By Glenn Fleishman

April 27, 2026 7:45 AM PT

Exploring the wide range of Find My-compatible devices

When the AirTag first shipped five years ago, I glommed right onto writing about it. I already had a section in a book on security and privacy about using the Find My device feature, enabled for iPhones, iPads, Macs, and Apple Watches. I was keyed up to understand where AirTag fit in. Recently, surveying the field, I found a shocking number of Find My network-equipped products, from an inexpensive flashlight to a $3,500 ebike.

Within the Apple ecosystem, it’s worth looking at what’s now available for those of us trying not to lose our things by misplacing them, forgetting to take them with us, or having them stolen.¹ Because more hardware now has effectively unremovable Find My tracking technology, it may be a more effective theft deterrent or way to recover an absconded item. (I’ve got an extra suggestion about that, too.)

A distinct itemization

AirTag introduced a new category: items versus devices. A Find My device can reach the Internet and report its position, and can use a native app to see other stuff via Find My; a Find My item just broadcasts over Bluetooth to any nearby listening iPhone, iPad, or Mac.²

An AirTag lets you track whatever it is attached to or inside by relaying its signal through other Apple devices. This offers something akin to GPS-based tracking without the need for constant battery recharging, while also finding its location and updating it when indoors. GPS works anywhere with a clear line of sight outdoors, while Find My crowdsourcing requires at least one nearby Internet-connected Apple device to relay its current position.

The stuff we track is more likely to be lost inside than outside, I’d wager, with exceptions for stolen bicycles and cars. Or when you park your car in a vast lot and forget where it is. Find My items benefit from relaying through Apple hardware that uses a combination of Wi-Fi positioning, cell tower locations, and GPS and other satellite-positioning networks, as available.³

The short battery life for a GPS-based tracker hands an advantage to the Find My network. While GPS trackers have become progressively more efficient over the decades, they still need to be recharged frequently—every few days to a few weeks, depending on battery capacity and how often they report location. That’s because they typically have both satellite receivers and cellular modems: the GPS location is derived and then transmitted over the cellular network. Find My items typically last at least a year, after which their batteries need to be replaced or recharged.⁴

Apple announced Find My licensing to third parties alongside the AirTag release, and products appeared soon after. These were mostly trackers that cost less, had a slightly different form factor, weighed less, offered rechargeable batteries, or fit better in a wallet.

It took some time for more variety to enter the Find My item market, and I frankly lost track of the sheer diversity of what’s out there. With Find My now built into a wider array of products, you might want to stick a third-party item into something you own, or replace a device with one that has Find My support.

Getting lost in all the Find My items

I set out a few weeks ago to compile a list of all items with certified Find My. Friends, I thought it would number between 20 and 30 items. It started to become unmanageable, so I built a site—FindYourTag—both for my own reference and because why not share it? Reaching over 50 items, I started to get emails and social media replies asking, “Why didn’t you include product X?” Indeed! I didn’t know about product X, but now it’s in. The database now lists 73 devices,⁵ though some are close variations of a single product.⁶

Some of these products have the attribute of supporting two or three kinds of alarms or tracking: some let you pair to both Apple Find My and Google Find Hub; a few expensive items also have their own proprietary movement alarm, managed via an app.

Here’s what I’ve found.

If you want a wallet tracker, you have a lot of choices. Apple has chosen to offer a single AirTag model. Baffling, because why not tap into the wallet-sized market? Apple’s absence is good news for third parties, because 14 different companies make a total of 18 wallet-insertable cards.

They’re all thin, though some are thinner than others. About half are rechargeable, though most of those require a unique magnetically coupled adapter that you are sure to lose unless you have a special place you keep odd adapters. Other cards advertise long battery life (two to three years) and have a discount program on replacing after that point if you return the battery for recycling.

If you’d prefer a wallet with built-in tracking, instead of a card you insert—well, there are eight of those, including the Nomad Leather Mag Wallet (Jason has one) that can hold up to four credit cards, and attaches via MagSafe to your iPhone.

Apple does offer a MagSafe-attached wallet, the FineWoven Wallet with MagSafe (holds up to three cards), but it features a Find My “lite” variant Apple doesn’t license: it only reports the last known location relative to the paired iPhone using Bluetooth via Find My—it lacks the crucial crowdsourcing component.

