Tech News Weekly 441 Transcript

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

Mikah Sargent [00:00:00]:
Coming up on Tech News Weekly, Amanda Silberling of TechCrunch is here and we kick off the show talking about Anthropic's new Fable 5 and how it tested things by having it play Pokemon. Then I mention how the FCC is looking to end the burner phone and privacy implications therein before Dan Morin of Six Colors, who was on the ground at WWDC, stops by to tell us about everything Apple announced and give us his initial impressions of the new series. Stay tuned for this episode of Tech News Weekly.

Mikah Sargent [00:00:45]:
This is Tech News Weekly, episode 441 with Amanda Silberling and me, Mikah Sargent. Recorded Thursday, June 11, 2026: Siri AI Initial Impressions. Hello and welcome to Tech News Weekly, the show where every week we talk to and about the people making and breaking that tech news. I am your host, Mikah Sargent, and I am joined this week by the wonderful Amanda Silberling. Welcome back to the show, Amanda.

Amanda Silberling [00:01:13]:
Hello. I don't know if I'm breaking the tech news right now or breaking myself with the tech news.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:20]:
Is your brain broke by the tech news?

Amanda Silberling [00:01:22]:
My brain is broken just in general, but also by the tech news.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:27]:
Fair enough, fair enough.

Amanda Silberling [00:01:28]:
I'm preparing for this podcast. Broke my brain.

Mikah Sargent [00:01:31]:
You know, you're not the first person to say that. But anyway, in any case, this is the part of the show where we share our stories of the week. These are the stories that we find interesting and think that you might find interesting as well. So, Amanda, would you like to tell us about your story of the week?

Amanda Silberling [00:01:51]:
I guess so. So the tech news broke my brain this week because I intentionally am like, I'm coming in here not with the WWDC story because that's going to be a lot in the second half of the show. And I've mostly been reporting on that this week. So I was like, well, other big tech news of the week is that Claude released the Fable 5, which is a version of mythos, which is the AI model that a couple, I think like a month ago, Anthropic was like, we have created this destructive model that if we release to the public, everyone's going to die. And then it was like, is that real or like, is that advertising? Like, are we all going to die? But so Fable 5 is the first, like consumer accessible iteration of Mythos. And I was not initially reporting on this when it came out, like Monday. So today I was like playing catch up and like, all right, I'm Going to learn all about this so I can talk about it with Mikah. And then I was playing around with it and fell down a Pokemon rabbit hole.

Amanda Silberling [00:03:00]:
I fell down a PowerPoint making rabbit hole. I don't know which. I'll let you choose your own adventure of where we lead this discussion.

Mikah Sargent [00:03:08]:
Let's do it. Yeah. Because one of the things that is interesting about Fable 5, because of the main LLMs anthropics models, are the ones that I actually do use a lot stuff, and also, you know, all the integration. So basically, when I saw Fable 5 announced, very excited, very interested, just to see what it could do, if it could do things that were better. And so I, you know, ran some tests and tried different things. But one of the most fascinating aspects of this is just how much the protections are ramped up on it. So, as you pointed out, one of the reasons, or one of the areas, of course, is cybersecurity anthropic. This is essentially mythos, but with big old handcuffs on.

Mikah Sargent [00:04:00]:
And, of course, I expected the cybersecurity area that it would not let you basically draft cybersecurity or cyber attacks. But it also is very aware of biological concerns like creating viruses that could, you know, harm the population. So because of that, there are protections in place where it will not talk about cybersecurity security stuff and it will not talk about biology stuff. But when I read that, I thought that it meant that if I said, hey, make me a virus that would make people fall over and, I don't know, sneeze ice cream or something, and then it would say, no, I'm not going to do that. Well, no, it seems like you can talk about anything related to biology. And what it does is it kicks you down to the next best model, which is called opus. And so, quite literally, I was trying to. What was it? It was.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:09]:
It was a. Well, I wish I could remember, but here's an example of something that basically would fall into this boat. If you were talking about. No, I think it's probably better if I just remember what it was that it ended up moving me. Oh, I was watching a Instagram of someone doing. And maybe you've seen this, Amanda. The mammalian dive reflex is the new trend.

