2026-03-24 23:35:11
Apple today announced Apple Business, a new all-in-one platform that includes key services companies need to effortlessly manage devices, reach more customers, equip team members with essential apps and tools, and get support from experts to run and grow efficiently and securely. Apple Business features built-in mobile device management, helping businesses easily configure employee groups, device settings, security, and apps with Blueprints to quickly get started. In addition, customers can now set up business email, calendar, and directory services with their own domain name for seamless and elevated communication and collaboration.
This new offering actually consolidates three existing Apple products, Apple Business Manager, Apple Business Essentials, and Apple Business Connect, and offers mobile device management for free, which will save some existing customers money. There are also some new API functions for larger organizations, and Apple is offering businesses access to Apple-hosted email and calendaring for the first time. The new Blueprints feature will make it easier for administrators to assign configurations and apps.
Also announced today is something that has been widely expected: ads in Maps in the U.S. and Canada. We now know those will arrive this summer. Apple provides additional details further on:
Ads on Maps will appear when users search in Maps, and can appear at the top of a user’s search results based on relevance, as well as at the top of a new Suggested Places experience in Maps, which will display recommendations based on what’s trending nearby, the user’s recent searches, and more. Ads will be clearly marked to ensure transparency for Maps users.
Again, it’s not a huge surprise to see this—Apple has been working on bolstering its ad business in the past few months. But it does mean that once this feature is enabled, you’ll have to scroll past an ad to see results when you search for stuff in Apple Maps.
Ads or no, companies that use Apple Business will also be able to edit their metadata and upload pictures directly into Apple Maps.
It’ll take some time to digest these changes, but it seems like this is a simplification of Apple’s business offering, and making MDM free will be a win for smaller organizations. Unfortunately, Apple’s still only offering 5GB of free iCloud data on managed accounts, and it’s hard to think that any business should rely on Apple’s notoriously unreliable email platform.
2026-03-24 22:15:01
From Eric Berger at Ars Technica, the first of a three-part series about orbital data centers. This first part focuses largely on economics, but also touches upon issues of the environment, the obliteration of the night sky, and more. It’s a really fascinating read.
“This is not physically impossible; it’s only a question of whether this is a rational thing to scale up economically,” [engineer Andrew] McCalip said. “The answer is it’s really close. And if you own both sides of the equation, SpaceX and xAI, it’s not a terrible place to be. I wouldn’t bet against Elon.”
Yet betting on Elon also requires a giant leap of faith.
The third part of this series will dive deeper into detailed cost estimates, but in terms of round numbers, the bare-bones cost of deploying 1 million satellites is more than a trillion dollars. SpaceX’s two biggest previous projects to date, the hyper-ambitious Starlink and Starship programs, each required on the order of $10 billion up front. So in terms of scope and cost, orbital data centers are two orders of magnitude larger.
The part that has me curious, but isn’t really addressed in the story, is future-proofing. Companies like Nvidia are kicking out new chips at such a rate that the processors you send in to orbit will almost certainly be outdated by the time they’re operational. Will that be enough to offset the perceived gains? Are we constantly going to be launching new satellites? What happens to the old one? What if the AI bubble bursts? All fertile ground for a near-future sci-fi story, methinks, if not near-future non-fiction.
2026-03-24 06:54:46
Myke talks to Jason about his “Jeopardy!” experience, and Jason interviews David Pogue about his book, “Apple: The First 50 Years.”
2026-03-24 03:20:50
Collect your meager Kalshi and Polymarket winnings, I guess: Apple has officially announced that its 2026 Worldwide Developers Conference will kick off with an in-person event at Apple Park on Monday, June 8.
As in recent years, the event will run for the week, starting with the Keynote and Platforms State of the Union on Monday, followed by video sessions and labs. Videos will be accessible on the Apple Developer app and website, as well as YouTube.
Those who attend the in-person event will be able to watch the Keynote and state of the union, as well as participate in other activities throughout the day. Attendees will be determined by random selection, with invitations sent out by the end of the day on April 2. You must be a member of the Apple Developer Program or Apple Developer Enterprise Program, or a winner of the 2026 Swift Student Challenge to apply. Additionally, 50 “Distinguished Winners” of the challenge will be invited to a three-day experience that includes Monday’s special event.
