2026-04-28 05:17:06
Given a week to process the news of Apple’s CEO transition, we ponder where Apple will go under John Ternus, the role of Johny Srouji, and why a book about Tim Cook would not be a cookbook.
2026-04-28 00:00:06
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2026-04-27 22:45:42
When the AirTag first shipped five years ago, I glommed right onto writing about it. I already had a section in a book on security and privacy about using the Find My device feature, enabled for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches. I was keyed up to understand where AirTag fit in. Recently, surveying the field, I found a shocking number of Find My network-equipped products, from an inexpensive flashlight to a $3,500 ebike.
Within the Apple ecosystem, it’s worth looking at what’s now available for those of us trying not to lose our things by misplacing them, forgetting to take them with us, or having them stolen.1 Because more hardware now has effectively unremovable Find My tracking technology, it may be a more effective theft deterrent or way to recover an absconded item. (I’ve got an extra suggestion about that, too.)
AirTag introduced a new category: items versus devices. A Find My device can reach the Internet and report its position, and can use a native app to see other stuff via Find My; a Find My item just broadcasts over Bluetooth to any nearby listening iPhone, iPad, or Mac.2
An AirTag lets you track whatever it is attached to or inside by relaying its signal through other Apple devices. This offers something akin to GPS-based tracking without the need for constant battery recharging, while also finding its location and updating it when indoors. GPS works anywhere with a clear line of sight outdoors, while Find My crowdsourcing requires at least one nearby Internet-connected Apple device to relay its current position.
The stuff we track is more likely to be lost inside than outside, I’d wager, with exceptions for stolen bicycles and cars. Or when you park your car in a vast lot and forget where it is. Find My items benefit from relaying through Apple hardware that uses a combination of Wi-Fi positioning, cell tower locations, and GPS and other satellite-positioning networks, as available.3
The short battery life for a GPS-based tracker hands an advantage to the Find My network. While GPS trackers have become progressively more efficient over the decades, they still need to be recharged frequently—every few days to a few weeks, depending on battery capacity and how often they report location. That’s because they typically have both satellite receivers and cellular modems: the GPS location is derived and then transmitted over the cellular network. Find My items typically last at least a year, after which their batteries need to be replaced or recharged.4
Apple announced Find My licensing to third parties alongside the AirTag release, and products appeared soon after. These were mostly trackers that cost less, had a slightly different form factor, weighed less, offered rechargeable batteries, or fit better in a wallet.
It took some time for more variety to enter the Find My item market, and I frankly lost track of the sheer diversity of what’s out there. With Find My now built into a wider array of products, you might want to stick a third-party item into something you own, or replace a device with one that has Find My support.
I set out a few weeks ago to compile a list of all items with certified Find My. Friends, I thought it would number between 20 and 30 items. It started to become unmanageable, so I built a site—FindYourTag—both for my own reference and because why not share it? Reaching over 50 items, I started to get emails and social media replies asking, “Why didn’t you include product X?” Indeed! I didn’t know about product X, but now it’s in. The database now lists 73 devices,5 though some are close variations of a single product.6
Some of these products have the attribute of supporting two or three kinds of alarms or tracking: some let you pair to both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub; a few expensive items also have their own proprietary movement alarm, managed via an app.
Here’s what I’ve found.
If you want a wallet tracker, you have a lot of choices. Apple has chosen to offer a single AirTag model. Baffling, because why not tap into the wallet-sized market? Apple’s absence is good news for third parties, because 14 different companies make a total of 18 wallet-insertable cards.
They’re all thin, though some are thinner than others. About half are rechargeable, though most of those require a unique magnetically coupled adapter that you are sure to lose unless you have a special place you keep odd adapters. Other cards advertise long battery life (two to three years) and have a discount program on replacing after that point if you return the battery for recycling.
If you’d prefer a wallet with built-in tracking, instead of a card you insert—well, there are eight of those, including the Nomad Leather Mag Wallet (Jason has one) that can hold up to four credit cards, and attaches via MagSafe to your iPhone.
Apple does offer a MagSafe-attached wallet, the FineWoven Wallet with MagSafe (holds up to three cards), but it features a Find My “lite” variant Apple doesn’t license: it only reports the last known location relative to the paired iPhone using Bluetooth via Find My—it lacks the crucial crowdsourcing component.
Stuff you probably will leave behind accidentally. There’s a whole shaggy category of things that you have left behind and aren’t a Kindle that you wished you were alerted about leaving behind (a Find My feature) or could track later. This includes:
Keys: The Ekster Finder Tag ($39) is a key-holding clip with the Find My item in the middle.
Glasses case: Satechi has the right idea here with its FindAll Glasses Case ($50). I left my distance glasses somewhere in the greater Boston area in March, and, wow, is replacing your glasses with prescription, transition lenses expensive. Oof. Ouch. Get me a Satechi, and send it back through time! (Did I mention they’re vegan, too?)
Camera: Insta360 makes a lot of different camera models. On two of them, the GO 3S ($295) and GO Ultra ($450) are both tiny, making them prone to loss, and trackable.
