MacBreak Weekly 938 Transcript

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

0:00:00 - Jason Snell
Jason Snell sitting in for Leo Laporte. Macbreak Weekly is packed because the iPhone event happened. New iPhones, new AirPods, new Apple Watches. Apple has got to close a bank account. It's going to cost them billions of euros. There's so much to talk about. We're barely going to be able to scratch the surface. But what a surface. Me, Shelly Brisbin, Mikah Sargent, Andy Ihnatko. Next.

0:00:24 - VO
Podcasts you love. From people you trust. This Is TWiT

0:00:33 - Jason Snell
This is MacBreak Weekly episode 938, recorded Tuesday, September 10th 2024. Previously on Apple Welcome back to MacBreak Weekly. I am your guest host, Jason Snell, normally a panelist, promoted briefly into not Leo's chair, because I think they sold that. Anyway, Leo is gone. He's on break, but we are here. Leo has picked the perfect time to go away because you know what it's iPhone week. Apple made its big announcements yesterday, which means thank you, apple, for not releasing products on MacBreak Weekly Day, but instead the day before, so that the next day it's perfect. No notes, no notes. Let me introduce my panel who is joining me now, the one regular panelist who remains in his chair, his library, not his personal library, but his, you know, his community's library. It's Andy Ihnatko hello hello, I'm glad to.

0:01:32 - Andy Ihnatko
We're so. We're gonna have to the two of us make up for two others, but we've got two others that more than make up for us, if that makes any sense.

0:01:40 - Jason Snell
So this is gonna be pretty exciting yeah, oh, I mean absolutely, I didn't do that math. How many of us are there are? Are there six of us? Now, I don't even know. I don't even know. But we are joined by two wonderful guests. First, he is no stranger to you and to all listeners and viewers of Twit. Of course it is our pal and my occasional dungeon buddy, Mikah Sargent.

0:02:02 - Mikah Sargent
Mikah welcome. Thank you, thank you, you happy to be here. Uh, we we covered the event live yesterday, rosemary orchard and myself, and got kicked off of twitch, not just youtube, so that was a fun new experience nice apple.

0:02:18 - Jason Snell
Apple doesn't want to watch you watching them they just want people watching them.

0:02:23 - Andy Ihnatko
Water message was too dangerous for them and apparently they were watching us watching them, watching you watching us.

0:02:29 - Jason Snell
Yeah, and they didn't like that and they don't like that. No, no, they're against that, they're opposed to that. And also joining us, uh, somebody who I worked with back at mac user magazine murmur murmur years ago and she now works at the Texas Standard caster radio, producer, rock on tour, fan of old movies. It is Shelley Shelly, Shelly, welcome.

0:02:51 - Shelly Brisbin
Hello, thank you for having me. Jason, Congratulations on your temporary promotion. I'm sure it won't go to your head in any way whatsoever. Glad to be here. I watched the Apple event from my home, safe from prying eyes and watching watchers of all kinds. I got to watch the whole thing.

0:03:09 - Jason Snell
It is dangerous sitting in for Leo when I just consumed like a five-hour podcast miniseries about the French Revolution, because is next week the terror? I don't know. We'll find out. Next week we're going to have to learn our new names for all the months.

0:03:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Jason, I didn't sign up for that. I'll support you up to a link. It depends.

0:03:25 - Jason Snell
We'll see if you're with the revolution or against it. Anyway, jason Tober, I don't know, Jason Tober, I mean honestly.

0:03:32 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't.

0:03:33 - Jason Snell
Just a little tip I don't need to change the names of the months, because July, august, September, october, november spells Jason.

0:03:41 - Shelly Brisbin
You gave him that opening, Andy and not Coke. It's your fault, that's right. I'm in your calendars.

0:03:46 - Jason Snell
You can't get me out.

0:03:47 - Andy Ihnatko
We've been working together for a long, long time. We got it. How is that?

0:03:51 - Mikah Sargent
the first time I've ever thought of that.

0:03:54 - Jason Snell
Mikah, it took me like 35 years to realize my name was in the calendar but I finally did.

I finally figured it out. So, Apple event I was there Last week. I left everybody. I know it was a huge cliffhanger Will Jason get into the Apple event? And then, literally like 40 minutes later, I got an email saying yeah, you can come to the Apple event. So that was really exciting for a week there, I guess. But yes, I got to go. What a relief. I got to watch the same video you watched, but I did get to see Tim Cook introduce it from the stage of the Steve Jobs Theater. He said good morning like 10 times, expressed his excitement and then played a video for us. But I did get to spend some time in the hands-on area so I was able to pick the brain of some people at Apple. We'll throw that in as we go just some of the stuff that I got to see and touch and ask about.

But we should start with the new iPhones, because that's what everybody's talking about and I know I said this last week but I'm going to say it again the crowd for an Apple event is one thing, and then there's the crowd for the iPhone event, and the reaction to Apple events is one thing, and then there's the reaction to the iPhone event. This is the event that the world pays attention to and it's evident from who was at the theater. It's people from all over the world broadcast journalists, influencers, all sorts of people. It's a very different crowd, the usual crowd. We're like on the outside, we're like the kids with their backs against the wall at the school dance, and then all the really popular people are there in the middle. But we did get to get our hands on them. The iPhone, because the world cares about the iPhone. It's one of the most important consumer products out there. So we got iPhone 16, two models the 16 and the 16 plus, and then the 16 Pro and Pro Max just iterations on last year's sizes and models, and you know we can go into it. There's a lot to dig into here.

Upgraded cameras across the board, a new button for photography, a dedicated button. This is interesting. Last year Mark Gurman did a bunch of reports about a button that they were going to bring to the iPhone and then they had problems and they couldn't bring it in and they replaced it with the action button. I wonder if this is that other button that they were trying to do last year. But it's a real button, dedicated. It is called the camera control and it is a dedicated physical hardware button that allows you to launch the camera control and it is a. It is a dedicated physical hardware button that allows you to launch the camera app and take pictures and control the camera app by doing a soft press or a swipe, but the hard press down to the click is what you'd expect. It takes a picture or, if you hold it down, it takes a video that's what really impressed me about this.

0:06:23 - Andy Ihnatko
It'd be nice enough to have a dedicated camera button. It would be a little bit nicer to have one that lets you do focus lock, then recompose, then click the shutter. The fact that they've really made this into almost a three-dimensional button device where it's not only sensing depth, but also like back and forth, like a touch device and, at least in the videos that they had in the demonstration the ability to do things like zoom without having to shift your grip to tap something on the screen, the ability to recompose and do things like that, that seems like it could go from being a power feature for people who are interested in real photography to people who just don't want to drop their phones because they're fumbling with the interface. I'm really impressed with that.

0:07:09 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I got a chance to use it and what I would say is that it's not. It takes a little getting used to, especially this idea that you're kind of like squeezing it partway down, but if you've shot with a point and shoot or a DSLR, you've had that experience already. It becomes very familiar and it's complex as you want it to be right. If you want it to be more complex, you can do a double squeeze and it basically gives you a menu of items that you can choose and you swipe to choose an item and then that becomes the control that you swipe and then press to to shoot. So if, if it matters to you, so if it matters to you, if focus matters to you or portrait mode matters to you, or whatever it is that you want to set up photographic styles which we'll need to talk about because they completely overhauled that as well you can set whatever you want to be.

The thing that happens when you swipe back and forth. It's sort of up to you, and when I tried to describe it yesterday and I feel like, just like yesterday, it sounds really complicated. It's a lot easier when you look at it, but I think the beauty of it is it's only as complicated as you want it to be. If you want it to keep it simple, you can just keep it simple and it will be. I think that's the beauty of it is building a muscle memory of like I can put it down halfway and then I've got the shot I want, and then I can press it all the way and click and take a picture.

0:08:27 - Shelly Brisbin
I think that grip ability is such a big deal because we've had camera shortcuts of various kinds forever. We had the action button last year. We have the push the button on the lock screen. We have, of course, the camera app, but this is just so simple and straightforward and, as you say, it can be as complicated as you want to in terms of how you take the picture. But if I just really quick want to get a shot, especially if I have my iPhone in a case with a cover on it, which is just me and I'm dumb and I just choose cases that have stuff that gets in the way, but that's my choice but this way I can grip it with one hand and I can take that picture or those many pictures, so that one of the pictures that I take will actually be the exact one I want.

0:09:10 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, it's always fun to see the flurry of like last minute stories that come in like on the day before and the weekend before, and there are a lot of stories about oh, someone has a brand new iPhone case that doesn't seem to have room for the new button that now we all know is going to happen.

0:09:27 - Jason Snell
So I think we talked about this a little bit last week that, yeah, if you can hold off on like buying a case, a third-party case for at least for like a couple of months, that's probably going to be for the best especially this time, because it's a touch sensitive capacitive button and they're actually putting another button on the case that will channel your capacitive you know, electricity on your finger through that button to the button down below and like that is going to be harder to knock off. I I have faith that they'll knock it off, but it's, it makes it harder. I wonder if that's a little interesting. I'm sure it's not a motivation, but I'm sure somewhere within apple they're like oh what if we made a button so complicated?

0:10:07 - Andy Ihnatko
it would be harder to make a third case and we'll have a new excuse for making this harder to repair without pissing off the wrong people. So you've had the chance to actually like press it is. Is there like a? Can you feel like a haptic response when you are pressing it, kind of like the, the, the magic trackpad and stuff like that?

0:10:25 - Jason Snell
so it's a little bit of both. When you do the little half squeeze, it's not it's not actually, you know, really depressing as much as it is uh, doing giving you a little haptic. There's haptic on all of that, but when you press it down, it depresses and it's got a kind of a delightful little kind of like pop uh button feeling. When you press it down you can't miss it. When you do that, uh, that shutter button, I don't know what all the secret sauce is in there. I don't know if they're firing haptics while it depresses, right, like because what? What the magic trackpads taught us is that you can fake a lot of stuff with haptics and you think your finger moved, your finger moved, but it moved because the device shook, not because you actually depress something, but there is a physical depress. That happens, but there's also probably a lot of magic that's happening that's, and that's something that apple does really well.

0:11:15 - Andy Ihnatko
Haptics is one of their unspoken secret sauces.

The way, the way, even the way that they introduced in the first apple watch, the way that it's not just a buzz, it can actually like, do, like a sort of like, a sort of like a bug is crawling across your wrist, and the way that they did it with a magic trackpad, like I remember getting my briefing and talking to an engineer and I had to sometimes like I'm sure the people who are in this conversation are will understand this there are times where, like nobody, my readers and listeners don't get to see the questions that I ask.

So I can ask really dumb questions to make sure I understand something and I remember just asking. So there's nothing mechanical here, no, so meaning that when I think I feel like it's pressing down and clicking, nothing is pressing down and clicking, no, ok, so if this device is absolutely dead, turned off, no power, and I were to press into this, I would feel nothing, and because it was just so unbelievable, and so I'm really looking forward to see how they would apply that to this button nothing more creepy than than touching a magic trackpad that is off yeah, yes, and it does nothing.

0:12:21 - Jason Snell
It's like michael, what do you think about this one?

0:12:27 - Mikah Sargent
I was a little nervous about the button being complicated. I'm glad to hear what you said about the simplicity being there, and then you could make it more, Because I was thinking about if I was the photo subject and I saw someone holding up their iPhone. I'm so used to, you know, they hold up their phone, you wait a second and then it's done to seeing someone holding up their phone, then swipe it around Right, Hold on, hold on. I've got to, and it's like what is happening here you suddenly, a professional photographer that I've hired to you know, take my, my head shots. I was not expecting that. So it's good to hear that you kind of can avoid all of that extra stuff, because I just think for me it might get in the way.

0:13:15 - Jason Snell
Think about. I mean, I have used through my life SLR cameras a bit and some point and shoot cameras, and what I learned with SLR especially is like you can have it in the like green mode, where literally everything is auto and you go halfway down to focus and all the way down to shoot. You can also put it in, you know, shutter priority, aperture priority, and there's a little wheel behind it. I remember when I was reading about it and I was discovering and I was like, oh, what does this wheel do? And it turns out that in auto mode it does nothing. But there are all those other modes. I feel like that's sort of what they're going for. Here is the. The swipe things are there and the double squeeze to get up and like find another thing to go down into, to use that as the swipe. It's all there for the people who care, Right? But but you don't need to know it ideally, right, because that would make it impossible but but also.

0:14:09 - Andy Ihnatko
But also they're making the camera more camera like. Like. I did not intend, I did not bring this as an intentional prop. I'm just like in the habit now of carrying my camera around because I'm walking two miles to get to the library back and sometimes you see birds and stuff.

But yeah, I mean, what I like about using this normally doesn't have such a ridiculously long lens on it, but even like with a iPhone style lens on it, what I like about walking around with it is that all I got to do is just like hold it and press this button.

I don't really have to look down and find where the button is, and it has these two like rollers to set. I've got it set on manual usually. So here's how I set the, here's how I change the shutter speed, here's how I change the aperture, and it will do like the, the ISO automatically, and so this is all stuff that you do tactical, tactile, and all I'm doing is I'm looking at the picture, I'm not looking at the interface. So the more they can do about that to make this really complicated supercomputer of computational photography, feel like the Instamatic that maybe you had when you were like eight years old the better, and we're not talking about the Apple Watch yet, but, foreshadowing, I thought that a lot of the most impressive things about the Apple Watch 10 were just about let's make this act more like how people expect a watch to act, and this is the sort of fine point that Apple is so good at with their hardware.

0:15:31 - Jason Snell
Yeah, this button, we'll see how it goes, but the physical having muscle memory, being able to just kind of go doot-doot, is great. They have some other little tricks in there where I think there's like a hold at which point you can get the interface to drop away. So all you see temporarily is the content, because you're not in that. Uh well, I'm using a computer, right like. Instead, you're just really focused on taking a picture and, in good news and I think that, given how much we've talked about this on the show andy, you would uh have recognized this too Out of the gate, this button has an app API so that a maker of a third-party camera app and it's going to be limited to camera apps third-party camera apps can also build on this same button and build their own menus, and they even in the demo showed kind of wild Snapchat where you're actually swiping to say which friend of yours is going to get that picture that you're taking Like.

So that's you know, when we talk about Apple having issues in the EU especially, and not dealing with competitors and not opening up some of their subsystems to competitors, here is a feature that, out of the gate, is going to support third-party camera apps.