Stuff you probably will leave behind accidentally. There’s a whole shaggy category of things that you have left behind and aren’t a Kindle that you wished you were alerted about leaving behind (a Find My feature) or could track later. This includes:

• Power adapter: Finding out that Twelve South has a line of four different PlugBug models with Find My built in made me wonder why Apple doesn’t include Find My as a default feature on its adapters? The matrix of the four models is you can choose 50 watts and two USB-C jacks or 120 W and four USB-C jacks; either wattage charger can be purchased in a travel edition, which comes with the full array of adapters for worldwide plugging in.

• Keys: The Ekster Finder Tag ($39) is a key-holding clip with the Find My item in the middle.

• Glasses case: Satechi has the right idea here with its FindAll Glasses Case ($50). I left my distance glasses somewhere in the greater Boston area in March, and, wow, is replacing your glasses with prescription, transition lenses expensive. Oof. Ouch. Get me a Satechi, and send it back through time! (Did I mention they’re vegan, too?)

• Flashlight: Cheap flashlights are now absurdly bright—probably FAA-rules-violatingly bright if pointed upward—but how many flashlights have you lost? The $25 Footnote FlashFinder is compact, recharges via USB-C, and has Find My.

• Camera: Insta360 makes a lot of different camera models. On two of them, the GO 3S ($295) and GO Ultra ($450) are both tiny, making them prone to loss, and trackable.

The expensive stuff that you would highly regret having stolen and being untrackable. You can add a Find My tag in a lot of ways to a bike or scooter, but they typically have to be located in some external location that a thief could remove or cover with foil, blocking the signal. For instance, I have a Knog Scout ($65) which uses a special drive⁷ on the screws you use to attach it to the standard water-bottle mount holes found on most bikes.

But wouldn’t it be better if you had Find My as part of the vehicle, making it effectively unremovable without destroying the bike or scooter? Several manufacturers agree.⁸ You can find Apollo, Segway, Specialized, and Velotric models with just that.⁹ For those serious about measuring their performance, you can even get a 4iii powermeter (the Precision 3+ Powermeter, starts at $335, several models) with integral Find My.

For further reading

I am a big fan of Find My for the obvious reason that it’s let me keep track of my stuff over the last several years. That journey includes pupping part of a Take Control book about security and privacy that had swollen with tracking facts into separate volume: Take Control of Find My and AirTags. If you’ve ever had a question about setting up tracking of your own stuff, locating people, or using the Find My apps, I have so many answers for you.

[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]

By Jason Snell

April 23, 2026 4:16 PM PT

Introducing the Six Colors Audio Newsletter

Six Colors wouldn’t work without direct support from our members.

Over the years we’ve added a bunch of new members-only features to the site. Our weekly podcast has proven to be very popular, so much so that it made me realize that a lot of members are perhaps a bit more inclined to consume podcasts than reading what we write with their eyeballs.

As a result, I’ve built a new “Six Colors Audio Newsletter” podcast feed. Using the same logic as our regular members-only email newsletter, it posts an episode any day there’s at least one full story on the site. Any day we’ve got stuff on the site, a new Audio Newsletter episode drops, complete with introduction and chapter markers per story. Here’s a link to a sample episode.

The Audio Newsletter uses a high-quality text-to-speech engine, so it’s not a human reader, but I’m surprised at how good it is. I’ve spent a lot of time tweaking the script to make the output better, including alternating two different high-quality voices, using additional voices for lengthy quotes from other sources, calling out footnotes explicitly, and even switching to a “read every character” mode when stuff is posted in code font, which happens frequently in Help Me, Glenn! columns. And the refining of the script continues!

If you like reading our words with your eyes, thank you. But since I began quietly experimenting with this automated read-it-to-you podcast, I have heard from numerous members who say they just don’t have the time to read everything we write, but are happy to have integrated this podcast into their listening queue. I hope it’s useful for a subset of the audience.

If you’re a member, you can subscribe on your Memberful page.

And if you’re not yet a member, here’s a plug: when you join you don’t just support Six Colors, you get access to a weekly exclusive podcast with Dan and me, John Moltz’s This Week in Apple column, Dan’s monthly Back Page column, a full-content newsletter if you’d prefer to read the site that way, the new full-content Audio Newsletter, and access to a really good Discord community. It’s a lot!

