Jason Snell has ended his More Color column at Macworld, closing a long and unusually durable run at one of the oldest Apple-focused publications. Snell said the column is finished after 11 years as a contributor, following 17 years as a Macworld editor and nearly 500 columns in his second stint with the publication.
For readers who came to Apple coverage through blogs, podcasts, newsletters, and social feeds, Snell’s departure is a marker of how much Apple media has changed. He joined Macworld in the fall of 1997, when Apple was still trying to recover after Steve Jobs returned and pushed out Gil Amelio as chief executive. Snell wrote that his family asked what job he expected to get if Apple collapsed.
Snell had previously worked at MacUser, which he said had folded before some staff moved to rival Macworld. His first Macworld period began before the iMac, before Mac OS X shipped, and before Apple’s consumer product line became the culture-and-commerce machine it later turned into.
In his farewell, Snell tied his own career points to Apple’s corporate turns. He described the 1998 iMac, the arrival of Mac OS X, the iPod, Apple’s retail stores, and the iPhone as the run of products and bets that reversed the company’s position. He also credited Apple’s transition from the classic Mac operating system to software built from NeXTSTEP, while keeping enough compatibility for users and developers, as an underappreciated piece of the comeback.
Snell left his full-time job at Macworld the day after Apple introduced the iPhone 6, iPhone 6 Plus, and Apple Watch in September 2014. He then launched Six Colors, his independent Apple site. Macworld brought him back as a columnist in early 2015, with Jon Phillips and others asking him to write More Color, according to Snell.
The final column also uses Apple’s current leadership change as a backdrop. Snell wrote that he has spoken with Tim Cook once, at WWDC 2026, and has spoken with incoming CEO John Ternus many times. He argued that Ternus’s long career inside Apple’s hardware organization gives him a different view of the company than Cook, whom Snell described as a supply-chain and manufacturing executive recruited by Jobs to fix an urgent weakness.
Those assessments are Snell’s, and they come from a columnist ending a personal run, not from Apple. Still, they show the frame he is leaving behind: Apple as a company again at a transition point, with the iPhone era mature and industry pressure shifting around artificial intelligence and other changes.
Snell said 2026 has also brought other personal milestones, including an appearance on Jeopardy!, a Wall Street Journal review of David Pogue’s Apple book, and crowdfunding a podcast about Apple history. He thanked Macworld, editor Roman Loyola, and readers, while pointing people back to Six Colors, where he said he will continue writing about Apple.
This story draws on original reporting from Macworld.
