“JPMorgan will issue Apple credit cards for both new and existing cardholders, the people said. The transition from Goldman, as is the case with most card deals, will take time.
JPMorgan is planning to launch a new Apple savings account, according to people familiar with the matter. Consumers with existing Apple savings accounts at Goldman will decide whether they want to stay there or open an account with JPMorgan, the people said.
It’s been widely known that Goldman Sachs wanted to unload its end of the partnership, which, when it launched in 2019, was one of its major forays into consumer lending, but which ended up costing it a lot of money. Apple’s discussion with potential partners have been taking place for almost two years now, including the likes of American Express and Capital One.
JPMorgan Chase, of course, already has a wide range of existing credit card lines and is well versed in this business. It’ll be interesting to see what, if any, changes get made. It seems like Apple will remain in the driver’s seat in terms of perks and the like—and I wouldn’t expect there to be any significant changes from the technology side of things.
Left to right: iPhone Air, Field Notes and pen, iPhone Fold mock-up, iPhone 17 Pro.
If many years-long rumors are true, 2026 will be the year when Apple’s long-gestating folding iPhone becomes a reality. But there are a lot of different approaches to folding phones out there, and there’s no guarantee that the folding iPhone you imagine is the one that Apple is imagining.
Leaks from Apple’s supply chain have begun to strongly suggest the shape and size of the product we’ll call, for lack of a better name, the iPhone Fold. And since it’s likely going to be nine months before anyone holds one of these things in their hands, this seems like as good a time as any to consider the story Apple is likely to tell when it’s selling this device.
Not your usual iPhone
First, a disclaimer: Nobody knows anything, except the people who do. We’re left to go on rumors and extrapolation. That said, many people have spent time doing the math required to extrapolate the shape of the new iPhone based on rumored specs, and even building a 3D printing template so you can build one and hold it in the real world.
If these mock-ups are real, this folding iPhone is not going to be what you may have pictured in your head: a modern iPhone, roughly the shape of an iPhone Pro, that folds open to reveal a larger screen inside.
Instead, Apple may be making a device that’s much wider and squatter than existing iPhones when it’s folded up. The mock-ups people are printing show a phone that’s squatter than an iPhone mini and wider than an iPhone Pro Max! If that shape is right, the iPhone Fold will look a bit more like a mini notebook when it’s folded, unlike any iPhone that has ever existed.
The shape makes sense, however, when you imagine what that phone looks like when it’s unfolded: a screen with a 4:3 aspect ratio, the shape of an old-school television and—more importantly—an old-school iPad. In fact, this rumored design would make the unfolded iPhone the shape of an iPad, just slightly smaller than the iPad mini. (The iPad mini’s screen is 8.3 inches when measured diagonally, while this screen is rumored to be 7.76 inches.)
Apple’s sales pitch?
Apple’s taking a real risk if the new folding iPhone doesn’t look like an iPhone. If people read it as looking weird or lesser in some way, that may turn them off—even if they were otherwise willing to buy a $2000+ phone. So why would they do it?
Here’s my guess at Apple’s thought process: If what you really want is an iPhone that looks like an iPhone, literally all the other iPhone models will deliver on that. The iPhone Fold is designed around what it provides when it’s unfolded. Yes, when it’s folded, it will work like a normal, albeit squat, iPhone. But it comes alive and is unique when it’s open.
When it’s open, it’s an iPad.
The battle between iOS and Android rages on in the smartphone world. Apple leads in some markets, Android in others. It’s a duopoly, and both companies are making a lot of money and wielding a lot of power based on their successes in that market. But in the tablet market, the truth is that the iPad is successful, and every other tablet out there is not. Not only in terms of sales and profits, but in terms of functionality.
Over the years, Google has rededicated itself multiple times to the idea that Android is going to be a better operating system for tablets, and that Android tablet apps are going to get better. And yet every time I use an Android tablet, I’m struck by just how awful the experience is compared to an iPad. Even now, most apps just feel like phone apps wearing clothes several sizes too large.
