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Designer, editor, and educator David Reinfurts 2019 book, A *New* Program for Graphic Design (Inventory Press) was a surprise success, selling out its initial print run in three weeks. Its now in its third edition with translations in Chinese, French, German, Italian, Korean, and Spanish. The book was described as a do-it-yourself textbook, but a traditional design textbook it was not. Across its three chaptersTypography, Gestalt, and InterfaceReinfurt draws on designers, printers, artists, and publishers to show that graphic design is not a narrow area of study but rather a broad way of looking at how we understand the world. The creation of the book, too, was as unusual as its contents. The three chapters were based on three courses Reinfurt had been teaching at Princeton University. To produce the book, Reinfurt presented all his lectures from all three courses to an audience at Inventory Presss studio in Los Angeles. Transcripts were produced from the three days that were then edited to form the book, making for a casual, dialogue-driven text that is at once personal, meandering, and expansive. [Cover Image: Inventory Press] Now, Reinfurt and Inventory Press are releasing a follow-up book, A *Co-* Program for Graphic Design, that is based on three of Reinfurts new courses: Circulation, Multiplicity, and Research. Reinfurt taught these courses over Zoom, during the pandemic, and much like the first book, used the recordings from those sessions as the structure for the new book. Because of the limitations and opportunities of teaching over Zoom, A *Co-* Program introduces a series of new voices, guest lectures from each course, which further expand our understanding of what graphic design can be. In a moment where graphic design is undergoing profound change, I find this pair of books to help situate both what it means to be a graphic designer and what it means to teach graphic design. Reinfurt, I think, offers a timeless approach to graphic design that transcends technical skills, industry demands, and visual fads in favor of treating design as a serious area of study that blends disciplines and ways of thinking. I was curious to talk with him about the ideas in the books and why graphic design, as a term, is still a useful framing device. Much like the creation of the books themselves, this conversation was conducted over Zoom and edited for clarity. And like their content, this conversation meanders and moves, attempting to find new ways to teach graphic design. Fast Company: I want to begin by talking about the title of this book. You open A *Co-* Program for Graphic Design with a list of all the alternative titles you had come up with and a roundtable conversation with some former students about what Co-program means. I want to ask you about the other part. I want to ask you about graphic design. What is graphic design? You have to find a place to locate yourself. Over the years, I’ve worked between a lot of different areas, but my training was in graphic design and I hang on to that as a label. But you’re asking what graphic design is. That term has been around at least for enough time to gather some historical weight, and I like that, too. The first book was originally going to be titled A New Primer for Visual Literacy, as a play on Donis Dondiss Primer of Visual Literacy, but we decided to rename it because it didnt feel like a good idea to riff on a previous book. We landed on A *New* Program for Graphic Design, which I liked a lot. People know the term graphic design. People are often confused about it, but at least it’s familiar. I like this idea of graphic design being a way to locate yourself. You’ve called yourself a graphic designer for about 25 years now. Has your understanding of graphic design changed over your career? Does it mean something different to you now than it did when you started? I’m certain it does, but I don’t worry about that too much. It’s a way to identify where I’m coming from and probably where my work is the most legible. But I love the idea of a bait and switch. I dont mean that as a trick. I find it’s really useful to be able to give someone a way into the work and then have it become more complex than they’re expecting, because it’s so unsatisfying when it’s the reverse, right? The reason I asked you those first two questions is that I think thats exactly what you do in these books: you complicate our understanding of what graphic design can be. In the first book, you talk about graphic design as the most liberal of the liberal arts and offer an assortment of definitions throughout both books. I think it’s interesting that this term has all of these different definitions or approaches or ways into it or ways out of it. When you were first invited to teach a graphic design class at Princeton 15 years ago, how did that blurriness or elasticity shape how you thought about what that would mean to teach graphic design? First, I knew it needed to be an introductory class. What’s the basic skill that’s useful in graphic design? Where do you start? Typography seemed like it. Design has been taught that way for a long time. Theres a historical weight to it; there are a set of skills that come with it, and that seemed like a way to introduce graphic design to the campus that could open up other modes of thought. You write in the first book that graphic design is often taught just as a series of skills, and that you feel like that shortchanges what it means to teach