Our imaginary reviews of the iPhone Duo, how we stay open-minded and curious instead of becoming the “Old Man Yells at Cloud” meme, our current read-it-later methods, and pouring one out for the iPod and MP3 players.
Guiding Apple through its comeback, Steve Jobs comes up with a clever strategy to make the Mac the center of everyone’s digital life. The problem is, he’s failed to integrate music into the mix—and Apple will have to scramble to catch up.
As the song goes, we all need a little help from our friends. And that applies to apps for our Macs and iPhones as well.
Fortunately, the apps in the spotlight this week all aim to lend a helping hand, whether it’s tracking down files to free up space on your devices, expanding text or storing clippings to save time or even doing things with the photos and screenshots you’ve accrued over the years.
Do you know of any helpful macOS and iOS offerings? Drop us a line at apps@sixcolors.com with a brief description. We won’t be able to respond to every email we receive, but we will give any and all suggestions a helpful once-over.
Crumb
I’m not as diligent about keeping my Mac free of detritus and cruft as I should be, to the point where gigabytes are often in short supply on my laptop’s drive. Crumb promises to do the hard work of freeing up space on your Mac, with some more sophisticated tools to help you track down the files that have outlived their usefulness.
At its most basic, Crumb clears out your caches, which can remove a surprising amount of filler if you’ve not used a cleaner app in a while. Running the app for the first time, I wound up with 2.4GB of cache and logs that could be safely jettisoned — I imagine that number won’t be as garish with more frequent cleanings, but anything that helps me keep my drive free of cruft is welcome.
Crumb has some other modes, like a Visualize tool that shows you what’s in different folders and how much space that folder takes up. An analysis tool can spot whether the content in the folder contains things you’ve created and, therefore, should be reviewed manually before deleting. You can also tap a shortcut button to head straight to a folder to review its contents.
I find Crumb’s Duplicate tool particularly useful, since I’m in the habit of downloading images, tweaking their sizes for stories and then keeping copies in multiple places. Duplicate tracks down the extras for purging, while an Uninstall feature helps you remove apps and any files they leave behind.
The free tier of Crumb entitles you to one full cleanup — a trial of the app, in essence. A one-time $9 payment unlocks unlimited cleanups as well as the Uninstall, Duplicates and Organize tools. (The latter feature sorts things into folders such as Images, Videos, Documents and more.) A Crumb license works on up to two Macs.
Klackey
Klackey is a multipurpose text expander that works on both Windows machines and Macs, though it’s only the macOS version we’re concerned with here. And while some may find the extensive toolset to be overkill — Klackey brings a lot to the table — the text expansion features certainly impress.
I get a lot of email submissions, as you might imagine, and I’ve been struggling with a way to send out a reply that doesn’t make responding to emails my full-time job. In Klackey, I can write a general reply and give it a simple code preceded by a semicolon — say ;reply — so that when I type that code into a Mac app that accepts text input like a mail client, my form letter shows up automatically. I can do that for any other frequently used text snippets I want to store in Klackey as well.
Klackey offers other features like a clipboard history for keeping everything you copy close at hand, a notes tool for organizing your thoughts and even an encrypted secure folder for storing items like passwords. I found the text expansion to be the real selling point, but you can decide for yourself with a free 14-day trial when you download Klackey. After that, a payment unlocks all the current features with a year of updates, with a cross-platform license covering up to two computers.
As I write this, Klackey is available for $35, a discount from the regular price of $49.
MemoryString
You’re not hurting for options when it comes to assembling your photos and videos into a movie that you can view or share with others. MemoryString is betting you’ll give this macOS offering a try for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that it’s free.
That’s not “free” as in you get to assemble a video or two before you’re required to unlock the full app. MemoryString won’t cost you a dime to download — neither initially nor through any in-app purchases. Just grab the app, import some photos or videos and fiddle around with the transitions, titles and audio. (There’s a royalty-free library included with the app, or you can add your own music.) A MemoryString watermark does appear at the end of the finished video.
MemoryString looks to be an alternative to iMovie by getting you to the finished product faster, while also offering more control over your project than the Memory Movie feature included in Photos.