And regardless of your membership status, thank you for reading this site. I can’t believe I’ve been doing this for eleven and a half years, but here we are.

By Philip Michaels

April 23, 2026 1:09 PM PT

Scoring the differences between ESPN and Apple Sports

In recent weeks, when I’ve fired up the ESPN app on my iPhone, an unpleasant sight has greeted me amid all the scores and upcoming games I’m trying to check in on. There, placed prominently in each entry for upcoming games, regardless of the sport, has been a big, ugly-looking block of betting odds.

Outside of friendly card games, I’m not a gambler and certainly not someone who wagers on sports. (If you take nothing else away from this article, “Never bet on anything that can talk” is a good piece of advice for anyone to live by.) I don’t begrudge your gambling fix if that’s where you find some joy in life’s slog, but I don’t want it consuming precious screen real estate when all I want to do is check a baseball score.

At some point, ESPN apparently updated its iPhone app, as the odds block no longer appears in the Scores tab, and there’s no mention of betting in the app’s preferences. If ESPN truly went in and fixed that part of the app, then kudos — but it hasn’t stopped me from exploring other alternatives to following my favorite sports, starting with Apple’s very own Sports app.

Apple released the Sports app a little more than two years ago, launching with the sports in season at the time and steadily adding more leagues and teams over time. These days, you can follow most of the same things in Apple Sports that you can via ESPN. Even better from my perspective, you can banish any betting info should you not wish to see it. In the settings of Apple’s app, there’s a toggle to hide betting odds.

I’ve been spending the past couple of weeks taking a second look at Apple Sports to see if the app’s improved any since its 2024 launch. And rather than kick ESPN to the curb, I’ve kept using this old, familiar score checker, comparing what it offers to Apple’s effort. My goal: find out which app is the better fit for my fandom and make it my permanent app of choice for staying on top of sports from my iPhone.

ESPN vs Apple Sports: Customization

Both the ESPN and Apple Sports apps place a premium on letting you follow your favorite teams and sports, though they take very different approaches to how those favorites are displayed. In ESPN’s case, your favorite teams appear at the top of the top of Scores tab, followed by the leagues those teams play in. The rest of the Scores tab includes other sports, with ESPN highlighting the biggest news of the day — or at least the news related to sports it has the broadcast rights to — in the app’s Home tab.

In contrast, Apple’s Sports app is all about your favorites. Nothing appears on the Home screen unless you put it there. That goes for teams as well as leagues, which can require a little extra work on your part.

Say your favorite team is the Detroit Tigers — and why not? Thomas Magnum rooted for them. Once you mark the Tigers as a favorite, all their games will wind up in your Sports feed… but if you want other Major League Baseball scores to show up, you’re going to have to designate MLB as a favorite, too. It seems like that should be self-evident — who follows a team in a vacuum? — but as far as hoops to jump through, it’s a relatively minimal one.

I’m torn as to which approach I prefer, though there’s a lot to be said for the stripped-back style of Apple Sports. If I’m just interested in finding out what the teams I follow are up to, Apple provides me with that. I think that gives Sports the edge over ESPN, even if it’s a slight one.

That said, sometimes it’s good to be aware of what’s happening beyond your silo of interest. If an NBA game broke out in my kitchen, I’d want to know why LeBron James wasn’t chipping in his share of the mortgage, but that doesn’t mean I don’t appreciate seeing the NBA playoff results in the ESPN app, if for no other reason than to feel slightly more informed about the wider world. I can find those results in Apple Sports — just swipe right from the Home screen, tap on NBA and voila — but as with setting up favorites, it’s an extra step or two compared to ESPN.

I should also note that ESPN’s list of sports and leagues to track is a little more extensive than what Apple offers, even after two years of expansion on Apple’s part. I’m a fan of the Oakland Roots, a soccer team that plies its trade in the second-tier USL. I can include the Roots among my favorites in ESPN’s app, but not Apple’s. Similarly, the US Women’s National Team is MIA from Apple Sports, though presumably that changes when the 2027 World Cup gets closer. All of this is more of a Me Problem, but I’m the guy trying to find a sports app that best suits his needs.

