2026-02-05 23:00:15
I cut the cable TV cord just about seven years ago, and I don’t regret the move at all. Through a judicious selection of streaming services—some free, some bundled—I’m able to see most of what I care to. And for the most part, it’s all on my own schedule.
The one pain point has been sports, which remains one of the few things keeping cable TV afloat. Even that’s changing a little bit, as streaming services are picking up coverage of more events. But to have access to everything, I’d have to subscribe to a whole host of packages, and that balloons the cost up to what I was paying for cable way back when. No thank you.
But there’s a solution of sorts when I need a sports fix, especially if there’s a can’t-miss event that I want to watch from the comfort of my own couch instead of at a sports bar or a friend’s house. It’s day passes via Sling’s streaming service.
If you’re not aware, Sling bundles up a bunch of different channels into one of two collections—Orange or Blue—that you can either buy separately or as one. It costs $45/month to buy one or the other or $69 for the whole megillah. That’s a bit steep for my tastes, but last August, Sling introduced a day pass option, where you can pay just $5 for 24-hour’s worth of access to the bundle of your choice.
So in this scenario, if there’s some event I want to watch on ESPN, I fire up the Sling app on my Apple TV, select the event from the schedule and follow the prompts to hand over my $5. (There’s a little extra tacked on for taxes, but the total bill is less than $6.) And that day pass means I don’t just get to watch one event on ESPN—for the next 24 hours I can watch anything on Sling’s Orange tier, which includes channels like the Food Network, TNT, TBS, and more.
I can tell you that Sling day passes work great in practice. I have a New Year’s Day tradition of watching the Rose Bowl game, a by-product of spending some formative years in Southern California. Or at least I had that tradition: the Rose Bowl has moved from free-to-air TV over to cable in recent years, blocking the game from my cord-cutting view.
On this New Year’s Day, though, I bought a Sling day pass, specifically to watch the Rose Bowl game. And because I made my purchase early enough in the day, I also got to watch two additional football games that were airing on ESPN. It was a nice throwback to my cable TV days, only without the big monthly bill.
There are, however, a couple pitfalls to the day pass approach. First, once you make a purchase from Sling, you’ll never be lonely again, as the streaming service will send many entreaties to your mailbox urging you to maybe consider a full monthly subscription. A quick tap of the Unsubscribe button takes care of that problem, though.
A more pertinent issue would be the fact that those day passes can add up pretty quickly if you don’t exercise some restraint. Fortunately, that’s not a problem for me, as my New Year’s Day splurge happened when there was an event I wanted to see at a time when I planned to be home. Maybe there will be similar circumstances later in the year—a World Cup match, maybe, or an NCAA tournament game. But I’m not too worried about racking up day pass charges.
And even there, you’ve got options. In addition to its day passes, Sling also has 3-day ($10) and weekly ($15) options, which can come in handy if there’s a multi-day sporting event on the calendar. I imagine those will get a workout in some corners when March Madness rolls around.
Cord cutting remains tough if you’re a sports fan, particularly if you blanch at the idea of committing to multiple streaming services just to watch your favorite teams. But at least Sling’s day passes give you a little more flexibility when it comes to unwinding with a good game.
2026-02-05 06:12:57
Our cozy gaming habits, list view vs. column view throwdown, whether AI coding integeration makes us want to build apps, and the rumored Apple products that we’ll instabuy.
2026-02-05 04:00:32
Is it age? Obliviousness? A delayed mental unacuity from my heart surgery last November? Or could it be a Shazaam/Berenstain Bears scenario? All I know is that the first version of this article took Apple to task for including a menu in the Phone app for macOS 26 Tahoe that, in fact, was there all along.
Or was it?1
The Phone app introduced in Tahoe for the Mac (and on iPadOS 26) made it much easier to deal with telephony across your devices. Instead of cramming phone features relayed through your iPhone into FaceTime, you can use a full-fledged Phone app. I have been a big fan of it, since I spend most of my working hours standing in front of a desktop Mac. I far prefer using my hard-wired USB headset for calls than AirPods or, gasp, holding my iPhone to my ear!2
After months of using the Phone app successfuly, I suddenly couldn’t get audio input to work. The Phone app has minimal controls and—I thought—no option to select audio input or output, which, in other apps, means the system selection rules apply.
I use several Rogue Amoeba apps and installed the latest version of SoundSource to see if that helped. Maybe there was an audio routing problem? But no: no settings were active and quitting the app didn’t change the input problem.
Checking the Sound pane in System Settings, I could see that the correct microphone was selected for input and, crucially, showed that it registered me speaking in the “Input level” section as I tested it. I could also be heard on Zoom and Google Meet, and could record audio locally.
Clearly, something else was at work! I called up my old pal Jeff to do some testing. (He’s also a technology writer, so we trade off troubleshooting.) After trying several things, I launched FaceTime by clicking the camera icon on the Phone lozenge that appears by default in the upper-right corner of your display during a call.
