iOS Today 816 Transcript

Please be advised that this transcript is AI-generated and may not be word-for-word. Time codes refer to the approximate times in the ad-free version of the show.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on iOS Today, Rosemary Orchard and I, Micah Sargent, talk about the AI apps for your phone. Stay tuned. Podcasts you love.

Rosemary Orchard [00:00:14]:
From people you trust.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:16]:
This is TWIT. This is iOS Today, episode 816, with Rosemary Orchard and me, Micah Sargent. Recorded Tuesday, August 18th, 2026 for Thursday, August 20th, 2026. 2026, the ultimate AI showdown. Hello and welcome to iOS Today. This is the show where we talk all things iOS, iPadOS, watchOS, HomePodOS, and many other offerings that Apple provides. Our goal here on the show is to help you make the most of your devices by giving you advice and suggestions for apps and gadgets you can use to make it all possible. I am one of your hosts, Micah Sergeant.

Rosemary Orchard [00:01:03]:
And my name is Rosemary Orchard. And yeah, we're, we're here today to have a fun, uh, though perhaps slightly hallucinatory time, but obviously in a completely normal and legal sense.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:18]:
Uh, yeah, I am hallucinating the next words that will come out of my mouth, and those next words are about Siri. Um, look, We have— we— I was, I was just having this conversation, uh, a couple of days ago because, um, I was visiting family in California. And as is often the case, uh, with me being the sort of tech person, we were having conversations about, um, you know, technology use and what's, what's working well and what's not. And there seems to be this sort of general— milieu, if you will, of people having sort of features and settings and apps that worked before that they are feeling suddenly are not working how they used to. And I was explaining how, A, sometimes features sort of get collapsed into others, but that there is a ramp-up right now in sort of AI-ifying everything. And I do feel that it is at the root of some of these issues. One example of that is now that we've got Siri sort of being baked with AI from the get-go, you can't always count on the consistency that you once had. And some people might roll their eyes at that, but bear in mind that in the before times, when you would ask Siri a thing that Siri did not know, it would do the thing that, yes, would make you annoyed, But it was consistent in saying, here's what I found on the web for you.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:03]:
It didn't do something else. And then the next time you do the same thing, something else again. And the way that it came up was where most recently had GPS running, and in the course of the trip, 3 different times it named the upcoming street that I was going to need to sort of do a manoeuvre onto. And each of the 3 times it Pronounced the name of the street differently, and my significant other was asking me like, "What's what? Why?" And I was explaining how the new Siri voice is even more sort of generated on the spot and has a lot more of the the AI built into it. And unfortunately, that does lead to inconsistencies. That said. This is an episode that we have not done yet, and I think is an episode that people will want. And it is an episode that I also see as a bit of a responsibility in the sense of looking— if you type in ChatGPT or you type in Claude in the App Store, oftentimes you're presented with a bunch of different things that are not the actual application.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:27]:
So even Even if we're just here to link people directly to the real thing so that they don't get, you know, phished or scammed, then I think this episode has served its purpose. But I also feel, again, that it's important that we are covering the stuff that people are talking about. So let's start with Siri, because people right now are not going to be used to the changes that are coming to Siri. that we, Rosemary, you and I have been able to kind of use over the course of the summer. And that is this ongoing promise, right, that Siri is going to change the way, or Siri is going to change in such a way that we can interact with our devices through Siri much more directly and also count on it to answer questions for us. So if we wanna take a look at Rosemary's screen, we can see, a little bit more about Siri and its AI capabilities.

Rosemary Orchard [00:05:35]:
Yes. So this is the Siri in the upcoming iOS 27. So this is the standalone app and it can do some wonderful things. I did encounter an interesting issue at the weekend, which is I asked it to create a reminder for when I got home to remind me to do something. I actually don't remember now what that was, and I am 100% certain I didn't do it. And you know why I'm certain I didn't do it? Because Siri attempted to get my ETA out of Waze. And that's not something that Waze surfaces. So Sarah was like, hey, I don't know when you're going to be home.

Rosemary Orchard [00:06:08]:
And I was like, can you not do it with GPS, like the old-fashioned way? However, in Siri's defense, at exactly that point in time when I was asking it for help with this, whatever it was that was probably quite important, I've now forgotten to do. I was also running out of data on my data plan. I have obviously resolved that and I now have a larger data plan and I'm actually saving money every month. Quick reminder, folks, check your plans, make sure that you can't get more data for less money or just save money. But there are quite a few things that you can do. So in the Siri app, you can actually have like a whole conversation. And something that I do like about this is it is then something that you can basically sort of start having a conversation with it. So say, for example, you're using it for trip planning.

