godier is challenging the entire idea of the “email inbox” RSS interface that’s been predominant forever. My insertion of newsletters into my Feedbin interface was the first clue that what I want to do is not actually read RSS, I want to read what I want using an app that makes that easy.
What is that app? What would we even call it? If it’s all email newsletters, should I just be reading in my mail client every morning? Mail clients are nice and all, but I wouldn’t call them optimized for longer-form reading. Read-later apps like Instapaper are sort of similar, but focused more on long-term storage. News apps tend to be siloed or impossible to personalize. (I am not visiting Apple News in the morning.)
I don’t have an answer here, but I’m enjoying the uncertainty. After five years of a system that has served me pretty well, I’m realizing that it’s got more rough edges than I had really noticed before. It’s okay, but it should be a lot better.
Maybe we should all revisit the assumptions we make about when and how we read. That was really Terry Godier’s point, and it’s a good one.
2026-04-08 23:49:33
Software developer Photon, whose product requires running a bunch of Macs to connect to iMessage, discovered a pretty major bug:
Every Mac has a hidden expiration date. After exactly 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, and 47 seconds of continuous uptime, a 32-bit unsigned integer overflow in Apple’s XNU kernel freezes the internal TCP timestamp clock… ICMP (ping) keeps working. Everything else dies. The only fix most people know is a reboot.
The whole story is wild (albeit technical). Photon says they’re working on a fix, but really, this is something Apple should be working on.
As someone who keeps a Mac mini running in my closet, I guarantee you that I have been affected by this bug. But who remembers that it’s been 50 days since the last time your Mac server became entirely unresponsive other than pings? Unless I’m traveling, I just shrug, reboot the Mac, and go on with my life. Not great.
2026-04-08 05:34:42
Like millions of people around the world, I have a mixed marriage: I’ve long used Macs, but my wife Kat’s personal computer is a Windows PC.
That categorization isn’t entirely fair, though—because Kat also uses an iPhone and wears an Apple Watch every single day. We have an Apple TV in the living room and a HomePod mini in the kitchen. She’s certainly no stranger to the world of Apple devices. If anything, the Lenovo laptop that largely lives underneath our TV is the odd one out in the house.
When we bought her that laptop for personal use a year or so back, price was one of the primary drivers—until the MacBook Neo, the $500-ish computer range was a market in which Apple simply didn’t compete. But when the Neo arrived last month, I thought this seemed like an ideal time to see what would happen if we took advantage of Apple’s two-week return period and tried to replace her personal PC with a Mac. So, I ran down to our Apple Store one Sunday and picked up an Indigo MacBook Neo with 512GB of storage for her to put through its paces.
This wasn’t just an opportunity for her, though—it was also a chance for me to see what it was like for someone who has largely only used a Mac in passing to switch up their habits and use it full time. The result was, honestly, illuminating. In addition to jotting down some thoughts about our experiment, we’ve also recorded a podcast in which Kat and I discussed her experience, including what won her over and what areas didn’t quite work for her.
One thing that jumped out at me when I was first helping her set up the MacBook Neo was the acclimation process. There are plenty of things that we long-time Mac users take for granted as the way things work, but if you’re switching from another platform, they can seem not only unobvious, but downright hostile.
For example, I noticed she ran into a lot of problems with two-finger clicking. Apple’s trackpads are often considered best of breed, but they can be jarring to somebody who’s not used to them. She would frequently bring up context menus by accident, because she’s used to resting her second finger on or near the trackpad while clicking. This is one of those habits that simply takes time and muscle memory to adapt to, but it can definitely get in the way when all you’re trying to do is click a button.
Sometimes there are larger differences that just need to be re-learned. For example, Windows has long featured a very keyboard-driven interface in which you can access most of the drop-down menus without resorting to using a pointing device. While this is technically possible in macOS, it’s not quite the same: either you have to some specific workaround like using the Command-? shortcut to access the Help menu and then search or use the arrow keys, or you have to enable macOS’s Full Keyboard Access, which is an extreme option that can really disrupt the user interface.
