2026-02-03 02:50:18
It’s Super Bowl week and the start of the Olympics, so Will Carroll joins Jason to discuss Peacock’s almost-make-or-break moment, streaming fights and wrestling, and the fate of a clutch of Regional Sports Networks and other cable channels.
2026-02-03 01:30:30
Six Colors subscriber Mihir writes in with a Photos question:
How do I delete just the RAW file in a RAW+JPEG pair from my photos library on my iPad or my iPhone?
The short answer: you can’t. Not directly, anyway. And it’s not just an iOS or iPadOS limitation—macOS won’t let you do it either.
I can understand why Mihir asks. An image in RAW format can occupy several times the amount of storage as a JPEG equivalent. This has to do with the nature of the image being stored, as I explain below.
There are good reasons to capture as RAW and good reasons to discard those formats later. I’ll go through the background of RAW, and then provide a workaround to Apple’s missing piece.
The RAW format used by digital cameras is often capitalized as RAW, but it’s not an acronym, nor is it a format in the traditional sense.
RAW means the file contains “raw,” or unprocessed, sensor data from your camera. To produce a JPEG, TIFF, or other format, a digital camera—including your iPhone—performs post-processing to produce an image that’s immediately usable. This can involve making significant changes to dynamic range and white balance, or even combining multiple images as a form of computational photography, as Apple does with iPhone photos.
This makes RAW the digital equivalent of a film negative: it’s typically larger than a post-processed file, and contains information that hasn’t yet been shaved down or squeezed into a presentable output. This gives you more flexibility when editing, but it requires processing to be usable for design, printing, or sharing.
Many cameras let you set a RAW export that includes a JPEG preview usable on its own. The JPEG is the best post-processed output from the RAW, and was originally provided because desktop (and later mobile) software didn’t support RAW or didn’t always keep up to date. Without the JPEG, importing the RAW file by itself would have been much less useful.
There’s no single RAW standard—Canon, Nikon, Sony, and others each have their own proprietary versions. It has become common to write “raw” in all caps, probably to distinguish it from the adjective form.
Because the information comes more or less directly from sensors without intermediate steps, it contains much more data that appears like noise, as the variation between adjacent sensors is retained rather than smoothed away. So even for RAW formats that compress data—not all do—the files will be larger than final images intended for viewing or printing. RAW will always be much larger than a corresponding JPEG file, as JPEG is lossy by nature, and discards some information even when you’re using the maximum setting.
After camera makers began supplying RAW output, often requiring apps they released to support it, photo-management and image-editing tools added RAW processing filters to meet the needs of digital photographers. Every professional app supports importing RAW, including Photoshop, Lightroom, Pixelmator Pro, Capture One, and DxO PhotoLab. And Photos!
Image-editing apps generally treat RAW as an import format: you view a preview, then apply changes before it is imported into an editing environment where you can work on the resulting image. Photo-management apps with built-in editing tools, like Photos and Lightroom, typically retain the original RAW image, and allow you to apply modifications on top. This provides much more flexibility in achieving your desired outcome.
When you import RAW+JPEG pairs into Photos, Apple treats them as a single, indivisible unit. You can choose which version to use as the basis for editing (Image: Use RAW as Original or Use JPEG as Original), but you cannot discard one half of the pair while keeping the other. Delete the image, and both files are thrown away.
Apple built Photos around a lossless workflow. This means that the original file that’s imported isn’t modified—changes are layered on top and previewed, and can be reverted back to the source image. You’d think it might engineer an override in a case like this, but apparently not.
If you need to reclaim the storage space those RAW files occupy, it’s only possible on a Mac, and it requires exporting, deleting, and re-importing.
Follow these steps if you haven’t made any modifications that you want to keep for any or all of your RAW+JPEG pairs:
Of course, you can use the same process to jettison the JPEG and retain the RAW-formatted file.
When you delete files, if you’re sure that you have all the backups you need, you can click the Recently Deleted album in the Photos sidebar, authenticate if prompted, and click Delete All. (Or select images and click Delete X Items.) This removes the images from your Mac, iCloud Photos, and all linked devices immediately and forever. Use wisely!