This is Apple’s big advantage when it comes to a phone that can open up to become something much larger: That larger thing can be an iPad, with apps that make sense in that size and shape. Apple has separated iOS and iPadOS, but they are essentially the same operating system, with some differentiated features based on what hardware is involved. Apple can bring as much or as little of iPadOS to the iPhone Fold experience as it wants to.
I’m not sure what will make the move across. Will full-on windowed multitasking be offered, or will Apple limit it to some basic tiling? Will the iPhone Fold be the first iPhone to support the Apple Pencil? Will the iPhone Fold drive an external display? It’s all for Apple to decide.
But after looking at these 3D-printed mock-ups and seeing a squat, paper-notepad-shaped iPhone that unfolds into a small iPad, it seems pretty clear to me: If this is the shape of the iPhone Fold to come, Apple is focusing on it being an iPad you can fold up and stick in your pocket, not as an iPhone that unfolds into two iPhones placed side by side.
Apple added iCloud for Messages several years ago to solve the problem of presence.1Presence is a loose concept that describes where you are active at a given moment when some kind of alert or information should reach you. For instance, Apple’s awareness of which device you’re actively using should prevent an incoming phone call from ringing on several devices at once. (Spoiler: It does not.)
With Messages in iCloud enabled, all messages from this device and from other enabled devices sync.
In the context of Messages, however, this could be important before a full synchronization existed. You could read your messages on potentially several devices: your iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, home Mac, and laptop or work Mac. Most of us have at least two of those. When you read a message, reply to a conversation, or start a new one, where should the messages that comprise the conversation live?
Before iCloud for Messages, Apple generally synced messages among devices that were logged into the same iCloud account and were awake, among other parameters. If one was turned off or lacked an Internet connection, the sync might never happen, leaving an incomplete record across your communications.
When you enable Messages in iCloud on all of your devices, all incoming SMS, MMS, iMessage, and RCS messages are ostensibly received by at least one device, uniquely labeled, and encrypted for upload to your iCloud account, where other devices retrieve the updates.2
This leads to reader Phil’s peculiar situation. Phil uses Messages only via his iPad. He preferred not to sync his conversations via iCloud for his own reasons. He has two Macs; he uses the Messages app on neither of them.
However, he writes:
Recently, I accidentally invoked Messages on my Mac Mini, and, for a brief moment, I saw an excerpt from one of my Messages threads, which was created and executed on my iPad. I quickly turned off the Messages app on my Mac Mini (thinking I could avoid switching the storage of my Messages to iCloud).
Subsequently, I checked my iCloud storage, and I had Messages turned OFF for the cloud. What is going on here? If my messages were not residing in the cloud, how could the Mac Mini Messages app pick up some stuff from one of my Messages threads?
Where I think Phil is being bitten is the default synchronization that occurs among any devices logged into the same iCloud account, whether or not Messages in iCloud is enabled. Some aspects of this can be disabled; other parts of the process require logging out of Messages entirely.
Here’s what you can check using iOS 26/iPadOS 26 and macOS 26 locations and labels:
Prevent text messages from passing beyond your iPhone by disabling forwarding devices.
Disable Messages in iCloud: Ensure you aren’t syncing via iCloud. Go to Settings/System Settings: Account Name: iCloud: Messages and disable “Use on this iPhone/iPad/Mac.”
Disable other devices: On an iPhone, go to Settings: Apps: Messages: Text Message Forwarding and disable other devices.
Disable accounts for incoming iMessage: On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings: Apps: Messages: Send & Receive; on a Mac, go to Messages: Settings: iMessage. Disable the accounts you don’t want to receive messages from on a given device, which may be all addresses and phone numbers.
Log out of Messages: The nuclear option is to disable Messages entirely on devices you don’t want to have any messages sync with. On an iPhone or iPad, go to Settings: Apps: Messages: Send & Receive and tap the linked email after Apple Account at the bottom. Tap Sign Out. On a Mac, go to Messages: Settings: iMessage, and click Sign Out.