ESPN vs Apple Sports: Information

Sometimes I want to know more than just the score — I want some sense of how the game went. Both ESPN and Apple Sports let you tap on a particular game to get the who, what and how much, though that information gets displayed in different ways.

Let’s look at an in-progress event using a Tigers-Brewers game as our point of comparison. Both apps give you the basics — the score, the inning, who’s pitching and who’s batting, plus an inning-by-inning line score. But even that info comes across in different ways.

Apple Sports seems to take a backward approach, putting the name of the batter and pitcher above the logos for their respective teams; in ESPN’s view, the logo appears next to the scores, making it much easier to see who’s winning and losing at a glance.

ESPN also offers a more expansive view when presenting a lot of the same information you see in Apple’s app. The pitcher and batter appear, but you also get images, including a pitch-by-pitch breakdown of balls and strikes in ESPN’s default view. You can also see who’s on base in the ESPN app.

Weirdly, Apple believes that team stats showing the number of hits, strikeouts, walks and more should be the key data you see first. If you want team box scores, you’ve got to scroll down. That information is easier to access with ESPN.

Apple’s approach to including details about baseball games makes no sense to me as someone who’s followed the sport for most of my life. It gives the impression that no one employed by Apple has spent much time poring over box scores in the morning paper, and that Apple decided to shoehorn baseball into a template designed for a different sport.

Apple continues to shortchange fans once the game ends, at least when it comes to baseball finals. If you want to find out who the winning and losing pitchers were, you’ll have to scroll down to the box scores in the Sports app. That information appears prominently in ESPN’s end-of-game report.

In fairness to Apple Sports, other end-of-game reports are a little better organized. A soccer box score at least shows me who scored, whether I’m looking in Apple’s app or on ESPN. With ESPN, I do get a written match report, though.

ESPN vs. Apple Sports: Extras

As you might expect, ESPN’s app offers a lot more than just scores, with news articles, video highlights and direct access to anything streaming through ESPN. That’s simply a non-starter for Apple, just as you wouldn’t be able to buy an iPhone or a MacBook Neo directly from Stephen A. Smith.

ESPN does a better job listing the channels where you can find broadcasts of games. Checking ESPN’s Premier League scoreboard, for example, I can see which matches are streaming on Peacock compared to which ones are on cable TV. If you want to find that info on Apple’s Sports app, you’ve got to drill down into the actual entry for the game.

However, in Apple Sports, you can jump to other apps that are streaming those games — something ESPN doesn’t offer for non-ESPN telecasts. So with Apple Sports, it’s ultimately easier to tune in on the action — unless, of course, we’re talking about the live sports Netflix is starting to feature more prominently.

ESPN vs. Apple Sports: Verdict

The ESPN vs. Apple Sports debate may be one of those instances where you wish you could pick and choose the best elements from either app to produce the ultimate score checker. Take the depth of ESPN’s information and the more sensible box scores and combine that with Apple’s customization features, and you’d really be on to something.

After giving both apps a try, I’m not sure I’m ready to abandon the Worldwide Leader in Sports, especially now that the ill-considered betting features that had me ready to dump ESPN seem to have been scrapped. But I’m keeping Apple Sports on my iPhone just in case, because in an age where sports gambling is everywhere, I know the value of hedging my bets.

[Philip Michaels has been writing about technology since 1999, most notably for Macworld and Tom’s Guide. He currently finds himself between jobs, so if you need someone who can string a few sentences together (or make your sentences read a lot better), drop him a line.]

By Jason Snell

April 22, 2026 8:53 AM PT

I’m switching back from Spotlight, at least for now

As a part of the process of reviewing macOS Tahoe, I stopped using my longtime launcher LaunchBar and forced myself to use Apple’s new and improved version of Spotlight.

The surprising thing is, I never went back to LaunchBar. Spotlight in Tahoe was responsive, well integrated, and finally supplied me with the OS-native clipboard history feature I’ve wanted for years. While there were a few features from LaunchBar I missed—most notably, the ability to bring up an app in the launcher window and then drag a file onto it from the Finder—I was able to adapt quickly.

My friend Dr. Drang gave Spotlight in Tahoe a go recently and had a much worse experience, most notably reporting that it was terribly slow. He quickly retreated to LaunchBar (and, for clipboard history, Keyboard Maestro).