I found that the app works best when you import an image or folder, as MemoryString crashed when I tried dragging things directly from the Photos app on my Mac. However, MemoryString’s developer responded promptly to my bug report.
In other words, it’s a promising alternative if you’re looking for a tool that helps you turn the photos on your Mac and iPhone into moving pictures, and the free status means there’s no barrier to giving MemoryString a try.
Pixph
Just as there are lots of ways to assemble your photos into a video or slideshow, you also have many options for managing all the things you save to your clipboard. So why turn to the $10 Pixph as a place to stash text, URLs or anything else you care to copy? Besides the convenience of having a storage space on the side of your display — or wherever you choose to position the Pixph window — there’s also the matter of organizing all those clips.
It’s easy to copy something over to Pixph: just highlight and tap your shift button twice to capture it in the app. But Pixph also lets you organize clippings into projects, so that if you’re researching something, all the related text strings, links and images you’ve saved are all in one place, ready to move back into the window that you’re working in. Pixph lives in the menu bar of your Mac, and it’s easy to pivot between projects when you find a relevant clip to save.
I found Pixph’s commitment to the Liquid Glass interface a little bit distracting, though it was easy enough to open up settings and switch to dark mode so that the app behind the Pixph window wasn’t as visible. Pixph also treats your clippings as a checklist, with buttons for marking off items when you have no further use for them. Some may appreciate that approach, but it really didn’t fit into my workflow.
Nevertheless, the ability to organize items and even add your own thoughts via a note feature makes Pixph a useful tool for people to add a little structure to their projects.
DumpPixels
If you find yourself filling up your iPhone’s Photos app with screenshots — and then forgetting to delete those screenshots later on — DumpPixels can clean up your photo library without sacrificing the information you were looking to capture in the first place.
Anytime you capture a screenshot, it appears in DumpPixels, which also copies any text that appears within that screenshot. Say you capture an article in the News app because you spot an interesting snippet of text. Within DumpPixels, you can save a note containing that text to the app’s Notes tab. You can then delete the screenshot, freeing up space in your Photos library while retaining whatever information you wanted from the screenshot.
Or at least, DumpPixels will delete the screenshot after you’ve unlocked the app. The free download only lets you save copied text from screens, while a $20 in-app purchase unlocks the deletion feature.
If there’s a limitation to DumpPixels, it’s that it only works on screenshots. If you were to take a photo of a flyer with date and address info, that wouldn’t get copied into DumpPixels — unless you were to take a screenshot of the photo itself, of course. Still, if you find yourself snapping a lot of screenshots to collect data for later use, DumpPixels could be an effective way to better manage all the info and imagery you’ve collected.
Just as we’re busy pondering the HomeView and preparing for the iPhone Duo launch, word arrives of another Apple event on the horizon! Plus, Apple and Meta bond over local AI.
One of the most bizarre and sometimes useful features added in macOS 27 Golden Gate is contextual naming in the Finder, as well as other places where a name for a file is useful, using Apple Intelligence.1 I say bizarre because it’s easy to be surprised by what’s filled in—or that anything but Untitled Document or Untitled Folder appears.
Meanwhile, if you want to rename a big batch of files, you can opt for a little-known feature built right into the Finder, or dramatically increase your power with a third-party utility.
Apple Intelligence has some suggestions
Three examples of file renaming suggestions in Golden Gate, showing options for font files, an image of Kilroy Was Here spray-painted on a door, and a Take Control book.
There’s not much to using Golden Gate’s automatic file naming, which is the delight of a feature that’s discoverable, self-explanatory, and useful:
Select a file name or folder name in the Finder, wait a moment, and single-click it, so that the name becomes highlighted.
Wait a moment. Because Apple Intelligence is involved, some behind-the-scenes analysis of the item’s contents takes place.
A drop-down list of suggestions appears, which may or may not match what you want. If one does, click it. This replaces the file or folder name.
You will also see suggestions appear in Apple’s apps when you save a currently untitled document, as well as when you transfer files via AirDrop or text an image to a person or group. I’ve noticed when I text a screenshot on my iPhone, the name “Screen Image” appears in the message text without any detail.