Rosemary Orchard [00:06:53]:
So I'm going to Lisbon in September. So suggest something I could do in Lisbon. That's not how you spell Lisbon. That's Alison. Lisbon on a Monday evening in September. So I can have this conversation with it. And then in a week or so, I can realize that I've got the Friday free as well because I'm spending a whole week there and come back to it and say, hey, also I've got the Friday free. What should I do? And does this affect the Monday plans? And you can come back to it.

Rosemary Orchard [00:07:27]:
And it's actually pulled the information out of my calendar. I'm arriving in Lisbon on Monday. the 21st. They're suggesting traditional Portuguese culture things and so on and so forth. I actually have a bunch of things planned for that week. So yeah, there's some nice suggestions here. Now, obviously, I can also go and look at TripAdvisor, and I can look at Google Maps and, you know, all of these other sources of data to choose what I want to do myself. But it's quite— what is quite nice about using an AI for this, whichever AI it is that you end up using, if you use any of them, is that it can trawl through all of those travel blogs that people have put on the internet.

Rosemary Orchard [00:08:09]:
And they, you know, where somebody said, oh, I was here on the Tuesday morning, it was deserted. And somebody else has said, I was here on the Monday evening, it was absolutely rammed. And I wouldn't recommend that if you, you know, you need to get there early in the morning to see this, whatever it is. And that's where a large language model is fabulous for this sort of thing because it just pulls in all of that data from all of these people who have written about it around the internet and distills it into something. However, I will warn you folks, sometimes it'll get really creative. I did have something a little while ago where I was asking about Lisbon and it was telling me about Barcelona. Now, I don't know how familiar you folks are with geography, but Portugal and Spain are 2 distinctly separate countries. They are adjacent, to one another, but they are not the same country.

Rosemary Orchard [00:08:58]:
So make sure you double-check the work that is returned by AI to make sure that it's actually something that's doable. And don't trust it 100%. The number of times that I've seen people who are like, yeah, AI said that I needed 45 minutes to get like to check in at the airport and get through security. And then I missed my flight. It's all ChatGPT's fault. Yeah, you need to take a little bit of accountability, ownership, and responsibility for the actions that you take as a result of data. that is given to you. So don't treat it as gospel, but it is a really good starting point for these things.

Rosemary Orchard [00:09:29]:
But I do like the fact that in the Siri app, I can just start a conversation, have a chat with it, and then come back to it later, which can be really useful if you're working on something that's, you know, longer and ongoing and so on and so forth, you know. And the fact that it integrates 100% with everything on your device, it can pull out things like the fact that my calendar shows that I'm getting to Lisbon on Monday, the 21st of September. If anybody else is going to the Open Home Foundation conference, Please do hit me up, by the way, in the Twitter Discord because I'd love to say hi. But, you know, it's got all that data and it's local and on-device. And, you know, Apple charge you enough for their devices. I'm trusting them not to sell all my data as well.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:10]:
Indeed. I was looking through some of the recent Siri prompts that I've done and one that I was very happy about because again, having the on-device assistant made by the company And therefore having access to so much of my phone meant that while I was driving, I was listening. I'm not often a lyrics person. It takes me a long time to pay attention to the lyrics of a song. I go for the sound of a song first. But I was listening to a song and it seemed like it was talking about a pretty wild topic. And so I said, you know, while I was in the car, I held down the little voice button and I said, hey, can you look up the song that I'm listening to right now and tell me what it's about? And to be clear, That's what I said. I didn't say, I'm listening to blank, can you tell me what it's about? Also, I should give you, give context that at the moment, this was a song that was shared with me from someone who uses Spotify.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:10]:
So I was also using Spotify, not Apple Music. So it just shows you the level of integration that Siri has because it told me the name of the song and then it told me about what the song was about. And then I went on to say, because this ended up being a cover or no, sorry, a remix of its actual song. So I said, that's great. Could you please add the original song to my Up Next queue? And it was able to find the original song. And this is the important part. It didn't do it in Apple Music. It added to my Up Next queue in Spotify.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:51]:
That is impressive to me.