If you don’t want to receive iMessages, disable all the addresses and phone numbers at which you might receive them.
Did you know?
I wrote an entire book that covers Messages plus FaceTime and the highly overhauled and improved Phone app. It’s up to date for iOS 26, iPadOS 26, macOS 26 Tahoe, and, yes, watchOS 26: Take Control of FaceTime and Messages.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
Apple seemingly calls the feature iCloud for Messages, but labels it as Messages in iCloud. ↩
Note the critical factor that Messages in iCloud are protected only by your iCloud account login as the encryption key for stored Messages is part of that backup. Enable Advanced Data Protection for iCloud, and end-to-end encryption protects that embedded key. ↩
It’s a new year, so let’s look ahead to new iPhones and new iPhone accessories as well as how some other Apple products may fare in 2026.
That new iPhone smell
In addition to computers, Apple also makes what they call “smart phones”, so called because they are required to provide at least three hours of educational programming a day.
Ha-ha!
If only.
Apple will be shipping a number of new phones this year, some of which may or may not interest you. Let’s look ahead.
While Apple is expected to deliver a low-cost iPhone 17e in the spring, the average selling prices for iPhones in 2026 go up substantially after that. In the fall, Apple will ship the iPhone 18 Pros and a new foldable iPhone, highly expected to cost a million dollars.
One thing you won’t get this year is a base model iPhone 18.
PowerPhotos is the ultimate toolbox for Photos on the Mac. It works in conjunction with the Apple Photos app, filling in missing features that Photos itself doesn’t provide. It lets you work with multiple Photos libraries and store them wherever you want, including on an external drive or a network drive. Split up your giant library into smaller ones by copying photos and albums with a simple drag and drop, preserving metadata such as descriptions and keywords along the way. You can free up space on your laptop’s drive or save space on iCloud while still keeping all your photos handy in the Photos app.
If you already have multiple libraries, you can use PowerPhotos to merge them together while weeding out duplicates along the way. PowerPhotos also features a powerful duplicate photo finder, batch photo metadata editing, multi library search with nested search terms, advanced export, and more.
PowerPhotos 3.0 can be downloaded for free, with many of its features available for free. Purchase a license to unlock advanced features such as library merging, deletion of duplicate photos, and unlimited photo copying, metadata editing, and exporting. Existing users of PowerPhotos 1 or 2, or iPhoto Library Manager can use their license key to upgrade for 50% off the regular price, and Six Colors readers can use the coupon code SIXCOLORS26 to receive a 20% discount for both regular and upgrade orders.
AppleVis, a web site and community that follows Apple from the perspective of blind and low-vision users, announced its annual Golden Apple Awards, recognizing apps, games and developers for their contributions to the industry:
Since their launch in 2012, the AppleVis Golden Apple Awards have afforded blind, deafblind, and low vision users of Apple products an opportunity to recognize and acknowledge the hard work and dedication which developers have put into making and maintaining great and accessible applications over the given year.
The awards were voted on by AppleVis community members, based on a slate of nominees chosen by a committee of outside experts and commentators, including yours truly.
The Best App award went to PiccyBot, which uses AI to provide audio descriptions of photos and videos, from Sparkling Apps.
Best Game honors are shared by Core Quest and Dungeons, both part of the Adventure to Fate series from TouchMint.
PiccyBot creator Sparkling Apps also won Developer of the Year.
The David Goodwin award, which honors excellence and commitment to accessibility in app development, and is named for AppleVis’ founder, went to Aira. The company’s Aira Explorer is a pioneer and both AI-based and human-provided description services for people with visual impairments. TouchMint and Weather Gods Ltd. earned honorable mention.
When all is said and done, I doubt anyone will cite 2025 as a key year in the history of Apple. The company admitted that it couldn’t deliver on a promise it made back in 2024, and it shipped a bunch of impressive but incremental improvements to its existing hardware devices. The iPhone Air is a fun product, but is hardly setting the world on fire. 2025 was, above all else… a year.