We also ran into some idiosyncrasies that seemed particular to this experience. For example, this version of the MacBook Neo shipped with the previous version of the iWork apps, before their inclusion in the Creator Suite. Not only did this lead to some weirdness where you opened an app and were immediately told to download a different version of that app, but there was some sort of bug upon first run that really degraded the performance: in Numbers, for example, we dealt with repeated spinning beachballs as we tried to do anything as simple as enter data into a cell. It’s the kind of experience that leaves a bad taste in your mouth, even if subsequent uses later in the week were fine.
As for the positives, they tended to fall into two categories. The first I’ll call “quality of life” advantages. The build of the MacBook did not go unnoticed, with the solidity of its aluminum chassis and a keyboard that she deemed excellent. (She remarked several times on how much she enjoyed its clicky-clacky nature.) The Neo also runs far cooler than her Lenovo laptop, despite its lack of fan, and has a vastly superior battery life.
She, did, however knock the MacBook Neo on one hardware feature—or lack thereof. And no, it wasn’t the two USB-C ports or that one is slower than the other. It’s the lack of a touchscreen. That’s a feature that even budget PC laptops have had for a long time, and Apple—arguably the king of touchscreens!—has refused to bring to its computer platform. Coming from the Windows side, I can understand how weird that is—at least for now.
But the biggest win were what I’d call the ecosystem advantages. Since Kat already uses an iPhone and an Apple Watch, having all her passwords synced and at her fingertips—literally, since I sprang for the model with the Touch ID sensor—was deemed life-changing. Likewise, the ability to use apps like Messages on her Mac and have it seamlessly integrate with her phone was a real plus. However, we did run into one small hiccup there: at first, Messages wasn’t showing names of contacts; we discovered that was because Contacts had only synced about a dozen address records. After some further poking around, it turned out that most of her contacts were stored not in iCloud, but in her Google account. Once we set that up to sync, things worked fine, but it was another hoop to jump through to get everything working properly.
Similarly, she really appreciated the integration with Apple Pay and Touch ID. That’s a workflow she’s gotten very used to on her iPhone and Apple Watch, and its ease and simplicity is familiar—and equally good—on the Mac.
However, despite her generally positive reception to the MacBook Neo—which I think surprised even her—Kat was equally adamant that one place she’d never be able to use the machine is in her work. The main reason: Excel.
Kat spends a lot of her professional life in Excel, doing work like finance or advanced modeling—tasks that I cannot even pretend to understand. Now, Microsoft does of course make a version of Excel for the Mac. However, while it shares most of the same features as its Windows counterpart, most is not all. One key feature that she relies on in her work is a slew of powerful keyboard shortcuts that simply have no Mac equivalent.
I couldn’t believe this was the case in the year 2026, but sure enough. I even uncovered a Reddit post detailing this discrepancy, which itself links to a very lengthy Microsoft support document on all the keyboard shortcuts.
While you could laboriously remap many of these options to a Mac keyboard, the question simply becomes: why? In the strange eventuality where she was forced to use a Mac for her work, it would probably be far more expedient to simply run a Windows version of Excel in an emulation environment than create bespoke equivalents. But retraining all her muscle memory and skills? That’s a non-starter.
After two weeks, I’m sad to say the MacBook Neo was packed back in its box and returned to the Apple Store to spend more time with its family. In lieu of flowers, please send donations to the poor Windows users.
Honestly, this wasn’t a slight on the Neo itself—the simple truth is that Kat just doesn’t use her personal laptop for much. In fact, the biggest competition to the Neo was not the Lenovo, but her iPhone, which is where she does most of her everyday computing tasks. Like many of us, she’s gotten used to a life that’s phone-first and only turns to a computer when she really needs something like a keyboard.
Ultimately, were that Lenovo to break tomorrow1, Kat deemed that she would be tempted—perhaps even likely—to replace it with a MacBook Neo. But as it stands today, that PC is still alive and kicking, and thus we don’t have the need to buy a replacement that will, itself, barely get used.
Despite the Neo’s return, I consider the experiment to be an overall success. For someone who has long been frustrated with her experience using a Mac whenever she had to sit down at my desk2, Kat ended up surprisingly pleased with the Neo. Were she to end up using a Mac more, I believe she might even find herself delighted with all the other features she has yet to discover. It gives me hope that our house may still someday be united in platform harmony.