graphic design. Can you tell me more about that? In my experience, design education should not be training for a job. If you want to learn practical skills, you can find them in many different ways. But I think in school, the point is to get disoriented, not to get oriented. I feel like in school, you should just have all these crazy ideas and facilitate those because the rest of your working career is going to try to limit that. We’re doing a disservice to train a student for a job. I don’t know what the jobs will be. I don’t just want to see more designers like what we already have. I want to see more designers who are surprising and crazy and can make a go of it for a whole career. If you think about typography, for example, you’re thinking about both what it says and how it says it. I don’t just mean rhetorically, but visually: a visual form conveys a lot of meaning. This is something every graphic designer knows. It’s pretty easy to understand how hello, written in sans serif, bold, condensed, means something very different than hello in a lowercase script. These lessons of how you can modulate a meaning with form, I think, are a good entryway into graphic design. It is a set of skills that could get you a job, but I also see it as a useful skill hats applicable across many different disciplines. It introduces a rigor in the way you thinkit’s a rigor that thinks about how a message is embodied. Building on that, there’s almost no mention of technology in these books. Where does technologythe computer, ways of production or makingcome into the classroom? I keep students off the computer as long as possible, because you realize how they loosen up when they’re working with their hands. Plus, it’s going to change, right? The technology will never be the same and everyone will use it slightly differently. When Im giving assignments, they are meant to be broad. I want to signal Hey, this is something different. You can loosen up. You can do it a different way. Im predisposed to leaving things open for the studentor readerto find their way through it, regardless of the technology. Lets get into some of the specific content in the book. I think of your first book as being about production and the second book as about distribution. The chapters in the first bookTypography, Gestalt, Interfaceare all about how you put ideas into the work and then the chapters in the second bookCirculation, Multiplicity, Researcherare all about how those ideas go out into the world. Does that sound right to you? That wasnt intentional, but it sounds right. At least since going to graduate school, Ive been interested in that second part. I would see design in the world and realize how multiplied the responses were: it can be torn in one situation or somebody writes on top of it or puts a sticker on it. Those things are fascinating to me. I realized the work is not done when you’re finished doing the work, the work is done when it’s done being used. I have always felt like that part of design was ignored because it’s not as tidy. I’m not very interested in the monic idea of what it’s supposed to be. Im endlessly interested in all the individual variations: if it’s been altered, or if it doesn’t land the right way. The first chapter in the book begins with the Black Lives Matter typography because I was interested in how you could write it in ways that rhyme visually, rhyme with each other, but weren’t exactly the same. In that way, it felt like a brand, but it wasnt organized from the top down. The book opens with the Black Lives Matter typography and ends with a chapter about research. I felt like Research could have been the title of every chapter because the argument you implicitly make here is that all design is a form of research. I was interested in doing a class on design research because I’d heard that term bandied about a bunch of different ways over time and wanted to look at how it was talked about at different points in time. To think about all design as research gives you more latitude as a designer to spend more time making things that might not satisfy what needs to be done. To get to the best work, you have to go through a bunch of hoops, and you should follow your intuition. I think that’s what you bring to a project as a designer. So when Im talking about research, I’m really talking about design process: how do you cultivate your own idiosyncratic, wasteful, digestive process? Both of these books are filled with design history: you jump back and forth through time, looking at different people, looking at different projects, looking at different ways design has been understood. What is the role of design history in your teaching? I want to find some exemplary practices that I can use as models. It can be powerful to pull examples from the pastfrom a time that is not right nowso you can inject a bit of critical distance. You can say, We dont really work like this anymore but here is one approach. Here is one way someone approached this problem. How does this resonate with what were doing? As a student, you can look at that and realize that you could also invent an equally novel way of approaching this work now. I instinctively think it’s useful to have heroes or role models that you can look to and think, Here’s somebody who approached their work in a way that really resonates with me. How am I the same or different? I keep hearing conversations about the death of graphic design. That its being replaced by product designers or brand strategists or creative