On the other hand, 2026 feels like it will be momentous for Apple in numerous areas. After a few years of calm, it feels like the storm is upon us.
Here at Apple, we don’t like looking back—only ruthlessly forward. But certain milestones demand recognition, which is why we’re taking a hard look in the mirror as we prepare for our imminent arrival at the half-century mark.
In just three short months, Apple will turn 50. Hard to believe: the life expectancies of many of our contemporaries was often measured in months or years, not decades. Some vanished. Some were acquired by bigger companies. But Apple has persisted. And we’ve seen tremendous rewards, because in this business you either die the ignominious death of the foolhardy or live long enough to see yourself become the hero. Pretty sure that’s right.
But in recent quiet moments, when we’re doing a mindfulness exercise or heeding the Apple Watch’s reminders to breathe, we find our thoughts wandering backwards through the past and wonder what the Apple of today really has in common with Apple of 50 years ago?…
In a special year end installment of our Unwound segment for all listeners, Mikah and Dan talk about tech impressions from 2025 and what they’re excited about for 2026.
Once again the year draws to a close and so we are forced by contractual obligation to tell you, dear readers, about our favorite things from the last arbitrary period of time. I’ve assembled (arbitrarily) my top three picks across several different categories, just to pull out some things I really enjoyed which, who knows, you might like too.1
New Apple Features
Wi-Fi password filling — I only noticed this somewhat recently, but if you log in to a captive Wi-Fi network in macOS Tahoe (and, I assume, other Apple 26 platform updates), it will offer to fill in the Wi-Fi password for you. I’m not sure why this was never a feature before, but I absolutely love it.
Preview app on iOS/iPadOS – The Quick Look option previously offered by Files was fine for doing exactly what it said on the tin, but for anything more in-depth, the shortcomings of smushing PDFs into the Files app became quickly apparent. Fortunately, after only eighteen years, Apple finally shipped its own PDF viewer on both the iPhone and iPad, and it’s really improved the experience of dealing with PDFs on those devices.
Sleep Score – Continuing this year’s theme, which is apparently “arbitrariness”, yes, the idea of scoring one’s sleep on a 100 point scale seems ridiculous, but I’ve found that since starting to track my sleep with Apple’s Sleep Score feature, I get antsy when I don’t do it. Yes, there are other apps that take more direct health metrics into account, but Apple’s scores being potentially more inflated do weirdly make me feel better about my sleep? So I guess that’s something.
Apps
Nike Run Club – I got back into running for several months this year, though the cold weather has recently put paid to that. However, I still really appreciate the Nike Run Club app for its Guided Run feature, which provides an audio accompaniment to your workouts, often in the form of the very cheerful “real life Ted Lasso” Coach Bennett; it puts Apple’s soulless Workout Buddy feature to shame. Having a Watch app that lets me download the audio guides to listen to locally, and therefore not require me to bring my phone along, is an added bonus.
Dark Noise – Speaking of sleep, I’ve gotten more into using white noise this year when I wake up in the middle of the night, and Charlie Chapman’s Dark Noise app has become my weapon of choice. Great assortment of sounds, easy to use, and it lets you make custom mixes of your sounds. (My personal favorite is a mix of Airplane Interior with Green Noise. Puts me right out.)
Wipr 2 – I retired 1Blocker this year in favor of this little indie app by Kaylee Calderolla. It’s a universal app across all of Apple’s platforms, easy to set up, and does its job without ever getting in your way. Best of all it’s a paid app that doesn’t require a subscription! Buy once and you’re done.
