2025-11-28 00:30:59
Listener Jason M. wrote:
I just listened to your recent appearance on John Gruber’s The Talk Show. I was glad to hear more about the subscriber program you’ve begun at Six Colors, and I have a suggestion for a subscriber-only feature: a weekly podcast recapping the recent posts on the site.
He wrote that ten years ago this week. My initial response to Jason was that it was an “interesting idea” but that I was “hesitant to do more podcasts at this point.” And yet I immediately forwarded his email to Dan Moren and wrote, “I wonder if we just hopped on Skype once a week for 10 minutes as a part of a Six Colors meeting and recorded a recap podcast.”
Dan’s response: “I think doing a quick, informal podcast, might be interesting…. Plus if we could do it with minimal effort/editing, then it probably wouldn’t be too much overhead. At the very least, it’s probably worth trying! And podcasts are in our wheelhouse.”
A week later we posted the first episode of the “Six Colors Secret Subscriber Podcast.” (The RSS feed and episode URLs were entirely security-through-obscurity, hence the need for secrecy.)
A decade and 474 episodes later, thank you to listener Jason M. for the prod, and to all the Six Colors members who let us keep doing this thing. (We use Zoom now, and it’s more like half an hour, minimum, but it’s still quick, informal, and interesting!)
If you haven’t heard the podcast, there’s an unlocked sample episode as well as a delayed episode feed. Members at the higher More Colors and Backstage level get an extra post-show segment that’s sometimes as long as the actual show, and access to listen live when we record on our Discord.
When we launched the Six Colors membership plan, we had no idea how it would go. I think literally nothing from that initial membership benefits plan survives other than the general idea that by giving us money, you are manifesting more of our work into the world on this site. Our old “magazine” is now a regular newsletter of site content, we’ve added a member-exclusive weekly post from John Moltz, and most notably, we added a podcast we had never, ever intended to do—and based on all my surveys, most members consider it the biggest attraction in the membership!
Dan and I both do a lot of podcasts. This one is different, right down to the complete lack of notes and the occasional sound of my laundry running. Thanks again to Jason M. for suggesting it and to everyone else for making it worth doing almost every week for 10 years.
That said, we’re taking this week off! Our next new episode will be December 5.
2025-11-27 23:53:38
Joseph Cox of 404 Media reports on an unusual phenomenon when he and other Apple users have seen “both the iOS and Mac versions of the Podcasts app… open religion, spirituality, and education podcasts with no apparent rhyme or reason.” It appears to be someone using Apple’s auto-opening technology to kick off a hacking attack:
That said, someone has tried to deliver something a bit more malicious through the Podcasts app. It’s the first podcast I mentioned, with the title “5../XEWE2′””"″onclic…”. Maybe some readers have already picked up on this, but the podcast is trying to direct listeners to a site that attempts to perform a cross-site scripting, or XSS, attack. XSS is basically when a hacker injects their own malicious code into a website that otherwise looks legit. It’s definitely a low-hanging fruit kind of attack, at least today. I remember it being way, way more common 10 years ago, and it was ultimately what led to the infamous MySpace worm.
Apple did not comment for Cox’s story. My guess is that this is someone testing around the edges to see if there’s a vulnerability here, but even if everything’s secure, nobody should have strange podcasts opening up in the Podcasts app.
2025-11-27 22:43:32
Apple’s annual tradition of commissioning a special holiday-themed commercial film continues this year with “A Critter Carol,” a two-minute long film starring an array of singing woodland creatures portrayed by hand-made puppets.
The film definitely gives off muppet vibes, what with the shaggy forest puppets, occasional good-natured mayhem, and humor amplified by the spot’s use of a fun song, “Friends,” by Flight of the Conchords. Muppet vibes are good.
In addition to being imbued by the spirit of the holidays, does the film spotlight a blue iPhone 17 Pro? Yes, Virginia, it does. And as you might expect, it was shot (by veteran Apple short director Mark Molloy) on iPhone. (There’s also a brief behind-the-scenes video that’s almost as cute as the film.)
2025-11-27 06:42:39
Sam Roberts of the New York Times reports on the death of a fixture of Mac and Apple culture in New York, David Lerner of Tekserve:
In 1987, 14 years before the first Apple Store, Mr. Lerner and Dick Demenus, a fellow former engineer at WBAI, the counterculture listener-supported FM radio station in New York, started what became Tekserve, a warren of workshops in four locations on West 23rd Street. The company was an immediate success.
In a single day, Mr. Lerner told The New York Times in 2002, the company sold computers to the Council on Foreign Relations, the Trilateral Commission (an international public policy network and regular quarry of conspiracists) and the Communist Party (whose offices were down the block).
Back in the day, when there were no Apple Stores, shops like Tekserve saved the bacon of Mac users on a regular basis. I never visited Tekserve, but it was legendary.
