It might be weird to describe myself as an “authentication enthusiast,” but I guess I’ve never claimed to not be weird. I’ve written a whole lot about passwords and passkeys, so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I’m a big fan of Apple’s Passwords app. It lets you easily store your authentication details, share them with others, and even view the history of changes to your accounts.
Previous to Apple offering features like iCloud Keychain and Password Autofill, I relied on 1Password to store a lot of this information, but in recent years I’ve transitioned in large part to Passwords. But you’ll note I said “largely.” There are still a few things that I use 1Password for and while Apple is generally good about ticking off the lowest hanging fruit and leaving third parties to offer more niche products, I’d argue that authentication and security are important enough to our everyday lives that the Passwords app can afford to take on more responsibility.
Edovia’s Screens can use SSH keys to simplify logging into a remote computer.
So, maybe it’s time for a power user feature. cracks knuckles SSH keys! You know them, you love them. If you don’t know them, you should love them. Like passkeys, SSH keys are credentials that rely on public-key cryptography to simplify connecting to remote servers and computers without the use of passwords.
And before you dismiss this as something that’s just for those of us who enjoy diving into Terminal, lots of services and sites let you use SSH keys, from GitHub to apps like Edovia’s screen-sharing app Screens and many more. Again, like passkeys, their use helps make our lives more secure and more convenient.
1Password’s SSH key integration is clever and user-friendly, even if it doesn’t always play nice with other key management solutions.
Managing these credentials, however, can be a headache. In part because they can be stored or viewed in many places: in your user’s home directory on macOS, synced via iCloud Keychain, in macOS’s Keychain Access app, the command-line ssh-agent tool, and even some third-party apps like, yes, 1Password can handle them.1
A veritable surfeit of solutions. Too many, really. I’d love to be able to have all my keys stored in a user-friendly interface like Passwords, which would hopefully work under the hood with the command-line tools as well as providing a system for more easily using the keys. 1Password seems to provide the best implementation here, where you can set it up to have requests for your key pop up a dialog box where you can use biometrics or your main password to authenticate.
Just as Apple eventually supported (or at least didn’t actively hinder) Touch ID for sudo on the command line, it’d be great to see Passwords embrace SSH key management for those of us who need it. Which, honestly, is all of us.
A recent foray into setting up some SSH keys for one of my remote servers led me to discover that I had turned on 1Password’s SSH key management feature which, while cool, ended up confounding what I was trying to do. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
The Apple Creator Studio subscription bundle announced earlier this week makes sense. We live in a world where Adobe’s Creative Suite and Microsoft Office have been subscription plays for more than a decade. When Apple bought Pixelmator in 2024, it seemed like Apple really was building its own take on the Creative suite, and later this month it’ll finally arrive.
At $129 a year, it’s a lot cheaper than Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription and roughly what I pay for just Photoshop and Lightroom… but it’s obviously more expensive than Canva’s Affinity suite, which threatens a new business model of “free software, but pay for AI features.” Still, I’m old enough to remember when Logic and Final Cut cost many, many hundreds of dollars—putting them entirely out of the reach of most people. Now you can just spend $13 for a month in Final Cut or Logic to work on a project or even see if it’s the right tool for you. I think that’s a pretty good deal.
Truth be told, Final Cut and Logic are among Apple’s two most updated apps. I’ve been using them both for ages, and there are always new updates with new features—and I’ve very rarely been asked to pay for an upgrade. (The Logic Pro release notes are a sight to behold.) When a developer is committed to consistently improving its subscription product, I think it’s a fair exchange that benefits customer and developer alike.
The addition of Pixelmator also gives Apple a piece it was missing before. Pixemator combines many features found in Photoshop and Illustrator, giving Apple the design tool that it was missing previously. It’s hard for me not to look at this bundle and think that, for the people it’s designed to serve, it’s a pretty compelling offering.
But something about this announcement really doesn’t sit right with me.
Apple has chosen to roll its “iWork” apps—Numbers, Keynote, Pages, and Freeform—into this bundle. While the company has gone out of its way to assure everyone that those apps, which come free when you buy Apple hardware, will remain free… it’s also essentially converting them into “freemium” apps that have features that will only be unlocked if you pay $129 a year for the Creator Studio.
Some of the additional items do make sense as subscription offerings. Apple is offering loads of templates and themes for those apps, limited to subscribers. It’s not unreasonable to ask for money in order to access a content library, and the templates and themes seem geared at the target audience for the bundle: creators.