2026-04-07 06:41:55
Since 2021, Six Colors has been compiling an annual report card 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, and we ask them every year.
If you’re part of the Apple IT community and would like to participate in this year’s survey, it’s just a click away. Results will be posted at the end of the month.
2026-04-07 06:37:57
The Mac Pro is dead, iOS 18 security updates are now available for all, and Siri’s upcoming revamp comes into focus. After all that’s done, both hosts share their Apple origin stories.
2026-04-07 02:19:49
You might have noticed that, after installing iOS 26.4, your iPhone is behaving differently. Some actions (like changing your password) require a one-hour wait, followed by biometric authentication. You never had to do this before. Why now? Because with iOS 26.4, Apple has decided to enable its Stolen Device Protection feature on all iPhones. This feature may not make you safer—or feel safer—but it should prevent or severely deter misuse and hijacking of your iPhone and Apple Account.
Alternatively, you may not have noticed this—several sites reported in February 2026, during the 26.4 beta testing period, that Stolen Device Protection was automatically enabled in the update. Or a dark pattern—a user-interface design that pushes you to a particular decision without removing one or more others—may have caused you to opt in. However, I’ve found no confirmation from Apple, nor do various sites that write about Apple have a definitive answer!
So this is a good time to review Stolen Device Protection, whether or not you had it enabled without your permission.
Months after a report in the Wall Street Journal about multiple people being assaulted or shoulder surfed to unlock a stolen iPhone, and from there to hijack the owner’s Apple Account, Apple added Stolen Device Protection. This feature flipped the script on iPhone authentication, requiring Face ID or Touch ID to access certain features or make significant changes—a passcode no longer sufficed. It also added a cooldown period, requiring a one-hour delay in many circumstances before those biometrically authenticated actions could occur.
The scenarios are very straightforward:
With a passcode, those with criminal intent can access all sorts of stuff stored on your phone, including bank accounts, and use Apple Pay. What’s worse is that the Wall Street Journal reports documented that with a passcode, a thief or attacker could initiate an Apple Account reset, allowing them to hijack your account, change its password, and render it inaccessible to you—perhaps forever! (Apple is being sued about recovering such stolen accounts.)
Now, it’s unclear how many people suffered this kind of crime. It might have been dozens or hundreds—maybe it was thousands? There’s no comprehensive law-enforcement data, and Apple has offered no insight. Stolen Device Protection can cause minor to major inconveniences, depending on which features you can’t use for an hour, so I assume Apple found the issue significant enough to roll it out in 2024—and to push people to enable it in 2026, if not enable it for them.
Note that this remains an iPhone-only feature, even though an iPad could be exploited the same way. I have to infer either that Apple has had almost no reports of exploitation via iPad passcode theft, or that they are balancing the needs of the average iPad user who is out and about with that device against the complexity of managing Stolen Device Protection.
If you have Stolen Device Protection enabled or want to, let’s go over what that entails.
On your iPhone, go to Settings: Privacy & Security: Stolen Device Protection. If it’s disabled and you want to turn it on, you will be unable to do so if you don’t meet a number of requirements:
Once enabled, you see two options: Away from Familiar Locations and Always. Familiar Locations ostensibly leans on Significant Locations, but I’ll warn you that I have, on multiple occasions, been in my home, a place I spent a significant majority of my time, and was told by Stolen Device Protection that I wasn’t in a familiar location.
When you try to carry out certain actions, that’s when the protection kicks in. There are two kinds of deterrence:3
I suspect that with Stolen Device Protection, a thief flings the iPhone away as soon as possible, except in even rarer circumstances than the above.
If you’re not typically in environments in which you might be at risk of the specific kind of theft or violence discussed above, Stolen Device Protection can be overkill and a pain. As noted above, I do spend most of my time at my house, working from a home office, and I avoid crowded bars and other venues.
However, if you like the additional protection and are willing to deal with the timeout or location-based iffiness of Stolen Device Protection, turn it on and give it a try, if Apple hasn’t already done so for you or snookered you into it. And you can always turn it off—it just might take an hour.
I write about all sorts of security and protection, mostly focused on people having physical proximity to your devices, in Take Control of Securing Your Apple Devices.
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