0:16:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I'd like to think that. I'm sorry, Shelley, we were about to say something.

0:16:47 - Shelly Brisbin
Oh, I was just going to take another direction and say that I'm excited that it's on all the iPhones.

It's not just it's not like the action button, it's not like the dynamic island that started on the pro phones only. It's available to everybody and I think that will also improve adoption quite a bit. And I think this is the kind of thing that will become in the cultural zeitgeist People will know that this is the camera control button and they'll probably will become you know jargon or words that people will associate with using their phone in this way, and that only spreads faster because it's available on all the models of the new phones.

0:17:22 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, absolutely. The only thing that surprised me is that they're calling it I would have guessed slightly that they would have called it something like remember, when they created the iPod, they didn't necessarily call it the Apple Music Player or the iMusic Player the iPad 2, they want to make it vague so that it can fill other purposes without making it sound like it needs a rebranding, given that they've already put visual intelligence this is the button they put visual intelligence behind. I would have put a little bit of money on the idea that they would have called it the seek, the look button or the capture button.

0:18:01 - Shelly Brisbin
Yeah, I want a one word Camera control is lots of syllables.

0:18:05 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also you're controlling a camera as opposed to getting a result from pressing this button.

0:18:10 - Jason Snell
And not a brand. It feels more generic than that. It's not like some busy magic brand. So here's my theory on that, which is they want this to be a unitasker. They really want it to always be about camera capture, even though the AI feature where you hold it up and find out what kind of dog that is is a which is a to come feature, but it is a camera feature. I think they wanted to go low key with the branding on this and just say look, it's just a camera control. That's all it is. That's all it's ever going to be.

If you make an RSS reader and you want to be able to swipe on it in order to scroll your stories, you can't. We're not going to let you. And for everybody who asked me, I got a lot of texts while I was down there. They were like can you assign it to other tasks? Here's the answer. Apple doesn't talk about camera with the action button anymore and the action button also is going to be on the iPhone 16, not just the pro. The action button is your. It does whatever you want button. But camera control is a unitasker. It's a dedicated hardware just for the camera and and I know it's a little bit weird, but I think I understand philosophically what they're trying to do there, which, which is to say now the iPhone literally is a camera. It has a shutter button on it, just like your camera did, and that's all it will ever be able to do. Interesting choice.

0:19:32 - Andy Ihnatko
You think that maybe we're would it make sense I'm not going to ask for predictions, because who knows but do you think it would make sense for there to be I wouldn't call it a dual boot iPhone, but you can the ability to lock it into the mode where it's a camera that also runs iPhone apps. If you're at Disney World and chiefly you're using it as a camera device and you're occasionally sending things to other people and, of course, you occasionally want to get messages from your kids wherever the hell they are in the park but that's another thing that I would love any phone to be able to do, to be able to essentially say please just lock this into the camera, a camera app, make everything the shortest distance between a dark screen and an active camera thing.

0:20:19 - Jason Snell
Since you can use this locked. I mean, they're kind of already there, in the sense that if you call this up and press, you're in camera and then you go click, click, click and then you put it back down. If it's, you don't have to unlock it, right, you can, you can, but you don't have to. It's interesting. That's what I andy. I think that's the impulse that they're going on here, right is they want to make it because, look, we've been talking for almost a half an hour about new iPhones, and we're talking about a button on it, but it's a camera button and Apple knows why do people buy new iPhones?

0:20:49 - Mikah Sargent
The number one reason has to be the camera, because they're so important as our cameras in our lives and I also hear a lot of people outside of our techie space talking about wanting to get to the camera quicker, like that is not a thing that is just amongst us. That is a thing that I have heard anecdotally many times and seeing that it you know. We know that in the next version we're also going to be able to change the two buttons that are on the lock screen to access other stuff quickly. But the fact that this camera button can get people to that Snapchat camera faster or I don't know what else other people use their signal camera or whatever, who knows? But yeah, or something like halide or yeah, exactly.

0:21:38 - Jason Snell
Or obscura, yeah, exactly.

0:21:40 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, being able to get there to the thing that they like to use and use it as the camera, I think will improve people's abilities to do that. Because I think about myself and how I don't really take a lot of photos and I kind of, after going to a place and doing a thing, kind of looking back on it, going dang it. I wish I would have taken a couple of photos while I was there. I feel like having this physical manifestation of a reminder that hey, you've got this great camera in your hand right now would be quite nice and would be that reminder that I need to. Why don't I just click this button and take a few photos.

0:22:22 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I think the I've heard, and I'm sure people are who are listening to this, are saying it now. But you already can swipe to the right to take a photo and you can always tap on the button on the lock screen to take a photo, and that's all true. But I will tell you, even with all of the attempts Apple has made to make it that easy, including setting the action button by the by the way, to default to to opening the camera, people don't do it. They just don't do it. So I think apple's saying, all right, if we make a button that only does the camera and we put it on there and it looks pleasing and it's like this is the camera button. People press the camera button, will people feel like they can get to the camera faster?

And honestly, I think this is a mental disconnect with software on a touchscreen as great as touchscreens are and the iPhone exists because Apple was like we're not going to do a BlackBerry, we're going to make it so that the software can define the interface on that touchscreen and touchscreens are awesome. However, there is a disconnect where you're like oh, now I got to go here and I got to do this and I got to tap on this and this button is Apple saying what if we built a completely different touch-based system that is not on your screen? That feels like a button that will. Will it make people more comfortable? And I guess we'll find out over time if it will, but I would probably bet that it will, because I think it makes more sense in our brains than you know, sliding around things that come and go on a touch screen.

0:23:43 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I think that there's Apple's doing such a good job with the camera system on their iPhones. I think every other high-end phone is doing a really great job, but Apple really, really takes it to heart. They're running out of problems to solve. They're running out of bad pictures that get taken and I think one of the big remaining challenges is oh my God, my kid is doing something awesome.

Where's my phone? Getting it from my pocket to unlocked to in the camera mode, to I know where the button is and I'm pressing the button and, oh wait, no, I actually wanted video. There's still and, as everybody's saying, if you know how it works, there are shortcuts, there are ways to get it live very, very quickly. As you said, jason, you don't necessarily have to unlock it to get it to activate the camera, but that's still kind of a stumbling block, which is why I keep thinking about the idea of what if I know that I'm just going to be taking a lot of pictures. A lot of great things are going to be happening and I just wanted to always assume that I've. The next thing I want to do is take a picture If we grease the rails that way.

0:24:49 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I wonder if there's even something where it feels you touching that button and depress. I mean, if you depress it a little it just goes to camera mode, right? So maybe that you know with with machine learning.

0:25:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Can't they just figure out that there's a motion that usually means I'm taking a picture, particularly when it's desperate. It's like, okay, I'm going to change the camera setting so that if he's shaking, if there's something quick happening, I can take something of a good picture, because this person has lost their mind. I've got to be the sensible person in this equation.

0:25:21 - Jason Snell
Well, we have just scratched the surface. There is so much to talk about today. I know Leo complains like, oh, nothing's going on. In the summertime it's really boring around here. Well, he leaves and look what happens. So we will have much more with Shelley Shelly, andy Anotko, Mikah Sargent I'm Jason Snell sitting in for Leo. We have so much more iPhone to talk about. But first a message from the aforementioned Mr Laporte.

0:25:44 - Leo Laporte
All right, we're going to pause for a moment. I'm back in my studio from vacation to tell you about 1Password. Actually, it's a great story, in my opinion. 1password, a few months ago, acquired Kolide you may remember this and now they have created a new tool that is a must-have. It's 1Password Extended Access Management. So here's the question for you Do your end users always work on company-owned devices, on IT-approved apps? Yeah right, they bring their iPhone, they bring their laptop, they run their outdated version of Plex. They do it all. So how do you keep your company's data safe when it's sitting on all those unmanaged apps and devices? 1password has an answer to this question Extended access management One password. Extended access management helps you secure every sign-in for every app on every device, because it solves the problems traditional IAM and MDM just cannot touch.

Here's the visualization for you. Don't close your eyes if you're driving. You can do this in your head. Imagine your company's security like the quad of a beautiful college campus ivy-lined brick buildings, surrounded and lovely paved paths leading from building to building, twisting and meandering through the quadrangle. It's gorgeous, right? Those nice brick paths between the buildings. Those are the company-owned devices, the it approved apps, the managed employee identities, then on every college campus this is the case. There are dirt paths worn, but on that beautiful grass which those paths are the shortest distance between point a and point b. That's the paths real people take. Those are the unmanaged devices, the shadow it apps, the non-employee identities on your network like contractors and so forth. So most security tools, their mindset, is these perfect paths and the buildings and everything.

But really where do the security problems happen? Often on the shortcuts, on the unmanaged devices, the unmanaged personnel, the BYOD devices, the shadow IT. That's why you need 1Password Extended Access Management. It's the first security solution that brings all these unmanaged devices, apps and identities under your control. It ensures that every user credential is strong and protected, every device is known and healthy and every app is visible. It's security for the real world, for the way we work today, and it's now generally available to companies with Okta and Microsoft Entra and in early beta for Google Workspace customers. So if you're using Okta, Entra or Workspace, you need 1Password Extended Access Management. Check it out at 1password.com/macbreak. That's the number 1, p-a-s-s-w-o-r-d.com/macbreak. Thank you 1Password for supporting MacBreak Weekly. And now back to the team. I give it to you oh thank you.

0:28:47 - Jason Snell
thank you, leo. Uh, welcome back to MacBreak Weekly, a podcast about iPhone cameras. Um, I was gonna segue, but I can't yet because I we need to at least mention what the camera upgrades were. Uh, at, the 48 megapixel camera on the iPhone Pro has gotten a companion 48 megapixel camera, which is good because that's the camera used in macro mode, and one of the big complaints I saw last year about the iPhone's camera system was that the macro mode camera wasn't up to speed.

You'd be looking at that gorgeous 48 megapixel camera and then you get a little too close and it would shift to a visibly inferior camera. Well, guess what? They're both 48 megapixels now, and the 16 base model, which is just an incredible value, has picked up the 48 megapixel fusion camera. They're calling it, but this is the one where this, I think, did this what last year or the year before where it's a 48 megapixel sensor, but there's a mode where they let you shoot 48 megapixels for detail and 12 megapixels with a quad bend. It's using four, four pics sensor pixels in order to capture the light information and then they merge them together into a 24 megapixel image. That's not too enormous but is sort of the best of both worlds that's now available for shooting on the 16, the base iPhone and that generates some pretty incredible photography. So the camera story on both of these models leaving aside the button that shoots the camera the actual camera story on both of them is pretty seriously improved, so that's good news, yeah.

0:30:35 - Shelly Brisbin
And spatial audio on the base, 16 models, spatial video. I'm sorry on the spatial on the 16 models, which is fun. I don't think I'll be using that a lot, but I'm always somebody who sort of leans away from the pro models because I am not an avid photographer. I enjoy photography a lot, but I always love it when a great system like this moves to a platform that is, as you say, a better value, more affordable and, for somebody who's looking to move up on their iPhone, I think the 16 is such a good upgrade for almost anybody yeah, and as you said last segment, uh, you get the action button and you get the uh, the photo capture button thingy, photo control uh, you get that too.

0:31:23 - Jason Snell
You get all the, all those things and a very, very good main camera for a good price. You also get by the way this is a little little side note some people care, I care, other people don't care good colors this time, yeah right bright. There's an aquamarine, there's a teal, there's a pink, as well as black and white for people who don't want their phone to be fun, uh, or interesting anyway, not that I'm judging.

Yeah, uh, yeah, okay, fine whatever I mean, but if you want it to be, fun, uh, or interesting in any way not that I'm judging yeah, uh, yeah, okay, fine, whatever I mean. But if you want it to be fun, that blue is beautiful. I love it. It looks so good. I got to see that one in person and it's a winner. Um, and other colors are also available. I hear I can't see pink very well, but I hear the pink is nice so there's lots.

0:32:01 - Andy Ihnatko
It's it's a barbie pink, it is like my. My complaint is like, when they do, when a company does a pink, it'll be oh wow, they're doing the rumors, they're doing a pink phone. It'll be like oh well, they could claim that it's sort of a rose. They'll come up with a fake word for it. This is pink, this is Barbie pink, this is yeah, and I mean I agree with you and I mean I agree with you. This is another little thing that I just love about the 16.

Because you've heard us, we've complained a lot about how, like on the MacBooks, they have a very, very like East German approach to colorways. Like we have lots of colors. We have gray, a darker gray and a lighter gray and a gray that's so dark it might look like it's black, but it's not quite black. These are like this is a fun purple and a fun like John Waters 1964 bowling shirt green. And yeah, it speaks to the fact that a lot of people just don't even want to put their phones into cases and they want their phones to look fun. If it's an iPhone, it's not something that I think a lot of other manufacturers can really benefit from.

0:33:19 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, let's be honest, not only do colors appeal to lots of people, especially young people, but that bright pink is going to appeal to young women and I love the idea that they've gotten bold and they've gone out there and they said you know what? This might be the girly phone, let's embrace it. Probably not the phone I'm going to get, but God love all the people who get one and decide that they don't need a case or get a clear case so that that pink can shine brightly.

0:33:43 - Jason Snell
Yeah, right, and the little camera bump is also the, that, the bright color that goes along with it. And the camera bump now it's vertical, it's it's a camera, you know rectangle kind of overly thing, uh, which is nice. But that means those, those two cameras are side by side, which allows the spatial capture if you want to do some 3d capture for all your friends with the vision pro. We're not breaking the seal on the vision pro segment today, but it did get mentioned in the presentation because otherwise why would you be taking spatial video? They had to mention it.

Some amazing audio capture stuff in in the story too, that they're going to build surround sound essentially after you're out of your video capture and give you some options about how to display it. It's a little more cinematic. They're basically doing some multi-channel audio processing. If Alex were here he'd probably explain it all to us, but he's not here, so I'll just say it's interesting that they're trying to take spatial audio in your video capture so that you can have some choices about how the sound is reflected when you're shooting your video on the iPhone, which is awesome.

0:34:45 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, you were talking about those cinematic choices. Right, when you can choose studio you can choose. I think one was called cinematic, One was well, I can't remember, but anyway, they, yeah, they sort of pan the audio spatially to separate what's in frame versus what's not. I thought a couple of those sounded really good. There was one that I thought, oh, at least they're being honest, Never played back. It didn't feel like it was, you know, faked because it didn't sound great, but it was kind of interesting how it was able to do what it did.