Jeff still couldn’t hear me! Interesting. FaceTime’s input and output controls are ancient and mysterious. Audio and video are both controlled from the (inappropriately named) Video menu, and it turned out that my audio input was set to a screen-sharing program I no longer use. I changed it to the microphone that was set as my system default, and suddenly my voice rang out.
“Ah ha!” I thought to myself—and said to Jeff and to editor Jason Snell—”I am a very clever chap and should document this as an article for Six Colors,” which Jason agreed to. In editing the article, Jason said, “Isn’t there a Video menu in the Phone app?” Despite my recollection that there was none, and my recent checking for such a menu, there it was on my Mac. It must have been there all along, and, Westworld-like, it didn’t look like anything to me.
In my defense: Why, why, is there a Video menu in an app called Phone that doesn’t use video?3 Apple doesn’t document this in the Phone part of its Tahoe manual And I wasn’t the only one unaware of it: Jason and Jeff didn’t know it existed either, until Jason was pushed past the Somebody Else’s Problem Field level of awareness.
I guess this is how I keep humble. Despite decades of using a Mac, I can still miss a Video menu in an audio app.
2026-02-05 02:00:15
I’ve been a fan of the Transit app for a long time. Apple and Google Maps can provide similar information about how and when to catch a bus or a train, but Transit has always focused more tightly on those modes, with lots of real-time data, and a social component, if you’re into that sort of thing.
It had been a long time since I’ve used Transit, so updates haven’t been on my radar until I found myself in Northern California recently. I needed to use BART, the AC Transit bus system, and San Francisco’s MUNI, all in the course of a weeklong trip. And when I opened Transit, I discovered that a lot of things about using the app have gotten better with the release of version 6.0 last year.
Transit has always been best as a “live” app, the kind you want by your side when you need to know if you’ve missed the bus, or how long it will be before the next one comes. It works great for route-planning, too, but so do the “big two” mapping apps. Transit also excels when you’re on a train or bus, watching for a stop.
What’s new are the big, bright boxes that tell you how long you need to wait for your transit vehicle, offered with real-time data, when available. It’s also easier to scroll a list of stops your vehicle will make, because the list is bigger and bolder onscreen. As before, you can use the Go feature to plot your route, live, and have Transit tell you where and when to get off, with any combination of phone and Apple Watch notifications.
If you’re planning a trip, Transit offers a lot of preferences you can adjust, whether it’s limiting the amount of walking you need to do, or getting there quickly, whatever the mix of modes. These have been beefed up, but they’re a little hard to find for the beginner.
There’s always been a social component to Transit, from usage badges to aggregated data that gives the app more information about the routes its users frequent. In the most recent version, there are also poll questions, meant to gather information about vehicles, stops and safety. Multiple choice questions pop up when you’re on a bus or train, and it’s easy to either ignore them or participate. If you answer two or three multiple-choice questions, Transit will ask if it can send you more, or if you’d rather not. It might be annoying to some riders, but it’s a way to pass the time while you ride, and the questions are all on the app’s screen, not pushed to your phone as notifications… Which feels like a nice balance.
2026-02-05 01:30:27
Apple lets you store payment cards in two places on your devices. Apple Pay is for point-of-sale (POS) transactions at a payment terminal or the like, as well as for payments in apps or in Safari. AutoFill Cards, the name of the menu items, lets you, er, automatically fill cards within Safari, and in any browser that supports Apple’s autofill framework.
Why does Apple have two places to store credit and debit cards? Why is the way you set them up similar, but not identical? When can you use one and not the other?
I thought I knew the full answer prior to researching my new book, Take Control of Wallet, but it took a lot of careful reading and testing to understand what I had been missing.
(Yes, I wrote an entire book about Wallet. You may laugh! But Take Control Books publisher Joe Kissell and I agreed on it after I realized how many pain points I kept finding as an ostensibly experienced user. Wallet has a lot of unexplored territory for many people—including me!)
As far as I can tell, you could start entering and syncing payment cards within Safari as of 2013, with the release of Mac OS X 10.9 Mavericks and iOS 7 (which encompassed iPad at that point). Apple added secure password synchronization via iCloud Keychain in those releases, including support for debit and credit card numbers.
An autofill card entry requires you to enter a card number and all associated details.1 You can start on a Mac at Safari: Settings: AutoFill, and click the Edit button next to “Credit cards” (it also includes debit cards). On an iPhone, iPad, or Mac, you can also go to Settings/System Settings: Wallet & Apple Pay: AutoFill Cards. An iPhone and iPad let you bypass manual entry by pointing your camera at a card, and visible details are extracted and dropped into the form for you.
You will note that when you go to that particular location on any device, Apple prompts you for some kind of authentication. That’s because you’ve stored card information that could be extracted and used by someone else simply by looking at it—the details are exactly what would be entered in a Web form.