The expensive stuff that you would highly regret having stolen and being untrackable. You can add a Find My tag in a lot of ways to a bike or scooter, but they typically have to be located in some external location that a thief could remove or cover with foil, blocking the signal. For instance, I have a Knog Scout ($65) which uses a special drive7 on the screws you use to attach it to the standard water-bottle mount holes found on most bikes.
But wouldn’t it be better if you had Find My as part of the vehicle, making it effectively unremovable without destroying the bike or scooter? Several manufacturers agree.8 You can find Apollo, Segway, Specialized, and Velotric models with just that.9 For those serious about measuring their performance, you can even get a 4iii powermeter (the Precision 3+ Powermeter, starts at $335, several models) with integral Find My.
I am a big fan of Find My for the obvious reason that it’s let me keep track of my stuff over the last several years. That journey includes pupping part of a Take Control book about security and privacy that had swollen with tracking facts into separate volume: Take Control of Find My and AirTags. If you’ve ever had a question about setting up tracking of your own stuff, locating people, or using the Find My apps, I have so many answers for you.
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
2026-04-24 07:16:42
Six Colors wouldn’t work without direct support from our members.
Over the years we’ve added a bunch of new members-only features to the site. Our weekly podcast has proven to be very popular, so much so that it made me realize that a lot of members are perhaps a bit more inclined to consume podcasts than reading what we write with their eyeballs.
As a result, I’ve built a new “Six Colors Audio Newsletter” podcast feed. Using the same logic as our regular members-only email newsletter, it posts an episode any day there’s at least one full story on the site. Any day we’ve got stuff on the site, a new Audio Newsletter episode drops, complete with introduction and chapter markers per story. Here’s a link to a sample episode.
The Audio Newsletter uses a high-quality text-to-speech engine, so it’s not a human reader, but I’m surprised at how good it is. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking the script to make the output better, including alternating two different high-quality voices, using additional voices for lengthy quotes from other sources, calling out footnotes explicitly, and even switching to a “read every character” mode when stuff is posted in code font, which happens frequently in Help Me, Glenn! columns. And the refining of the script continues!
If you like reading our words with your eyes, thank you. But since I began quietly experimenting with this automated read-it-to-you podcast, I have heard from numerous members who say they just don’t have the time to read everything we write, but are happy to have integrated this podcast into their listening queue. I hope it’s useful for a subset of the audience.
If you’re a member, you can subscribe on your Memberful page.
And if you’re not yet a member, here’s a plug: when you join you don’t just support Six Colors, you get access to a weekly exclusive podcast with Dan and me, John Moltz’s This Week in Apple column, Dan’s monthly Back Page column, a full-content newsletter if you’d prefer to read the site that way, the new full-content Audio Newsletter, and access to a really good Discord community. It’s a lot!
And regardless of your membership status, thank you for reading this site. I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for eleven and a half years, but here we are.
2026-04-24 04:09:04
In recent weeks, when I’ve fired up the ESPN app on my iPhone, an unpleasant sight has greeted me amid all the scores and upcoming games I’m trying to check in on. There, placed prominently in each entry for upcoming games, regardless of the sport, has been a big, ugly-looking block of betting odds.
Outside of friendly card games, I’m not a gambler and certainly not someone who wagers on sports. (If you take nothing else away from this article, “Never bet on anything that can talk” is a good piece of advice for anyone to live by.) I don’t begrudge your gambling fix if that’s where you find some joy in life’s slog, but I don’t want it consuming precious screen real estate when all I want to do is check a baseball score.
At some point, ESPN apparently updated its iPhone app, as the odds block no longer appears in the Scores tab, and there’s no mention of betting in the app’s preferences. If ESPN truly went in and fixed that part of the app, then kudos — but it hasn’t stopped me from exploring other alternatives to following my favorite sports, starting with Apple’s very own Sports app.
Apple released the Sports app a little more than two years ago, launching with the sports in season at the time and steadily adding more leagues and teams over time. These days, you can follow most of the same things in Apple Sports that you can via ESPN. Even better from my perspective, you can banish any betting info should you not wish to see it. In the settings of Apple’s app, there’s a toggle to hide betting odds.
I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks taking a second look at Apple Sports to see if the app’s improved any since its 2024 launch. And rather than kick ESPN to the curb, I’ve kept using this old, familiar score checker, comparing what it offers to Apple’s effort. My goal: find out which app is the better fit for my fandom and make it my permanent app of choice for staying on top of sports from my iPhone.
Both the ESPN and Apple Sports apps place a premium on letting you follow your favorite teams and sports, though they take very different approaches to how those favorites are displayed. In ESPN’s case, your favorite teams appear at the top of the top of Scores tab, followed by the leagues those teams play in. The rest of the Scores tab includes other sports, with ESPN highlighting the biggest news of the day — or at least the news related to sports it has the broadcast rights to — in the app’s Home tab.