Clipboard History on macOS: Two years ago, a question from a reader led me to ponder what stones Apple had left unturned over four decades of Mac development. My conclusion was that the lack of a clipboard history feature was a gaping hole. Somehow, in macOS Tahoe, the hole was filled. Apple added a clipboard history feature that might not satisfy power users of Pastebot, but will work pretty well for general use. My only real complaint about Apple’s implementation is that it requires two keystrokes—Command-Space to invoke Spotlight, and then Command-4 to enter Clipboard History mode. I’ve wired that sequence to my old LaunchBar clipboard history shortcut (Command-backslash), but users should be able to set that shortcut without needing a third-party tool.
iPad Multitasking: They finally did it. Apple got over all of its hang-ups over not making the iPad too much like the Mac, and just went for it: iPadOS 26 multitasking is full, no-compromises Mac-style windowing. Put a window wherever you like, drag ’em around, do what you want. And because the feature is hidden behind a mode toggle, people who don’t want to use the feature will never see it. If I had any quibbles about Apple’s implementation, they were mostly about Apple ignoring some unique utility users found in Split View and Slide Over, two old-school iPad multitasking features that didn’t make it over in 26.0. Fortunately, Apple added most of the missing features back in 26.1 and 26.2.
Private Cloud Compute in Shortcuts: Say what you will about Apple’s AI models, but the 26 OS updates gave every user access, for free, to Apple’s private cloud models via Shortcuts. Being able to pass steps of an automation to an LLM unlocks a lot of functionality, and I’m happy to do that all in a private environment and without setting up and paying for an API key from a third-party AI company. Next up: Apple needs to keep improving its models and start offering a way for third-party apps to hook into Private Cloud Compute. But this is a great start.
Some shiny app favorites
Over the decades, I’ve built up some intricate workflows based on apps I’ve been using forever. I try to remain open to new apps and new ways of working, but there’s a high bar to clear there. As a result, most of my time is spent with old favorites like BBEdit, Fantastical, and Safari. On the iPad, I’m still using 1Writer for writing, though I am constantly scanning for other apps that combine my preferred style of Markdown editing with an appropriate level of automation support.
Still, there are some apps that I want to single out.
Mimestream continues to be my Mac mail app of choice. It only supports Gmail, so your mileage may vary, but I’m a Gmail user, and this is the Mac Gmail client of my dreams. I can’t wait for the iOS (and, hopefully, iPad) version.
I got to use Final Cut Camera this year for a few multi-camera recording sessions for Upgrade, and came away very impressed. The integration between Final Cut Pro for iPad and Final Cut Camera on iPhone is solid, making it super easy to capture multiple camera angles and then put them all together later. My only real complaint is that there’s no way to use Final Cut Pro on the Mac to do the same thing. That makes about as much sense as the fact that Final Cut Pro for iPad still doesn’t support the background export feature in iPadOS 26 that was practically written for it.
Callsheet by my pal Casey Liss has only become more firmly ensconced in our everyday lives, as we watch movies and TV shows and wonder who that actor is and what else we’ve seen them in, or how old they were, or what the age difference is between that older actor and his much younger co-star. I’m so glad to never have to visit IMDB again.
Numbers is this obscure app from some fruit company in Cupertino that’s in the esoteric genre of “spreadsheet” apps. Anyway, in the last few years, I finally stopped using Excel, because I’ve discovered that I’m more comfortable in Numbers and Google Sheets. The end of a decades-long relationship is admittedly weird, but the more I dig into Numbers, the more I appreciate it. This year, with the help of a few readers, I managed to completely revamp how I generate financial charts using Numbers formulas I had never seen before. I still use Sheets a lot because it’s a lightweight answer to basic collaboration, but Numbers is an increasingly large part of my life.
ChatGPT and Claude aren’t great Mac apps yet, but the more they properly integrate with the Mac, the more promise they show. ChatGPT gained the ability to look right into specific windows on my Mac, and Claude’s support for MCP servers and AppleScript creates some delightful synergies. I firmly believe that most AI discourse is hype, but that there are also genuinely useful applications for the technology underneath that giant hype bubble. Last week, I got Claude to grab text from BBEdit, proofread it, and insert the result back into a new BBEdit window. Just amazing—but of course, the Claude app isn’t automatable, and there’s no way to “save” a Claude prompt for re-use later. You have to laugh—this technology is so remarkable and so primitive at the same time. Given OpenAI’s purchase of Software Applications, a startup from the creators of Shortcuts that aimed to fuse LLM technology with the Mac interface, this is an area worth close attention in the next few years.