2025-11-27 00:30:45
A lot of car stuff happened this month, where we needed to go from a one-car household to two. We bought a new car, but it wasn’t going to be delivered in time, so I’d need to rent a couple of cars in the meantime.
The thing that made the rentals tolerable was knowing I could rely on Apple CarPlay.
CarPlay is one of the best pieces of software Apple has ever made. It’s a little magic trick where a car’s infotainment system gets a projection of a virtual display generated by your iPhone with all of your audio and navigation apps filled with your data. You don’t download music files to the car or sync location data; it’s just instantly available to you.
It also lives separately from the software your vehicle needs to function safely on the road. The partition of what’s the automaker’s responsibility and what’s Apple’s responsibility is crystal clear because the software from the automaker looks and behaves differently. That’s a feature, not a bug.
When I picked up the 2025 Nissan Altima that smelled like hamburger grease, I was relieved that I didn’t need to use any of its much-older-than-2025 software stack for navigation or media. If anything, that 2018-era display became a window to the best of present-day technology.
The 2026 Chevrolet Trax hasn’t fallen victim to GM CEO Mary Barra’s long-term, anti-CarPlay plans. I couldn’t get wireless Apple CarPlay to work (Mary, is that you?), but the USB cable did just fine, and the screen was more than decent. The way CarPlay reflows and expands to fill a larger screen has greatly improved over the years. iOS 26 has a few issues with button edges getting trimmed by their container, but it generally makes good use of the space.
At no point did I need to create an account with each automaker for each rental car, or log in with credentials for other services. I didn’t need to use Bluetooth for rudimentary media playback for unsupported apps. I didn’t need to read addresses off my iPhone and manually type them into the car’s navigation system.
I did really need those services, too, as I was commuting to an office three days a week and had no idea what traffic patterns would coagulate in the roadways of the Los Angeles metropolitan area. I needed routing, and importantly, a routing system that I knew the ins and outs of. I wasn’t going to learn the quirks and features of software that was only temporarily in my possession.
I also needed a voice assistant, one that was absolutely terrible, but absolutely terrible in a predictable way for the limited types of requests I had while driving and not relearning what commands I needed for assistants. Sharing my ETA to time dinner, or to figure out if I needed to stop on the way home. Not fiddling with some other voice-to-text system that needs to sync my contacts.
Some automakers want to reset the relationship they have with customers for services. They will never be able to match CarPlay for personal choice, or data portability—and especially not for context, like what directions were you just looking at on your iPhone before you got in your car.
On a recent episode of The Verge’s Decoder podcast Nilay Patel talked to Mary Barra about CarPlay, and she said CarPlay was confusing to customers. Then her Chief Product Officer, Sterling Anderson, cited Steve Jobs as the reason for their move away from CarPlay, and talked about the possibility of federated IDs for logging into your car.
These are not people interested in replacing CarPlay with a better solution for motorists, just a better solution for GM.
Oddly enough, there’s a rumor that Tesla might add CarPlay support. Men would rather add CarPlay support than go to therapy.
I don’t begrudge Tesla adding CarPlay support merely because I don’t like the company, and especially its CEO. The whole point is that every automaker should have it, so the power and personalization are in the consumer’s hands.1
That same empowerment of consumers doesn’t extend to CarPlay Ultra. With CarPlay Ultra, Apple is also misunderstanding the balance of the relationship all three parties are in between automakers, consumers, and itself.
People might have forgotten it, but there were a few years where Apple marketed this as “next generation CarPlay” and stalled out development on regular CarPlay. It was the Apple /// successor to the Apple ][‘s CarPlay.2
CarPlay Ultra is a priority for some Apple executives who want their car’s interface to look a certain way. It doesn’t extend to real control of the vehicle. No portability of car settings in multi-driver households (that’s for the automaker’s profile selection screen), or integration with assistive driving tech, etc. Ultra is about making the climate and volume sliders look like Control Center sliders.
Apple’s continued efforts at improving CarPlay in iOS 26 instead of letting it go stale in some effort to push Ultra adoption are a huge relief.
We’ve got widgets now! I haven’t really found any personal utility in them so far, except the Overcast widget that lets me more easily resume playback of my most recently listened to episode. Still, it’s great that it’s there, and with 26.2 you’ll apparently be able to squeeze in another column of them on certain screens.
CarPlay is such a boon that we take for granted. Any attempts to veer further into Apple’s control, or swerve back to automakers, ruin that. Staying between the lines is pretty key to CarPlay’s success.
The ability to literally get up and go with any car can’t be overestimated. Whether that’s my month of rental cars or it’s the reliable, everyday vehicle that someone’s been using for years, it’s worth reflecting on how CarPlay has helped reduce friction in our lives.
2025-11-27 00:00:00
This week we talk about whether or not Tim Cook is resigning, holiday gift buying and agree we could all use more sleep.