I have to agree with Dr. Drang here: I don’t know when, and I don’t know why, but over the last few months, as macOS Tahoe has gone from 26.3 to 26.4 to 26.5 beta, Spotlight has gotten progressively worse. It’s sometimes incredibly slow, making me wait to launch an app. Sometimes it misses entire categories of items. (I frequently launch items saved in my Safari favorites, and on several occasions, Spotlight just refused to show any of them.)

Also, my months of using Spotlight revealed another weakness: It’s just not as good as LaunchBar is at intuiting which items are more important to me. In Spotlight, if I type home and accidentally select an app like HomeControl or HomeBot instead of the regular old Home app, I am then prompted to launch that other app, seemingly forever. In LaunchBar, not only does it seem to recognize that the app I’ve launched hundreds of times is more likely to be my choice than the app I’ve launched once or twice, but LaunchBar will also let the user define a text shortcut that is hardwired to a particular item.

Spotlight in Tahoe will let you define text shortcuts, which it calls “Quick Keys”—but only for Actions, one particular class of item. Why that functionality isn’t available for all items is completely beyond me. But the result is that I end up launching the wrong thing, and I have no real recourse except to try to remember to launch the right thing again and again until it figures it out.

(A sad admission: On several occasions, I have renamed bookmarks and even deleted some installed apps just to stop Spotlight from recommending the wrong thing.)

In any event, Dr. Drang reminded me that there’s an easy solution to my quibbles about Spotlight: Just go back to LaunchBar.

One reason I had been willing to stop using LaunchBar was that it had been increasingly unstable for me, indexing files slowly after startup, failing to find recent changes, and throwing indexing errors. It also hadn’t been updated very much recently, making me wonder if the developer was more interested in its app Little Snitch and had put LaunchBar in maintenance mode. Fortunately, there was a substantial update in March, so maybe there’s life left in the ol’ girl after all.

So, for now, my dalliance with Spotlight is over, and I’ve returned to the familiar floating launcher window of LaunchBar. However, I’m going to keep an eye on Spotlight. If Apple can make it faster, more reliable, and a bit more customizable in macOS 27, it might be on to something.

By Glenn Fleishman

April 21, 2026 4:10 PM PT

MailMaven review: An email nerd’s best friend?

I don't have a dog for the same reason it's hard for me to get excited about email apps: the short, sweet lifespans make you love them so intensely and miss them forever when they're gone. You're never sure whether you'll spend several years with a favorite pup or mail client, or get lucky and have 15 or more. Eventually, in my experience with dogs and email clients, they grow old, fade, and are no more. This is the cycle of life and the software business cycle for many apps.¹

While I love dogs and seek permission to pet from the owner of nearly every dog I encounter, I have gone cold on new email apps after decades of losing my greatest loves.

I can't remember which horrible mainframe program I used first, in the 1980s, but pine—developed at nearby University of Washington—was a standby in my early Unix-plus-Internet days. I adopted Eudora as soon as I found it and used it for many, many years because it only offered text-based email—no HTML! When it petered out around 2002, Mailsmith arose from Bare Bones, with the same text-only front end. Despite friend Rich Siegel and other developers keeping it alive long after its commercial utility had ended, I eventually shifted to Postbox in 2019. Guess what happened in 2024.²

Thus did I approach the relatively newly released MailMaven version 1 with some fear, even as I smoothed its fur, patted its back, and said, "Good mail app! Good mail app!" I'm happy to say that MailMaven gave me the puppy experience: I'm so excited to meet it and get to know it, and I'll be even more so as it calms down and matures, and I get to live alongside it for what I hope is a long time.

Continue reading “MailMaven review: An email nerd’s best friend?”…

By Jason Snell

April 20, 2026 5:40 PM PT

That was Tim, this is Ternus: Some first thoughts on Apple’s CEO transition

Tim Cook didn’t get to be a part of a “thoughtful, long-term succession plan” in 2011. After stepping in for Steve Jobs multiple times during the Apple co-founder’s fight with cancer, Cook became CEO, and Jobs became executive chairman just 43 days before Jobs died. Apple didn’t dictate the executive transition. Jobs’s cancer did.