Now, I noted above that this works for images that you haven’t modified in Photos. As part of its lossless workflow, exporting unmodified originals means you lose any changes unless you follow these steps:
Because of how iCloud Photos syncs images, you may want to delete all the images you intended to first, and make sure those images have moved to the Recently Deleted folder on your devices before you re-import them.
While Mihir specifically asked about iOS and iPadOS, the export-delete-reimport workflow requires the Finder and file management capabilities that only macOS provides.
For more expert advice on Photos, you should obtain a copy of Jason Snell’s Take Control of Photos, which addresses all of the app’s features and vagaries.
People have been asking Apple to add a “split RAW+JPEG pair” or “delete RAW only” feature for many years, and the company hasn’t budged, likely because of its focus on lossless workflows.
In the meantime, if you find storing RAW+JPEG is taking you too close to a full volume, you could shoot RAW only on your camera, and let Photos generate a JPEG preview. If you want to convert to JPEG, you can export it from the RAW file and re-import it. Or you might switch between RAW+JPEG, RAW, and JPEG shooting profiles on your camera, as many support user-defined modes that include output formats.
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
.cr2, .cr3, .nef, .raf, .arw, and .dng. Failing that, look for any file that doesn’t end with .jpg/.jpeg or .xmp. ↩
2026-02-03 00:49:42
We break down Apple’s latest financial results (including the potential supply-chain storm brewing on the horizon) and then discuss the difficult roll-out of Apple’s new Creator Studio bundle.
2026-01-31 01:00:09
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2026-01-30 12:08:00
As was foretold (in last quarter’s corporate guidance), on Thursday Apple reported its biggest quarter ever. The holiday quarters are always Apple’s biggest, and this was no exception. It offered the most revenue ($143.8B) and most iPhone revenue ($85.3B) of any financial quarter in Apple’s history.
Suffice it to say that the iPhone 17 family is a hit.
“This is the strongest iPhone lineup we’ve ever had, and by far the most popular,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said during his conference call with analysts. As for the quarter itself? “It exceeded our expectations, to say the least.” Spoken like a man whose most popular product, the one vital to his company’s existence, grew 23% from the year-ago quarter.
Even more interesting, though, is Apple’s suggestion that it’s still selling the iPhone 17 about as fast as it can make them—or to be more specific, about as fast as TSMC can make cutting-edge 3nm chips to power them, per Cook:
We exited the December quarter with very lean channel inventory due to that staggering level of demand, and based on that, we’re in a supply chase mode to meet the very high levels of customer demand. We are currently constrained, and at this point, it’s difficult to predict when supply and demand will balance. The constraints that we have are driven by the availability of the advanced nodes that our SOCs are produced on, and at this time, we’re seeing less flexibility in the supply chain than normal, partly because of our increased demand that I just spoke about.
Those details are really interesting. Back during the height of the pandemic, sales were constrained because Apple lacked access to “legacy nodes”—chips made on older processes for stuff like Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. That is definitely not the case now, when it’s the “advanced nodes” of 3nm chips at TSMC that are just not being built fast enough because demand was much higher than Apple expected.
This also extends a long-standing story that the Chinese market really likes a new-looking iPhone. Overall, Apple’s revenue was up 38% in China. Cook said that traffic in Chinese Apple Stores grew by “strong double digits,” and cited surveys that said the iPad was the top-selling tablet in urban China and the MacBook Air and Mac mini were the top-selling laptop and desktop in the last quarter in urban China. Cook, a longtime proponent of Apple’s business in China, seems thrilled.
Mac revenue was down 7% in the quarter, the poorest performance of all Apple’s categories. But it’s hard to be that down about the results, because not only did the Mac still generate $8.4B in revenue and reach an all-time high in its overall installed base, but this was all happening in a quarter that is the proverbial “tough compare”—since Apple released the M4 MacBook Pro, Mac mini, and iMac in the year-ago quarter, and only the low-end M5 MacBook Pro in this quarter.
Full credit to analyst Michael Ng of Goldman Sachs for the most creative way possible of trying to get Apple to reveal its future product strategies: Ng asked Apple CFO Kevan Parekh if there would be any tough comparisons due in the upcoming quarter, to which Parekh replied, “There’s nothing that rises to that kind of color that we’d outline in the outlook.”