But it’s some of the other stuff that gives me pause. Apple is adding features to the iWork apps, and locking them behind a paywall. There’s a feature that generates a Keynote presentation from a text outline, and another that creates presenter notes from an existing slide deck. Users of Numbers will be able to have access to Magic Fill, which lets them “generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition.”
On the one hand, these read like they’re AI-powered features that might have actual costs attached to them. But they still don’t seem like features designed for the creative customers targeted by the bundle. They seem like regular features of Keynote and Numbers, ones that those apps’ much more general user base might want… but rather than being broadly released, they’re being withheld.
I don’t generally like the idea that Apple’s taking the free software that has added to the value of its premium hardware for a couple of decades and turning it into an upsell designed to generate more services revenue. But at least I can understand that if there’s an actual cost to running AI-powered functionality, giving it away entirely for free might not be a wise thing to do.
More specifically, this move stinks for anyone who uses Keynote and Numbers and isn’t in the target audience of Pixelmator, Final Cut, and Logic users. If Apple wanted to offer an iWork subscription for $20 a year that enabled AI features, some nice templates, and the rest, I’d… probably still complain.
It junks up the simplicity of the classic iWork concept: Apple devices come, for free, with a suite of software tools that let you get things done. Even though Apple has taken great pains to say that the iWork apps will remain free, they’re now free with an asterisk: free except for the stuff you have to pay for. Asterisks make things less simple.
But at least if Apple chose to offer iWork users a targeted bundle, it would be something understandable and reasonable. This, though? A feature to make building formulas and tables in Numbers is, somehow, limited to people paying $129 a year for Final Cut? A feature to make it easier for someone to build a Keynote presentation out of their notes is only available for someone shelling out $129 for Logic or Pixelmator?
It just doesn’t make sense. It’s as if Apple has decided that there can only be one Apple software bundle, and all of its apps are just going to be dumped into it. And I’m worried about where this potentially might lead, in terms of making the entire Mac, iPad, and iPhone buying experience feel more exploitative and gross. Apple needs to recognize that it’s in the business of selling high-margin hardware that people buy because it’s nice. The more that an expensive phone or computer is just an upsell opportunity for the real thing that requires an annual fee, the less special it is.
I understand charging an annual fee for great professional audio, video, and design tools. But for features in a free bundled spreadsheet app? It just doesn’t pass the sniff test.
Apple’s new subscription bundle of creative apps, the single-use tech we’re bringing into 2026, how often we erase and reformat our devices, and our hopes for Gemini-powered Siri.
Wonder no longer about what the future holds for Apple’s pro apps. On Tuesday, the company announced its Apple Creator Studio subscription bundle, including Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator Pro, Compressor, and MainStage as well as additional features for productivity apps Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and Freeform. The bundle will be available starting on January 28.
Let’s start with the top line news: the subscription, which is a universal purchase across Apple’s platforms, is sharable across up to six members of an Apple family and will cost $12.99 per month or $129 for a year, with a one-month free trial. There’s also a substantial education discount for the bundle: $2.99 per month or just $29.99 per year. Additionally, customers purchasing a new Mac or a specific model of iPad1 will be able to get three months of the bundle for free.
You can also continue to buy the Mac versions of any these apps as an individual one-time purchase. The productivity apps themselves will stay free—subscribing to the bundle will only unlock additional features for that software.
All the pro apps gain new features as part of this update. Final Cut Pro gets Transcription Search to search through footage and find the right piece of audio; Beat Detection, which lets you time videos to beats in music; and Montage Maker, which uses AI to edit together a dynamic video where you can adjust the settings.
Logic Pro gains a Synth Player for its AI Session Players; Chord ID, which can turn audio into a chord progression; and a new Sound Library. The iPad version also gets the Mac version’s Quick Swipe Comping feature as well as Music Understanding functionality that helps you find a loop by using natural language to describe it.
Pixelmator Pro is perhaps the biggest part of this announcement, as many have wondered what was in store for the graphics app after its parent company’s acquisition by Apple in late 2024. The Mac app comes to the iPad for the first time with Apple Pencil support, and there’s a new Warp tool across all versions.