As you can imagine, results vary. However, I’ve found in my testing that Apple Intelligence does a reasonably good job. This includes looking at what a photo or image file represents and suggesting a name derived from that—a kind of hidden Visual Intelligence.
If you don’t like this feature, go to Finder: Settings: General and uncheck “Suggest file names.”
It has a number of limitations:
Names aren’t always suggested. This may be because Apple Intelligence has evaluated that the current name is better than one it could offer, or because the query times out or is determined to take too much computational time.
There’s no feedback when it fails—no message appears that says “no suggestions available,” or the like.
It doesn’t always use the current name as a context clue or, seemingly, pull from our private information to which Apple Intelligence has access. For instance, I clicked a file called “glenn as a freshman,” a photo taken long ago and far away, and the Finder suggestions were: “Person with Hand on Head” and “Person in Thought Pose.” Not inaccurate, but not specific. However, a folder I clicked offered suggestions derived from the folder name.
Images with controversial elements may not receive suggestions. A picture of my older child from 15 years ago, dressed in a lobster costume that many people thought was a devil costume, gets no suggestions, while other photos of the same type, size, and time period do.
You can’t get suggestions for a batch of files or folders, only one at a time.
Batch rename your files and folders
Apple introduced a built-in automatic renaming feature in Finder with OS X 10.10 Yosemite. It’s limited, but functional, and if you only need some basic replacing, prefixing, or suffixing of names of a group of files, it will do the trick for free.
The standard macOS “Rename Finder Items” dialog configured to apply a custom name and sequential index to files.
Long before Apple built basic renaming into Finder, I began to rely on A Better Finder Rename ($30 for all current version updates) by Frank Reiff.2 It lets you apply rules to rename files or folders you select, which can include extracting information from metadata in each file to apply unique information from it.3
A Better Finder Rename offers multi-step rewriting of file and folder names based on tags or conditions. Here, I’m adding the camera model and shooting year tags to files that only have date stamps.
Each renaming pattern is created in the Actions list. So if you want to renumber files and apply EXIF metadata, you can do that as two separate Actions, as shown in the screenshot.
There are many Actions categories, each of which has context-specific choices for renaming. I’ve used A Better Finder Rename in the past to fix a folder with hundreds of images that were named arbitrarily to extract the capture date, allowing for better sorting. I’ve also used it for picayune tasks, like making sure all the screenshots for an article for Six Colors had the same prefix, to make them easier to find after uploading.
A Better Finder Rename has many categories to choose from (and concatenate together as Actions) at left; options for the Text category at right.
What’s in a name?
In an era in which Spotlight works as advertised, coupled with the new capabilities in Siri AI, do we even need well-named files? Oh, yes, indeed. I would argue that the more sensibly named your files are, the less time you waste trying to find what you need. Visually scanning names organized at least lightly into some kind of folder hierarchy will always provide better results than searching, even today.
This battle has raged since the introduction of the Mac—nay, since the introduction of file names! Good names save time, no matter how well-indexed the contents.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
All Macs that can run Golden Gate are capable of Apple Intelligence, which requires an Apple silicon Mac (any generation). ↩
It was introduced in 1996! Happy 30th anniversary, Frank! Version 12, the current release, first shipped in 2023. ↩
Jason, the editor of this site, instead relies on a similar long-serving utility, the $19 Name Mangler from Many Tricks. ↩
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Apple’s new HomeView sure seems like a good fit for the kitchen, which is why the company’s press releases, demos, and ads seem to lean into the idea that you’ll be cooking with the little guy.
But is there an ugly side to all that convenience? Here’s Dominic Preston, writing for The Verge:
The HomeView is just the latest in a long line of websites, browser extensions, and smart home gadgets with the same promise: that it can take an online recipe and strip it down to the essentials…. There’s only one group of people likely to object: the food writers who created those recipes in the first place.
So wait a second. Apple building a product that gets past all the garbage that loads up recipe sites—not just the ads but the endless, meandering bad writing that exists because search engines apparently demanded it—to get to the actual ingredients and make their users’ lives better, is a problem because it might hurt the livelihood of the people who create those user-hostile websites?