Visiting a payment site in Safari on any Apple platform, you can tap or click in most payment card form fields, and Safari provides a list of cards that you can drop in. Autofilling requires authentication. On other browsers that support autofill in macOS, you typically have to Control-click/right-click in a field, then choose AutoFill: Credit Card, authenticate, and then use a long scrolling pop-up menu to have filled in or copy information from.
But note that at the bottom of AutoFill Cards, there’s an option labeled Apple Pay Compatibility: if enabled, either before or after you have entered cards, your device checks whether a given card or cards support Apple Pay’s contactless method. If so, you’re prompted to add the card or cards to Apple Pay. (One advantage of AutoFill Cards is that you can include payment cards here that aren’t supported by Apple Pay, which can include some store-brand cards and stored-value cards.)
Now, we know Apple Pay uses a different process, one that doesn’t send the actual card number, and which involves some encrypting handshaking with merchants, banks, or card-processing networks. So why are we storing cards for autofill, too? And what exactly is the difference?
Let me introduce you to the Secure Element.
I confess I had never heard of the Secure Element before. Or, perhaps having seen the name, I confused it with the Secure Enclave, Apple’s proprietary security component that handles private information and security keys.
The Secure Enclave is built largely around material entering and not leaving, or generating cryptographic elements internally. For instance, when you enroll in Face ID or Touch ID, the data collected is passed to the Secure Enclave and not stored in regular memory or on a drive. When you later authenticate, biometric details are sent to the Secure Enclave for verification, and it responds. The Secure Enclave is built into the T2 Security Chip for later Intel Macs and is part of the system-on-a-chip (SoC) of M-series Macs.
In contrast, the Secure Element allows two-way communication, though not with Apple or your device! When you add a card to Apple Pay by entering the details or using a card’s RFID chip, the card number is passed to the Secure Element and never stored by Apple. The Secure Element negotiates a secure connection with the card issuer or its payment network, and you’re asked to validate possession in one of several ways, like entering the security code or a texted confirmation number.
Once validated, the card network passes back a cryptographic element used as part of future transactions and a device-specific card number (called a Device Account Number or DAN).2 This number does not correspond to your physical card’s number. It’s stored within the Secure Element. Card networks also mark the number so it can’t be used for in-person swipe transactions, on websites when entered manually, or when read to a merchant over the phone. This number can only be deployed via the Secure Element with a secret that only it possesses, unique to the DAN and device.
Apple has no access to this number; only the “applets” that run on the Secure Element do. The last four digits of the number are passed back to the operating system so they can be displayed in Wallet, but the rest of the number remains secret.3
(With Apple Card and Apple Cash, Apple creates this number with the Secure Element during card setup. Apple provides access to a virtual card number via Wallet for iPhone or Apple Watch for manual or autofill transactions, which is a substitute for a physical card number, and you can see it in full.)
When you use Apple Pay at a payment terminal over NFC (near field communication) via an iPhone or Apple Watch, the Secure Element creates a cryptographically secured transaction with the DAN and a unique security code, which passes directly over NFC between the terminal and the chip. Only the card issuer or network can decrypt that transaction.
When you use Apple Pay via Safari, a third-party browser (by scanning a 2D code), or within an app, Apple requires all the parties involved—like the website and charging merchant—have completed steps with Apple or payment networks. The transactions are wrapped in more complicated layers with verification codes and encryption that are as secure as an in-person NFC payment.
All right! Now you know about the Secure Element and this unique handoff that Apple engages in. But why don’t Apple Pay and AutoFill Cards share information?
Here’s the crux, as you will have seen:
Now you know the reason: Apple Pay cards must be enrolled on each device, because there’s a process of creating a device-specific number for the card that can only be accomplished with biometric or other authentication on the device. AutoFill Cards are identical across all devices, so protected by iCloud security and device-based authentication when you want to view them or fill them into a browser form.
However, there is a time-saver for adding Apple Pay cards that I’m not sure everyone is aware of. In Wallet for iPhone or Apple Watch, you can tap the Add button (iPhone) or More…: Add Card (Apple Watch), and choose Cards Found For You. You can also tap Add Card in Settings/System in Settings on an iPhone, iPad, or Mac. (The Mac shows these cards initially, as “Select cards to use with Apple Pay.”)
If Apple Pay can’t sync, why do these entries appear? Apple Pay can’t sync payment cards for use, but it can sync just enough information about a card that you can select it on another device and use the bank, issuer, or network’s verification process to complete adding it to Apple Pay, since—I would guess—you’ve previously proved your ownership on another device. It’s not perfect, but it still achieves the necessary goal of creating a Secure Element entry.
If you found this useful or enlightening, please take a look at my new book, Take Control of Wallet. Wallet isn’t just about payment cards: you can add digital IDs, track orders, manage transit passes, and handle tickets, rewards cards, and boarding passes. I cover more ins and outs than you might believe possible in an app as simple as Wallet.
2026-02-05 00:00:00
Apple ships AI powered Xcode which prompts more AI talk. Lex makes an announcement, Dan explains what he does and Moltz lists his bonafides.