As for the productivity apps, the Apple Creator Studio adds a Content Hub for what Apple describes as “curated, high-quality photos, graphics, and illustrations.” There are also new premium templates and themes for Keynote, Pages, and Numbers and integration with image-generation tools from OpenAI. Apple is also, in an unusual move, including beta features as part of the bundle: the company mentions one that can create a draft of a Keynote presentation from a text outline and one called “Magic Fill” for Numbers with lets you “generate formulas and fill in tables based on pattern recognition.” Freeform’s premium features aren’t yet ready to roll out but will come later this year.
Overall, this ground is well trod. Other companies like Adobe and Affinity have offered creative bundles of their software suites, and recurring subscription revenue is an attractive prospect for the company.
I’m glad that Apple is retaining the individual purchase option for the Mac apps: if you’re a pro who really only needs a single app, an individual purchase seems to make more sense. Any more than that, and you might be better off with the subscription—as long, of course, as you don’t mind paying in perpetuity.
I do wonder a bit about those who’d prefer to have the iPad apps as individual purchases, but I’d speculate that Apple has probably looked at what customers’ buying habits on that platform and see this as a way to juice adoption there.
Any model capable of running Apple Intelligence, it seems: an A16, A17 Pro, or M-series chip or later and at least 6GB of RAM. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
Google and Apple join forces to corner the market on smartphone AI models, John Ternus gets a profile in the New York Times, live NBA basketball comes to the Vision Pro, and Apple inconsistently refuses to stop bad App Store behavior.
At Macworld Expo in January 2005, miniaturization was on Steve Jobs’s mind. Since the world was in the midst of iPod fever, most of the focus was on the tiny iPod Shuffle. But 21 years ago, Apple’s CEO also unveiled one of the most notable new Macs of all time. Yes, the Mac mini is now old enough to drink.
As someone who has owned many different Mac minis over the years, I’m about to extol the virtues of Apple’s tiny, versatile Mac wonder. But even I, a noted Mac mini lover, have to admit that the most important thing about the Mac mini was its price.
It cost $499, which is still the lowest list price ever for a brand-new Mac. (The cheapest starting list price for a current Mac at the moment is the $599 Mac mini.) As Jobs pointed out, this price meant that Apple was cutting all the frills out of the Mac mini’s packaging: This was strictly BYODKM, or Bring Your Own Display, Keyboard, and Mouse.
I came across two seemingly unrelated pieces of news recently that I am tying together as the theme of this column.
First, the heartbreaking garbage information that senior citizens may receive as many as 50 calls a day from salespeople trying to get them to reveal enough personal data that it can be used to commit fraud or identity theft, including charging Medicare for unneeded care or supplies or never-performed procedures.
Second, a wildly varying set of statistics about the percentage of iPhone owners who have upgraded to iOS 26. Is it 15%, 26%, 55%, or far more? We don’t know. But it appears to be far less adoption this far out than updates to iOS 18 a year ago. Blame Liquid Glass, or user exhaustion, or the amount of unused storage required.
The practical combination is that tools introduced in the 26 releases for Phone and Messages, particularly useful on an iPhone, are either not being used or could be used better.
Apple stepped up to the plate on overhauling and improving the way that unwanted and full-on spam messages are identified and categorized, and can be blocked. Let’s look at how you could configure your phone—and that of people you love—to better lock out the creepo fraudsters.
Take a look at updated Phone settings
In that TimesMedicare scam article, one senior explained to the reporter why he answers every call:
His family can’t set the phone to allow calls only from preapproved numbers, because that would filter out some medical calls. And changing his phone number seems unfeasible, given that every legitimate contact would have to be notified.
“I’m counting the days until open enrollment ends,” Ms. Kurutz said.
With iOS 26, there’s a lot more that can be done, even by a user who isn’t a smartphone expert. Most of the actions that can be taken are as complex as answering a call or not much more so. The benefits of acting on them should be enough to reinforce behavior.
The most incredible thing you can enable for yourself or someone else right away is the Screen Unknown Callers feature in the Settings app in Apps: Phone. To balance the need to get calls from unknown parties while also avoiding fraud, enable Ask Reason for Calling. Now, any incoming call that isn’t from a number in contacts requires the calling party to provide a little information, which is automatically transcribed and can be viewed in real time.
Using call screening ensures you don’t have to pick up for bozos.Set to Ask Reason for Calling for real-time, automated screening that can weed out scumbags (and time wasters).