0:35:21 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, I thought it was surprising. I'm looking at the feature quilt, like when they add, they end every section with oh, now, here is, like for a fraction of a second, a quilt of all of the different features that we really want people to remember. I'm surprised they went as far as to call it studio quality microphones with audio mix.

0:35:39 - Jason Snell
Oh man, Because that's Every microphone that they put in a computer in the last five years is studio quality.

0:35:44 - Shelly Brisbin
They've said that many times.

0:35:45 - Jason Snell
It makes me ask the question what studio? What?

0:35:48 - Shelly Brisbin
studio exactly. I don't know any podcasters that have switched to iPhones or MacBook Pros for recording, Just talking into their laptop mics, their studio quality laptop mics.

0:35:58 - Jason Snell
that doesn't happen.

0:36:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also that's one of the things that almost every flagship phone does really good audio.

More than once I've had a remote podcasting set up, just absolutely just spit the bed at the worst possible time and warmed up, just recording an entire podcast, just speaking into my phone, and I'm sure that my editor changed the settings and maybe worked a little bit harder, but it was perfectly fine and I couldn't really tell any sort of a difference.

So it's not as though we're like at Fisher Price talkie telephone status or anything, but I'm always really surprised when they because they always spend so much time not just talking about the stuff that ordinary users are going to fall behind, but we're talking about what we've got 4k, 120 Dolby vision video and we're using this new color space and this new time code and like, wow, you are really, really selling this hard to professional videographers. And I don't know where the line is between. We are selling this towards people who are commercial videographers for a living, for which an iPhone has a really, really good place, or if they're using it as sort of an aspirational thing for vloggers, saying that here's the phone that you should be using all the time anyway and you'll be taking with you some of the best video, most professional video equipment that's powered by battery.

0:37:23 - Jason Snell
Yeah, this year it definitely feels like the pro phones are more differentiated, with pro features like that 4k 120, which there's a very that funny slow motion video thing where they're like don't look back, it ruins it, you gotta keep walking forward as the explosions happen behind you.

But like that's a pro video feature and they showed it with the the video from the weekend that was shot on it that a tiny fraction of those phones are ever going to be used in that way. But it is aspirational and there are people who are like, yeah, but I want the best phone and they're going to get it. And then the counterargument is that for what a Pro Max costs or what even iPhone Pro costs at this point it's a pretty remarkable set of features. But you don't have to. I mean, I've been feeling this for a few years but it feels very much now like you can pick your poison and the low-end phone so-called low-end phone the iPhone 16 is a really great phone at a great value and if there are reasons, you want the more expensive super fancy phone, which does not come in an exciting blue or teal. It comes in gray and tan and black and white, basically various shades of gray, as metallic gray as, as amy said, titanium desert titanium.

We've gone into the desert for our titanium don't be afraid of the word brown.

0:38:40 - Andy Ihnatko
Brown is fine. Everything was brown in the 70s.

0:38:43 - Jason Snell
Watch the movie rollerball, every interior set that james conn is on is a shade of brown I'd say it's more gold with tan, but it averages out to brown. Certainly, certainly, uh, but. But there are pro features up there that that some people will really get excited about, and other people will be excited to know that they're using a phone. That's so great. It could do those things if they ever wanted to, which they don't and that's part of the profile of an iPhone pro buyer too, and that's fine. It's interesting. We're talking about a lot of detailed stuff here. I definitely got the sense from a lot of people that there's there's an undercurrent that I honestly get almost every year, which is that they're kind of bored with it because, oh, it's another smartphone that's slightly different from last year, but not really that different, and that's the truth of it. Like I know, people expect a revolution every year. There's that word again I'm not going to French revolution anyway but it doesn't happen. It only happens every so often and there are rumors I know Mark Gurman wrote about this the idea of the iPhone super cycle.

Every now and then, iPhone sales reach a new plateau and then they just kind of hang around there. For a while and for a few years we have been on that plateau and this is. There was a thought that apple intelligence was going to drive a new wave of iPhone sales, and it may yet, but given that these phones uh are are capable of apple, but Apple intelligence will not run on them until next month, when iOS 18.1 launches with a small initial set of Apple intelligence features. What Mark Gurman's premise about this in Bloomberg was it's going to take time, and also we now have an inkling that next year there may be a very different iPhone for sale as well, which is this slim rumored iPhone, and that it's possible the year after that there will be on the precipice of a new iPhone sales super cycle where a lot of people are motivated to upgrade their iPhones all at once. But it doesn't feel like this fall is when it's going to happen, especially since Apple intelligence just isn't going to be there for a while.

0:41:00 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, 100% right. It's also because it's going to be trickling out. There's going to be features that are not here today but next month, but then there are going to be other features that aren't going to be here until probably next spring. And even the features that come out, they're probably going to be a little bit half-baked. I would be really, really surprised if even a company like Apple, when they are trying to produce artificial intelligence features that are relevant and important and useful, you've got to push it, you've got to push it. You've got to push it Because if you're not going far enough, you're saying, oh, wow, great, so now the predictive text in my keyboard is much more predictive. Thank you very, very much. But if you push it too hard, that's when you find out that, wow, so you're reorganizing all my notifications and now all my spam emails are being bubbled right up to the top because it's using urgent words that you're not smart enough to be able to figure out. Even Apple, I think, during the last earnings call, basically wanted to hint at uh, the expectations of a super cycle coming up, and they specifically said they don't expect sales of iPhones the next quarter to be much different from what has been in a relevant quarter last year. Obviously, in a in a call like that, they have to be conservative because if they say, oh my god, we're gonna sell 80 bajillion and they don't, then they get then sued. But yeah, that's how things just are going to go.

But the last thing is there was a study that came out from a research marketing firm about the reasons why people upgrade phones. Unfortunately, I don't think the study was broken down by type, but overwhelmingly like a little less than I think a little less than half of the reason of the people who upgrade their phone are doing it simply because their old phone is just obsolete. Another third are upgrading simply because their phone is broken. And when you come to well, how did you upgrade? Because you were really enticed by the new features of this new phone you bought? That's a tiny, tiny sliver. I suspect that that might be not the same proportion for Apple users, because Apple users have a much more emotional connection to their devices. They also, on the whole, have a lot more money than the Android people, so that they can swap out a two-year-old phone. That's perfectly good and hand it off to the next person in the family chain. But yeah, I mean, if I had any thought about maybe upgrading this year, both for my Google Pixel and for the iPhone. It's like I'm waiting next year because I want to see new hardware.

I'll wrap it up by saying that Apple doesn't talk a lot about internal hardware in these events. Usually they do that with interviews with more engineering-focused news outlets, but one of the things that they were making sure that they were reiterating was like oh, 17% faster memory channel. Oh, 17% faster memory channel. And they're reiterating that because now, because it'll be able to run artificial intelligence models much, much better, because memory getting these in and out of memory is like the bottleneck and the limitation on what you can do with AI. So they want to make sure they're putting it out there that this is an AI phone, even if you might not be buying it as such. You don't want to be stuck two years from now not being able to do any of the cool stuff that every other phone can do, simply because you've got a perfectly decent phone that just has a little bit not enough memory or just a little bit too slow bandwidth on the die.

0:44:41 - Shelly Brisbin
I think two things about that. First of all, I think that the study that talks about motivations for upgrading iPhones and them perhaps being very different in the real world as opposed to in the tech bubble that not only we live in, but people who have the money and the desire to upgrade their phones every year or so, especially if they're focused on things like camera systems. I think I live in a world radio producers, folks I work with who have enough disposable income to buy new phones but they are all folks who are like I'm going to buy a phone when it's broken or when the piece of software that I rely on to get into my enterprise work system no longer works because my phone is so old. I know several people who are in that situation and who would never consider upgrading a phone until they had to, based on something like a camera system. The second thing is that I think AI as something that the market demands of Apple, both in terms of the financial markets, the shareholder markets, and also just in terms of the competitive push between Apple and Google and Microsoft and everybody out there. I think that desire for AI is far greater on the market side than it is on the consumer side.

Sure, people want to do fun things with AI, especially if you show them something very specific that is relevant to their life, and I think when Apple intelligence becomes a fact of life, people will flock to it and they will decide oh yes, I want to buy a new phone so that I can do that Apple intelligence thing, but as something that doesn't actually exist yet, I think for a lot of people, they're happy to hold onto the phones that they have until they see the thing that's available to them that they can't do now, whether it's being able to point the camera at that dog and find out what breed it is, or whether it's making some very ill-advised image, playground image, or whether it's having emails written for whatever that killer app is for that person. Until it actually exists, I don't think people are banging down the doors of their carrier stores and their Apple stores going please give me the Apple intelligence phone right now, because they don't really perceive it as something that it's real yet.

0:46:50 - Jason Snell
That's part of the folly of the whole rush to AI stuff is that a lot of it is hedging, a lot of it is well, if our competition gets there and we don't and it turns out to be something, we're in big trouble. So we've got to rush there too. But does anybody want it? And the truth is, people want features they can use that help their lives. And you've got. And that's why I've always said, even though Apple's way behind on AI from a technology standpoint I am not, I think they've got a good chance to do. Okay, if AI features really are the future because they're very feature focused and they're very, why would somebody want to do this focused and not the classic like even back to the computer, the personal computer days where you know other pc makers are just jamming new technology and not knowing what it's for, just so they can say it's new and apple would like lag behind until they found an actual feature that made sense and appealed to people, at which point they would go whole hog into it, and that that comes back to something Andy said about the word obsolete, and then Shelly echoed it as well.

What does obsolete mean? And it can mean a lot of different things. It can mean a very specific piece of software that you rely on, a very specific workflow you can rely on. Sometimes it means my phone feels slow and it feels old and it feels obsolete and there's probably a better solution for me. Another way things can become obsolete is there's some amazing new feature that everybody's doing and your phone doesn't do it and that makes it obsolete. But it's not going to be a label, a sticker on the box that says comes with AI. It's going to be a thing you can do that they can't do.

0:48:22 - Shelly Brisbin
It might be that camera button, it might Something like that.

0:48:24 - Jason Snell
I mean it could be Right. It might be that camera button, it might Something like that. I mean it could be right, but it's going to be an actual thing, right, not just a sticker or a checkbox.

0:48:30 - Andy Ihnatko
I think you're 100% right. It's all about features and the most compelling thing for anybody whether it's I've got an old phone and I'm hanging out with somebody who has a new version of the phone, or I've got an Android phone, I'm hanging out with someone who has an iPhone the most compelling impression you can make on somebody is doing something with your phone that makes them say why can't my phone do that? For years? The generative AI features on my Pixel phone for pictures are so second nature that I don't even think about it anymore. We're taking a picture of a church. Oh, there were a whole bunch of ugly power lines getting in the way. I don't think, aha, I'm going to use the hardest of the power of AI. I just simply draw a little line on my fingertips and then it goes away. But I don't know that someone's looking at me and saying wait, how did you get that picture? Well, I just erased them on my phone.

Oh, what app do you have? No, I don't need an app, it just does that. All I have to do is tell it to remove something. It'll remove something. Does my phone do that? What phone do you have? An iPhone? No, but if you subscribe to Adobe Lightroom. Maybe it can do that and it goes in reverse too.

Show me something that I want to do on my phone, that my phone can't do, and that will loosen my wallet a lot faster.

0:49:50 - Jason Snell
Yeah, for sure.

0:49:53 - Andy Ihnatko
More faster than a demo of here's what this new AI-based A18 product can do.

0:49:58 - Jason Snell
Here's the base 10% faster is what it is. Oh, I need that. Mikah, you watched this in real time yesterday. What left out of you about, about iPhone, stuff, if anything?

0:50:08 - Mikah Sargent
um, so I just in general, um, the way that apple intelligence played a role in kind of the delivery where a lot of what we saw, I felt not even just for that, but for some of the features it made it clear what you said at the beginning of this episode today, which is that the audience for this event is more mainstream than you get for some of the other events, and even the coverage of it is more mainstream, because it felt like when you're reading the second book in your series that you're going through and the first chapter is just a review of what you've already learned, or a Netflix series where season two starts off with that teaser trailer.

0:50:57 - Jason Snell
Previously on.

0:50:59 - Mikah Sargent
Apple. There was a lot of previously on Apple going on and I'm not going to lie, that did kind of pull me out of it because I'm going okay, but it became difficult to sort through what was new and my internal checkboxes of oh yes, I already knew about this and knew about this what new feature from the operating system is made possible by the introduction of new hardware. So, like the, the, the Dynamic Island, for example, is a great. We didn't know that was going to happen. The iPhone, the new iPhone, came out. It had that, and here I didn't really like did anything stick out to you as being truly for other than, of course, the button?

Yeah, Obviously that's the big one.

0:51:52 - Jason Snell
Photographic styles actually. But you're right, I mean there is always going to be a replay of WWDC, because 90% of the people who watch the iPhone event didn't pay attention to.

WWDC, or they don't remember it or they read an article about it and forgot about it. But now that it's actually here, they have to make that case again and for us close Apple watchers, it makes a very different impression than it does, I think, for the rest. But photographic styles I mentioned this briefly, but basically a few years ago four years ago I think they introduced this concept where, for the first time because Apple was always very fussy about their photo capture pipeline and they're like oh no, no, no, we, we always want it to be as real as possible and we don't want to mess around with it and they finally said Okay, if you want to make it warmer or or desaturated or whatever you want, we're going to actually do it. Where, deep down in the pipeline, you can say I want all my stuff to be warmer and softer. And instead of taking a photo, processing it to get it to the top and then making it warm and soft with a filter, it actually makes some choices deep down in the processing to capture a warmer, softer image. So that was a big step for them. Four years later, they have essentially thrown out the old photographic style system as well as the old filter system from the photos app and replaced it with this new photographic styles just on these new models, as my understanding, where every time you capture an image, it's actually capturing more data than you think.

And the example I'll give you is if you set photographic styles to black and white in the iPhone 16 or 16 pro and you take a black and white in the iPhone 16 or 16 Pro and you take a black and white photo and it looks gorgeous because deep down in the image pipeline they're like it's a black and white, we're going to map these different colors to different tones and we're going to bring it up and it's going to be beautiful. And then you look at it and go I really wish I had shot that in color. You go to edit, you want to reprocess that style later. It has the data, so it's not like a raw image. It's still a standard kind of image format, but they have they have retained some level of data that allow you to change the style after the fact, which is a wild idea, because when they put it in the video I was like, well, that's just a filter, right, but it's not because they're actually using more detailed information.