There are, as usual, lots of eyes on WWDC, where Apple traditionally announces all its big platform updates for the year to come. This year we’re expecting the “27” year updates, but there are big questions marks hovering around some features, like the much-delayed Apple Intelligence offerings. We’ll find out that and more on June 8.
2026-03-24 00:00:46
Safari web apps and PWAs are a nice start, but they’re limited. Browser tabs are messy. And most tools for turning websites into apps still feel more like wrappers than real Mac software.
Unite Pro takes a different approach. It turns any website into a fast, isolated Mac app built specifically for macOS — with support for Window, Sidebar, and Menu Bar modes, deep visual customization, smart link forwarding, and native enhancements like dock badges, meeting alerts for Google Calendar and Outlook, AI overlays for ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Claude, and more.
What makes Unite Pro special is how much control it gives you. You can remove distractions, force dark mode on sites that don’t natively support it, apply custom scripts and styles, and shape each app around the way you actually work — while keeping sessions, cookies, and permissions separate from your browser.
Six Colors readers can get 20% off Unite Pro this week with the code SIXCOLORS. Learn more and download at bzgapps.com/unite
2026-03-24 00:00:07
I started seeing pictures in Photos that I was sure I didn’t take recently, but often of locations I knew vaguely. After a few days, I realized the issue: my older child, in college on the East Coast, and currently traveling during spring break, had a Camera setting that caused all their images to blend into a shared family library.
Fortunately, our kid is old enough, wise enough—and communicative enough with us parents—that I didn’t see anything they didn’t want me to see, but it is the kind of thing that could be awkward in some shared groups.
The issue is that the Camera app has a tiny icon that’s easy to tap and activate without realizing it. That button’s activation is then persistent for all subsequent photos you take!
Here’s how to work with this feature intentionally, and deactivate it if you never want to use it—with purpose or not!
The iCloud Shared Photo Library is an oddball: you can create or belong to one, and one only, and it can be shared with the creator plus five others, who don’t need to be in your Family Sharing group, if you have one.1 The thing that you create is called Shared Library throughout the interface.
Once you’ve created or joined a Shared Library, its availability appears in Photos on your devices with iCloud Photos enabled and, more subtly, in Camera. If you’re viewing both libraries in Photos, images from the Shared Library have the Shared Library two-person icon overlaid in the upper-right corner; videos, for some reason, do not.
On a Mac, Photos: Settings: Shared Library reveals participants and offers a Shared Library Suggestions checkbox. Enable this if you’d like your Mac to say, “Hey, maybe you should add this image to the Shared Library!” (I didn’t find this particularly useful, and disabled it.)
Go to Settings: Apps: Photos, and you’ll note an extra option on iPhones and iPads: Sharing from Camera. That’s the culprit in my offspring’s openness.
You can tap Sharing from Camera or go directly to Settings > Camera: Shared Library: Sharing from Camera. With Sharing from Camera enabled, you see a yellow icon of two people side-by-side in the upper-left corner of the screen in portrait mode or the lower-left corner in landscape. Tap it to disable directly from Camera. A yellow label appears at the top of the Camera interface to indicate which library is in effect after you tap the button. When Sharing from Camera isn’t turned on, the icon appears with a line through it.
The setting is persistent within Camera, so each time you open Camera, your previous Shared Library choice remains. You can override this via Settings or by tapping the icon again.
If you never want to enable Shared Library by accident or intentionally, disable Sharing from Camera in the Photos: Sharing from Camera settings.2
If you found you put media in the Shared Library and want to return them to your own, you can fix this quite easily:
In a bit of turnabout, a few days after writing this column, I get a text from my youth: “Your photos seem to be going into my account. I think you pressed the share button in the app by accident.” D’oh!
Our very own leader, Jason Snell, has a book that covers Shared Library and much more. Pick up a copy of Take Control of Photos to get up to speed on this and other quirky Photos features.
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