Rosemary Orchard [00:11:52]:
Nice.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:52]:
It was impressive. I have to give credit where credit's due on that. I was not expecting it to be able to do that deep level of integration. And I think that's the stuff that I see the friend of the show, Matthew Cassinelli, and then also you and some other folks kind of talking about where Apple has built up over time this framework and encouraged developers to partake in this framework that is now enabling so much more interaction with different apps through these little hooks. And I think it's really cool.

Rosemary Orchard [00:12:29]:
Yes. Yeah, this is all Shortcuts actions under the hood, folks. So every time you've heard me talk about Shortcuts actions and gone, I don't even want to use Shortcuts, I don't need that. Yeah, Siri is using Shortcuts actions under the hood. You don't have to build a shortcut yourself. It's all right there.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:46]:
The next app on the list is, of course, one of the most popular apps in the App Store, and that is OpenAI's ChatGPT. Now, over time, ChatGPT has gotten more— the app itself has gotten more complex, giving you more ability to interact and do what you need to do. So in the app, there's a chat mode, which many people will be familiar with, but there's also a work mode. That mode is used to kind of let tasks run in the background. And over time, we've seen the addition across the board of and by across the board, I mean by the big kind of 3 companies, Gemini from Google, Claude from Anthropic, and ChatGPT from OpenAI, we've seen the addition of remote access where it pairs with a computer, in this case a Mac, my Mac, in order to run things locally on your Mac that you might need to do in your home. Now, most people who make use of it will probably, you know, the people that, that I know who are using it that aren't in our little techie, uh, sphere are using the free version. Um, it is free to download. Um, it has a plus tier that you can get for $19.99, and it is available on iPhone and iPad.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:16]:
Now It again starts out free and then you have the ability to kind of add from there. But I really, I really feel like we're so close to the launch of Apple's next set of platforms that it becomes a little bit more difficult, right, to, to start by recommending these third-party tools. because they don't have that same level of deep integration with the system and therefore can't access parts of your phone that you can access with Siri. So I wanted to ask you, Rosemary, regardless of which ones you use, it could be Claude, it could be Gemini, it could be ChatGPT, how do you find, you know, positive or negative, the interactions that you have with those apps on your phone, uh, versus a computer where they can at least reach out more and grab things as needed?

Rosemary Orchard [00:15:26]:
I honestly quite like the fact that on iOS, at least most of these apps are pretty constrained. It, it's actually a feature in some ways of, well, you don't have access to all of this other data, so go figure it out for yourself. It's kind of like, um, and this is something we talked about, um, a lot at work because I am a software developer. by day. So obviously, there's the whole, oh, you know, we don't need junior developers anymore. Guess what? In like 20 years, you're gonna need a bunch of junior devs. So that's not true. But, you know, there is, you know, a lot of— a lot to be said about basically, it's like having an assistant.

Rosemary Orchard [00:16:06]:
Okay. And I have one colleague in particular who really likes the name Copilot, because AI is not something that you just let do your work for you. It's something that you give very specific, narrow-focused tasks I mean, you can ask it some super open-ended questions, you know, but, you know, you get out of it what you put into it. So the more precise and detailed information you can give it up front, that's better. But sometimes it's actually quite freeing for it to not have access to things like my calendar and so on and so forth, because that way it's just like, oh, on an average Monday in September, this could be a really nice thing for you to go and do. Or one thing I have been testing, thanks to a colleague at work's suggestion, is if I'm uploading things to sell them, like on Vinted or on eBay and so on, uploading a photo of that and asking it to create a description. Now, obviously, I need to verify it myself and make sure that it's good. But it does things that I wouldn't have thought to do.

Rosemary Orchard [00:17:03]:
You know, I was selling a nice dress the other day, and it sold very, very quickly. And I credit a good chunk of that to the fact that I actually used an AI to help me write the description.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:12]:
Hmm.

Rosemary Orchard [00:17:13]:
And it just input emojis as bullet points. So it used a different emoji to represent various things about the dress as each bullet point, which meant that when you opened it, obviously, you have the pictures, which I had to take myself, and I didn't do any AI touching up on that, obviously, because I want people to actually get what they're looking at. But then in the description, there were emojis of flowers and hearts and things like that, which, you know, the heart was the same colour as the dress, it was black, and the flower was pink, just like the flowers on the dress. I'm not talking about the same dress I'm currently wearing, to be clear.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:45]:
Okay.