If it’s a scammer, it’s easy enough to tap Stop or just ignore. Any legitimate party will say who they are. Later, you can select the call and tap Report Spam. While some fraudsters rotate through numbers like mad, I think some industry and governmental measures in the United States to reduce the ability to fake incoming phone numbers have worked: If I don’t block a number immediately, I will often see calls from it over time until I do. I also find that looking up a number via a search engine leads me to a page with a huge number of spam reports, meaning that number should be blocked in any case.
People unfortunate enough to follow me on Bluesky know that I needed a lot of medical care in 2025—things are going great now!—and I enabled this iOS 26 feature in the summer on a beta release. I constantly had calls coming from healthcare workers, and the filtering feature meant I answered all of those (and then marked them as known callers), and was able to avoid dozens of others.
Call Filtering may move some calls out of sight if Unknown Callers is on, though it’s quite useful when you aren’t expected calls from unknown numbers, like medical staff.
Because of the possible need to receive calls from unknown numbers, as above, you may want to leave Phone settings for Call Filtering: Unknown Callers turned off. If you don’t, then a screened or missed call from such a number requires tapping the Filter menu and choosing Unknown Callers to review it. At least a red dot appears over the Filter icon when there are messages in Unknown Callers or Spam to give a cue.
The other option in this section, Spam, should be turned on. It lets you rely on a carrier’s analysis from phone network traffic of call patterns or customer reports of spam. I also recommend installing the free version of the apps from AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon that let you enable spam detection at the network level—that can block some calls even before they reach your phone.
The Call Blocking & Identification option is yet another way to amp up your iPhone’s intelligence about calls you (or a loved one) doesn’t want. Services from companies like Hiya receive spam reports constantly, and push out updates to a list that’s resident on your device that allows instant matching for potential or well-known spam numbers. Enabling one of these apps lets calls that pass through other layers of filtering display a label identifying a call you might not or surely don’t want. With a paid subscription, you can also show enhanced Caller ID information.
Filtering unknown senders and spam can prevent most unwanted messages.
While Phone has received the biggest boost at fighting crud, and Messages is not where most of the Medicare and other kinds of relentless fraud come from, it’s still worth enabling in Settings in Apps: Messages: Screen Unknown Senders and Apps: Messages: Filter Spam. This lets you tap Filter: Unknown Senders or Filter Spam to review messages dropped into those buckets.
This takes more training. I find I have to tap Mark as Known or Not Spam on more messages than phone calls—most phone calls are correctly identified.
While I’m focused on iPhone here, call screening can be used in Phone for iOS, iPadOS, and macOS; some of the other screening options are slightly different or missing on macOS, but if you have them enabled on your iPhone, the effect is the same. It’s only if your iPhone were turned off that you would see a difference.
Liquid strength
Look, I know you have feelings about Liquid Glass—speaking to both upgraded people and non-upgraders—but I think there’s a value to overcoming that distaste and taking advantage of the good. Reducing the attention stolen away from you can be worth the cognitive load of adapting to a new interface.
For those who want extra help in sorting out iOS 26 and spam, you can check out three of my books:
Take Control of FaceTime and Messages: This book, which includes full cover of the Phone app across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and watchOS, will help you understand everything you can do to fight spam, scams, and many forms of harassment.
Take Control of iOS 26 and iPadOS 26: This title will help any iOS 18 or iPadOS 18 user understand exactly what changed, instead of digging through settings and features in apps.
Take Control of iPhone and iPad Basics: This edition, completely revised for iOS 26 and iPadOS 26, takes you through all the stuff that nobody ever tells you about an operating system, and that it’s just assumed you know. It’s great as a gift, too.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
The full implications of this deal aren’t yet known, but it’s likely to affect both Siri as well as other Apple Intelligence features, several of which were first announced in 2024 but have yet to actually ship. Gurman has also previously reported that those delayed Apple Intelligence features are likely to make their debut in iOS 26.4 this spring.
It’s unclear exactly where in the timeframe we are. Given that 26.3 is already in beta, and 26.4 is expected in a few months, it’s possible that work has long since started on this, even if it’s only being officially announced now.1 Even with the leg-up provided by Google’s models, it seems unlikely the company could simply roll in that tech for a feature due out in short order.