technologists, or some other new term. History becomes another way to root contemporary work in a discourse. Yes. This goes back to our discussion of why identify it as graphic design rather than something else, and it just reinforces my opinion that it’s useful to connect what we’re doing now to a body of what people have done before. If we’re constantly changing what it’s called, it just goes poof, up in the air. A good and useful model that has a much richer discourse than graphic design is architecture. Architecture has shifted what the profession does so radically and architects are very good at claiming lots of territory that doesn’t always look like architecture as we narrowly define it. An obvious example is what OMA has done with AMO in making research a valid output of their studio. Lots of people do that kind of work, but doing it within the context of architecture gives it previous discourse in history to anchor it in. I think in graphic design, weve built that discourse in history, and it is useful to connect these expansive practices to that so students can see a range of opportunities. Architecture is a good example here because we often think of architecture narrowly as buildings, but AMO or any other architect working outside of that context often describes their work more broadly as a spatial practice. Architecture, then, isnt just about making a building but larger questions of how we relate to things in space. When you think about it that way, you could make a building, but you could also make a film or an exhibition or a temporary structure, and they all connect to these larger questions of space. Does graphic design have something like that to root itself? Is it too simple to say something like text and image? I do think there’s a core there and it’s close to text and image, but I’d define it as language and its form: how something is said, and the visual form that carries that. Text and image can seem like categories, where the language and the form or something feel like a rich place for discovery. How has teaching affected how you work on other projects? Has it changed how you think about design? Has it changed how you work? Surely it has. Teaching doesnt harden up how you think about your work, but instead gives you 85 different ways of talking about it. It gives you lots of perspectives. When I first started teaching, I would not talk about my own work. I wouldn’t even introduce who I was or where it’s coming from. But as I got into it, I realized it can be generous to acknowledge my viewpoint. Here are the things I like to do. Here’s something I was working on last week. I can speak about those things with lots of detail, and that’s more genuine than speaking about something I don’t know about. I have always thought about teaching and practice being one continuous thing. The only way teaching made sense to me was to make it similar to how I think about design. Im interested in how to make a continuous process and make kind of evrything Im doing speak to the other parts of it. Maybe this is a self-preservation device. Maybe that’s why I’ve been able to work independently for a long time. Tell me about your own design education. You have a BA in Visual Communication from UNC-Chapel Hill and an MFA in Graphic Design from Yale. How did they shape your understanding of all of this? What I took from my undergraduate education was the freedom to just jump across departments. I was taking math and journalism and English and studio art. I found that liberating. There is a lot that I also took from Yale. I was totally disoriented. Not everyone could make sense of what I was doing, but it didn’t matter because they’re enthusiastically encouraging you to do it your own way. That sounds like it also speaks to the longevity of your independence and how you operate in the classroom. Its not about developing a specific set of skills to get you a job but developing a point of view to guide your work. Thats basically what these books are about, too. Hindsight makes it easier to make that connection, but Im sure that’s the case. I remember teaching myself Adobe Illustrator, but the tools were a way to get to something else. You have to find your way first, and then you figure out how you do it.
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Fathers Day comes with mixed feelings as I prepare to enter my 60s. Like many of my contemporaries, I spend a lot of my time looking after an aging fatherstruggling with how to keep his fragile health and well-being from further deterioration. Even a titan of industry like Tim Cook (with unlimited tech and financial resources at his fingertips) is not immune to the challenges of remotely caring for an aging father. On Fathers Day, I can’t help but wonder how many more of these occasions I will have with my Pop around, and reflect on my own mortality. How might things be different if I am lucky enough to live into my mid 90s as he has? What role will my relationship with technology play in preparing me to better navigate that future? Aging, particularly cognitive decline, exposes a huge gap in our tools and resources that technology is struggling to fill. As a Digital Pioneer who came of age in the era of personal computing it is impossible to imagine a future without this intimate relationship. While staying in good physical shape is important to me, I am frustrated by the unending wave of new watches, wearables, and other health gizmos coming out of the tech sector that drive our obsession with