A filter acts in one way across a whole image, and this is going back to data and doing a reprocess, and that requires a huge amount of calculation, and I think that's one of the reasons. Could they have gotten it to run on older models? Maybe, but I think this is one of those issues where they're like this is the model. These are the models where we're going to build that in, so that every capture does it that way. So that's an example. That's very cool, but you're right, it's hard to pick those out when they're also replaying everything that came in June.

0:54:45 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, it's like what am I actually getting? That's new. I was actually quite pumped about these new filters. I thought that they were very cool, and it's kind of exactly what I was hoping for in terms of updates to the photos.

The one thing that kind of teased me a little bit it's a question that comes up on my show Clockwise a lot, or whenever we are about to have an Apple event I should say our show, since it used to be Jason's. So, with that, I always talked about wanting to have a photo coach that was made possible by AI, so that it could recognize a scene, and it felt like that's what they were going to announce, because they had just talked about Apple intelligence. They had said here's something that's enabled through the performance and the intelligence of this device, and then they went into those photographic styles, and it's nowhere near the photo coach that I was asking for, but it happened to be another feature that I thought was really cool, so I went ahead and gave it a pass. It was fine, but, yeah, I thought that was an exciting introduction.

I think, though, what stuck out to me the most across this whole event was something that Shelly had talked about earlier, which is just that there's a lot of. There are a lot of parallels, if you will, between the standard iPhones and the Pro iPhones, and I love that because it makes it easy for me as an individual who is often asked what phone should I get? Should I upgrade, should I do this? Now I can say you're going to get pretty much everything that you would expect without needing to go to the pro model, and I think that's really exciting. I love that all of the buttons are on all of the devices and that you know everybody gets to try out that action button now, for sure, but also the capture button.

0:56:38 - Shelly Brisbin
So pretty exciting. It simplifies explaining the line too. I remember back when it was at the 11 or the 12, where they all had the same chip I think it was the 12 and it just made the line simpler and you could decide based on either size of phone or the camera system, if that was the thing they were interested in. And I feel like this whole event and we will get to other products, I assume but this whole event was so good for the mid-range, like, if you're not, if you're, if you're an apple watch 10 person, if you're an iPhone 16 person, if you're an Apple Watch 10 person, if you're an iPhone 16 person, if you're an AirPods person who can't decide between the pro and the mid, there's so much for you.

That's not the way Apple sold it. I feel like the density of information, without all that much that was new in the event, was kind of messed up. To be honest, it wasn't aimed at a consumer in the way that I would think an event that had so much mid content in it might have been. But these are Apple events and they're constrained by history and by the way they do things, even in the evolution of the video only era. But it just felt like this event was all about really beefing up their mid range and maybe that means that that super cycle is coming, because we have new phone designs on the high end, maybe on the lower end too.

But it really feels like a strong mid-range and a strong selling point for any Apple product, whether it's at the bottom or the top of the line.

0:58:02 - Jason Snell
I'll pile on that with something from Ben Thompson at Stratechery, who has pointed out recently that if you look at inflation and factor it in, the iPhone is an even better deal because as prices have gone up, apple hasn't raised the price of the iPhone, so those iPhones are more and more affordable. But I think you're right, Shelly. I think waiting in the wings is an iPhone slim that costs $1,600 to start and a foldable iPhone that costs $2,000 to start. Right, like it's almost like they're getting all their ducks in a row and we're at the end of another generation where the efficiencies are there and they're able to sort of like make those for cheaper and sell them for the same prices, and and all of that is good.

What happens next usually is that there's a new phone with cutting-edge tech that costs a fortune, relatively speaking, and that may be where I would be surprised if next year it was a lot less sedate.

But this, this year, you know, the fact is, people don't buy a new phone every year.

This year is, I think, a great value year for the iPhone and the Apple Watch too, which we'll get to in a minute, I do feel like that, and the fact that they didn't have those laggard features that you know you got to wait for on the low end model the fact that the first off, the iPhone 16 Pro, got the 5X zoom, because that was a missing feature last year.

And the fact that the iPhone 16s have both of the new input buttons on them and a lot of other capabilities, and the 48 megapixel camera. That was such a big deal when it was introduced to the Pro models. There's a lot of value to be found there, given especially that the price points haven't crept up like so many other price points have over the last few years. So I feel like we're. You know this is not a bad time to buy if you're not a cutting edge person, because, yeah, there'll be a phone you can probably buy next year or the year after the cost of fortune and is unlike anything you've ever seen before. But if you're not that person, maybe this year is a good year yeah, I mean we.

1:00:05 - Andy Ihnatko
It's interesting when you think about it In the next two or three years, we could see a massive partitioning of the iPhone, because right now, just as you've been saying, the differences between the iPhone 16 and the iPhone 16 Pro, they're very real, but they're not as tangible as the difference between a nothing phone and a pro phone used to be. However, of course, we're not talking about the iPhone SE. That's probably going to be released next year. But how do you make the iPhone 16 now a budget phone without really making it a very? Apple would never give an iPhone user a nerfed experience, but it's going to have to be a really diminished device.

And now we're talking about the iPhone Slim, which we're talking about as if it has its own distinction, because I think the rumors that Gurman and others are putting across is that no, it's not going to be just a new design way, it's going to be an actual, specific model that's designed to be as slim as possible. Okay, what are you going to have to compromise in terms of heat, in terms of features, in order to make that happen? The folding phone. Once again, it's going to have to be the most expensive, if it's not the most expensive iPhone in the product line, they'll have solved a huge problem. But even so, every single whether it's Samsung, whether it's Google, whether it's any of the other manufacturers it's an $1,800, $2,000 phone that makes compromises compared to the $1,000, $1,200 flagship phone. So we might see like four different stratas of iPhone users, simply because, if they want to have that much diversity in the product line, pick your poison. What do you want and what are you willing to give up for it, besides the headphone jack, of course?

1:01:51 - Jason Snell
All right, let's take a break, and then we will talk about some other things that also were announced this week. Because there's so much. There is so much. I wish we could have bottled all that time. We spent talking about nonsense all summer, but that's not how it works. We got to do it all now. But first here's one more message from Mr Leo Laporte.

1:02:10 - Leo Laporte
This episode of MacBreak Weekly. Oh hi, I didn't mean to interrupt, but I am here. As long as I am, can I just insert an ad? Thank you. This episode of MacBreak Weekly is brought. I'm still on vacation, honest, I'll be back in a bit, a couple of weeks, brought to you by this week by Veeam. Oh, I love these guys.

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1:04:00 - Jason Snell
All right, thank you, leo. Apple Watch was also introduced Apple Watch Series 10,. We mentioned the Triumph of the Mid-Range. The Ultra 2 did not get updated to the Ultra 3. Interesting the Apple Watch SE did not get an update. Interesting, but the mainstream Series 10 got a big update. It's actually really interesting because, as somebody who has not succumbed to the desire for an Ultra watch, I find it very funny that now which Apple watch has the biggest display? Is it the Ultra 2? It is not. It is the larger of the two Series 10 models.

1:04:36 - Andy Ihnatko
Look at you with your Ultra watch, with its puny little display. Oh, I'll give you a watching the flying glass you can see what time it is.

1:04:45 - Shelly Brisbin
I enjoy watching people who spent the money on the ultra, but I want the new thing and not knowing what to do, I'm sorry. I enjoy it. The way.

1:04:53 - Jason Snell
Yeah, me too. Me too. I mean the way apple is pitching. The ultra is. It's a sports watch. It is a rugged watch. It is not necessarily going to be the biggest or best. In other ways it's different and I think that's true, and sometimes it will be biggest and best and other times it won't be. But as somebody who has not succumbed to that, I was excited and I'm going to admit it here. Have I bought an Apple Watch Series 10? Yes, I have. I have. I have a Series 7. I have waited patiently. It is time. I am excited about the bigger screen. I am excited that it's thinner.

It's got some interesting I wouldn't call them colors Again. The colors are used. All of his authority on the iPhone 16 and then went back into hibernation. However, there is a very pretty jet black aluminum. It's the first sort of like shiny aluminum they've done there. There are some titanium models. They took those away after the series 7. They brought them back and put the stainless steel models on hiatus. Titanium apple watches are beautiful that's what I've got right now and uh and very lightweight and there's's some nice colors there, again for Apple's definition of color, which is shades of gray. But I I bought the jet black aluminum, looks really great of the series 10. And I use my Apple watch a lot.

There are also, of course, health features in here. New app, new watch faces there's always new watch faces. There's some new like swim features and temperature of the water you're in, and I mean like they load a lot of stuff in here. But I think what's really interesting is that this is also adding to this model and I think previous model as well Sleep apnea detection using motion, not oxygen, because you know they can't do the oxygen sensor anymore. Not oxygen, because you know they can't do the oxygen sensor anymore, but using motion. They analyze your sleep for 30 days and they can actually detect, based on scientific results, detect whether you may have sleep apnea and then refer you to a doctor.

1:06:54 - Andy Ihnatko
So that's a pretty cool message a doctor who claims to have worked on this feature back in 2017 with Apple, wrote a small piece about it. It relies on peripheral arterial tone and the autonomic nervous system, measuring variations in arterial volume, which reflects the activity of the autonomic nervous system. So, yeah, so they didn't necessarily need new sensors to make this happen.

1:07:19 - Jason Snell
It's the heart sensor and the motion sensors.

1:07:21 - Andy Ihnatko
yeah, yeah, and, as with most of the help features, it works on machine learning. Basically, there's a reason why they started working on this in 2017. It's like you have to build the model that looks at all this data coming in and I'm not expecting a call from somebody. Is it telling me that? Hi, oh, 12% chance you're having a stroke.

Whatever you want to do with this information up to you. I'm like wait, what, what, how, wait. And so sleep apnea which is, like you know, I think all of us, you know, I think most of us in the conversation are old enough to have grown up before sleep apnea was like a known and published thing and we just thought that, oh, uncle Gray, he just died peacefully in his sleep. No, he had sleep apnea, he had a heart attack because he couldn't breathe. And had he known that he had this condition and just simply slept with a mechanical aid, he might have lived to be 80 or 90. So, yeah, if nothing else, it'll give Tim a new thing to talk about at the first five minutes of the next event Say we've got so many letters.

We'd like to show you this video.

1:08:48 - Mikah Sargent
I was just recently diagnosed with sleep apnea and I several well, not several a few years ago I, my psychiatrist, was suspicious that I might have that, and so she had ordered a test for me to do, and it was one of those take-home, cetera. And so it came back saying, no, probably didn't have it. Well, it kept having some issues, and so I finally said, hey, I'd like to do a test, but I want to do an in-person test please. And so I did go in, and despite the room being set up quite literally like a hotel room I mean, set up quite literally like a hotel room, I mean it was it was the they focused on making it seem as much like this is just a bed you're sleeping in, it's comfortable, everything's great, here's your bathroom, all that kind of stuff. You're still in a place that's not familiar. You still have a bunch of wires connected to you. You don't necessarily know, like I didn't know, cause I'm a side sleeper, and so I had spent most of the night laying on my back. And then finally the guy comes over the thing and says you know, you can sleep on your side if you want to, right? And I said, oh no, I didn't know that. So, anyway, all of that is to say, even in that environment I still didn't get very good sleep, but it was enough that they were able to determine that, oh yeah, I had plenty of stop breathing events over the course of the night, and so I was diagnosed with that, and then coming home and trying out a CPAP to see if that helped at all before I was actually able to get one was, I mean, it was a whole process and I just moved from California to Portland, oregon, which meant that average person I know that if I had like this is a more standard insurance that I have now, if I'd had this, I don't think I would have been able to go and do all of those tests and all of that stuff without spending so much money, and so I'm really thankful that I was able to do it before I moved.

But a lot of people can't do that, and so any kind of helpful indication that helps them maybe justify if they have to spend some money to get these tests done, to confirm it, or if it is just helpful enough to say, okay, I will drop the $750 that it costs to buy your standard CPAP of today, whatever it takes having that knowledge and knowing.

I mean it is remarkable the effect that sleep apnea can have on a person, not just in terms of their overall sleep cycle, but it will actually change your because of the drop in pressure in your chest. It can actually cause your heart to reshape itself because part of the muscle starts working harder to get your blood pumping in an area where pressure has dropped. So that's where those heart issues come into play. It's not just because you've stopped breathing, but because of a literal change in pressure within your chest. So there are all of these other conditions that kind of come out from this, and so I was really pleased to see one more means of people being more aware of it. Because, as it said, what was it? 75% of people aren't treated for the sleep apnea that they have, and it can be a killer, and it can certainly be a life shortener, even if it's not a full-on killer.

1:12:40 - Shelly Brisbin
You have a complicated relationship with sleep apnea and the short version is I'm married to somebody who has it, has had a CPAP for years. After I had a small stroke a year and a half ago, the doctor suspected that I might have it and sent me for one of those tests where you go into. And in my case it was a very cold room with concrete floors and even though I was allowed to sleep on my side, I was not very comfortable. They'd spent half an hour putting the electrodes on me and another half hour taking them off, and then almost immediately they called and said okay, you've got it. Why don't you come in and do another night? And then we can tell you what CPAP to get? And I noped out at that point and I shouldn't have, but I did because I was so frustrated by just general medical bureaucracy and the fact that it cost me quite a lot of money and because it's it's covered, but only partially. And then you, as you say, Mikah, you have to spend 750 bucks for the CPAP machine.

As a side fellow, side sleeper, I am not looking forward to having that thing on my face, but I I love the idea, not only that the Apple Watch has it. But I specifically love the detail that it bases its recommendations and its information to you on 30 days worth of data. It's not just that you put it on one night and it says you know what You're breathing kind of funny. It takes 30 days worth of data. I don't know how doctors will receive that, because I know the other thing.