Did… a recipe blogger write this?
I would know, since I’m one of them — I have my own food newsletter where I occasionally publish recipes, so I have a little skin in the game.
Oh. I see.
My recipe app of choice is Mela, which (like many recipe apps) already has a feature that grabs the details from a web recipe while avoiding the SEO garbage. With HomeView, Apple is doing the same thing. I approve.
Of course, as a 21st-century media professional, I feel for the recipe writers who got jerked around by Google and are now reaping the consequences. Preston mentions that a lot of professional recipe sources are now moving to subscription models, and I think that’s a positive development, whether you’re the New York Times or a small content creator with a paid newsletter.
One of my big concerns about the HomeView is that it doesn’t seem to have any facility to support recipe apps. It would probably be a perfect device for an extension of Mela or Paprika, but they’re not CarPlay audio/video apps.
I hope Apple can find a way to allow users to bring their personal recipe catalogs onto the device in the future. In the meantime, if I were the developer of a recipe app, I’d be looking into creating a web version, to be loaded in HomeView’s included Safari browser.
I wondered what the entry-level, initial price of each Apple TV box at introduction was, from the March 2007 original to the Apple TV 4K (4th generation) announced October 13, 2026, adjusted for inflation. So I charted it.
Essentially, only the original, (Mac-based!) Apple TV was more expensive in actual dollars than the current model. And as recently as earlier this year, it was the second-cheapest it had ever been. Talk about whiplash.
Get to know Apple’s Photos app and how best to use it to import, manage, edit, sync, and share your photos in macOS 27 Golden Gate and iOS 27/iPadOS 27! Following the expert advice of Jason Snell, publisher of Six Colors and former lead editor at Macworld, you’ll learn how to navigate Photos like a pro!
The biggest updates this year were about the three new AI-based photo-editing tools, as you might expect.
The ebook is $19.99. Upgrades are $10 for people with editions 1-3, or $5 for Take Control Premium members. While the book has been updated for the 27 operating systems, book buyers also get access to last year’s edition, which is devoted to version 26 OSes.
Apple TV has plenty of reasons to keep on living. But it sure would be nice if Apple would show the product some attention beyond the massive price increases. Attention like new hardware, OS improvements, and (eventually) a price that makes it less of a hard sell to people who are desperate to escape the garbage of all the other streamer-box platforms.
Well, this week the Apple TV got some attention, in the form of a hardware update that came along with another price increase, up to $299. If the Apple TV’s base price of $199 made it “essentially dead” for anyone but the most die-hard of Apple customers, how much more dead could this fourth-generation model be?
While I’m obviously not a fan of the theatrical declaring of products dead because they don’t meet one analyst’s definition of success—lots of products are profitable and successful without taking huge market share—I do think that the $299 price tag puts Apple TV hardware in a really tough spot. (And to analyst Dan Rayburn’s credit, this week he made his point with a little more finesse: At $299 “it won’t appeal to the masses,” he wrote.)
These days, pretty much every TV you buy comes with an embedded computer that means you don’t really need to buy anything to make it work with streaming services. A stroll through my local Costco reveals a panoply of enormous TVs with high-quality screens, low prices, and embedded OSes from Roku, Amazon, Samsung, or Google. They all have all the apps, and all the services.
As a result, the addressable market for an external TV box just keeps contracting. For most people, what’s in their TV will be good enough. That leaves the rest of us, of course: the people who realize that the embedded systems in TVs tend to be slow and inelegant and are even potentially built on privacy-invading surveillance technology. But there are, sad to say, a lot fewer of us.
This change in the market means that cheap streaming sticks, once a mainstay, are essentially irrelevant. They’re no better than what’s in the TVs out there. Maybe there was a day when spending $20 for a Roku stick at Walmart made sense, but those days are largely over.
For the people who do care, who do want something better, the options are more limited. Amazon’s Fire TV Cube is $199. Roku’s “Ultra” is $149. The Google TV streamer, my favorite of all the non-Apple products on the market, is $150.