In contrast, Apple’s Sports app is all about your favorites. Nothing appears on the Home screen unless you put it there. That goes for teams as well as leagues, which can require a little extra work on your part.
Say your favorite team is the Detroit Tigers — and why not? Thomas Magnum rooted for them. Once you mark the Tigers as a favorite, all their games will wind up in your Sports feed… but if you want other Major League Baseball scores to show up, you’re going to have to designate MLB as a favorite, too. It seems like that should be self-evident — who follows a team in a vacuum? — but as far as hoops to jump through, it’s a relatively minimal one.
I’m torn as to which approach I prefer, though there’s a lot to be said for the stripped-back style of Apple Sports. If I’m just interested in finding out what the teams I follow are up to, Apple provides me with that. I think that gives Sports the edge over ESPN, even if it’s a slight one.
That said, sometimes it’s good to be aware of what’s happening beyond your silo of interest. If an NBA game broke out in my kitchen, I’d want to know why LeBron James wasn’t chipping in his share of the mortgage, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate seeing the NBA playoff results in the ESPN app, if for no other reason than to feel slightly more informed about the wider world. I can find those results in Apple Sports — just swipe right from the Home screen, tap on NBA and voila — but as with setting up favorites, it’s an extra step or two compared to ESPN.
I should also note that ESPN’s list of sports and leagues to track is a little more extensive than what Apple offers, even after two years of expansion on Apple’s part. I’m a fan of the Oakland Roots, a soccer team that plies its trade in the second-tier USL. I can include the Roots among my favorites in ESPN’s app, but not Apple’s. Similarly, the US Women’s National Team is MIA from Apple Sports, though presumably that changes when the 2027 World Cup gets closer. All of this is more of a Me Problem, but I’m the guy trying to find a sports app that best suits his needs.
Sometimes I want to know more than just the score — I want some sense of how the game went. Both ESPN and Apple Sports let you tap on a particular game to get the who, what and how much, though that information gets displayed in different ways.
Let’s look at an in-progress event using a Tigers-Brewers game as our point of comparison. Both apps give you the basics — the score, the inning, who’s pitching and who’s batting, plus an inning-by-inning line score. But even that info comes across in different ways.
Apple Sports seems to take a backward approach, putting the name of the batter and pitcher above the logos for their respective teams; in ESPN’s view, the logo appears next to the scores, making it much easier to see who’s winning and losing at a glance.
ESPN also offers a more expansive view when presenting a lot of the same information you see in Apple’s app. The pitcher and batter appear, but you also get images, including a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of balls and strikes in ESPN’s default view. You can also see who’s on base in the ESPN app.
Weirdly, Apple believes that team stats showing the number of hits, strikeouts, walks and more should be the key data you see first. If you want team box scores, you’ve got to scroll down. That information is easier to access with ESPN.
Apple’s approach to including details about baseball games makes no sense to me as someone who’s followed the sport for most of my life. It gives the impression that no one employed by Apple has spent much time poring over box scores in the morning paper, and that Apple decided to shoehorn baseball into a template designed for a different sport.
Apple continues to shortchange fans once the game ends, at least when it comes to baseball finals. If you want to find out who the winning and losing pitchers were, you’ll have to scroll down to the box scores in the Sports app. That information appears prominently in ESPN’s end-of-game report.
In fairness to Apple Sports, other end-of-game reports are a little better organized. A soccer box score at least shows me who scored, whether I’m looking in Apple’s app or on ESPN. With ESPN, I do get a written match report, though.
As you might expect, ESPN’s app offers a lot more than just scores, with news articles, video highlights and direct access to anything streaming through ESPN. That’s simply a non-starter for Apple, just as you wouldn’t be able to buy an iPhone or a MacBook Neo directly from Stephen A. Smith.
ESPN does a better job listing the channels where you can find broadcasts of games. Checking ESPN’s Premier League scoreboard, for example, I can see which matches are streaming on Peacock compared to which ones are on cable TV. If you want to find that info on Apple’s Sports app, you’ve got to drill down into the actual entry for the game.
However, in Apple Sports, you can jump to other apps that are streaming those games — something ESPN doesn’t offer for non-ESPN telecasts. So with Apple Sports, it’s ultimately easier to tune in on the action — unless, of course, we’re talking about the live sports Netflix is starting to feature more prominently.
The ESPN vs. Apple Sports debate may be one of those instances where you wish you could pick and choose the best elements from either app to produce the ultimate score checker. Take the depth of ESPN’s information and the more sensible box scores and combine that with Apple’s customization features, and you’d really be on to something.
After giving both apps a try, I’m not sure I’m ready to abandon the Worldwide Leader in Sports, especially now that the ill-considered betting features that had me ready to dump ESPN seem to have been scrapped. But I’m keeping Apple Sports on my iPhone just in case, because in an age where sports gambling is everywhere, I know the value of hedging my bets.
2026-04-23 03:10:23
Our app launchers of choice, the software makers we love and those we’ve lost faith in, our browser preferences, and forgotten automations causing inexplicable behaviors.