It had previously been thought that Google’s Gemini would be offered as an option via Siri, in the same way that ChatGPT has been available for some time. That was tacitly confirmed by Apple software chief Craig Federighi who said at the company’s 2024 Worldwide Developers Conference, “we may look forward to doing integrations with different models like Google Gemini in the future.” But that deal never materialized—perhaps in part because the two companies were discussing this more substantive deal?
Either way, Google’s models are clearly a step up from Apple’s own endeavors thus far. The two companies also have a longstanding relationship over search in Safari, which makes this perhaps an unsurprising continuation of that. But as to whether it can help Apple dig itself out of the AI hole in which it’s found itself, well, we’ll find out soon enough.
Apple provided Six Colors with the full statement:
Apple and Google have entered into a multi-year collaboration under which the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google’s Gemini models and cloud technology. These models will help power future Apple Intelligence features, including a more personalized Siri coming this year.
After careful evaluation, Apple determined that Google’s Al technology provides the most capable foundation for Apple Foundation Models and is excited about the innovative new experiences it will unlock for Apple users. Apple Intelligence will continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute, while maintaining Apple’s industry-leading privacy standards.
The fact that this was announced via a statement to CNBC certainly indicates that the audience of this news is not the tech industry but the financial markets. ↩
[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Mastodon at @dmoren@zeppelin.flights or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. His latest novel, the sci-fi spy thriller The Armageddon Protocol, is out now.]
Norbert Heger gets to the bottom of a problem I’ve been having lately—my inability to resize macOS Tahoe windows at their corners:
It turns out that my initial click in the window corner instinctively happens in an area where the window doesn’t respond to it. The window expects this click to happen in an area of 19 × 19 pixels, located near the window corner.
If the window had no rounded corners at all, 62% of that area would lie inside the window… But due to the huge corner radius in Tahoe, most of it – about 75% – now lies outside the window.
That’s right, folks, the solution to resizing the corner of a window in Tahoe is to click outside the edge of the window. I can’t even.
Since X’s users started using Grok to undress women and children using deepfake images, I have been waiting for what I assumed would be inevitable: X getting booted from Apple’s and Google’s app stores. The fact that it hasn’t happened yet tells me something serious about Silicon Valley’s leadership: Tim Cook and Sundar Pichai are spineless cowards who are terrified of Elon Musk.
It is absolutely unconscionable that, as of this writing, X is not only still on the App Store but is ranked #1 in “News”1 and that Grok is the #3 free app. Moreover, there has been—as far as I have seen—no public statement from Apple or Cook about this situation in the days, at least, over which it has unfolded. Probably because it is indefensible. Even, if at this point, they removed X/Grok from the store—which, don’t get me wrong, they absolutely should—the question would be “what took so long”? Was there something you had to think over? It suggests the company is hoping that all of this will simply blow over. Which is certainly…a choice.
As Lopatto rightly points out, this exposes Apple’s entire argument that the App Store is there to protect its users for the sham that it has always been.
Nick Heer, writing in his own link to Lopatto’s story, points out “This is why it is a bad idea to rely on private corporations to do the job of regulators and law enforcement.” Yeah. It also points out one of the failures of capitalism at the scale at which these companies operate: there are no market forces that can make an impact here. No number of customers will desert Apple over this that will make so much as a ding on the company’s bottom line. And even if they did, there is only one real alternative, Google, which is doing the exact same thing. The only thing that can force these corporations to act is government regulation—and whoops, this administration has not only pulled the rug out from under its regulatory agencies, it also literally employed the chief perpetrator.
It’s one thing not to expect political activism from large corporations, but to compromise your stated values all in the name of business as usual simply exposes that your values never meant anything in the first place. Lopatto called it right: cowards.
One of the immersive views is behind and underneath the basket.
I got to watch the first quarter of tonight’s Lakers-Bucks game from the front row by the scorer’s table. Except when I was suspended in the air behind both baskets. Or maybe in a concourse watching people walk to their seats, or occasionally right out on the court for the national anthem or a Laker Girls performance.
In other words, I was watching it in my Vision Pro during the first live Apple Immersive sports broadcast.
The experience overall was surprisingly… normal? The video just played, and it felt like watching any other Apple immersive video on the Vision Pro, other than the fact that it was happening live.
Clearly, Apple and its partners (including Spectrum SportsNet, the Lakers’ TV partner) have learned a lot from their first couple of years experimenting with immersive video. Unlike previous sports highlight packages, the live broadcast kept switching camera angles to a minimum. For most of the quarter, I watched either from courtside or from behind each basket. I found that I got the hang of switching perspectives when flipping from one basket to the other pretty quickly, and the view of the action was definitely better behind the basket. But seeing action from center court, courtside, also felt like a rare treat.