After I had had a stroke, they had told me you need to have a heart monitor and maybe you could use your Apple Watch, and I waved mine in the air and said, hey, look, I've got that covered. And they said, oh no, we need to install a heart monitor inside you, which was probably a better, obviously a better, medical situation for me. But the Apple Watch as something that doctors can accept as a source of data probably varies quite a bit, and I'm sure that will be the case with sleep apnea. Obviously, nobody's going to give me a CPAP machine diagnosis based on this data, but it probably will get me back there for that second test. I have a Series 9, and my understanding is that I'll be able to do this on my Series 9. And so I'm really looking forward to running through that 30 days and having it say, Shelly, you really should go back back, and then I'll do it.

1:14:45 - Jason Snell
Yeah, I got the sense that there's, there are papers about this right and that they've done these studies and that I think that's one of the reasons it works on the series nine is that they've been running these studies, but that that that should make doctors feel better about it.

But I do wonder and there are CPpap shortages like I actually do wonder if this is going to lead to a cascade of sleep apnea diagnoses, which is a good thing, right, but it may also overwhelm different parts of the medical system.

I also interesting trend with this that apple talked about how they expect to get approval from this, and this is one of those cases where people I saw some people saying, well, why doesn't apple wait until they get approval? Well, the problem is they get, they're getting approval in more than 100 countries for a medical device and Apple announces their products when they want to, not when the FDA says it's okay, right, but I think they have enough confidence for them to say we anticipate approval in more than 100 countries and we think it's going to be great and so it won't come next Monday, think it's going to be great and so it won't come like next monday, but it's coming and it's it's gonna. You know, like, like Mikah said, that video with tim cook saying look at all these letters I get from people whose lives we've saved, we'll have people with cpaps next time right like that's gonna end, though I so hate that part.

I know it's inevitable it is, but it's inevitable right and it's true, I mean that it is, but it's inevitable, right? And it's true. I mean that's the thing is it's very difficult as a company to say you've got to buy our products or you'll die, right.

1:16:08 - Mikah Sargent
Like they don't want to say that, so they just imply it.

1:16:12 - Jason Snell
You build features that do save people's lives.

1:16:15 - Andy Ihnatko
They do do that and on top of that, they don't charge extra money for the features that save people's lives. Right, it just absolutely honks me off that Fitbit and other companies. It's like if you buy this thing that costs as much as an Apple Watch and you get, okay, it will give you a heart rate monitor, it will be a stopwatch, it will time your workouts, it will log certain things, but, yeah, okay, so is it going to give me trends like health trends? No, all the really cool stuff that will actually help you improve your life will cost you $9 a month, forever. And also the fact that Apple's figuring out ways to do this just as a software update for as many pieces of hardware that can possibly support it. That is absolutely laudable. I mean, I give Apple a lot of ribbing about how the implication is that they only want to save the lives of people who also own iPhones. I still think that why can't I buy an Apple Watch and pair it and use my Mac or my iPad as an activation device? But that's neither here nor there. They are doing, they are walking the walk, and they're doing this in a very positive way. And then just a little bit of background on this technique that they're using for detecting sleep apnea. The FDA approved it, like in 2019. 2019 was the first device that actually used this technique, so it's not as though they're trying to forge a new path. They're just simply implementing it in a new device.

And also this uh, we talk a little bit about deregulation and, you know, government interference. This is one area in which deregulation is actually having a really positive effect because I think during the obama administration, the fda basically decided that technology for health care and personal health care with personal devices is evolving way faster than the existing certification processes set up to handle. Let us set up a new qualification that a company like Apple can apply for. That will give them a fast track to approval under certain circumstances and under certain limitations, and that's what this is working on right now.

The fact that the new AirPods can be used as a hearing aid again happened because, under the Biden administration, I think they basically made a push that it is insane that you can't sell hearing aids over the counter If you stick it in your ear. It should be something that you should be able to buy at any store and not have to spend $3,000 for, plus having an ongoing commercial relationship with an audiologist, and that's the reason why Apple can not just simply hint at oh well, these AirPods might make audio a little bit clearer when you're having conversations, thanks to the magic of artificial intelligence and machine learning, but now they can say no, the phone will give you an audio test, it will calibrate these for the type of hearing loss you seem to have, and you have full control over the use of it and the volume of it. That's such a breakthrough thing for so many people.

1:19:11 - Jason Snell
And it works both ways. I mean, this is not because I know, again, I get the feedback of, like, oh well, apple makes these pronouncements and all of that, but the and then the regulators. Are the regulators feeling pressure or whatever? But like it's a two-way street. The existence of technology that allows these things to be built is one of the motivators to change the way the regulations work, because you realize, oh well, maybe in some areas we would be better off leveraging this technology rather than letting it sit there and then having kind of old, older technology that's very expensive and part of the healthcare system. So how do we do that? And these are two cases where the systems have been changed to allow this stuff to happen.

Before we move on from the Apple Watch, I wanted to mention a couple other design changes they made. The metal wraps around the back. Now, which is more visible with, like lighter colors, it's much thinner, they say. Now, which is more visible with like lighter colors, it's much thinner, they say. What I found in holding them is it feels to me like the top at the screen and the bottom bulge of the sensor have both kind of gotten squeezed a little bit and shaved off a little bit. So at a glance it doesn't, you don't go Whoa, it's such a thin Apple watch, but if it's on your wrist I think you will. I think you will notice, and that they changed the aspect ratio slightly. They also modified the screen on the series 10 so that the off angle viewing is better, which is good, because sometimes your watch yeah you're not always looking straight down at your watch, sometimes you're just glancing at it.

So they've done a bunch of improvements on that side of the Apple watch as well. One thing I did notice that I wanted to mention is we live in the Apple intelligence era now. Apparently, one of the items on the little bento slide or the quilt that Andy mentioned for the Apple Watch is intelligence. And you're asking yourself what is blank intelligence, blank intelligence? And the answer is apple's painted itself into a little bit of a corner where it's got a bunch of machine learning based features that it used to brand as machine learning features and now it doesn't quite know what to do because they're not apple intelligence, they're just intelligence.

So things like crash detection and fall detection and some of the health sensor translation, it looks like it's using fuzzy logic, it's using the neural engine that's on that processor which they said oh look, four neural engine cores or whatever, but not Apple intelligence, because obviously that requires not just a lot of RAM and a much more powerful processor, but it also requires a personal context model. That doesn't exist on your watch, because your watch isn't downloading all your email and all your calendar items. Probably right, it's, it's. It doesn't work.

So apple is struggling. What you're seeing is apple struggling with how it defines machine learning features and intelligence features that are in devices they sell, that are outside of the sphere of apple intelligence, and this will be something to watch over the next year at least, if not longer, because at some point it look they haven't even shipped apple intelligence yet, but at some point they're going to need to have a story for why. When I ask siri something on my apple watch series 10, it doesn't give me a good answer. But if I ask on my new iPhone 16, it does give me a good answer, and since they talk to each other, couldn't the series talk to each other? And I'm sure they'll get there. But for now you end up in the situation where some of these features are like they're intelligent but they're not.

1:22:29 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple intelligent.

1:22:30 - Jason Snell
They just don't like each other very much.

1:22:32 - Andy Ihnatko
That's how intelligent they are.

1:22:34 - Jason Snell
They don't talk anymore.

1:22:35 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, actually, I want to just tease this a little bit earlier. I want just to I teased this a little bit earlier that the things I really some of the things I really liked about the updates is, like I said, things that make it into something more conventional as a watch. The fact that the always-on mode can now update itself not by the minute but by the second, so that you can actually like, see the seconds, see the second hand sweep, and it feels more like a watch. It's a simple fact that they keep expanding the battery life so that you're no longer quite on the edge. The idea of, just as a timepiece, being able to keep it going for three days is a really, really big deal.

Another thing that kind of warmed I warmed up to it over time the idea of oh speaker playback so I can listen to spatial audio music on Apple Music through my watch Isn't that nice. Well, you know, maybe I'm not going to listen to opera on this, but listening to podcasts if that's the only thing that I have, that's in a quiet room that's perfectly fine.

1:23:35 - Jason Snell
When you're making dinner or something and you don't have time to go get your headphones as long as you're alone.

1:23:42 - Shelly Brisbin
As long as you're alone, yes, Not on a bus, not in a library. Please don't annoy your colleagues wherever you might be Absolutely, absolutely no.

1:23:50 - Jason Snell
There's a bunch of really nice touches in here, the always on display improvements. The battery you mentioned is interesting. Another trend I noticed in this event is that Apple was a lot vaguer than they used to be. There was a lot of like, oh, it's more, and even places where they would boast they would throw out a superlative and then not quantify it, and I found that a little baffling and I don't know if it's because they made this video and they weren't sure what the final numbers would be, or they decided that the numbers weren't important Because the iPhones getting back to the iPhone for a moment the iPhones they made the claim like longest iPhone battery life.

All the iPhones got longer battery life, I believe, and in the case of the Pros, it's a pretty dramatic improvement in battery life based on Apple's tests, and we know that the problem with our hours claims is it's very particular kinds of hours and if you use it for other things, the time will change completely. But still, they didn't make those claims. They made the superlatives but didn't do the measurements. They they they're on the website but like in the presentation, they're like no, battery life's longer and that's it I think that is an interesting vagueness that they're you're talking about for the iPhones too, not just the apple watch.

1:25:00 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, the iPhones, anytime they talked about battery.

1:25:02 - Shelly Brisbin
they were not specific, they were super vague. I noted that.

1:25:05 - Mikah Sargent
That is because if you go to the iPhone 16 Pro Max and you look at the comparison that it has to the iPhone 15 Pro Max, it's actually up to what did it say? Up to two hours less battery life when playing video, and I assume that that's because of the screen size.

1:25:29 - Shelly Brisbin
So yeah, I'll go compare with iPhone 15 Pro Max, even though it's a bigger phone with a bigger battery.

1:25:36 - Mikah Sargent
Yeah, up to two hours less video playback on iPhone 16 Pro than you get with the iPhone 15 Pro Max. However, it's still up to four more hours of wait. Hold on, that doesn't make sense.

1:25:48 - Jason Snell
Okay, Let me read this out loud Pro versus Pro Max.

1:25:51 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, that's what it is Pro. Okay. So I'm sorry, it's the Pro that has less.

1:25:55 - Jason Snell
Okay, so the Pro Max went from 29 to 33 of video playback and 25 to 29 for streamed and 95 hours I love this stat to 105 hours of audio playback and the pro showed similar boosts. But this is this is the thing is again, it hasn't stopped them before, but I do think it's interesting that. Yes, you know, it's like saying it's all a popularity contest, man. It's like battery life is entirely defined by the tests that you run, because if you run it full out, you can drain that battery pretty fast. But if you compare running it full out on a bunch of phones, you will find the ones that last longer. But what they like to do is say, like on their laptops they'll be like it's web browsing and things like that and it's a specific test that they run.

But it varies so much that maybe they've decided that's not that meaningful and what's meaningful is just to say our batteries last longer. Hooray on all these devices. I just find it peculiar that they stopped making claims like because that's a, those are good numbers. To say our battery life has reached this many hours is a really nice. Like 22 hours on an iPhone, 16 of video playback. You're saying, basically, our phone, all day battery life. It's amazing. And so they're like well, it's just the best.

1:27:15 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, despite what I said about how good the mid phones are and I absolutely still believe that the thing that would have tipped me over to buy a pro, especially in the 13, 14, 15 eras, is that that's where the sweet spot is. For max battery life, the pro, Not the pro max, not the regular phone, but the pro. And that's a story that you can tell somebody and then go yeah, I would like that. Whether it's that many more hours of battery life or that much greater percentage of battery life than the non-pro phone, that's a story somebody is going to respond to.

1:27:47 - Jason Snell
Yeah for sure. All right, you are watching MacBreak Weekly. It's me, jason Snell hosting this week for Leo. Andy Ihnatko, Shelly Brisbin, Mikah Sargent are all here and we're breaking down the iPhone event from this week. All right, I wanted to talk about the AirPods, but we should start a little segue again because Andy mentioned it the health, one of the banner features of the AirPods Pro that didn't get a new version. It's the ones you already have if you have AirPods Pro 2. Already had.

There will be a software update that will do uh hearing test and will adjust your hearing and you can basically you can use them as hearing aids, as over-the-counter hearing aids, to improve your hearing and what you you know the audibility of people around you talking. It'll adjust your tv, it'll adjust your music and it'll adjust reality around you so that you can hear better. And this is just a software update. It's kind of amazing, like just a software update for the existing. Now they're going to be new airpods pro next year, mark erman says, and who knows what they'll do x-ray specs, I don't know, but these are just getting a free software update to make them into hearing aids the ones you may already own, not the AirPods Max, which I want to talk about. Airpods Max that's weird, but AirPods Pro the product that didn't get an update actually got, I think, one of the most amazing updates of all the announcements.

1:29:14 - Shelly Brisbin
It's the most underreported story of the entire day, based not only on what I think, but on my sample size of one, when I went to my editor this morning and she said, hey, tell me about that Apple event. And I told her a bunch of things and she said, wait, airpods can be hearing aids now. And I think that sentiment is probably going to be pretty resonant in the mainstream. Whether people are owners of AirPods or not.

There are a lot of people that are saying that an AirPod user would feel a lot less stigma than somebody who doesn't want to have a hearing aid, because I know from people I'm around in my life hearing aids are not something that you want to wear and that be seen to be wearing, and the fact that there's a hearing test that sort of gives you some idea of whether you need some kind of hearing correction.

I mean, that's a huge deal and I don't know I don't remember whether Mark or the rumors in general led us to expect this in any way or not, but I just feel like it's such a surprising and underreported story and as hearing aids 249 for AirPod Pro becomes an incredible value, because even in the over-the-counter era, most devices that call themselves hearing aids. 249 for AirPod Pro becomes an incredible value because even in the over-the-counter era, most devices that call themselves hearing aids and a lot of people that make headphones, like Sony and Sennheiser, make over-the-counter hearing aids that still sell for over $1,000, and they're sophisticated and they're customized to be hearing aids. I don't know what the testing procedures for those devices are, but at 24249, airpods Pro are an amazing value as hearing aids. They are potentially destigmatizing for a lot of people. They potentially get a lot of people to take a hearing test that wouldn't otherwise take it. I think it's awesome.

1:30:52 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, $250, that's what the doctor visit might cost if you're going to a cheap doctor. I mean, you're absolutely right. The idea of people who are aware of hearing loss or have partners in life who are aware of their hearing loss, even if the person is not the idea of, well, you're going to get new wireless earbuds anyway, why don't we get these? Why don't we take this test, see if it improves anything? And that's just such a huge, huge thing I love it Again.

