He walked out of a corner office at the biggest Mac magazine on earth and rebuilt the whole thing from a home office in Mill Valley. The Apple world followed him there.
Every February, a spreadsheet goes around the Apple internet. Dozens of writers, developers, and podcasters quietly submit grades - the Mac got a B+, services earned a C, the Vision Pro is incomplete. Then Jason Snell turns it all into charts, and for a week the whole commentariat argues about Apple's report card. He invented the ritual. He runs it from a desk in Mill Valley, California, with no boss, no masthead above him, and no permission required.
That is the trick of Snell's second act. For 17 years he was Macworld - senior editor, then editor in chief, then Senior Vice President and Editorial Director for IDG's consumer titles, steering Macworld, PCWorld, and TechHive. He covered every version of Mac OS X, the first iPod, the first iPhone, the first iPad. He sat across from Steve Jobs for an interview. Then in 2014 he left the building and started Six Colors, a site named after the rainbow Apple logo that old-timers swore they would bleed if you cut them.
The name is the whole thesis. Six Colors is for people who care about Apple the way Snell does - closely, affectionately, and without the corporate filter. It is reader-supported. It is small. And somehow it became one of the most-cited independent voices in a beat dominated by billion-dollar publishers.
“Longtime Apple fans used to say that if you cut them, they'd bleed six colors.”
// the origin of the nameSnell does not write a single column and call it a week. The Six Colors masthead is mostly him and longtime collaborator Dan Moren, but the podcast footprint is enormous. He hosts Upgrade with Myke Hurley on Relay FM, co-hosts MacBreak Weekly alongside Leo Laporte and Andy Ihnatko, and argues taxonomy with John Siracusa on Robot or Not? That is before you reach the science-fiction wing.
The flagship. Daily Apple coverage, charts, and member podcasts, founded 2014 and supported by readers.
His weekly Apple talk show with Myke Hurley on Relay FM. Equal parts news, draft picks, and friendly chaos.
The geek-culture network he launched in 2010. Star Trek, Doctor Who, For All Mankind - more than 20 shows deep.
The long-running Apple roundtable on TWiT, where Snell is a fixture of the Tuesday panel.
The Six Colors Apple Report Card started in 2015 as a simple idea: ask a few dozen people who think about Apple for a living to grade the company across its product lines, then average the scores. A decade on, it is a fixture - picked up by TidBITS, MacStories, and the broader press every year. The genius is not the survey. It is that Snell, a journalism-school grad with a spreadsheet habit, makes the charts genuinely fun to read.
Categories shown for illustration of the format. Actual grades vary year to year and come from dozens of panelists.
“A strong player.”
// How Ken Jennings once described Snell, a line Snell now keeps in his own bio after a turn on Jeopardy!
What separates Snell from the average Apple pundit is not access or volume. It is method. He came up through proper newsrooms - MacUser, then Macworld - in an era when an editor in chief still shipped a print magazine on deadline. That training shows. The Report Card is, underneath the rainbow branding, a small act of survey journalism: define categories, poll a panel, normalize the scores, and present the result honestly even when it makes the company he loves look bad. Software grades that slide year over year are not buried. They are the headline.
The charts are the part people screenshot, but the discipline is the part that matters. When dozens of working professionals trust you enough to hand over candid grades every year, you have built something a press release cannot buy. Snell treats that trust as the asset it is. He has talked publicly about the mechanics of making the charts readable - the deliberate choices about color, scale, and labeling that turn a column of averages into something a reader actually wants to study. It is design in service of clarity, which is the same thing he has been doing since the InterText days: take a pile of words and make them land.
Independence is a team sport. Six Colors runs alongside Dan Moren, Snell's longtime Macworld colleague, who writes and podcasts under the same banner. The podcast life threads him into a wider web: Myke Hurley and the Relay FM network, where Upgrade airs every week; Leo Laporte's TWiT, home of MacBreak Weekly; and John Siracusa, his sparring partner on the gloriously pedantic Robot or Not? The Incomparable, meanwhile, is a rotating cast of dozens - writers and friends who show up to argue about Star Trek episodes and superhero movies with the same rigor others reserve for quarterly earnings.
That network is the real Six Colors business model. There is no venture money, no parent conglomerate, no quarterly mandate from a sales team. There is a website, a stack of shows, a membership program, and an audience that decided it would rather pay one person it trusts than read ten it doesn't. In a media economy that keeps consolidating and laying off, Snell built the opposite: a one-desk operation that outlasted the corporate titles he used to run.
Snell was born October 6, 1970, in Oakland and grew up in Sonora, a former Gold Rush town in the Sierra Nevada foothills. He studied communication at UC San Diego's Revelle College, then went north to Berkeley for journalism. The path from there reads like a clean line, but the through-thread is older than any magazine: a kid who wanted to publish things on the internet did exactly that in 1991, when most people had never heard the word. Everything since - the magazine career, the site, the podcasts - is the same impulse at scale.
Most people who covered the launch of the original iPod have long since moved on to management, retirement, or some other industry. Snell is still at the keyboard, still in the press seats, still recording the morning-after reaction show. He has watched Apple go from a company on the edge to the most valuable on earth, and he has written through all of it without losing the thing that makes the coverage worth reading - a fan's enthusiasm checked by a reporter's skepticism. He will praise a great Mac and pan a bad operating-system release in the same week, and the consistency is why both land.
He still files a regular column for Macworld, the publication he once led, which is its own kind of full circle: the editor who left now writes as a contributor, on his own terms. The 17 years inside the building bought him the standing to thrive outside it. That is the whole shape of the career - decades of institutional credibility, cashed in for the freedom to do exactly what he wants, every day, for readers who chose him directly.
“I'd rather be writing about Apple than working at a place that mostly writes about Apple.”
// the independence thesis, in one line