Again, my real surprise was that it held up so well: The video was smooth, though when LeBron James zipped right past me, he did get a bit blurry. I’m sure the video quality wouldn’t hold up to close inspection if it were compared with a highly produced and massaged immersive documentary, but it didn’t feel any lower quality than Apple’s previous pro sports efforts, like its MLS, NBA, and Super Bowl highlight packages.
While I was able to tell the score by looking up at the scoreboard, Apple and Spectrum helpfully added a score graphic located… down on the floor, basically. It never got in the way of the action, but I could look down and quickly pick up the score and the time if I needed to.
It was novel to hear the play-by-play announcers, who were calling the game specifically for the immersive broadcast, tell me that Bucks coach Doc Rivers was “off to your left on your Vision Pro.” The announcers did a fine job, though I do wonder if it might be wise to have an option that turns off the announcers and lets you just experience the entire thing as a spectator.
If I have one real criticism of the broadcast, it’s that I’m not sure the sound was entirely right. It sounded good, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t exactly sound spatial. Sound is one of the ways your brain places you into a scene, and it felt like the sound I was hearing was not really attached to a spatial environment that matched what I was watching. There’s probably some more work to be done on that front.
Still, this was pretty awesome. Having been to a few women’s college basketball games this past year and sat in the front row, I’ve come to appreciate that when you can see the size of the players, hear them talking, and really get a sense of depth as the ball moves around the court, it’s a very different game than you get in a flat television image. Apple and Spectrum’s immersive NBA game had a similar effect. I’m ready to see more.
(Anyone with a Vision Pro should be able to watch the replay of the Lakers-Bucks game starting Sunday at 9 am Pacific via the NBA app.)
The Apple executive transition speculation keeps heating up. On Thursday, The New York Times’s Kalley Huang and Tripp Mickle weighed in with a profile of John Ternus, reportedly a candidate to replace Tim Cook as CEO:
Apple last year began accelerating its planning for Mr. Cook’s succession, according to three people close to the company who spoke on the condition of anonymity about Apple’s confidential deliberations. Mr. Cook, 65, has told senior leaders that he is tired and would like to reduce his workload, the people said. Should he step down, Mr. Cook is likely to become the chairman of Apple’s board, according to three people close to the company.
I’ve expected the transition for Cook to board chair for a while. It makes too much sense, because it allows him to keep doing some work—including, probably, the more high-level political stuff that has become part of Apple’s world—while a new CEO can get their sea legs and focus on other parts of the business. And Cook may not love that political stuff, but I get the strong sense that he’s good at it.
I don’t know if Tim Cook is really “tired” (maybe it’s from all those early mornings and high-intensity workouts?), but it seems entirely reasonable to me for a 65-year-old man to consider cutting back on his workload and provide support for a CEO transition that he (sadly) couldn’t get from Steve Jobs1.
This part of the article struck me from a pure journalism standpoint:
Despite his low profile, Mr. Ternus appears to have shot to the front of the pack to be Apple’s next C.E.O., according to four people close to the company. But Mr. Cook is also preparing several other internal candidates to be his potential successor, two of the people said. They could include Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software; Eddy Cue, its head of services; Greg Joswiak, its head of worldwide marketing; and Deirdre O’Brien, its head of retail and human resources.
Note how the attribution changes across those three sentences.
Four people “close to the company” say that Ternus is the frontrunner to be CEO.
Two of those people say Cook is preparing other candidates as well.
And then… uh, here are some names.
The placement of those sentences would imply that they’re all of a kind, but they actually seem to be in decreasing order of accuracy. Four people say Ternus is the frontrunner. Two say he’s not the only person being prepared. And then… there’s a list of names, which you might assume were floated by the previous sources, but the article doesn’t actually say that.
My guess: An editor at the Times got out their red pen (or modern equivalent) and wrote “Who?” next to “several other internal candidates.” So Huang and Mickle supplied some names. But did they get those names from sources? It doesn’t say so. It reads more like they got those names from Apple’s executive page and their own musings. Let’s make no assumptions about the fact that Federighi, Cue, Joswiak, and O’Brien are listed.