1:31:26 - Mikah Sargent
This is the democratization of healthcare access that I think is so important as costs continue to climb and that look so much of medicine in the United States in particular is gatekeeping through and through, and you have to pass this test and that test and convince this doctor and that doctor and you really have to advocate for yourself and I see people that I care about all the time trying to get basic medical care and they're not listened to and they're not believed and it results in all these issues and this just stinking swerves the whole gatekeeping situation, because it's not. This is not one of those things where you know it'd be different if it was the blood sugar monitor that people are talking about and then, because your Apple Watch tells you that you are a diabetic, then you can order insulin from Apple and start taking it. That, of course, is not you know Apple insulin, not great Ecosystem play. Wow, yeah, ai Apple insulin, exactly.

But the idea that something that is not going to cause you harm and will help, like this, I think is awesome. That it's just let's just swerve the whole gatekeeping system. You spend two hundred fifty dollars and you, even if you don't pass the tests, of needing the full suite of what a hearing aid could provide, but it just simply makes things a little bit easier to hear around you. That's great. I love that.

1:33:08 - Jason Snell
Yeah, it's a gentle, like a little gentle progression because, yeah, people that was the stat that blew me away is that not only do 70% of people like not have hearing tests in the last five years, but 80%, 75%, something like that, of the people diagnosed with hearing loss are not treated. And that's not just about access. That's also about people not wanting to admit that they've lost their hearing or that they're getting old or anything like that, or the stigma of wearing hearing aids or the price of hearing aids. There are a lot of things that go into that and the idea and I've heard people say, well, yeah, but I ignore people who've got their airpods in because I think they're not listening to me and it's like I. There are cultural things that we're all gonna have to get over, although I would say you know people have been. There are lots, including younger generations of people. We got transparency mode.

People pause their airpods and leave them in all the time. But, like, wearing airpods does not have the same kind of stigma, and it may be be that you know you get glasses and you only wear them situationally for a while and eventually you wear them all the time. Maybe it will be like that where you'll realize, oh, I'm in a loud environment and I can't hear this person clearly, so I'm going to put my AirPods in and it's not as big a deal and maybe over time that changes. It's not going to replace. We're not saying like ohods are going to replace all hearing aids, right, I'm sure there are hearing aids that do a great job, that last a long time, that are better, a better fit, but like it's a little like the, your iPhone being the camera you have with you.

And that's the most important thing having airpods and having a context where you can pop them in and not feel like your life is changing dramatically just because you've entered a new little airpod mode. Yeah, that makes you be able to hear better. That is powerful and, and you know, I again I'm not saying we should construct the stained glass window for tim cook or anything like that, but I am saying this is a place where apple's using his tech in ways that could actually make people's lives better and leveraging their power in an industry in this case their wireless headphone tech to do some things that could improve people's lives. It's very exciting.

1:35:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Unlike when they talk about privacy, when they talk about health as one of their missions and one of their commitments. That's no lie, there's no shade, there's no marketing about that. I mean, it helps them out a lot. But, yeah, it's hard to argue that they're doing things they don't necessarily have to do. They're not monetizing it the way that other people are trying to monetize this sort of stuff and they are making their customers' lives materially better.

And as we see, new technologies come about, the idea of just having cameras inside your glasses. Think about how the technology that Google uses to add captions to YouTube videos. A few years ago they added a new system where they will try to detect who in the video is actually speaking and then use the mouth shapes that they're making to say okay, let's enhance whatever part of the audio seems to be, that voice, the ability, the idea of one day having that technology, not necessarily in the glasses themselves, but through the glasses and the computing power of the phone. And coming back, the fact that I'm looking at you, Shelly, means that in a crowded room it's trying to. It knows. Okay, Andy is making eye contact with Shelly. He seems to be having a conversation with Shelley. I'm going to enhance his audio, but I'm also going to especially enhance Shelley's audio and make sure that that's the prime focus of his hearing.

1:36:34 - Shelly Brisbin
That sort of stuff is still possible. As I say all the time, the existence of this technology doesn't mean it's always great. I mean Google captions has, or YouTube captions has been called craptions for a reason. They've improved, but there are a lot of people, especially deaf and hard of hearing people that I know, who do not have a lot of respect for them, and that was not to ding you, andy.

The point I'm making is the existing existence of that technology is great, but we always owe it to ourselves and I say this all the time when I talk about accessibility to evaluate how well that technology has been implemented. The good news for Apple is that their track record when they do something like this is very, very good, and so I have. Obviously, you want people to test the AirPods as hearing aids and test the hearing tests, and you want people to express their opinions and write reviews and evaluate it. However, is medically ethical to do so, but Apple's reputation gives it a lot of grace in terms of the likelihood that these features will be implemented in a way that's very effective for a lot of people and yes, by the way, they're going to sell a bunch of AirPods and Apple Watches, and they have the right to do that.

1:37:42 - Andy Ihnatko
That's fine too, yeah, and let's not forget that they also have a two-week no questions asked return policy. So the idea of people just buying AirPods see if it helps. If it doesn't help in a week and a half, okay, let's go back to the mall, get our money back. That's pretty damn good.

1:37:56 - Jason Snell
I love the idea too, just that people have these and they'll run the test and like, if you've already got airpods pro 2, like you could just do this and see what happens, and that that may change people's lives too, just in realizing oh my god, I had no idea. My son and I were talking about this last night, about his uh. I remember when he got glasses for the first time and it brought back memories of when I got glasses for the first time and how we were talking about the resistance to assist devices right, which is a real thing, including people not like you know. Grandpa didn't want to get hearing aids, which we were talking about, and I resisted wearing glasses for a long time. Because you're a teenager and it's not a thing you want to, you want to do, and I would literally, in my high school chemistry class, asked to ask to walk up to the front of the class and into the corner to look up at the periodic table, because I couldn't read it from across and I would rather visibly do that in class than wear glasses. And then there's that moment, that moment that my son and I were sharing, where you put on your glasses for the first time and you realize, oh, those trees aren't just green blobs. Now you can see individual leaves and the shadow cast by each individual leaf on the leaves below it. And I said the leaves, and my son went the leaves right, because both of us had had that experience.

I wonder what kind of experiences people who just maybe even random people with AirPods now will do when they do this and they realize how much they've maybe been missing because they didn't want to think about having hearing loss. It could be again. Yes, there'll be an inspirational apple video that we'll all have to sit through, but it is. It is like apple's not a charity. They make a lot of money, they do a lot of stuff. They're in a lot of lawsuits, like, but it's a bet. Let's take a balance view. This is a case where there's a tech giant that's trying to build some features that make people's lives better too, and, yeah, they're going to buy AirPods and that's great for them. Jason, can I mention really?

1:39:45 - Shelly Brisbin
quickly speaking of inspirational videos, which I almost never do. Apple had a video at the beginning of the event yesterday and it was one of those. People are dancing around and they're using their Apple Watch and they're using their phone and they're doing all the things that you do and there's a little story. Several people in that video happened to have disabilities. It wasn't about the disabilities, it wasn't about now. We're going to inspire you with our stories of having and I love that Apple has evolved and grown in terms of the way that kind of content.

They're obviously featuring their products. They showed double tap on the watch. They showed live captions. They clearly showed people with disabilities using those devices, but they were integrated into a video so that I as a viewer, even if I'm not paying attention to there are at least three of them. I lost count. Honestly, there are three, and then I was like wait, there's another one. I can't count. And so I as a viewer, even if I'm not paying attention to something like accessibility or health focus or whatever that thing is that we're supposed to be inspired by, it's normalized for me, and that took Apple and it has taken all of us who cover this stuff and have to address health and accessibility and all those things that can make us uncomfortable. If it's turned into inspiring videos, it's Apple has evolved and grown in the way they present that and I just want to give them a little credit for that.

1:41:04 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, and also notice, when you watch back again the demos of the camera features for the 16, the 16 Pro, you notice that there is a real diversity of skin tones there.

And that's not and it's not just because, oh well, representation matters it does matter.

But there has been a long historical bias to the days of film, where imaging technology is biased to make sure that white skin looks great.

If you don't have white skin, good luck. And so both Google and Apple have been doing a lot of work to make sure that they're throwing out old models and making sure that new models are actually able to capture anybody, and so it's not an accident that there is such a range of skin tone in these sample pictures, even though the days when they would actually have to, both Apple and Google would have to point out that, okay, well, we have this new imaging model that tries to have natural skin tones no matter who's being photographed. But it's still important enough that we are going to make sure that every single person that we photograph in these sample videos is going to be represented. Everybody who's a potential consumer of this device will see themselves represented, so that they know that this camera will take good pictures of myself and my family Absolutely AirPods see themselves represented, so that they know that this camera will take good pictures of myself and my family.

1:42:25 - Jason Snell
Absolutely um airpods that did get announced, by the way, we talked a lot about airpods that already exist, but a big software update. I want to mention airpods 4 were announced, and what's interesting about this is there are two of them there's only one product products in it it's kind of wild.

So there's airpods 4 for 129, actually kind of.

You know, nice looks good.

And when you talk about um diversity in the range of human experience in the world, this is another example where you know the fact is early airpods the people said were uncomfortable in their ears.

Apple was basing the comfort fit on those airpods on a very small sample probably.

People at apple and what they've done progressively over the years is use larger and larger measurement groups of ears, because everybody's ears are different and ears in particular parts of the world and different groups are also shaped, tend to be shaped differently, and it turns out that there turns out there was a bias toward the ear shapes of the people who are working on AirPods at Apple and people working on headphones in general, and that's one of the reasons they didn't fit as well. Now I'm not guaranteeing that AirPods four are going to fit your ears after the previous generations didn't. But I am going to say Apple seems to have invested a lot of time and effort in trying to come up with a design that is comfortable for the largest number of people, not just in Silicon Valley but in the entire world, and that's exciting. It's also that that fit is important because the more expensive AirPods for that do noise cancellation, the better a fit in your ear. Also, the better the noise cancellation is going to be.

1:44:04 - Andy Ihnatko
And we should also point out that this is part of the pernicious nature of bias, because, apple, when they were designing the fit of those ear of the first air pods, they were not trying to be exclusionary, they were not trying to say, hey, these are for a certain demographic, a certain cultural demographic. However, they were testing it with their own internal people, and their people tend to be white dudes and maybe even white dudes of a certain age, and so the diversity of the company has a limitation on the diversity of the products that are manufactured by the company, unless they are 150% aware of that kind of a problem.

1:44:48 - Jason Snell
And Apple sells products all over the world, right, it is incumbent on them. They need their products, right? Imagine the embarrassment, actually, when you just discover why did our headphones? I don't have any information about this, I'm just saying saying it would not surprise me if they're like why do the airpods not catch on in certain parts of the world? And the answer is well, in those parts of the world, most of the people complain that they don't fit. It's like oh, why is that? It's because you didn't design them, right, you know like. You designed them for california and not necessarily for the rest of the world, and so they've done. I, I taught you know.

It was in the video too. They talked about it like they are doing more to get more data points on. On sizing, they've got these two different models now, including noise canceling. For a pretty again shelly, talking about that mid-range feel you can get a pair of regular airpods that not the cheapest ones, but the other ones that have the same name that uh will do noise canceling, which is canceling for 179 throw it in there.

50 more. What, what a deal. But um case they look the same.

1:45:51 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like yeah it's.

1:45:52 - Jason Snell
It's a little weird. It's a little weird. I mean we didn't even mention we, we showed it on the video earlier. The airpods max got a the biggest non-update ever the price is the same.

They changed the case from us or the uh the port on it from lightning to usbc and they offered some different colors, but it still got the old audio processing chip in it. It doesn't have any of the newly introduced in the last year or two audio processing modes it it's. You know, I know people who like that headphone, they wear it and they enjoy it, but the fact that they're still charging a very high premium for something that apparently Apple doesn't want to put the effort into upgrading at all is a real downer, and I've definitely heard from friends who've said they're going to find a new pair of headphones because Apple seems to not care.

1:46:41 - Andy Ihnatko
It's because apple knows they got it right the first time you can't improve on perfection unless you get airpods pro.

1:46:48 - Jason Snell
Yeah, true. Well, unless yeah, yeah that you can't improve on that chip that's in the airpods max other than the chip that's in all the other airpods.

1:46:54 - Mikah Sargent
Now is one thing that I forgot. I know we're on on AirPods, but it just came up because I'm trying to look through the accessories to see any fun new stuff, any conversation about fine woven, because this is the time when new fine woven accessories would have been announced.

1:47:11 - Andy Ihnatko
And the only thing I've seen is a Kate wallet. The fine woven case est mort.

1:47:16 - Shelly Brisbin
It is no longer it's a dead parent.

1:47:17 - Mikah Sargent
It's an ex-case. It's an ex-case.

1:47:19 - Andy Ihnatko
It's an ex-case.

1:47:20 - Mikah Sargent
Did anyone ask, though, what happened there? They're not talking about it.

1:47:24 - Andy Ihnatko
Apple spent 10 minutes during the keynote saying, boy did we screw things up. Here's all the mistakes we made. We own this mistake. Oh, I missed that part, andy. I missed that part.

1:47:35 - Mikah Sargent
But see there's a new AirTag, fine woven key ring, for example and a new iPhone fine woven wallet color.

1:47:44 - Jason Snell
So there are still a few fine woven cases.

1:47:47 - Shelly Brisbin
Yeah. Well, it's interesting because I believe it was on the watch.

They said various configurations could be made carbon neutral, which I assume means that as you go in and configure it based on what band you choose, carbon neutral assume means that as you go in and configure it based on what band you choose carbon neutral and I'm kind of intrigued by that because I assume those I haven't been there to configure one, but I assume that those are not fine woven bands and so they're still threading a needle. I think the thing about fine woven is it gave them the ability to make more things carbon neutral without your having to do a lot of configuration magic, and now you have to pick just the right combination to get to carbon neutrality, which has to be really frustrating for Apple, because that's not where they wanted to be right now.

1:48:25 - Andy Ihnatko
It's also something that you can't expect them to get into this, but it's a question that's very much on my mind. If they're going to continue to talk about their environmental initiatives and their progress towards certain goals, are they going to be now, when they talk about Apple intelligence, talking about? Here is the energy consumption, here is the water consumption that we Because they're hiring out to Google to do a lot of the heavy lifting using their cloud compute for a lot of the training and they've already had to say okay. In their last big report, they said we are going to have to adjust our goals and change our tactics because this is really costing us and affecting our ability to make these things. So I would love to see if they put some, as they're publishing these white papers, that those of us who are interested in their AI technology can find it'd be nice if they had something saying here's the energy consumption of training this model. Here's how we're trying to offset that and still maintain our goals for being a green company.