When you could get an Apple TV starting at $199, you could spot Apple playing its usual game—not the low-price leader, but in the ballpark. At $299, though, it becomes a lot harder for me to convince my relative who is complaining about how slow and terrible their streaming interface is to spring for the Apple one and solve their problems.
In the past, Apple has offered a second, lower-priced Apple TV model alongside the fully specced-up one—the previous low-end Apple TV 4K lacked Ethernet and had less storage space—but that’s not currently the case. I’ve seen some commentators suggest this is a good thing because it “simplifies the product line.”
I don’t follow that argument at all. Having a cheaper product is good, because not only do some people not need Ethernet or large amounts of storage on a streamer box, but lower prices broaden the market! (The iPhone product line could be simplified if we got rid of the iPhone 17e, iPhone 17, iPhone Air, and heck, iPhone 18 Pro Max, but I don’t think that would be a very good idea!)
So why only one Apple TV 4K this time? There are three possibilities. The first is that Apple just doesn’t care about trying to reach people at lower prices, and has resigned itself to the fact that tvOS is an exceedingly small niche product for its most committed customers. It’s possible, but I don’t want to believe that.
The next possibility: Given how weird chip supply and cost issues are right now, Apple has prioritized releasing its high-end product, and will release a lower-end model at some point in the future once it can make enough with the parts it has on hand. Going to market with a brand-new Apple TV 4K in the lowest-end version doesn’t make any sense… you’d always start with the high-end model that is going to be an instant buy for your hardest-core customers who don’t mind the price tag. Then you backfill later with the stripped-down model that maybe doesn’t have as much storage, or those fancy microphones, or an Ethernet port.
And finally, it’s possible that the Apple TV hardware world is in flux because Apple wants to make a different product that hits a lower price point. One that’s less full-featured than the top-of-the-line model, but different enough that it’s not just a variant of the existing product. This is the long-theorized “Apple TV Stick,” and I’m not sure that product needs to exist if the company can just make a box that’s more competitive with the high-end offerings from Google, Amazon, and Roku. But at least it’s possible, and might even be preferable if there are key markets asking for it. (I recently stayed in a hotel with Apple TV boxes on the back of every room TV. Would hotels prefer something a little simpler to install? I honestly have no idea.)
Regardless, as someone who thinks that tvOS—despite all its limitations—offers the best TV media streaming interface experience out there, I hope Apple cares enough to keep it alive and keep it relevant for the small market of people who can’t imagine being stuck with using the software embedded on their TV sets. The masses may not care, but we care, and if that’s not a recipe for a successful Apple product, I don’t know what is.
By the time the website came up over six minutes later — where you can search for other Apple Stores — my ship date had already slipped to the end of November or early December.
It seems that my work on Widgetsmith and our other apps will be constrained to the simulator a little longer. It is also nice to have the new thing when it’s new, so I can write and talk about it when it’s new.
I guess the upside is that, now that shipping dates have slipped into 2027, the iPhone Duo will be new for a long time.
Clearly Apple is struggling with Duo supply, but there’s also obviously a lot of Duo demand and curiosity out there. Put them together and you get a device that’s sold out into next year already. The Duo is not going to be the best-selling iPhone of this cycle—not even close—but I still think it will be the best-selling folding phone ever, and by a lot.
For the record: I got all the way to the final screen with Apple telling me my 256GB Night Sky order would be available next Friday. But then it slipped to Nov 9 – Nov 16.
HomeView’s simplicity may put off hardcore home automation enthusiasts, but I’d argue it’s perfect for their long-suffering spouses. I’ve tried every version of physical smart home control interface in my home, and you know who hasn’t used any of them? My family.
Because my family all have iPhones, and because the HomeView will always be there and will feel familiar, I can see them actually using it. That means I could set up a full Home Assistant instance and run a detailed dashboard on a tablet in my office, then feed the scenes and devices into Apple Home so my husband and daughter can just tap to control them on a HomeView in the kitchen.
My own thermostat, which came with my HVAC system, is a piece of junk, and I can’t replace it because it is incompatible with third-party thermostats. But I can envision putting a HomeView on the wall and making that the primary interface for it and every other smart home device in my house.