Rosemary Orchard [00:17:45]:
But, you know, I think it's quite nice to get something that has a different approach because sometimes, as somebody who— my day job is to come up with solutions to problems. Sometimes I'm starting from the wrong place.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:59]:
Yeah.

Rosemary Orchard [00:17:59]:
So it's quite freeing to actually ask something that doesn't have the same context that you do, that isn't in the same position that you are. Hey, what would you do for this? And it goes, oh, actually, if you're trying to get from San Francisco to Tokyo, changing planes in Germany is a really stupid idea. You shouldn't be doing that. You can actually just fly the other way around the globe. And, you know, being based in London, that wouldn't occur to me. So I mean, that, that has occurred to me. But, you know, it's not something that would immediately, you know, come to the top of my mind. And so it's quite nice to have it not have that data.

Rosemary Orchard [00:18:34]:
But equally, you know, things, things are improving, and we are gonna see a lot more deep links coming soon. And don't forget, folks, ChatGPT in particular, you can sign into it through the Settings app for Siri and enable ChatGPT for further integration if you want to.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:48]:
One of, I think, I think it's a bit of a darling, especially in this community, and that is Claude. Claude has certainly been the, the AI app that I have used the— I should say the AI service that I've used the most because it's not just only via the app. Excuse me. And frankly, when it comes to how it's used on iOS, Once again, it's much the same way. You have your ongoing chats, you have work mode, you have co-work. That's what, what, um, what Anthropic calls it. And then you also have a, um, remote option that's called dispatch. And so it lets you dispatch some of the, the sort of, uh, interactions onto your Mac or your connected machine.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:42]:
And And, you know, you kind of wait for things to come back. And so it's— it really boils down to kind of what your chosen flavor of AI is in terms of which one you choose. It also does not integrate as deeply into the system as ChatGPT from OpenAI because of Apple's deal with ChatGPT and OpenAI. There is that ability to log into your account there. Now, we have heard, we've long heard it have been reported that that was going to change over time, that we would see more of these companies have their models as part of what you could interact with via Apple Intelligence. Not much has changed on that front in terms of switching between them. But of course, we now know that Gemini is essentially behind much of the capability that we have in Siri in the next versions of iOS. So with that in mind, you kind of, again, I think what Rosemary, you're talking about there where you have these sort of islands that exist, that is how I kind of see Claude more than the others where Google's Gemini is probably going to give me much of the same answers as the Siri that I have right now in beta.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:11]:
And OpenAI, is the fallback for Siri when Siri fails to be able to answer questions. So if you're looking for a third flavor that is really just a second flavor, right, that's where Claude, I feel, comes in. I wanted to ask you, Rosemary, and you may have mentioned this, and forgive me if you have, but of the big 3, which, which one gets the most use for you?

Rosemary Orchard [00:21:41]:
Honestly, thanks to my day job, I tend to end up using a version of Claude through GitHub Copilot because that is what is approved for usage at work. And I would just like to take a note to tell people, if you're using AI to help you do your job, please make sure that it's one of the ones that's allowed by your IT department or like explicitly licensed for your company because you could get into a lot of trouble otherwise and accidentally spill company secrets somewhere, which would not be good. But yeah, just because Yeah. Because of, you know, the way my job works. Yeah, it's mostly a version of Claude through Copilot. I change which version I'm using depending on the task at hand and what I'm dealing with, because there are different models which are more appropriate for different tasks than others. And of course, all of these things come with a cost. It may not be a bill that you see, but the amount of processing power that's required is something that, yeah, to bear in mind.

Rosemary Orchard [00:22:39]:
So I have a tendency to leave my model selection on auto so that, you know, the AI can go, hmm, this question is complex and detailed. I'm going to use a larger model for this versus I'm asking what color is the sky? You can Google that, folks. You don't need to ask it what color the sky is. It's reflecting whatever's underneath it, essentially. But yes, so, you know, if I'm doing that, then it'll choose a much cheaper and lighter model. So, yeah, it varies a lot depending on just what I'm doing. And when I've been doing image analysis, obviously that's needed larger models. But I've also been attempting to have some truly local models, like actually running on a dedicated device in my house, do image recognition with AI, which is quite fun to experiment with as a nerd.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:33]:
Yeah, that does sound fun. And then the next one, of course, is Google Gemini, which we've been talking about. There's one annoyance that I have with Google Gemini, and I wanna show you. If I hit the sidebar, you'll note that it says, or that there aren't any chats here, right? Here's the thing that sets, as it currently stands, Gemini apart from competing models. Both Claude and OpenAI from ChatGPT, or excuse me, ChatGPT from OpenAI, allow you to turn off model training while still maintaining your personal history of chats. So what that means for people who don't know is that typically by default, when I am interacting with an AI model, the interactions that I have can be used to further train AI systems. I have these turned off. When I went to do that in Gemini, and Gemini said, if you do that, you won't have any history of chats.