real-time tracking and performance optimization. This interaction model feels fundamentally misaligned with the experience of aging I have seen in my 94-year old father, who is now struggling through the slow, gradual decline of dementia. My father was intensely physically active throughout his entire lifeeven taking up swimming well into his 80s when he could no longer rush the net. But, at this point, his needs are much more basic and quotidian than they were even five years ago. The world of assistive devices that he occupies (hearing aids, wheelchairs) seems completely out of step with the digital environment that has nurtured me and my generation. I have lived a charmed life when it comes to technology. A mere two years after I was born, Doug Engelbart introduced the many of the fundamental design features that would define this new world (in the “Mother of All Demos“) including the windows GUI, hypertext, the computer mouse, and videoconferencing. The Sony Walkman came out in 1979, at the onset of my adolescence, and the Apple Mac was released in 1984, the year I started college, ushering in the era of personal computing. I began my professional career in UX design in the early 90s, at the dawn of the internet, which laid the groundwork for the ecosystem of connected devices we inhabit today. I worked on my first biofeedback devicea handheld heart rate variability (HRV) monitor called the StressEraseralmost 25 years ago. I would argue that digital tech has been the biggest cultural influence on my generation. As former MIT Media Lab professor Kevin Slavin puts it: We are the first generation that grew up with computation as a parent. When I look ahead to my own aging process, I keep wondering whether there is a future breakup for me with the digital tech I have come to know and rely upon. [Source Photo: malerapaso/iStock/Getty Images] I never imagined how digital technology would so fundamentally reshape our world (which became the thesis for the book User Friendly, that I developed with acclaimed author and designer Cliff Kuang). But I also never imagined what it might be like to grow old with this very same techuntil recently. Will the impact be a net positive or negative? I know that it would have been of little benefit to my father who never mastered an ATM, much less a smartphone. This is a story about my generations journey into our 60s, 70s, and beyond, and the potential for tech to help us gracefully adapt to our changing abilities. Its a story about how we can use that technology in a way that our fathers were not willing or able to. Technology can help us better prepare for our future and maintain our agency, particularly in the face of the inevitable physical and cognitive challenges. But its on us to embrace new behaviors and augmentations (and not inherit their perceived stigma from prior generations) while we retain the capacity to adapt alongside them. Digital pioneers The prevailing health tech narrative promoted by Peter Thiel and other broligarchs out of Silicon Valley is that biometric data will allow us to maximize day-to-day performance and ultimately turn back the clock on the aging process. American oncologist and bioethicist Ezekiel Emanuel describes this idealized vision as the American Immortal: Americans seem to be obsessed with exercising, doing mental puzzles, consuming various juice and protein concoctions, sticking to strict diets, and popping vitamins and supplements, all in a valiant effort to cheat death and prolong life as long as possible. The current wave of health tech is only intensifying our preoccupation. Yet, while we are obsessively tracking all of this stuff, it turns out that the most fundamental benefits of digital tech may be happening in the background, at least when it comes to our cognitive health. That seems to be the conclusion of a massive meta study of 411,430 digital pioneers like me recently published in Nature, which found that natural uses of digital technology were associated with better cognitive outcomes. Could it be that all of the constant noodling we are doing with our gizmos is actually good for us? But aging is not primarily a technology problem. It is one of behavior and cultureareas where only a limited number of tech companies can successfully play. As Mark Weiser and John Seely Brown put it back in 1996 in their seminal paper The Coming Age of Calm Technology: The important waves of technological change are those that fundamentally alter the place of technology in our lives. What matters is not technology itself, but its relationship to us. In order to shift the prevailing narrative, we will need to fundamentally alter that relationship. There is a massive potential for companies like Apple to upend our relationship to aging in both emotional and functional ways. The large tech companies have the unique capacity to take our existing behaviors and make these changes ambient, says Rick Robinson, the VP of Product Innovation for the AARP AgeTech Lab. He believes that their ubiquitous reach and scale could be transformative when it comes to aging and cognitive decline if they can be fully embedded in our digital environment. Apples cmmitment to health is a priority at the highest levels of the company. If you zoom out into the future, and you look back, and you ask the question, What was Apples greatest contribution to mankind, it will be about health according to CEO Tim Cook. The basic infrastructure is already maturing through the convergence of mainstream digital platforms like