Longplayarrived for the Mac this year, bringing its delightful album-oriented approach to listening to music over from iOS. I listen to most of my music while working at my Mac, so this is a great fit. I admire the developer’s commitment to automation hooks: he built in support for AppleScript, Shortcuts, and even control via MCP from AI apps. The real bummer is that it’s constrained by a macOS limitation that prevents apps from directly AirPlaying Apple Music tracks. Apple needs to fix that.
Superwhisper exemplifies the potential for good integration between our devices and AI systems that goes beyond chatbots. While I doubt I will ever be a voice-first user of computer interfaces, Superwhisper’s concept is flexible enough to impress even me. It will convert your speech into text, yes, but it can also process it through an LLM—and change how it processes it based on how you’re currently using your Mac. I really like the idea of a tool that knows that my text in BBEdit is not the same as my text in Mimestream or Safari. Superwhisper gets that.
Festivitas delighted me last year with its ability to string holiday lights across my Mac’s menu bar. For the Mac’s entire history, there have been “utilities” that don’t do anything useful, but provide delight, and this one fits right in. This year’s update added snowfall and, more importantly, support for automation via Shortcuts. I’ve spent the last month with a one-in-seven chance of a snowfall every 20 minutes, and it’s been delightful. I can not tell you how much delight about seeing those first flakes and saying to myself, “Oh, it’s snowing!” As someone who has never used a snow blower or shoveled a sidewalk, snow is a delightful effect that I generally only see in holiday-themed movies.
I sometimes think about what we lost along the way as Apple chased ultra-simplicity and luxury. Jony Ive spent a decade slowly removing any trace of personality from every product Apple released. Apple went from the original translucent-colored plastic aesthetic of the “Bondi blue” iMac G3 and the Power Mac G3 “Blue & White” to the more refined and unique design of the iMac G4 to… a bunch of aluminum rounded rectangles for decades. Chasing thinness, removing ports, simplifying everything down to metal and glass with no differentiation.
As Mantia wrote:
[Ive] and his team designed great products during the first half of his tenure at Apple. But as he became wealthier, he started to conflate good taste with luxury. Jony often described Apple products with words about craft, material, and precision, all things that appeal to a luxury market. Apple shifted away from making products “for the rest of us” and started making products that appealed specifically to rich people.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but they started making products that appealed to themselves. Because since Steve Jobs died, Apple, its executives, and its corporate employees got significantly wealthier. It wasn’t just Jony who took an interest in luxury. The whole company did. Anyone with even a little bit of power in the company started to dress more expensively. They all look like they could walk right out of a fashion advertisement.
In the wake of Steve Jobs’s death, Apple elevated Jony Ive to a position of total design authority as a way of signaling to the wider world that the company was going to be okay after losing its co-founder and leader. In that era, there was a genuine fear that a company led by an operations guy was not going to be able to keep the magic going. (Certainly, that’s a narrative that current and former Apple designers have been happy to push ever since.)
The more I think about it, the more this (perfectly reasonable!) tactical decision has come to feel like the original sin of the Tim Cook era. An unchained and elevated Ive sent the right message to the world, and Ive really is a talented designer who built beautiful things. But without Steve Jobs to rein things in, Apple’s design sense got more insular, more obscure, more minimal.
It’s one reason I’m so critical about Ive, his overlong tenure at Apple when he was obviously burned out, and the fatal mistake of placing software design in the clutches of him and his lieutenants: I just get the sense that those designers became untethered from the rest of us, chasing idealized product dreams based on the expensive luxury brands they wore, drove, and otherwise used every day. Not that Apple designs ugly stuff, but there is undoubtedly an antiseptic sameness to a lot of it that smacks of a design team that has disappeared up its own white void.
It’s time for the 12th Annual Upgradies! Myke and Jason discuss their favorites of 2025, take the input of many Upgradians, and hand out awards in numerous categories! Only the finest will walk away with the most coveted of titles: Upgradies Winner.