Mikah Sargent [00:24:42]:
And so Gemini suddenly becomes a far less useful AI because of this. And I found that very frustrating. I think it's something that Google should fix. That said, I want to say that with, with Google's Gemini, Google has done a good job of trying to make an AI system that is for the rest of us, as it were, meaning that it— I have found it to be good at real-world stuff. What do I mean by that? Well, where some of the other systems are very, very good at coding and very, very good at even design in some cases, the Google models seem to do a better job of taking like a photograph and understanding what's in the photograph and being able to kind of break down what needs to happen. And so when I've had different little tasks that I needed to complete, I will have— I've taken photos and, you know, sent them to Gemini, and it's been able to identify different parts of what I need to do very impressively. You can upload photos, you can take photos, you can You can generate video, you can create documents, and then you can also communicate just like the other models. It's multimodal, giving you the ability to communicate back and forth with the system.

Mikah Sargent [00:26:09]:
So in many ways, parity with the other, the other of the big 3, but arguably worse privacy, not worse privacy protections, but worse privacy options. It's very clear that they would prefer— yeah, the trade-offs. Thank you. They would prefer that you train their models. And I think that's a little annoying if you're a paying customer.

Rosemary Orchard [00:26:38]:
Yes. Though, that said, if you are heavily into the Google ecosystem, you've got Google Calendar, you use Gmail, you use Google Drive, Google Photos, Google Maps, YouTube, etc., then Gemini is really good because obviously it has access into all of that for you. So it can just look at your calendar and go, oh yeah, so I see on Tuesday you're gonna go and do this and eat at Barbecue Bob's or whatever it is that you're doing. Sorry, I've been watching Diagnosis Murder, folks, so Barbecue Bob's is living rent-free in my head. But, you know, it's one of these things where you have to figure out like what ecosystem are you living in? Because if you mostly live in the Apple world and you have everything in iCloud and so on, obviously Gemini is not gonna be quite as helpful as it would be if you've got Google systems and so on. And if your company is using Google Workspaces, then Google Gemini is probably a perfect tool for the job.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:29]:
Moving along, we've got 2 more on the list. I'll briefly mention Perplexity. Perplexity was an early, I would say, darling in, in the LLM, I don't know, blogosphere, I guess. And it was something that took search to a new place that we did not have from Google at the time. Now, of course, when you do a Google search by default, you're going to see an AI summary at the top. But Perplexity, you know, continues to try to, to exist and, and make things that people will— I really don't have a lot nice to say about Perplexity, Rosemary. That's the truth of it. It's just not— I don't feel like it can keep up these days with the other offerings that are out there.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:24]:
But boy howdy, do they keep trying. I have to at least give them that.

Rosemary Orchard [00:28:27]:
Yes. Yeah. So I asked Perplexity why it should be on the list because I thought that would be a fun experiment for today's show with all the apps that I researched. I, I asked all of these apps what apps they would put in a top 10 to talk about on this show. And then I asked it to, you know, justify each one. And Perplexity itself, as well as multiple other AIs, and I agree with this say that it's good for verified sources rather than it's just regurgitating data and putting words together that it thinks are the appropriate response and possibly just going, yes, yes, yes, this is what you want. I'm going to say yes to it. It is better at verified sources than other things.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:08]:
Definitely. And last but not least, the one I'm most excited to hear about. What if you don't want An online system that you have to rely on service and signal, and also, you know, the implications therein of AI use and its impact on the grid and the environment, etc. I keep hearing about these local systems. I didn't know, though, that we could have it on a phone. What? Tell us more, Rosemary.