Our thoughts on the new HomeView and its confusing pricing, whether we’re using AI agents like Meta’s Muse or OpenAI’s Dots, how we feel about passkeys, and if we’d ever use an Apple Pencil with an iPhone Fold.
Apple stuffs a lot of different kinds of tasks into Messages. It’s a junk drawer for communications with other people. Send photos? Sure. Set up a safety partner for when you are going somewhere? Why not. Pay somebody? Of course! And, yeah, let’s stick in a poll!
But I think the best use beyond text and media of Messages is sharing your location. It’s a convenient way to share your whereabouts with someone else or a group, either indefinitely or for a fixed time period. Starting in the version 27 operating systems, you don’t have to use Apple’s preset periods, either: you can set a custom duration, which can be up to 30 days.
Sharing your location in Messages is an extension of Apple’s Find My service and native apps. You can also share your location within a native Find My app—that’s on an iPhone, iPad, Mac, or Apple Watch, not iCloud.com’s Find My, which only works with devices.
When you share your location in Messages (left), it appears as a card within the conversation. Sharing duration is shown as an orange overlay. The recipient sees your current location and the distance to you. (Some details blurred for privacy.)
Like everything with Find My, your current location is locked down except to share with those you explicitly permit, and only for the period you choose, or indefinitely.
Methods of sharing location
Messages offers two different ways to share your location:
As continuous access: With iMessage, you can let someone see where you are as you move about for one hour, one day, or a custom period (in version 27 releases), or you can add them indefinitely to the list of people who can see your whereabouts in Find My.
As a pinned location: You can share your current location as a pin on a map, sent as an image preview with a link to Apple Maps. You can send this snapshot using SMS/MMS, RCS, or iMessage.
Starting in the version 27 operating systems, you can also hide your location via Messages (in the Info pane, tap or click Hide My Location) or the Find My app without the other person being notified. They’re also not told when you resume sharing.
Share your location via iMessage
Apple still hasn’t unified how location is shared in Messages across its four platforms, so I have to explain two divergent paths to the same result. (This is a bit overdue for Messages non-text/media features in general!)
Here’s how to share your location on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch in Messages:
Select or start a conversation.
Tap the plus (+) button and choose Location.
A Location view appears at the bottom of the conversation showing a preview of your current location. Tap Share and then tap For One Hour, For Today, Always, or Custom. (These names appear slightly differently in releases before the version 27 operating systems.)
If you picked Custom, choose your duration, anywhere from 15 minutes to 30 days, and tap Start Sharing. On an Apple Watch, that starts location sharing; on an iPhone or iPad, proceed to the next step.
Tap the Send (up arrow) button to start sharing your location.
Choose the duration for which you want to share your location from a popup menu (left). Pick Custom in any version 27 operating system, and you can set a period of up to 30 days.
A Request button appears if the other person isn’t sharing their location with you. Tap it to request their location.
If you’re already sharing your location with someone, there’s no duration prompt, and the Share button is labeled Send instead. You’re essentially just sending them a reminder with a link they can tap to open Find My.
On a Mac, follow these steps to share your location:
Open Messages.
Click the profile or profiles at the top of the conversation thread to reveal the Info pane.
Click Share My Location.
Where are you?
Apple determines your location from an iPhone, Apple Watch, or iPad, and shows you which device in the Find My app’s Me view under My Location. If you use Messages to offer your location to someone from another device, you’re alerted “Another Device Used for Your Location” and given an option to Cancel or Continue. With iPhone Handoff, which lets two iPhones share one number, your location follows the currently active phone.
After you send your location, the other person or people have access to it. They see a Location card in the conversation that continuously updates to show where you are.
They can tap Open Find My to see you within the Find My app or, if they’re not already sharing their location with you, tap Share My Location to reciprocate.
When someone shares their location with you, you can reciprocate. Here, a notification gives you the available duration options.
Likewise, when someone shares their location with you, it appears in the Info pane of any conversation they’re part of. If their current location is known, this tile adds more details; if it can’t be determined, a message says their current location is unknown.