the Apple Watch with personalized health tech augmentations like continuous glucose monitors (CGMs). Cardiologist Eric Topol, author of The Creative Destruction of Medicine and director of the Scripps Translational Science Institute, has long argued that smartphone apps, sensors, and peripherals can perform many diagnostics from ultrasounds and electrocardiograms to home tests of blood pressure (the adoption of which accelerated during the pandemic). And they can do it on a continuous basis. He believes that apps give himand his patientsa better portrait of day-to-day health. With the convergence of biometric data and AI, that portrait is now three-dimensional. In order to make the most of the time we haveand improve our baseline as Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei puts it in his essay “Machines of Loving Grace“we should be using these capabilities to sense inevitable changes earlier and adapt while we still have the agency to live the life we seek. To preserve our sense of independence and agency and allow someone to be in command of their life and person on their terms as former McKinsey and frog healthcare designer Montana Cherney describes it. I could be part of the first generation exiting middle age with the benefit of a continuous, longitudinal data set of our basic health biometrics generated by Oura rings and Apple Watches. What could this data tell us? This past February, Apple announced a massive, five-year, wide-ranging health study that could be a huge step in the right direction with the potential to broaden our understanding across a range of physical biometrics, cognitive behavior, and contextual variables. We anticipate we will likely find some signals that have previously just been missed because we havent had studies that are this broad, or we havent had studies that are this continuous. We havent looked longitudinally or at this level of granularity, according to Calum MacRae, a cardiologist and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, who will serve as principal investigator on the Apple Health Study. And, with the increasing capabilities of AI, this evolving data set will give us (and our caregivers) a much richer window into our physical and cognitive abilities at a much earlier stage in our health journeys, while we still have the mental and physical resilience to adapt. Now, we just need a different design paradigm. The signal is already there If you look past the hype, this signal is already there, though buried among more flashy data points and visualizations. For example, your iPhone can already assess changes in your balance through a set of custom steadiness algorithms. For more than five years, I tried to convince my father to carry a lightweight, collapsible walking stick as he navigates the sidewalks of New York. A little data could have gone a long way to demonstrate that minor changes in his balance had already occurred and put him at risk for the type of fall that can have a drastic effect on his quality of life. But this data is buried deeply within the Apple Health interface for all of us. Why not surface it more actively as we age? As we live longer, the next frontier is cognitive health. Approximately five million Americans over 65 have Alzheimers; one in three Americans 85 and older has Alzheimers, according to the Alzheimers Association. And the prospect of that improving in the next few decades is not clear. Instead of predicting a cure in the foreseeable future, many are warning of a tsunami of dementiaa nearly 300% increase in the number of older Americans with dementia by 2050. Yet we dont have an integrated conceptual model for cognitive health the way we do for physical health beyond a single metric like HRV, which is commonly used to assess short-term stress. What would it look like to close our cognitive health ringsnot just our physical ones? How could that help us build a long-term picture of our cognitive baseline, particularly while we still have the ability to adjust our behaviors and the interfaces that support them? [Source Photo: Issarawat Tattong/iStock/Getty Images Plus] While there is no singular clinical explanation for the cause of dementia, there is general agreement that the likelihood is compounded by a positive feedback loop of factors such as social isolation, hearing loss, and reduced motivation to be active in the worldall things that could be sensed much earlier through a more intimate relationship with tech. Your smartphone already knows how much time you spend outside in daylight, or how much time you spend in loud and chaotic environments. But it is not telling us how this contextual data over time correlates with key health biometrics like HRV, the agreed upon indicator of stress. As a caretaker, this type of simple data, which is often overlooked in the quest for the perfect workout or meditation session, would be invaluable in increasing my situational awareness. What if tech could have helped my family understand my fathers changing cognitive abilities much earlier in his aging process? And not only sensed those changes, but gradually layered in additional supports and digital augmentations without disrupting his familiar habits. A smartphone that proactively offers to read out his emails rather than waiting for him to learn a new habit, such as selecting voice-to-text within an obscure app setting. There is reason to believe that Apples big virtual health study may uncover ways to build more proactive features. For instance, detecting