Rosemary Orchard [00:29:48]:
Yeah. So I think an app that everybody who's curious about these things should download to check out because it is completely free and it's local and on device is Solaire AI. So as I said, it's free. And as Micah mentioned, it runs things on your device. So I made a mistake earlier where I was just trying to clean up a bunch of things and I was like, oh yeah, this is something to do with the solar panels that I was helping my parents troubleshoot and I deleted the app. So it's attempting to redownload the models whilst I'm also podcasting, which is not ideal, but it will start It will download a couple of gigabytes, about 5 gigabytes of models offline. It's going to download a couple of different models. But one of the things that I really like about this is obviously it can integrate with things on your iPhone.

Rosemary Orchard [00:30:32]:
You know, they've chosen to give you that option. So it's got options to integrate with HealthKit to analyze various metrics. And it does this as well so that you can have AI friends. Now, obviously, you've got to take this with a large pinch of salt. But essentially, when I go over to the left-hand menu in Solaire, I can see different people to talk to. So I've got my private assistant, and it's called a private assistant, your personal AI. And then you've got friends, Sam, your supportive chat buddy, and Julia, your thoughtful best friend. And then you've got historical figures you can talk to, like Nikola Tesla, Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Socrates, Benjamin Franklin.

Rosemary Orchard [00:31:13]:
I will say, say there's no woman on that list. There need to be women on that list. And then there are some skills. So you can have a translator, a summarizer, or a writer. And then after that, you've got the option to create your own persona and create your own skills. And then you have various options to talk to this in different ways. So it's suggesting various things. What should I cook tonight? Suggest a workout routine.

Rosemary Orchard [00:31:39]:
I can say I want a private space, I want health and insights. I can ask it to tell me something fascinating, um, and I'll see what it comes back with. Um, so yeah, there's tardigrades, tiny water bears that can survive conditions that would kill and instantly kill any other life form. That's my summary of its summary. Um, but you know, it, it is pretty cool that this is a thing that is completely free. Like, you don't have to pay anything and you can just try it and it does it all on device. So I personally like this for the fact that it works offline and it's got good privacy, um, and it has these integrations where the, the creator is working on, you know, looking at various options. Uh, in the settings, uh, you can actually enable AI providers, so you can connect your own server if you want to be nerdy and do that, but you don't have to.

Rosemary Orchard [00:32:31]:
You can change your performance between cool, um, Things will be slow comparatively speaking, but it's not going to work your phone quite as hard versus fast. Things run a bit warmer. AI personalization, you can do voice setup as well, so you can talk. This is something that I have been discussing a lot with my colleagues, that people interact differently with their devices based on whether they are speaking versus typing. Also, if you are speaking to dictate, you again speak differently to how you would if Like, for example, Micah and I just having a conversation here. So yeah, that is something that you may want to experiment with if you are trying to figure out why your AI responses just seem a bit blah and you would like to see if you can make them better. Try talking to it, like actually just talking and see what it comes back with. There is an option to support development which goes from £3.99 to £19.99, and that's in pounds.

Rosemary Orchard [00:33:29]:
Um, but it's, it's just a nice app. It's pretty. I've changed the, the appearance here, I have to say. Uh, um, so I've gone with iridescence, um, and you can adjust, uh, you know, photo brightness, and, you know, you can also adjust your liquid glass to aurora if you wanted to, and various things. There's a lot of tweaks that you can make to make this look the way that you like, but I personally think it's really cool that a completely free app that you don't have to pay any money for, and it runs completely on your device. That's awesome. And yes, I am actually personally right now, folks, experimenting with installing TinyLLM onto my Mac Studio because the number of times I've wanted to find a book that I've already read and I know I own it as an ebook, but I can only remember like the weirdest of details. Like, this is the sort of thing that actually can be really good for it.

Rosemary Orchard [00:34:24]:
You know, there are subreddits where people can help you find these things, but even they don't know everything. And trying to find it in book forums, I have genuinely spent years on and off looking for books and was completely unable to find them. And then eventually I caved and asked a couple of different AIs over the summer for some particular books that I was remembering the weirdest details of. And I found all of them.

Mikah Sargent [00:34:49]:
Wow.