Inset into the location section, you see their current city or landmark, a label showing how recently their location was updated, and a button. The time label appears as minutes or hours, Now (within the last minute or so), or Live (real time). The button shows the walking or driving time; tap or click it to open Maps with directions. Their location updates in real time as they move, which helps if you’re trying to meet up.
You can’t undo sending your current location, but in the Info pane in Messages, in any version of iOS, iPadOS, or macOS, you can tap or click Stop Sharing My Location to cut off the flow of location data.
Apple’s addition of Hide My Location in the version 27 releases lets you silently stop sending your location without alerting the person you’re sharing with. You can also resume from the same spot in the Info pane (or in Find My). The other person only sees your location is unavailable if they check. The reason to add this feature is both to allow privacy or safety, depending on with whom your location is shared. (Abusive partners or controlling family members often force people to enable location sharing.)
Share a pinned location via SMS/MMS or RCS
SMS/MMS and RCS can’t be used to share ongoing location information, but you can send and receive a pinned location with them via Messages, though only on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch:
Select or start a conversation.
Tap the plus (+) button and choose Location.
A Location view appears at the bottom of the conversation showing a preview of your current location. Tap Send Pin.
A Location link for Apple Maps appears, labeled Dropped Pin, with your current address below it.
Tap the green Send (up arrow) button to send your location.
For further reading
For much more about Find My tracking, location privacy, deflecting stalkers, and AirTags and the Find My network, see my book Take Control of Find My and AirTags. It’s been fully updated for the version 27 releases.
[Got a question for the column? You can email glenn@sixcolors.com or use/glennin our subscriber-only Discord community.]
I was curious about the limitations of the new Siri Remote‘s Precision Finding feature, which requires an iPhone 17 generation or newer. Earlier iPhones have Apple’s latest U-series ultra wideband chip, which is what Find My generally uses, so why wouldn’t they be compatible?
Now the remote has Find My support, but if you want to see exactly how far away it is on your iPhone with details like “20 feet,” rather than simply “far” or “near,” you will need to have an iPhone Duo, iPhone Air, or any iPhone 17 or later. Those are the only models that include its new N1 networking chip with support for Bluetooth channel sounding, which enables AirTag-like precision tracking, but without requiring a UWB chip.
So before you run out and buy a new $59 remote and then hand it over to your pet to lose, make sure you’ve got a compatible phone I guess.
Two decades after the Walkman had revolutionized personal audio, a new compressed digital audio format emerged that would redefine how we listen to music. We kick off our series about the origin of Apple’s hit MP3 player, the iPod.
Apple’s new HomeView device doesn’t have an App Store, but it does have an app story, of a sort. There are some selected Apple apps on its (surprisingly) iPad-like home screen, but you can’t add more. What’s a person to do?
If you use apps that play audio or video and support CarPlay, though, you’re in luck: HomeView supports those apps, and just those apps, via projection from your iPhone. So if you’re a fan of Overcast or Spotify, you’re in luck.
And if you’re curious about video CarPlay, well, that’s a feature Apple added this year that lets apps play video using CarPlay when the car is parked. And the HomeView is always parked.
Beyond that, though, it seems like HomeView is at least starting life as a very limited app platform. Apple does say that if you make a Siri AI query for your personal content, it will search everything on your iPhone or iPad—and that includes apps that aren’t on the HomeView. So you should be able to query your iPhone apps, but not actually run them.
In the short term, this means that if you want to (for example) access your calendar right on your device, you will probably have to do so via Apple’s Calendar app, even if you use a different app on your other devices. (If you use an app that has a web app equivalent, you could probably open it up in Safari, which is an app that the HomeView does offer.)
In the long term, I still think it’s quite likely that Apple will eventually expand what can be run on HomeView. I haven’t used one yet, but based on what I’ve seen on Apple’s website, it feels very much like a 1.0 product with plenty of room for expansion. Whether that comes in the form of apps, widgets, or access for CarPlay apps that aren’t audio or video apps, remains to be seen.
We break down Apple’s big home announcements, including the new HomeView, a collection of smart home products, a new HomePod Mini, and the new (and surprisingly expensive) Apple TV 4K.
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