I get the sense that Cook wanted to give his own successor the thoughtful, long-term plan that Jobs couldn’t give to him. Nearly two years ago, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggested that Ternus could be Cook’s planned successor. By the time the Financial Times reported that Ternus was likely to succeed Cook last November, it was clear things were already headed in that direction. I doubt there was a single person at the March unveiling of the MacBook Neo who didn’t know that John Ternus, who spoke to the crowd, was likely to be Apple’s next CEO.

Tim Cook knows he can’t stay at Apple forever. The longer he lengthened his tenure as CEO, the shorter he risked making the transitional period. I’d actually be surprised if Cook isn’t in the executive chairmanship for a lot longer than people expect. I don’t think he’s ready to put Apple in the rearview—but I do think he’s trying to get the timing on this exactly right.

And here it is: Cook will give Ternus the CEO job in a little over four months. (Wall Street has ten days to digest that news before Apple reports its latest financial results.) Then Cook will become Apple’s executive chairman, able to provide advice and support to his successor while presumably allowing him to forge his own path. Ternus gets a runway, mentorship, and a trusted adviser at a particularly stressful moment. I’m sure Cook wishes he’d been able to talk to Steve Jobs during his first year as CEO.

Oh, and Cook will apparently be taking one very specific job with him to the boardroom, according to the press release:

Cook will continue in his role as CEO through the summer as he works closely with Ternus on a smooth transition. As executive chairman, Cook will assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world.

It doesn’t take a magnifying glass to read between those lines. Cook is keeping one of the stickiest jobs he’s had to do the last decade for himself, for now: connecting with the representatives of various governments in ways that advantage Apple, whether that’s easing China’s worries about Apple’s focus on diversifying its supply chain, or convincing the Trump administration that Apple is investing in the U.S. while also needing tariff relief. Not only does Cook have the personal connections there, but it’s a messy business that perhaps Ternus is best insulated from—for now.

Tim Cook’s legacy

There’s going to be ample time to ponder the highs and lows of the Tim Cook era at Apple. The company is impossibly larger than the one Cook took over from Jobs. The explosive growth of the iPhone, especially from 2014 on, has changed the fundamentals of the company. When iPhone growth finally slowed, Cook swapped in a growing wearables business (led by what I assume is the product Cook is most proud of, the Apple Watch) and a dramatically growing set of subscription services. Those growth lines keep Wall Street happy.

When you’re the CEO, you’re the CEO of the whole company—but I do believe that CEOs come to the job with their own strengths, which reflect on their priorities as CEO. Cook’s focus on efficiency, owing to his background in operations, also served Apple well during this period. Realizing that product margins increase over time, he allowed Apple to sell iPhones at lower prices by keeping older models on sale for much longer.

Cook’s priorities helped make Apple a manufacturing powerhouse, capable of building products nobody else could—at least, until Apple showed the way. But as Patrick McGee so capably showed in his book Apple in China, Apple was also training up China on being a tech manufacturing powerhouse. Between that and Cook’s policy of engaging with the Chinese in order to gain access to the lucrative and growing Chinese market, Cook reaped benefits with the side effect of empowering a global competitor and not engaging with a government whose core principles do not fit with Apple’s.

The same goes for the United States, where Cook has managed to reduce the impact of tariffs by playing nice with the administration ¹, making some made-in-the-USA servers and boasting about its investments in American manufacturing while downplaying its commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.

John Ternus’s opportunity

For John Ternus, who’s been working at Apple for half his life, to say that this is a huge opportunity is an understatement. Congratulations, dude, here’s the keys to one of the world’s most important and valuable corporations. Don’t break it.

But Ternus’s arrival in the CEO’s office isn’t just an opportunity for him. It’s an opportunity for Apple. Every time a new person takes over, whether it’s in the role of CEO or even just a middle manager, there’s an opportunity for change. Even if you worked for the old boss, once you’re the new boss, you have the opportunity to turn the page. It’s a lot harder for someone to reverse themselves on a decision they made than it is for someone new to come in and see the opportunity to move forward. (Cook re-instituted an employee donation-matching program when he took over from Jobs, just as one small example.)

In spite of its success, or perhaps because of it, Apple has been a company in stasis for 15 or 20 years. When everything’s going great, and all the executives just stick around no matter how rich they get on stock options, it’s really hard to make changes. The arrival of any new person in charge, not just John Ternus in particular, is an opportunity to shake things up. New leaders have the freedom to make their mark. That could be good for Apple.