Also, it would be completely irresponsible for Tim Cook not to prepare several other candidates to be his potential successor. What if something happens to John Ternus? What if the board decides, for whatever reason, they just can’t hire him? What if the board has asked Cook to prepare several candidates for the job, in case they aren’t satisfied with his preferred choice? This seems like basic good governance to me. It doesn’t mean that the fix is in, nor does it mean that there’s a legitimate competition going on.
The more I think about this entire process, the more I reflect on the fact that Cook himself had to step in for Jobs multiple times due to his predecessor’s failing health. And when Jobs finally made the decision to move up to the job of Chairman and Cook was named CEO, he was too ill to really act as that form of mentor before he died a couple of months later.
I have to think that, above all else, Tim Cook wants to provide his successor a better transition. And it’s impossible not to look at the ongoing reports from Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and now the New York Times and not get the sense that Cook’s succession planning is kicking into gear.
Not to mention the disastrous transitions at other companies, like Bob Iger’s long goodbye-or-not at Disney that’s still ongoing. ↩
Apple chooses an Apple Card heir, one App Store app just gets worse and worse, and a PC vendor surprises.
Cutting to the Chase
Les jeux sont faits, madames et monsieurs, and will whoever had “a big bank, one that’s about as bad as the previous big bank” in the pool, please claim your reward of absolutely nothing.
It’s not like it was gonna be the Bailey Bros. Building & Loan.
This is apropos of absolutely nothing, but I thought you needed to know it: on my first try I typo-ed those first three letters as “WAP”. But, honestly, I wouldn’t say no to a financial publication by Megan Thee Stallion. Before you mock the idea, ask yourself this: do youown a Popeye’s? I DIDN’T THINK SO.
There are still about 8,000 details to be worked out about how this transfer will take place.…
As reported by Eric Slivka at MacRumors, both Apple’s Chairman of the Board Arthur Levinson and board member Ronald Sugar are standing for re-election at this year’s shareholder meeting, despite exceeding the company’s stated age limits.
Over the past four years, the Board has added three new members, representing over one-third of its membership, and two other, long-serving members retired. In the context of this year’s Annual Meeting nominations, the Board determined that it would be in the best interests of Apple and its shareholders to ask Art Levinson, the Chair of the Board, and Ron Sugar, the Chair of the Audit Committee, to stand for re-election, and to waive for each of them its guideline under which directors generally may not stand for re-election after attaining age 75. In making this determination, the Board considered several factors, including the significant experience and expertise that each of Dr. Levinson and Dr. Sugar brings to the Board, their deep insight into the Company’s business and operations, and their individual contributions as highly engaged members of the Board. The Board also considered the benefits of continuity among the Board’s leadership positions.
I admit, I found this decision surprising, if not shocking. It would seem to put paid to the idea of Tim Cook imminently taking over the role of chairman, though it does support the idea that will happen sooner rather than later—otherwise it seems as though the company would have considered nominating an entirely new chairperson. As it is, the composition of the board remains exactly the same.
However, it doesn’t mean that the company won’t announce transition plans in the near future, as rumors have suggested. It’s most likely it simply wasn’t ready to do so at the point at which it needed to submit this document to the SEC. The New York Times just ran a profile of John Ternus, which further elevates his profile as Cook’s successor, especially in the nearer term.
Ultimately, the move to stay the course is a conservative one from a company that these days has become more conservative when it comes to matters of corporate governance.
Jason helps guest Casey Liss figure out what his cord-cutting strategy might be. We also discuss his Callsheet app, touch on the rise of CanCon including “Heated Rivalry,” and offer some very nice TV picks.
Bose released the Application Programming Interface (API) documentation for its SoundTouch speakers today, putting a silver lining around the impending end-of-life (EoL) of the expensive home theater devices.
More like this, please. There’s nothing more frustrating than a useful piece of tech turning into e-waste because the manufacturer doesn’t want to support it anymore.
Jason’s made this point recently with another great example, the iMac and current lack of a Target Display Mode. This past week I ran into a similar issue with the Logitech Harmony remote that I set up for my parents: while Logitech’s mobile app for it still technically works, options are extremely limited for adding new devices.
To me, this feels like it goes hand-in-hand with Right to Repair for hardware devices. If a company decides it wants to stop making a device, that’s fine—that’s its business. But to be responsible stewards of not only their products but the environment, they ought to seriously consider enabling the community to support it themselves.
