2025-09-30 06:24:35
Jason’s spent a week with the iPhone Air and Myke’s been using his iPhone 17 Pro, so it’s time to discuss deeper thoughts about this year’s models. Also: internal chatbot chat, Intel investments, and miniature Macs!
2025-09-30 00:00:51
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2025-09-29 23:45:28
I ranted about the joy of passkeys and some of their limitations a few weeks ago, and that prompted a question from Six Colors member Ampsonic1, a naturally occurring and renewable source of excellent queries:
Can you use 1Password to store a passkey for an Apple Account?
Unfortunately, you can’t yet! Apple uses a unique process to generate the passkey for an Apple Account—it’s generated on device, the only time I am aware of this ever happens for a passkey. This makes it uniquely the only passkey that requires an Apple device to generate or use.2 It doesn’t even show up in Passwords, because it’s a different kind of beast.
Answered.
But, oh, there is more to talk about.
I have been reluctant to recommend 1Password or any password manager to hold your passkeys unless you regularly use non-Apple devices or are absolutely all in on 1Password (or another ecosystem) to the near exclusion of Passwords and iCloud Keychain as your password manager and sync solution.
The reason had two components: utility and portability.
Suppose you could easily copy passkeys among password-management ecosystems, eliminating the second point? In that case, the first point matters much less. Fortunately, we are on the verge of this major change! Along with portability, introduced in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26 Tahoe, comes a few other passkey (and password) improvements. Apple didn’t document any of these in its release notes for the operating systems because they all require third-party buy-in, which is already starting to happen.
I think passkeys are the bee’s knees, so anything that makes them easier to adopt is a great move in my book, as it will make everyone’s lives easier and their identities more secure. At WWDC 2025, Apple’s Andrew Abosh presented changes that are now in production releases to smooth the passkey wheels further.
Three of these are at the website end and require websites to make changes in their authentication software to take advantage. First, sites can now offer a streamlined sign-up process that Apple devices will pick up on, making it easy to generate a passkey as to accept a password recommendation from Passwords (or third-party password managers). Second, a website can push updates to your registered account—like if you change your email address—to the password manager so that those details associated with your passkey remain in sync. Third, there’s now an automatic upgrade workflow that lets a website prompt you to shift from password to passkey.4
But the particular issue above, portability, was addressed at timestamp 19:11 in the session.5 This standard has been in the works for a few years, and the FIDO Alliance—the group that has been moving us towards a “password-free” future, seriously—released a spec last October, then celebrated Apple’s news in June of this year.
You can see this in action with the latest operating system updates (step-by-step instructions next). When you use export in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, or Tahoe, you’re prompted for a destination app instead of relying on the old method, which was an unencrypted comma-separated value (CSV) file. The dialog notes, “Your items are securely transferred to the app you choose.”
So that’s that. But what about 1Password? Let’s walk through the export process.
The only bad news about the above is that the major password-manager developers haven’t all updated their systems yet to support this FIDO standard as implemented by Apple:
I’ll walk you through exporting from the Passwords app in iOS 26:6
I would have shown you Tahoe, instead, because it has better selection tools for choosing entries first; then you export them. However, there is a bug either in Tahoe or Bitwarden, as I cannot get the app to appear as a choice. Here are the steps, nonetheless, for when this works in the near future:
This process copies the passkey without moving it. Passkeys don’t need to be refreshed, since only your devices possess and sync the private keys required for your part of the authentication. Unless your equipment was compromised, the passkey could last forever.
Update: Unfortunately, I initially answered the question at the head of this question incorrectly. I had a false memory of receiving a prompt to create a passkey for my Apple Account; that is not how it works. For now and possibly forever, Apple Account passkeys are locked to devices and cannot be exported. Thanks to an alert reader for pointing this out!
[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]
2025-09-27 00:00:48
My thanks to Quip for sponsoring Six Colors this week.
Clipboard managers aren’t usually exciting. Most of them just capture everything you copy, then become a cluttered dumping ground. Quip takes a very different approach.
Quip is a supercharged clipboard manager and text expander for Mac, iPhone, and iPad, designed to feel like a natural extension of the OS. It gives you full control over your clipboard history, syncs seamlessly across devices with iCloud, and introduces Super Shortcuts—a built-in text expansion system that lets you paste signatures, links, or entire snippets anywhere with a quick trigger.
But what really makes Quip unique is Quip Intelligence: secure, on-device AI that keeps your clipboard clean and useful. It fixes broken links, removes tracking junk, normalizes messy formatting, cleans up code blocks, avoids duplicates, and learns from you—all in real time, right on your device.