if an early change in hearing could reduce the risk of cognitive decline down the line, according to recent coverage of their announcement. The potential, when combined with the advanced capabilities of AirPods, is not to just document research findings, but to be able to introduce positive health adaptations that might have direct therapeutic benefits. A new generation of tech As a generation we are now in constant contact with an envelope of digital services that could allow us to sense cognitive shifts over time with a high degree of sensitivity and then tune familiar interfaces to better adust to our changing abilities and our external environment. According to Robinson there is already a panoply of products that just need to be tuned to different cognitive needs, from memory loss to dementia. Adaptations that we can start to make gradually, before we face more serious issues and, most importantly, while we still have the cognitive capacity to adjust. We have many of the digital tools already but need to build in ambient intelligence and shift the design paradigm. In the background, a number of features like text to speech, that have been widely implemented for accessibility reasons, stand at the ready to support us as we age if we can just design better interfaces to more naturally transition between modalities as we age. That could start with familiar interfaces, like notifications or navigation, that could be tuned to our changing abilities, particularly as they are integrated with smart glasses or other forms of context-aware AR displays. Robinson provided a simple example from his early work at the AgeTech Collaborative where they developed a concept for AR eyeglasses to address the embarrassment associated with memory loss. The glasses would be augmented with a small camera, microphone, and computer vision that could be trained to recognize family and close friends. It would be paired with a capability that already exists with many hearables to “whisper” information, such as incoming text messages, in a discreet manner (which Robinson has already integrated into his personal layer of daily augmentations). Whispering, perhaps in the soothing and familiar tone of a synthesized family member, is just the sort of subtle design choice that could ease the burden and anxiety of aging in the future. It was interesting talking to Slavin who was born with congenital hearing loss. He sees a future in which AirPods will soon be able to match you to your auditory environments; quickly matching you to who is in front of you. The cognitive payoff to this digitally enabled sensing and adjusting feedback loop could be significant in relation to the types of changes that he has seen in his aging mother: The harder it is to focus, the harder it is to focus. So, (audio) technology can help us direct that to the best outcome, like blurring the background in Zoom. Using sophisticated tools to narrow (our) attention to the thing that we actually want to pay attention to. [Source Photo: spaxiax/iStock/Getty Images] Cherney feels a sense of reassurance as someone with a potential genetic predisposition to dementia living as a non-native speaker in Germany: I will be able to navigate much more easily than I would today. It is still scary, but in 20 years I feel like that translation will be seamless. Even with dementia, it will be effortless. I will just have my headphones in, and it will know me and know how to read the situation. The evidence from the Nature meta study seems to offer some reason for hope: Developing evidence shows that cognitive offloading to digital devices can allow older adults to compensate for age-related declines in cognitive control, memory and navigation abilities, increasing functional performance even in the face of cognitive decline. A lot has changed since my father entered middle age. His generation benefited from massive improvements in medicine. Like so many of his peers, he is on a daily diet of low dose, maintenance pills to make micro-adjustments to his blood pressure, anxiety, depression, cholesterol, sleep, and a host of other concerns. These medical innovations have cumulatively raised the floor on his physical health and have meaningfully extended his ability to age in place at 94. In the future, as we age, will tech augmentations in small, gradual doses provide a similar benefit to our generation and help us adapt gradually, in a way that our parents never really had a chance to? Many of the examples I have offered may seem relatively trivial in the face of neurodegenerative diseases, like dementia, that are largely untreatable today. But the feedback loops are real and play a significant role in the speed of cognitive decline. Technology is all about feedback loops, as Cliff wrote in the opening chapter of User Friendly. And user experience is at its heart the craft of designing better ones. While I am increasingly hopeful, it will take a different vision of healthy aging to get us there. This seems like a challenge fit for design in the age of AI.
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E-Commerce