Let me translate this for you: Ng is wondering if, perhaps, Apple is going to release some nice new Macs this quarter that will mean that it’s not a “tough compare” versus Q2 of 2025. Parekh replied by essentially pointing at his previous statement and saying that the dog did not, in fact, bark.
Look, we know there will be new MacBook Pros eventually, and probably pretty soon. Maybe they’ll help with Q2 Mac sales, though at this point they’d only be able to contribute for about half of the quarter. Still, a gold star to Ng for trying to logic his way into getting Parekh to reveal things about future product releases.
Apple posted a company gross margin of 48.2%, based on a 40.7% products margin and an astounding 76.5% margin on services. This was actually above the high end of Apple’s previous guidance on margin. This fact left several analysts on the call flabbergasted, none more so than Ben Reitzes of Mellius:
You know, I’m pretty shocked. I got to hand it to you, Tim, that you’re able to do 48% to 49%. What’s really going on there? How are you doing that with… the [memory] prices?
Parekh’s answer was basically that Apple tended to sell more of its high-margin products than its lower-margin ones during the quarter, which pushed margin up. What really impressed the analysts was his insistence that even this upcoming quarter, where memory price issues are expected to become even more serious, Apple says it feels “pretty good” about its guidance to another 48% to 49% margin quarter.
Looking more broadly at Apple’s forecast, the company says the second quarter should offer 13% to 16% growth versus the year-ago quarter. Considering that the Q2 2025 revenue number was $95.4B, this means Apple expects to generate somewhere between $108B and $111B in revenue next quarter. That’s just a staggering number, because it suggests that even Apple’s boring quarters are going to routinely generate more than $100B in revenue. (For the record, last year’s fourth quarter was the first non-holiday quarter with more than $100B in Apple revenue. This would be the second. There may be no going back.)
A few other notes about the numbers and call before I wrap it up:
The iPad, bolstered by the A16 base iPad and the M5 iPad Pro, was up 6%.
Wearables was down 2%, marking 10 straight quarters of year-over-year decline. (I suspect the softness in this category is why Apple is reportedly planning on launching several new home-based products, including a screen-based controller and a security camera.) However, here’s an interesting tidbit: Apple said it couldn’t make AirPods Pro 3 fast enough to meet demand, and that it believes the category would have grown had it not been for that supply constraint.
Forget profits and revenues. “This quarter set an all-time record for operating cash flow, coming in at $53.9 billion,” Parekh reported. Accounting nerds, this is your stand up and cheer moment. The cash must flow!
Everyone wants to know more about Apple’s AI deal with Google, but Apple’s not talking. “We aren’t going to provide any details on our arrangement and collaboration with Google,” Parekh said. Cook emphasized that it should be thought of “as a collaboration,” rather than Google just riding in and saving Apple’s bacon. When Ben Reitzes of Mellius tried to get more out of Cook, only to be stonewalled, he replied: “Bummer. Okay, I tried,” he said. “You did,” the CEO replied through a squall of laughter.
2026-01-30 10:00:06
I got a chance to watch Apple’s new “Top Dogs” immersive documentary this week before its release Friday. It’s about 30 minutes total split into two 15-minute episodes, and takes you behind the scenes (and out on the main floor) at the world-famous Crufts dog show.
It’s a pretty good example of all the issue that creators of immersive video are still working out. There are some amazing moments in “Top Dogs,” mostly when you’re watching a dog and their handler close up, or when you’re in the arena in Birmingham, England, watching the dog show. Unfortunately, there are also a bunch of pretty shaky moments: distracting quick cuts, some vertigo-generating dramatic camera moves, and a reliance (albeit understandable) on non-immersive footage in order to make the narrative make sense despite the lack of the right immersive camera angle.
The more I watch immersive content, the more I realize that it requires patience to help immerse you in the scene. “Top Dogs” lacks patience, even when it pads the main dog-show narrative with side quests to Flyball and agility competitions. I found myself wanting to watch Flyball or agility for a while, just to understand how it worked, but the documentary isn’t really interested in lingering on anything.
So, does “Top Dogs” have some fun fluffy dog action? Yes! I enjoyed watching some remarkable speciments of various dog breeds, even if there was not a single Boxer in sight. But as an immersive project, I found it more representative of a style that’s probably not the right way forward for this style of video.