Rosemary Orchard [00:34:50]:
And I'm having a fabulous time rereading them. So I just want to create a teeny tiny little LLM on my Mac that's just pointed at my ebook library. So I know it's been trained on my data that I have legally obtained, thank you very much, and just go, hey, so I'm looking for this book. I think it was set in Scotland, and there was a character that was teaching another character how to play golf. Go for it. And just see what it comes back with.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:15]:
Ah, that, I, that's actually one of the fun use cases that, uh, recently worked. Uh, you know, I had a family member talking about, oh, you know, when I was a kid, I loved it. And I was able to type that in and find it. And the, you know, that moment of like, oh my goodness, is so cool. Folks, if you out there have AI apps that you're using that you want to share with others that you think we may have missed, please do reach out. iosday@twit.tv is how you get in touch. All right, we are back from the break and we have just finished talking about AI apps for your system. It's time to move along to our news.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:54]:
A couple of quick little news stories here. First and foremost, we have Sonos getting an update that adds some live activities. Look, I love live activities, I have to tell you. I use them all the time. I have them set up for a fantastic app. By the way, I should say live activities are the little bits of live updating information that appear on your phone at the top of the screen. So if you have an order that you place, you know, a food order, it will, it can show you a little progress bar at the top as the order makes its way to you. The same thing applies for Sonos now, giving you the ability to see the current room or group and then also the playback status.

Mikah Sargent [00:36:41]:
It'll start about, I think it starts after playback begins if the app is closed, and then about 15 minutes after playback stops, it goes ahead and pulls it. I know we've got a lot, a lot, a lot of people who love Sonos out in the audience, so a very good quick mention of that. I also wanted to talk about, well, this is always very interesting, app tracking transparency or ATT. Apple announced App tracking transparency quite a while ago, and it was a sort of built-in tool. And we'll have a link in the show notes to more about how it's used. But essentially, it's a way to keep track of how apps are tracking your use, and then also giving you the ability to opt in or out. Germany's regulator accepted binding Apple commitments concerning ATT. In Apple's own consent flows.

Mikah Sargent [00:37:50]:
So it— what— here's what's supposed to happen. It's supposed to have more neutral language and more equal presentation of Apple and third-party consent dialogues. The idea is that right now, third parties are sort of arguing that when Apple puts up a prompt for its own apps and when Apple puts up a prompt for a third-party app, those third-party apps are not getting the same treatment and therefore are kind of unfairly not given consideration for tracking. And I think that's fair, right, Rosemary?

Rosemary Orchard [00:38:25]:
Essentially, it's just about making this a little bit more understandable for your average user. So for example, the tracking was— has said, would you like to allow this app to track you or ask this app not to track you? And it's gonna be changed from allow to— or from that to allow and reject. Very simple, very clear, very easy. Because ask app not to track basically says, like, to a lot of people, so do you pinky promise that you're going to be really good and, you know, do the thing that I've asked, or not do the thing that I'm asking you not to do? And it's good. Yeah, sure. Not making eye contact, right? So it's about trying to, yeah, make it easier for your average user who doesn't really understand most of these things because, you know, all of this is a lot to wrap your head around when you're not immersing yourself in this on a daily basis like Micah and I are. You know, it's just, you know, it's a lot. And my grandmother has no idea other than the fact that she has figured out the cookie prompts.

Rosemary Orchard [00:39:28]:
And because I was gonna install a Safari extension for her to sort out, you know, the whole cookie banner thing, 'cause I figured it would be driving her crazy. Turned out all she wanted me to do last time I saw her was bump up the text size for the guide on her TV so that she could see it better, which was great, you know. 10 out of 10 to Grandma. She's figured out cookies and she knows that she goes in and she turns off everything that isn't absolutely necessary to access the website. But most people don't really get that and they want the easy routes. They'll just click allow all, right? That's the easy option that's right there. So that's what most people do. So I think this is just a case of trying to make it a little bit more understandable for, you know, your average person.

Mikah Sargent [00:40:06]:
Absolutely. All right. Moving along to, Well, the app caps. Yes, it is nearly time to end this episode of iOS Today, but we wanna tell you about the apps and gadgets we've been using for some time or are maybe new to us, but we're very excited about. And there's, I didn't realize that things, things these days could not cost an arm and a leg and still give us what we want. 8BitDo, has a little device called a Flip Pad. And the Flip Pad is a tiny little USB-C gamepad that flips up over your phone and lets you play with this sort of classic handheld experience. It is for that kind of, again, vertical gaming.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:01]:
And you can sort of flip down if you have, you know, interactions that you need to do, then flip back up and it will play again. It's USB-C. There's no Bluetooth to worry about. And of course, the USB-C also powers it. So if you're looking for a sort of, I think, real feel, or as close to real feel as possible, a simulated feel experience for old-school mobile gaming, for just $30, you can get this, I think, well-made USB-C controller. gaming pad that I think is just very impressive from 8BitDo. And 8BitDo makes a lot of great stuff. Anthony Nielsen is a very— is a fan of 8BitDo stuff and was, I think, one of the first people to tell me about it for sure.