This week, Apple previewed its redesigned (and renumbered) operating systems at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference. While the new Liquid Glass design language was the star of the show across iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26, there were some other standout features, like a vastly improved calling experience on the iPhone. Apple also continued its annual tradition of introducing new privacy and security features in its latest operating systems, designed to keep you and your data safer than ever. Here are three of my favorite ones coming to the iPhone, iPad, and Macand three missed opportunities. The Passwords app will now remember previous passwords With iOS 18 and macOS 15 last year, Apple introduced the Passwords appthe one-stop app for managing all your passwords. The app was Apples first attempt at a standalone password manager, and it provided a robust set of management tools, including the ability to autocomplete 2FA codes, share passwords with family and friends, and even organize your passkeys. In iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26, Apple is adding a new feature to the Passwords app. It will allow you to see the previous passwords youve saved for any given website, along with the date you changed the password. Its an especially useful feature for websites that require you to change your password periodically and do not allow you to reuse a previously used password. Now, youll be able to quickly glance at the past passwords youve used for the site and easily choose an alternate one. Texts filtered as spam will automatically have their links disabled. Spam link protection in Messages stops you from clicking on a nefarious URL While the iPhone, iPad, and Mac are among the gadgets with the best security protections built in, bad actors are becoming more clever in finding ways to exploit vulnerabilities in the operating systems they target. A common way these bad actors can infect your device with malware is by using a one-click attack. This is when the threat actor texts you a link, which you then click on. You may think this link is innocuous, but really the moment you clicked on it, it allowed the attacker to access data on your phone. Bad actors know that many people will click on links that are texted to them, even from unknown senders. But now in iOS 26, iPadOS 26, and macOS 26, when the operating system suspects youve received a spam text, it will silo that text into a dedicated spam folder and convert the link to plain textmeaning it wont be clickable. You can still read the text and link in the spam folder, but the chances of you accidentally activating the link with a brush of your thumb are reduced. And if you decide the text isnt spam and the link is safe, you can simply move the text to your regular message screen, where the link will once again be clickable. FileVault encryption, enabled by default, keeps your data safe For over two decades now, Macs have come with an optional extra layer of data security called FileVault. The technology encrypts your Macs storage so none of the data can be read on it unless the users password is entered first. This means that someone could steal your Macs storage, hook it up to another computer, and still not be able to get access to the data contained on it if they didnt know your password. Until now, FileVault has been something Mac users had to enable manually. But starting with macOS 26, FileVault will be enabled automatically for all users when they update to the new operating system. Turning on FileVault is something users should have been doing the entire time anyway, and it’s nice that Apple is finally making its activation default, as it will help secure the Macs data even in the unfortunate event that the computer is stolen and a bad actor has access to the drive. Still . . . there are missed opportunities While the three privacy and security enhancements noted above will make our iPhones, iPads, and Macs more secure and private than ever, it was disappointing to see that Apple didnt add any other major privacy and security features this year. Some of the missed opportunities include: Lockable apps on Mac and Apple TV: Last year, Apple gave users the ability to restrict an apps access on an iPhone or iPad behind Face ID or Touch ID. Before the app opens, you need to authenticate with your biometrics or PIN, ensuring that people who are using your phone or tablet cant access data in apps you dont want them to see. This kind of restricted app access would also be extremely useful on other devices we frequently share, such as our Macs and Apple TV. Limited calendar access: In past years, Apple introduced the ability to limit an apps read access to just select photos in your photo library and select contacts in your address book. However, when it comes to calendars, you must either grant an app permission to access all of your calendar data, allow it to only add calendar entries, or deny all access. Still missing is the granular control to give an app read/write access to only select calendars, such as your work calendar, but not your personal one. Lockable folders: Many of us share our Macs with family members or work colleagues. A privacy and security feature Mac users have hoped for for years, which is still conspicuously absent, is the ability to lock individual folders in macOSs Finder behind Touch ID or a password. This would prevent someone with access to your user account (say, your child) from readingor accidentally deletingimportant or sensitive documents (such as your health records). Yet despite these misses, this years software releases show Apple is still working to actively increase privacy and security for users across its devices. The passwords, spam link, and FileVault improvements will be available when Apple rolls out its software updates to all users in September.
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