1:49:29 - Jason Snell
I believe they said in this video which I don't think they said at the WWDC video that the private cloud compute is in Apple's data centers, using Apple's green power and it's entirely renewable power, because that was a question people had was like, well, what about your data centers? How about that? And they're like, no, no, all of that, but that's the execution, not the model training. So, yeah, there's more of a story, as they had for their 2030 carbon neutrality.

But, yeah, it seems like the fine woven cases were the ones that were really the most negatively received, not so much the watch bands or the wallets, but those cases. And my wife had a fine woven case and it got destroyed so quickly and she previously had had leather cases that were fine, to the point where I bought her a leather case and the fine woven is gone Right, like get it out of here because it just was so awful that were fine, to the point where I bought her a leather case and the fine woven is gone right, like get it out of here because it just was so awful.

1:50:24 - Andy Ihnatko
And I think, partially, it's just that it was bad at dealing with getting beat up and it yeah, that was so surprising because even just a week or two after they were first released, people were taking pictures inside the apple store of. Here is what the ones that are on display look like after just a couple of weeks of being exposed to the public, and that's. It seems like I don't know. It seems like something that would have been caught like very early on in the process.

1:50:49 - Jason Snell
Even if people, even as people are just handling prototypes and, you know, putting them on phones in labs, you'd think they would find that I have a theory that there was a director from on high that said you got to get rid of leather and they had to figure out what to do and they made this call and it was a bad one, but they stuck with it and I think they probably knew it was a bad idea at the time and they just they shipped it and now you know, and they felt they needed to fit something in that leather slot and for this time like that's how well it went is there's just nothing in that slot. Now, yeah, that's forget it's clear case or it's silicone case or forget about it. And I think that's super, super telling you are watching and listening or however you consume this brain vibing MacBreak Weekly. The vibes are strong jason snell with andy and not co who is vibing. Shelly Brisbin is brainwaving us and Mikah Sargent is doing a whole cool brain mind meld right now.

1:51:49 - Mikah Sargent
It is carbon neutral? Yes, it is.

1:51:51 - Jason Snell
We are not expending Well I don't know, there may be some carbon being generated, some methane being generated. If I hold my breath, let's talk about OS details. I think that's something that I left behind that I want to mention um. Next monday, September 16th, big day, all the os's are shipping ios 18, ipad, os 18, watch os 18 is that 18? Now tv os update is coming out. Vision os up 2 is coming out next monday. So basically, monday, about about 10 Pacific is usually when they flip the switch, unless something goes horribly wrong, everybody's updates are going, even if you're not on a beta. You're just going to get the update and say, hey here, new iOS versions are coming right at you, macos Sequoia included. So get ready. And then we also got a little bit of detail iOS 18.1, which contains, contains apple intelligence. Apple has now said will ship in october. I love.

Let me give you a little sense of the layer cake, of what a beta might be to apple. There's the developer beta. Developer beta is the thing you have to especially install and it's supposed to be scary because it's like oh no, only developers can use it. It's scary, anybody can actually use it, but only developers should use it. Because it's supposed to be scary, because it's like oh no, only developers can use it. It's scary. Anybody can actually use it, but only developers should use it, because it's super scary. Then there's the public beta.

How does the public beta differ from the developer beta? Well, I mean, usually it's like they let the developers use the developer beta for a week and if nobody's computers explode, then it's the public beta. All right, and you get that for the summer. But what's going to happen now? So 18.0 is going to ship on Monday Great, is that a beta? No, it's a final. It's a final, but it has no Apple intelligence in it. 18.1 is going to ship in October they said that on Monday Great, what's going to be? Is it a beta? No, it will be 18.1. It will be in 18.1. Final is apple intelligence beta. So, uh, it's gonna ship. Good luck, but they're gonna call it beta.

And then you know, silicon valley has a long tradition of this. I believe gmail was in beta for like more than a decade. Well, more than a decade. I keep, I keep saying there ought to be a rule like after a while, while if you're still in beta, you have to start saying you're in gamma, okay, we're going to. We're going to step you through every letter of the Greek alphabet if you have to, but anyway, so it will be out, it will be in beta, but it will go to everybody who's got an Apple intelligence compatible device and they will be able to enable Apple intelligence. So sometime in October if you buy a shiny new iPhone, they're going to. All this stuff's going to ship or be picked up in in a in store on the 20th, but before that that's a Friday. Next week. On the Monday the OS updates will push out to everybody else, not with Apple intelligence. It'll come later in a final OS as a beta, just to make things perfectly clear.

1:54:44 - Shelly Brisbin
Is everybody clear?

1:54:45 - Andy Ihnatko
now, here you go Remember that when you see the beta in this context. Have you ever played chess with somebody who moves the piece but keeps their finger on it and says I haven't gone yet?

1:54:58 - Shelly Brisbin
Wait a minute, I haven't gone yet. I can take that back.

1:55:04 - Andy Ihnatko
That's pretty much what we're talking about. I'm not going to kid Apple too much about this, because I think every AI feature, once it leaves the corporate campus, it's not done being tested until you have millions and millions and millions of monkeys hammering on it. And that's when you find out that, oh, every time you ask for a picture of a chocolate cake, you get pornography. We didn't see that one coming. Okay, let's roll that back. We're going to roll that back.

Yeah, adjust our parameters a little bit. So, yeah, it's going to be a ride over the next several months and it's so long as people know that there is. They see that big beta slug on there saying that don't really rely on this when you take out the camera and you take a picture. Rely on that happening. We got that on lock. When it comes down to a generative AI edit to remove something in the background, maybe it'll remove the garbage can. Maybe it will put a picture of Paul Lind in its place. You might like Paul Lind instead of the garbage can. We really don't know what we're doing.

1:56:10 - Shelly Brisbin
It's the secret square, it's the center square, at the very least.

1:56:14 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, absolutely Saying something saucy, no doubt, I think calling it beta.

1:56:17 - Jason Snell
yes, the beta says we're still figuring this out. Which? They very clearly are, as are we all at this point, really, really, yeah. So okay, in next month. If you want to try out Apple intelligence and you've been afraid of the betas I mean of those betas, the developer betas it's okay. There will be a beta living in your phone that you can turn on and try it out in October.

1:56:40 - Mikah Sargent
Oh God, it's alive in my phone. The beta was coming from inside the phone.

1:56:45 - Shelly Brisbin
Honestly, I think that's going to be the scariest part, because all this time we've been waiting around. As I say, the market watchers and the pundits have been waiting around for Apple intelligence and tutting about how behind Apple is. But once Apple intelligence is out on people's phones and they have a chance to break things with it, I think that's when the fires are really going to be going on in Cupertino.

1:57:06 - Andy Ihnatko
Yeah, yeah, I think it'll be a lot of like.

It's always fun, as like industry observers who happen to also be Apple fans to see, like all of the hand-wringing and all of the hot takes about oh, look at that big camera bump on this Samsung phone and this Pixel phone.

Apple would never do it. They have taste until Apple does the camera bump, in which case, oh no, they did it right, they did it the right way, and so I think we're going to see a lot of people hoping that you didn't see the blog post or the social media post a year and a half ago about, you know, google releasing artificial intelligence when it's just not ready. It just goes to show the irresponsibility of this company not caring about the user experience when it's really about look, we have to put it out at some point. We have to if it's going to actually be built into useful things. We need to get people using it. That's why we're calling it a Google Labs feature and not actually rolling it out into anything. Yet Apple's going to have to eat the same cold cream of mushroom soup for a few months or a couple of years until they get it right, but they will get it right.

1:58:14 - Jason Snell
Speaking of Apple cutting some corners another story not related to Apple's event. Perhaps even Apple wanted to get everybody think positively that 13 billion Ireland, that Ireland has been really good at being a tax haven. But in this case the EU said this was not right. You and Ireland essentially conspired to create a tax evasion scheme between Apple and Ireland, and Ireland, for its part, said no, no, no, we don't. We were happy with it. We don't need 13 billion euros.

And the eu said, yes, you do, because apple deserves to pay it and so you are not a tax haven. You have to take the money. Well, good news ireland, you're going to get 13 billion euros, uh, from apple in back taxes. So don't let anybody tell you that it's a fine. Don't let the eu say, oh, we find it's not a fine, it is tax that apple is judged to have owed the, the republic of ireland, even though ireland uh said they didn't want it. The eu said no, no, no, no. That's not how it works. That's not fair in terms of taxing practices within the eu.

1:59:40 - Shelly Brisbin
Maybe they could just give an iPhone to everyone in the. Republic of Ireland, you know.

1:59:45 - Andy Ihnatko
I was actually reading in Irish newspapers that they're saying it's $13 billion, that in order to appeal the verdict, apple had to put it in escrow and it's going to take a few months for them to get that check and already they're basically having a discussion saying this is not like recurring income, so we can't like hire new teachers with it, so they're thinking about things like building infrastructure with it. But yeah, it was a situation where, like the classic thing that doesn't smell quite right, where okay, so Apple, you're saying that this division that is headquartered in Ireland qualifies for the super, super low tax rate, did an astronomical amount of business, even though you're basically a post office box above a shawarma restaurant. We think that maybe this is just a deal that you and Ireland came up with to basically have an economically mutually advantageous arrangement. And that's why you said, well, look, you can't, ireland, you can't just basically cheat your way into getting like Apple's business or any other company's business by giving them like a tax rate that you would never offer to anybody else.

And it did go. This was declared something like eight years ago, seven years ago, and so it just took this long for it to make it through the very last appeal. So Apple's statement is well, we're disappointed, of course, but we want to make a point out that we paid all the taxes that we were required to pay. We don't evade taxes, we just create situations. We don't evade taxes, we just create situations, we just avoid them when possible.

2:01:24 - Shelly Brisbin
Think how much interest Apple gets to keep from that escrow academy. $13 billion or seven or eight years, that's got to be worth a couple iPhones right there.

2:01:31 - Andy Ihnatko
That's a free toaster, not bad.

2:01:33 - Jason Snell
Well, congratulations to Ireland. Also, another story before we wrap up, I wanted to mention Ming-Chi Kuo knowledge. Before we wrap up, I wanted to mention Ming-Chi Kuo knowledge about the supply chain. He's making us ask the question is this the last big iPhone release to only feature Qualcomm modems? And the reason for this is it sounds like the iPhone SE that is to be released in the first quarter of next year may use Apple's in-house modem technology, their 5G technology that they bought from Intel and have been developing for tested around the world, and that the cellular networks around the world are all different and they have quirks. And Qualcomm has learned the hard way to create kind of a monopoly, but the hard way to build it, because it's hard to build modem chips and to get them to work reliably everywhere and Apple has learned how hard it was. After Intel learned and said anybody want this Apple here, take our modem business, we don't want it anymore.

2:02:44 - Andy Ihnatko
It's like being having an being the antitrust King of like re roofing it with asphalt. It's like nobody wants to be in that business. If you want to put in the 10 years of burned hands and and and and asphyxiation to do that, that's kind of like what it's like to build a modem chip that will actually work internationally. I think Qualcomm has also said previously that well, go ahead, build your own modem chip. It's probably going to be based on our patents.

2:03:12 - Shelly Brisbin
What could possibly go wrong. Just imagine the delight that SE fans will have when the SE4 finally comes out and they get the experimental technology first.

2:03:22 - Jason Snell
No, it's a gamble by Apple, although it sounds like Apple has been testing and testing, and testing and this is according to Ming-Chi Kuo they've reached the point now where they actually feel confident that this is going to work. There are undoubtedly going to be quirks, which is probably one of the reasons why it is not in the main iPhone line but in the iPhone SE to start, and then we'll go from there. There's also talk that it may be the one that's in the slim phone next fall, if that phone does exist. And, yeah, it's unclear what Apple will owe Qualcomm, because Qualcomm does have patents. Now patents expire and Qualcomm doesn't give their chips away for free or give their patents away for free with chip purchase.

So part of this is about Apple saving money. Part of this is about apple saving money. Part of this is about apple controlling its destiny and feeling like there isn't a single chip supplier that they are forced to deal with and they have a fractious relationship with qualcomm and lots of lawsuits and things like that. So interesting to see. But yes, let's put a note here, because I would lay odds that when these, these phones ship, we will get some weird reports about quirks in the modems that apple will have to figure out, because it's going to happen like, in the end, even if you test and test and test, you will eventually have to deploy worldwide and discover the lesson that qualcomm learned in 2017 and and although, to be fair, one thing that apple done, I believe this mode of business is in San Diego.

So a lot of the people who work there worked at Qualcomm in San Diego and now work for Intel and then work for Apple. So there is some knowledge that transfers and there's no non-competes in California. You can do that, which is good. It's one of the great things about California. Before we go, I have one other item, which is there was a really nice story on was it 9to5Mac? About the locations used in the event yesterday?

Yes, and it was Cult of Mac did it Good? Full credit to Cult of Mac. I noticed it. But they went and detailed all the different places because it was a San Francisco themed event. They showed off all of the beautiful places that are in San Francisco and there's Golden Gate Bridge and Coit Tower and there was stuff in Golden Gate Park, chrissy Field, all over the place, beautiful settings. I did wonder how they some of those outdoor settings, like with Craig Federighi at the Palace of Fine Arts, like how what phalanx of guards was keeping people far enough away that you couldn't hear what he was saying.

And were they using some video tricks where, like, he was actually not there or he was there but the background was frozen in a way so that you didn't see lots of people back there? I don't know that part of it, but it looked beautiful, looked beautiful. And as somebody who resides in this area, I will just say I think the conversations that are often thrown out about what a hellhole San Francisco is back watching all the people walking down the embarcadero and going into shops and going into restaurants and hanging out, uh, at fisherman's wharf and going to the exploratorium and throwing balls around at chrissy field and playing on the tunnel tops parks, and all I'll say is, if you want to believe the in the san francisco doom loop, go ahead. It's a beautiful place. A lot of great people live here. A lot of great tourism people come here.