Amanda Silberling [00:05:32]:
No.

Mikah Sargent [00:05:33]:
Okay, so this is. This is interesting. Many mammals have this thing where the trigeminal nerves that are in their faces, like in ours, the ends of them, which are near the eyes and the mouth and the nose, if those are hit by cold water, then it tells the body that we are in water and we are in cold. And it immediately causes your. Causes a mammal's heart rate to slow, and it causes blood to kind of move to the center of the body. And the idea is that it's protecting the body from what could be a potential lack of oxygen, but because it has to do with the vagal nerve and vagal response, or, excuse me, the vagus nerve and vagal response, then what people have found out is that it's a. Not a terrible way to kind of intercept and overcome a panic attack or similar things that cause your heart to race. And so anyway, this gal was having a panic attack.

Mikah Sargent [00:06:33]:
She got a big old cold bucket of water. She put her face in it and came up, and she was like. She was laughing, and then she was kind of complaining. Like, this is so stupid that it works. Like, it feels like a cheat code, but it's also just feels dramatic because, like, I can only imagine having a panic attack and I go running because I do. I've had panic attacks. I go running into the kitchen like, where's the ice? Where's the. But point is, I wanted to learn a little bit more about this and get, like, the behind the scenes of it.

Mikah Sargent [00:07:01]:
And so I popped that in and I was like, I'm gonna use Fable because it's, you know, the new one. It would not let me. It had nothing to do with viruses. It had nothing to do with anything. But it was like, this is vaguely biological. So, no. So I found that interesting in terms of how heavy the safeguards are, and I wanted to touch on that before we talk about kind of where we are whenever it comes to trading, because you pointed out that one of the tests that these companies have been running is video game playing. So can you talk more about that? I think that's the route that I'm going for this.

Amanda Silberling [00:07:36]:
Yeah. Yeah. So for the last couple of years, some companies like Google and Anthropic have been doing some experiments, both because it is kind of an interesting, like, logic puzzle benchmark. And two, just because, like, everybody that works at TEC companies are nerds, and they have the power to do these things. Nerds, Parentheses, appreciative.

Mikah Sargent [00:08:02]:
So non derogatory.

Amanda Silberling [00:08:04]:
Non derogatory. We're on a tech podcast. We're nerds. But so Pokemon is actually a really interesting benchmark for seeing how an AI model reasons through puzzles and can learn from the surroundings that it's put in. And so playing Pokemon Red or Fire Red, they're like the same game. But playing Pokemon Red has been a benchmark where initially in February 2025, Anthropic published a blog post and some tweets, basically explaining what it was doing here. And so the 3.0 sonnet model of Claude, when it tried playing Pokemon, like, it couldn't do anything. Like, it was just like, what am I doing? And then a couple models later, like, it was getting stuck in corners and then saying like, like it.

Amanda Silberling [00:09:06]:
Like Claude wrote a letter to like, whoever was controlling it being like, hello, I believe that I've reached a glitch in the game and you need to reset it. But it was just that it was walking in a corner and it couldn't figure out how to get out of the corner. So, yeah, so very like low level things. Eventually then Gemini comes along and Gemini does better. But Gemini can't figure out how to get through Mount Moon and resorts to killing all of its Pokemon in an attempt to warp to the Pokemon center following Mount Moon. Because when all your Pokemon die, you go back to the last Pokemon center you used to. But Claude didn't understand that it was the prior Pokemon center that you can't go forward through the cave. So then we had kind of like mildly suicidal Gemini and then now Fable 5.

Amanda Silberling [00:09:59]:
They also included a look at the how are we playing Pokemon Benchmark. And it was able to beat Pokemon Firered.

Mikah Sargent [00:10:10]:
It actually beat the game, which I don't think, I don't think I've ever beat a Pokemon game because I always just get you, definitely the site. I get up into the side quests and stuff. I just, I run around and play and I don't follow the story.