Mikah Sargent [00:41:54]:
In any case, check it out. It's the Flip Pad from 8BitDo. All right, Rosemary, what's your pick?

Rosemary Orchard [00:42:04]:
Uh, well, my pick, Micah, is so tiny that you can slide it into literally anywhere you can fit your tablet. And I, I'm having to turn it so that it doesn't just get removed automatically by the camera, but this is the MOFT Snap Tablet Stand. So this is the iPad mini size one. I also have a full-size one floating around here somewhere. Uh, my desk is somewhat insane at the moment, but this is magnetic and it just pops on the back of your iPad. Oh, that's so cool. IPad or an ebook reader, folks. Uh, it— the best thing is you can get extra stickers for it, so you can actually stick it to like 6 different devices if you want, just maybe not all at the same time.

Rosemary Orchard [00:42:39]:
But this connects and it does multiple angles. So I currently have my iPad Mini here. It is actually in a MOFT stand, and the kind of thing about the MOFT stands is the back of them is basically always completely magnetic, so I can just stick this somewhere and it just gives me some extra angles. And I think that this is just a great thing to keep in my travel bag because it means that I can then go, oh, I want to stand my iPad Mini up in portrait mode. Cool, done. Uh, and with the back of this being magnetic, I can actually slide it up and down. Now it does actually come with stickers, and I will say, folks, I have genuinely— and I mean this— removed these stickers from other devices and then stuck them onto new ones.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:19]:
Okay.

Rosemary Orchard [00:43:20]:
And you can't tell that this sticker has come off of this device. There's a little flap up here, which is supposed to not be stuck. It, it gets very, very close though because of just how it works. Um, and that's what comes with it. And then you can just stick your stand on. I've not done a very good job of that because I'm trying to do this showing to— showing the camera. And then you're off. And especially on the iPad Mini, it allows easy landscape and portrait positioning, but it works on the 11-inch as well.

Rosemary Orchard [00:43:47]:
13-inch, you, you may want to play with your positioning a little bit before you, you nail it down, like hold it in place with some masking tape while you figure it out. But these tiny little stands are quite— they're very affordable. They're made of vegan leather, so, you know, they're, you know, animal friendly and all that jazz. And I want to say that the large one is about $30. Um, and yeah, the smaller ones are obviously cheaper as well. But yeah, definitely. Micah and I have ended up just being a fan of MOFT things You know, we keep ending up recommending various bits, uh, products from theirs. And that's one I've genuinely had in my tech bag for ages.

Rosemary Orchard [00:44:25]:
It comes in a couple of different colors. It's nice. It takes up basically no space. And I love the fact that it, it, even when you're using it as a stand, it's very, you know, space friendly. And so if you've got a very narrow kitchen counter and you try to work and look at a recipe and, you know, also chop up your veg, You'll be able to get all of that done, I hope. Unless your kitchen counter is the absolute tiniest, in which case maybe Apple Vision Pro and you know you'll have to look at your recipes virtually whilst you also chop. Just be careful of your fingers.

Mikah Sargent [00:44:59]:
Indeed. All righty, folks. That brings us to the end of this episode of iOS Today. I want to thank you all so much for joining us. Of course, you can. You can reach us by email at iosToday@twit.tv. If you would like to help support the work that we do here on the network, that's wonderful. I can tell you how.

Mikah Sargent [00:45:20]:
It is by joining the club. Rosemary Orchard, if people would like to keep up to date with all the great work you're doing, where should they go to do so?

Rosemary Orchard [00:45:28]:
The best place to go is rosemaryorchard.com, which has got links to apps, books, podcasts that I am or have been involved in. And of course, you can also find me in the Club Twit Discord, hanging out in the live chat during the show and the iOS Today forum after the show. Micah, where can folks find you?

Mikah Sargent [00:45:44]:
If you're looking to find me online, I'm @micahsargent on many a social media network, or you can head to chiwahua.coffee. That's chiwahua.coffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Thank you so much for joining us, and we'll be back again next week with another episode of iOS Today. Bye-bye.