I’m also struck by the fact that John Ternus comes from a product-focused background. All in all, it was probably for the best that Tim Cook was as different in skill set from Steve Jobs as possible, because that was an impossibly hard act to follow. Cook, as an operations guy, got to put his faith in the product teams that were executing and guided them at a very high level. I think it would’ve been a disaster if Apple’s first post-Jobs CEO had been trying to cosplay as Steve. Cook couldn’t pull off wearing that turtleneck.

But it’s been 15 years, and maybe it’s a good thing for Apple to get a CEO who’s closer to the metal? Ternus knows the ins and outs of product development at a different level than Cook ever could. Given that Apple is, at its heart, a company that makes physical products and sells them, having someone who has spent decades at Apple working on those products feels like an opportunity for a positive change.

The importance of keeping Johny Srouji

As a part of Monday’s moves, Johny Srouji has been named Chief Hardware Officer, reporting to Ternus. This is a new C-suite position for Srouji, previously the senior VP of hardware technologies.

It’s hard to see this move and not consider Bloomberg’s report back in December that Srouji “recently told Cook that he is seriously considering leaving in the near future,” a report defused by Srouji two days later.

Srouji is the father of Apple silicon, and Apple’s chip efforts are one of the company’s greatest assets. When word of Srouji’s potential exit broke, it only underscored to me just how vital Srouji and his team are to Apple. It also struck me that perhaps this was evidence that Apple was negotiating with Srouji in order to retain him, during a period when one of his peers—Ternus—was about to be made his boss.

The moment your boss of more than a decade decides to hang it up seems like a pretty good time to take stock and consider what your own next move might be. If you’re Srouji, you undoubtedly have all sorts of different opportunities out there. Having a fellow SVP like Ternus be promoted over you also has to sting a little bit, even if you didn’t especially want the top job.

You need to retain key employees, and there aren’t many people more key at Apple than Johny Srouji. No matter how it went down, here’s the result: Srouji gets a C-suite title, and he takes over Ternus’s hardware role. Ternus’s lieutenant Tom Marieb is reportedly taking his slot and reporting to Srouji. This is textbook retention, and Apple has to be relieved that Srouji is staying on.

Still, these won’t be the last changes. With Cook on his way upstairs to the boardroom, I would expect many other long-tenured Apple executives to redefine their positions or even depart entirely. Keep in mind, most of these people have been working intensely for decades and have made enough money to retire in style. I have no doubt they do it because they love it, but once the boss changes and some of your old colleagues step away, it’s not the same, is it? It’s a cascading wave of change that is probably going to continue at Apple for some time.

Managing that change, and making it for the better, will be one of John Ternus’s first jobs. At least he’ll have Tim Cook to lean on for advice.

By Glenn Fleishman

April 20, 2026 12:23 PM PT

Silence! Listen, here’s how to control sound from your devices

Every Apple device has opinions about when it should make noise. Some of those opinions are reasonable; others will surprise you at 2 a.m.! If you’ve ever wondered why your iPhone alarm blared right through Silent mode, or why your Mac doesn’t have a Silent mode at all, here’s the breakdown.

Everything that makes noise

Before telling you how to suppress, silence, or control audio output, let’s first look at what might provoke a sound and which settings control whether it’s produced. Then I’ll dig into Silent mode and other volume-control options.

Here’s what can trigger audible alerts across your Apple devices, and what controls each:

• Notification sounds: Sounds associated with notifications are governed by both Focus modes and Silent mode. You configure which apps can use sound in Settings: Notifications, either globally or on a per-app basis. Settings: Focus: Focus mode lets you choose when to suppress these sounds when that mode is active.
• Sound effects: System feedback sounds are subject to Focus mode choices on an iPhone or iPad, and to the Alert volume slider on a Mac. Silent mode applies to them on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch.
• Ringtones: For phone and FaceTime calls, both Focus modes and Silent mode will suppress ringtones.
• Alarms: Alarms are a wild card. On an iPhone or iPad, you can’t silence them with suppression settings—neither Silent mode nor a Focus mode mutes an alarm. On an Apple Watch, however, Silent mode keeps alarms, well, silent unless you’ve enabled the breakthrough option, discussed below. On a Mac, the alarm sound is controlled by the Alert volume.
• Timers: Timers respect Silent mode on an iPhone, iPad, or Apple Watch. On Mac, they follow Alert volume.
• Emergency alerts (iPhone only): Government-originating messages, like AMBER Alerts and public safety notifications, ignore both Focus modes and Silent mode on an iPhone. Apple also offers “Enhanced Safety Alerts” for things like imminent earthquakes, though Apple’s documentation is conspicuously silent on whether these override your audio settings. (Educated guess: yes.)
• Find My’s Play Sound: If you or someone else triggers Play Sound in Find My for a device, that device always plays the Find My sound. It’s designed to help you find a lost device, so Apple bypasses all silencing. It can also help you find a device taken from you, or freak out the taker.

What the so-called Silent mode actually does

Silent mode is available on the iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch. When you enable it, Silent mode suppresses ringtones, alerts, and system sounds.¹ Silent mode doesn’t disable the audio alarms, timers, music, or video audio—they all play right through it. So do Find My’s Play Sound, emergency SOS sounds, fall and crash detection alerts, and government emergency alerts. Apple’s logic is that these are sounds you either explicitly requested or urgently need to hear.

Your device may also still vibrate, as haptics are controlled separately in Settings: Sounds & Haptics.

Despite this seeming clarity, you will find device-based exceptions:

• On an iPhone or iPad, a Clock alarm ignores Silent mode entirely—it will always make noise.
• On an Apple Watch, though, Silent mode does suppress alarms unless you specifically enable Break Through Silent Mode for that alarm.
• If your Apple Watch is off your wrist and charging, Silent mode is ignored, and alarms always play—the assumption being, I infer, that if you’re not wearing your Apple Watch, you’d want to know when an alarm went off!

How to enable Silent Mode

Each type and some generations of hardware have different pathways or options to manage Silent mode:

• On an iPhone 15 Pro or later (and iPhone Air): Go to Settings: Sounds & Haptics and toggle Silent Mode on.
• Older iPhones through the iPhone 15 and 15 Plus: These models have the physical Ring/Silent switch on the side.
• On any iPad: Go to Settings: Sounds: Silent Mode.
• On any Apple Watch: Go to Settings: Sounds & Haptics: Silent Mode.

On all of these devices, you can also toggle Silent mode from Control Center: just tap the Silent Mode icon. If you don’t see it there, you’ll need to add it by customizing Control Center.²

Macs: No Silent mode for you

Macs don’t offer a Silent mode. Apple apparently assumes that if your Mac is awake and making noise, you’re sitting in front of it and can deal with it!

Instead, Macs split audio into two buckets. “Sound effects”—Apple’s long-standing term for system feedback sounds, alerts, error bonks, and the like—are controlled in Settings: Sound under the Sound Effects section. You can route them to a different audio output device, and there’s an “Alert volume” slider you can drag all the way to zero to mute them.

Everything else—music, video, app audio—is controlled by the main Output volume, adjustable via the keyboard volume keys or a Control Center slider.

Pump down the volume

One more piece of the sound output puzzle worth putting in place: on an iPhone or iPad, the hardware volume buttons normally control media volume, but there’s a setting in Sounds & Haptics called Change with Buttons that lets them also control the separate Ringtones and Alerts volume. If that’s off, you need to adjust the ringtone and alert volume with the slider in Settings.

On an Apple Watch, which has no volume buttons, you adjust volume in Settings: Sounds & Haptics: Tap the speaker icons, or rotate the Digital Crown when the volume slider is visible.

For further reading

I suffered to understand all the interactions of Silent mode and Focus modes, so you didn’t have to, when I researched Take Control of Focus. This book explains everything you need to know about what produces banners, sounds, vibrations, and more, and how to tune, tweak, and otherwise customize Focus modes to preserve your peace of mind while getting a piece of work done—or even reading a book!

[Got a question for the column? You can email [email protected] or use /glenn in our subscriber-only Discord community.]

[Glenn Fleishman is a printing and comics historian, Jeopardy champion, and serial Kickstarterer. His latest book, which you can pre-order, is Flong Time, No See. Recent books are Six Centuries of Type & Printing and How Comics Are Made.]