It is not without its issues Having the main shopping drag right next to the tenderloin, not ideal. That's just how it is. But I'm going to say it. I really love that Apple showed off the beauty of the city of San Francisco, a place that's near and dear to my heart, and every time I'm in San Francisco I think part of me, part of me thinks yeah, if you're terrified to come to San Francisco, stay away. Stay away, because we'll just be here enjoying how amazing it is without you then.

2:07:13 - Mikah Sargent
So yeah, I actually I got a little tear. I'll be honest, I got a little teary eyed watching it because of leaving. Coit Tower is one of my. I'm going to get teary-eyed again. It's one of my favorite places in all of San Francisco and every time someone came to visit I would always take them there, and so that place really means a lot to me, and so seeing them there was really cool, but it was also a little hard because, yeah, I'm not there anymore, so I was really touched as well by that. And then also, yeah, the Palace of Fine Arts as well was cool to see. So really cool, really cool.

2:07:47 - Shelly Brisbin
I have to third that as a former Bay Area resident and for me it's always the Golden Gate, because I took my sister and brother-in-law running across the Golden Gate Bridge and it's one of my best memories of living in the Bay Area- yeah, I haven't been.

2:08:00 - Andy Ihnatko
I used to be in San Francisco twice, sometimes three times a year. I haven't been since COVID and yeah, that video of maybe what? Oh, we should go back, even if we don't even need to have a reason. We should just go back and check out things that we like to see there. Yeah, I agree with you, in Coit Tower, the first time I went there, I still have a crummy digital camera picture of the view. It happened to be sunset and it's like my God and the weirdness of this, what is it? It's a giant firefighting nozzle.

Yeah, sure, and it's named after a female mascot.

2:08:39 - Jason Snell
It's like, oh, it's a fire nozzle's a. It's a fire nozzle or or not, but yes anyway, it is, it is a uh it's a beautiful city.

Uh, a lot of people try to run it down um and the the narrative of uh there being I mean, they're like again covid, and especially in a tech market. A lot of people did work from home. The downtown is still recovering, but San Francisco is more than just the financial district and Union Square and the Tenderloin and it is a vibrant place and if you go out to 19th Avenue and you go into Stonestown on a Friday night it is packed with young people eating at the restaurants and shopping in the shops and like it's just. I'm glad Apple took the time to show some of the natural beauty of San Francisco. Before we go really quickly, some picks of the week from those who have them. I, as host, have chosen not to. I choose this as my discretion, but I see that at the very least, Andy and Mikah have picks of the week. Andy, why don't we start with you?

2:09:37 - Andy Ihnatko
If your lifestyle or your job involves keeping on top of all kinds of different news sites and all kinds of different research sites everything all over the Internet you probably have some sort of a feed reader, and if you're a Mac person, it might be an app called Reader, because it's one of the oldest, most best established, most feature rich ones out there. Very, very recently, I think last week, the developers of Reader decided to take it in a brand new direction. So if you are a fan of the old Reader decided to take it in a brand new direction. So if you are a fan of the old Reader app, it's still there. He's still going to upgrade it and support it, but they've created a brand new version called Reader. I don't know why they're saying the same.

2:10:12 - Shelly Brisbin
It's like AirPods, exactly.

2:10:16 - Andy Ihnatko
And it's interesting. One thing I definitely like about it is that it is subscription-based, so that it will be paying people in order to actually keep it maintained and keep it supported. Only a buck a month or 10 bucks a year. It does address something that was getting in my way with the Reader Classic app. If there's a website you want to follow, whatever news posting you there, take the url, paste it in and subscribe it. If there's the rss feed, it'll, it'll find it and it will add it to the thing. But that means that, like now, I will see like six colors, like oh, I've got 113 unread articles, and then you update and you have to wait for it to update, update, update, update. Reader is more like a web browser where your interface is your list of subscribed feeds and subscribed sites. So it's a lot more direct, it's a lot more dynamic, it's a lot simpler.

They've also changed things by adding specific types of places on the internet that you can sort of follow. So, for instance, I start every morning by going on to two different commercial comic strip sites and reading comic strips while I have my breakfast. They have actual sections. So if you are subscribing to Comics Kingdom or I can't remember the other one, but the other big one. You can just simply type in classic peanuts and now it will give you an updated classic peanuts every single time that you actually revisit it. It has a section for podcasts, has a section for subreddits, a section for YouTube channels. It's still brand new. He's still evolving it. At this point it can't do simple things like organize things into folders, like on my classic reader. Obviously, for all of my Mac news, all my Google news, all my science news, it's all in different folders. So I can just click on this one thing and have this massive scroll of what's been updated in the past day, day and a half. So it's not quite as useful as that might have been earlier. Again, that's why he's keeping the old one, but I was definitely willing to sign up for it, definitely willing to give him $10 for the year to see where he takes it. I'm kind of using it.

Alongside, I took the opportunity to revisit an app that I used to use before Reader called Net Newswire, which is open source and free. You can go to netnewswirecom. It's more of a classic approach to that sort of thing. It is the left-hand column of things you subscribe to and unread counts in a little pillbox next to it. Then you click on things and it'll drill into that thing. It's free, it works great. Both of these apps are available for both desktop and your phone. Definitely worth checking out.

The thing is, the problem with these. I think that the new version of Reader all I will say is that it does seem to address one of the problems that I was having, which is that I've got so many sites and sources subscribed that sometimes I just can't read them all. I can't keep up. It seems intimidating to try to keep up with it. This seems like a cleaner interface. It's not because I have fewer things subscribed. I actually was able to just export an OPML file of all my old reader subscriptions and import them right in. It's the exact same quantity. Definitely worth checking out Again. If it helps you find more things, even if it's just more comic strips to read on the internet, it's probably worth a buck a month all right very nice very

2:13:50 - Mikah Sargent
nice very nice Mikah yes for moi.

Um, I found something that seems to be brand new in the Apple store as I was looking through some different notes, and it is an item called the Belkin AirPods Cleaning Kit, which I immediately said at $13,. I absolutely have to order this and see how well it works. It appears to come with two different cleaning solutions as well as a let's see it says a cleaning brush, cleaning liquid, deionized water, a microfiber cloth and how-to instructions, so I placed an order for this. It won't come until October, so I can't tell you exactly how good it is or how bad it is.

I have purchased some different cleaning kits in the past that are made for hearing aids first and foremost, but have been pretty good to clean AirPods as well, and then it has kind of like a long microfiber brush that you can stick down inside of the charging area. I am pretty routine about keeping my AirPods clean, and I'll even give them a nice UV blast from time to time just to keep the bad germies off. So I'm very much looking forward to this AirPods cleaning kit, seeing what it offers and what you know Belkin specifically says you should do to clean your AirPods. So I'll report back whenever I get this and let everybody know how it went.

2:15:19 - Andy Ihnatko
I don't want to send a chill of fear through your spine right now, Mikah. I just want to ask are you prepared to see what it cleans out? Are you prepared to look at that swab and say this was I'd be inserting in my ear over and over again for the past month?

2:15:37 - Mikah Sargent
I will prepare myself for that. Should be fun. Should be that, should be fun.

2:15:42 - Jason Snell
Should be fun. Should be fun Jelly. You don't have to have a pick. I do have a pick, actually, If there's something you'd like to plug.

2:15:47 - Shelly Brisbin
Plug away, yes, please. I will give you a pick. It is not something that you can or have to buy. It is a reincarnated website called applevis.com. applevis.com, it is a site for Apple fans who are visually impaired or blind. It's been around for 14 years. It's run entirely by a team of volunteers, and that volunteer team was getting tired and was about to call it a day and announced in fact, AppleVis is going away this summer.

Well, that site has been rescued by a company called Be my Eyes. Be my Eyes makes AI-based assistive technology also for blind and visually impaired folks. Using your iOS device, using your device's camera, it can identify and interpret things for you in your environment, and that's really helpful if you're blind or visually impaired. What the heck is that thing? How should I interpret it? How should I act on it? How should I navigate? How should I cook this thing? What are the instructions? Anyway, that's what Be my Eyes does. So Be my Eyes provided some funding to Apple Viz, and so the people who were running it before David Goodwin is the founder, and there are six or seven staffers on a volunteer basis who have been maintaining this site, which is a combination of a blog and a forum and an app directory and a community resource, basically for anybody who's blind or visually impaired, who likes any Apple platform, and the site came back to life yesterday, as promised in conjunction with the Apple iPhone event, and one of the things that they do during product season, during iPhone season, is not only do they give you an overview of what was announced and what it means for people with blindness and visual impairments, but they go really, really deep into the accessibility, features and updates and changes and also the bugs. So if there are bugs that were introduced in any of the betas or in any of the shipping versions of the OSs, those are also referenced on AppleVis.

It's an invaluable resource for people who just got their first iPhone or Mac or Apple Watch and need to know how to use it. I mean, I like to think there's a book that some of them might be reading as well, that I happen to have written and you know they're friendly with me and I'm friendly with them. But it's a great resource, especially for people who are brand new. All of a sudden, you get an iPhone. This thing is accessible. Why don't you use it? But I don't know how to use voiceover or any of the other accessibility features, and Apple Viz will help you learn, and it's great to have the resource back in the community. It have some financial support. They hired a couple of the people who are running it to actually do so on a paying basis, so it looks like the site is back. The community is very excited for it. There's already a very active forum and people are just so excited to have it back there.

The community is kind of beside itself with happiness right at the moment how a company like Be my Eyes, which has an app and a vested interest in selling their product. They don't sell the product to users, but they sell it to companies that have information that blind or visually impaired users might want, and that's how they make their money. You know businesses and a company that has an interest in an app like that you have some questions about. Well, are we always going to guarantee editorial integrity? And they say that they will. It is run. The guy who's running it, for Be my Eyes is not only a blind person himself who is an AppleVis user, but somebody who formerly ran the San Francisco Lighthouse for the Blind, which is a highly regarded organization in the community. He's pretty well regarded as well, and so it's not guaranteed that everything will go smoothly, but it's as good an option as we can hope for, and one that, so far at least, is making the community pretty happy. So that's applevis.com.

2:19:34 - Jason Snell
Very nice, very nice. And that brings us to the end, although I'm sure we will have much more to cover, because we barely scratched the surface. Next week we'll just be doing some cleanup, I feel like, more than anything else, there's so much that is going on right now. It is high season in Apple land, but I'd like to thank my panel for talking about this. The first bite of the apple was you, oh, so to speak, was you three? Shelly Brisbin, thank you for being here. Tell people what you do and where they can find your stuff.

2:20:06 - Shelly Brisbin
Well, thanks for having me. I feel like I lucked out and I got here on a good day as opposed to next week or last week, I guess. I'm a producer for a daily public radio show, texas Standard, which, as you might imagine, is in Texas. We're on all the public radio stations down there and and we cover your news and your information and sometimes your technology. I also write for a little website called Six Colors, now and again oh, sounds good. Yeah, and I make podcasts for a network called the Incomparable. Wait, wait. Also sounds good. I'm sensing a pattern here.

2:20:38 - Jason Snell
Interesting.

2:20:38 - Shelly Brisbin
And I also write a book called iOS Access for All your Comprehensive Guide to Accessibility for iPhone and iPad.

2:20:49 - Jason Snell
A new version is forthcoming very soon and that's at iosaccessbook.com. iosaccessbook.com that's very good. People should check it out if they're interested in accessibility on the iPhone. Andy Ihnatko, you know what's going on. I don't want to lead you into WGBH, because you know that's not always what's going on with you. What do you have that you want to plug right now?

2:21:09 - Andy Ihnatko
Is it WGBH, WGBH? But there's a, there's a project I keep hinting at.

2:21:17 - Mikah Sargent
Oh, andy, come on. No, no, no, it's project.

2:21:19 - Andy Ihnatko
It is Jason. I'm having a conversation with Jason later on this week about one of the last elements as I'm preparing. Yeah, so well, until I'm so hungry for it. Oh man, I'm so glad that you've been patient.

2:21:32 - Jason Snell
Stay tuned.

2:21:32 - Andy Ihnatko
Thank you. I will say, as silly as it has been sounding, that I've been sort of talking about this for months. Everything has to make sure that, as as as our good friends in engineer aerospace engineering at Boeing realized, it's not enough to build the thing, it's not enough to launch the thing. It's. We got to make sure the thing can fly and stay in orbit. So a lot of the extra. It was easy to build the thing.

I launched the thing recently and I'm not going to make it public until I'm making sure that it's staying in orbit and I don't have to strand my readers until February waiting for an Elon Musk company to come bail them out. That would be horrible. But go to wgbhnews.rg to see my regular tech news segments on Boston Public Radio. The next one is actually a week from Thursday. I'll probably talk more about that next week, or spell my last name into most social media and you'll also get my pictures. You'll get my whatever's pictures of the typewriter that I found by the side of the road. Jokes that seemed funny to me at the time, classic.

2:22:33 - Jason Snell
Things that are hard to monetize. I-h-n-a-t-k-o. Thank you, t-k-o and Mikah Sargent, where can people find you? Well, TWiT is one of those places. What? Else would you like to explain what are you up to these days in your new non-California area?

2:22:51 - Mikah Sargent
You can find me being jealous that the months don't spell out my name. You can also find me here. In two weeks, I'm going to start putting this out into the world now. I will be reprising my role as the dungeon master of a campaign to raise money for St Jude Children's Research Hospital, so you'll be able to tune in for that on September 23rd Again, more details to come by finding me at Mikah Sargent on many a social media network or heading to chihuahuacoffee. That's C-H-I-H-U-A-H-U-Acoffee, where I've got links to the places I'm most active online and, yeah, you'll learn more about that and how you can help support the Children of St Jude by donating during the campaign and thereby making changes to how the game plays out. I will also be reprising my role as not the Statue of Liberty, although that is what everyone thought I was with my blue painted skin.

2:23:53 - Jason Snell
All right, very good. Yes, child Cancer Awareness Month, our friends at Relay are raising a lot of money and just put it in a plug, stjud.com/relay. You should check that out. There's a whole story. But yes, Mikah will be doing some awesome fundraising later this month, as will you, as will I, so say we all Lots going on. You can check me out at sixcolors.com, theincomparable.com, Upgrade Podcast at @relayfm, and you can also check me out here every week on MacBreak Weekly, including next week when we will be back and I will be hosting again for Leo. But until then, I now have the sad duty of reporting to you that you have to get back to work because break time is over. Goodbye.