Whether you’re managing projects, writing code, or just copying links, Quip makes your clipboard fast, searchable, and surprisingly powerful.
You can try Quip free on the App Store or learn more at bzgapps.com/quip.
2025-09-26 19:00:13
Surprise! Last Friday, Apple TV+’s Friday Night Baseball broadcast of the Giants and the Dodgers featured multiple shots taken on an iPhone 17 Pro. On the final Friday night of the season, the company will repeat the feat during tonight’s Tigers-Red Sox game (7 pm ET).
According to Apple, four iPhone 17 Pros will be positioned at Fenway Park — in the Green Monster, the home dugout, and roaming the stands. In contrast to the secrecy of last week, the Tigers-Red Sox game will feature a bug in the corner of the screen that shows off the shots that are coming from an iPhone.
Is it a self-promotional gimmick? Sure, but Apple is paying a lot of money for MLB rights. Also, it’s not as if the company hasn’t pushed its MLB telecasts in a bunch of different ways. The Friday Night Baseball broadcasts look great, and have featured loads of helmet and body cams, a cinematic depth-of-field camera, and even in-stadium drone shots. Apple has probably earned at least one night of iPhone Pro product integration.
Unfortunately, even though the iPhone is capable of shooting 4K video and beyond, the ones in Apple’s MLB broadcasts will be locked to 1080p at 60 frames per second, because stadium broadcast infrastructures just haven’t caught up with the 4K world. The iPhones will be running the Blackmagic Camera app, allowing iPads back in the production trailer to control exposure and white balance settings remotely. They’ll also be attached to the just-announced Blackmagic Camera Pro Dock, which integrates all the different connections needed to fit them into the production and make them just another broadcast camera.
Apple says that one advantage of using iPhones rather than traditional broadcast cameras is that they’re small enough to fit in places like the corners of dugouts and less intimidating for candid fan shots, since we’re all used to looking at smartphone cameras. (Maybe not on tripods attached to Blackmagic Camera Pro Docks, but it’s still a fairly small footprint.)
According to Apple, Major League Baseball even attached its little holographic “validation” stickers to the iPhones used in last Friday’s broadcast from Dodger Stadium, signifying that they were the first iPhones used to broadcast an MLB game. (Apple didn’t say, but I assume one of those phones will be sent to the Hall of Fame?)
This is the fourth year of Apple TV+’s Friday-night doubleheader. Some reports have suggested the partnership might be ending after this season, but the latest one I’ve seen suggests that Apple TV+ would be continuing on Friday nights. When all that gets resolved, we’ll see if this was a last hurrah or the start of something new.
2025-09-26 03:19:53
In an unsigned post on Apple Newsroom, Apple has poured out its heart about the EU’s Digital Markets Act:
It’s been more than a year since the Digital Markets Act was implemented. Over that time, it’s become clear that the DMA is leading to a worse experience for Apple users in the EU. It’s exposing them to new risks, and disrupting the simple, seamless way their Apple products work together. And as new technologies come out, our European users’ Apple products will only fall further behind.
Tell us how you really feel, Apple.
There’s a lot to unpack in this post, and it runs the gamut from concerns that seem reasonably well-founded—Apple potentially have to comply with third party companies requesting the full content of a user’s notifications—to claims that are more than a little ridiculous: “For instance, the changes to app marketplaces are making iOS look more like Android — and that reduces choice.”1
Yes, you heard it here: Apple says that the iPhone are essentially identical to Android.
Look, the DMA is a far-reaching piece of legislation that’s intended to increase competition by knocking down the kind of barriers that keep these enormous tech companies insulated from competition. It’s also a byzantine and tortuous set of regulations created by people who don’t necessarily understand the way technology works and the implications of their actions. Both are true!
Threading the needle of “things Apple really should be doing to improve interoperability and competition” and “things that might have unforeseen consequences that actually fly in the face of the EU’s intentions” is a tricky proposition, and the mechanisms in place to challenge the rulings are, admittedly, restrictive.
What neither the EU nor Apple really want to admit here is that dealing with companies at this size is a matter of partnership and compromise. Government entities might be the only ones capable of wielding a stick big enough to make Apple sit up and actually make changes—and it is actively making those changes in the EU, which is not only to Apple’s credit but also proves that regulation can work—but ultimately getting the most out of something like the DMA requires both sides to operate in good faith, which seems to be lacking here.