Amanda Silberling [00:10:25]:
I do think it's really interesting though, how even in like when Fable 5 beats Pokemon, they made a video on YouTube that you can watch. It's a 50 second video that condenses 50 hours of gameplay. So it's really hard to like, like pinpoint certain things. But I did pause it to see like what its team was at any given point. And when you're an adult playing Pokemon, usually you get a mix of Pokemon and you want to keep them around the same level and you build your team and that's how you're playing the game. But when I was a kid playing Pokemon and other kids I played with, I remember we would be like, well, I'm just going to keep leveling up my Charizard. And then you have like a level 70 Charizard and then a level 10 Pidgey, and that's your team. And that is what Fable 5 did.

Amanda Silberling [00:11:18]:
And it did beat the Elite 4. But it did have a level 78 Charizard and then like a level 25 Lapras was the second, its second best Pokemon.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:30]:
Now the, the. I think obviously, you know, people might be asking what, why, why are we having a play video games? Like you can't play your own video games. And frankly that of course is not the point. The point here is that these tools are

Dan Moren  [00:11:50]:
the.

Mikah Sargent [00:11:51]:
It has to do with what are called harnesses. Happy pride. And so with these harnesses you are able to kind of give more context and understanding to the model to help it better navigate whatever it. That you're providing it. And it's my understanding that this version was almost entirely harness less versus earlier versions that did have harnesses and still were not able to complete the game. So the reasoning that's built in and in particular the visual reasoning that's built in at this point is quite advanced enough to where you can put it at a problem. It's an obscure thing. I don't know if you remember back in school this.

Mikah Sargent [00:12:42]:
I think usually it's elementary school, maybe even middle school, the descriptive writing portion. And when the teacher asked you to write out the instructions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and you have different people writing out different versions of it and then the teacher reads through and follows the steps exactly as they're presented. And so oftentimes you get these funny situations where the, you know, the teacher ends up putting their whole hand into the peanut butter because you, you said grab the peanut or, you know, grab the jar of peanut butter or whatever. And the point is that if you just follow those rules exactly as written, you are probably not going to get what you want unless you really, really, really, really, really crank up the detail. So you can, you, and I can say make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and come up with that. But to have a computer do it is much more difficult to pull off. And so things like having it play Pokemon. It's more about the fact that it has learned that this is a video game.

Mikah Sargent [00:13:56]:
It has learned that it has the ability to control the video game. It has to learn what the goals of the video game are. It has to learn how to open up a menu. Like those things are second nature to us as gamers. But this is a hard test whenever you sort of pull back and look at it. And I find that to be a much more interesting benchmark than can it do economics, you know, problems. This is, this is just a much more fascinating thing given that, you know, we keep seeing the next wave of, of consumer Technology having something to do with robotics, you need to have that problem solving ability baked in. That is a much more conceptual problem solving ability if you're going to do something like robotics.

Mikah Sargent [00:14:50]:
So I just, I think it's really, really interesting. But you, I believe, tasked Fable as a way to test it. Do you want to tell us your. Your test, your Pokemon test?

Amanda Silberling [00:15:05]:
So you know how there's those party themes that are basically like, make a PowerPoint about the weird thing that you know too much about.

Mikah Sargent [00:15:16]:
Yes. I still haven't been invited to one of those, even though I want to.

Amanda Silberling [00:15:20]:
We can have one, please. Yes. So I made a PowerPoint for one of these situations and it is the thing that I know more about than anyone, which is what the heck does Harry Potter fanfiction have to do with OpenAI's failed coup to oust Sam Altman as CEO in small letters. Also six murders. We don't have to get into that part. But it's like a really fringe. OpenAI is not responsible for these murders. This is not.

Amanda Silberling [00:15:53]:
Don't worry about that part of the slide. Look up the Zizians. Don't worry about it. But so basically the thesis of the PowerPoint is that a lot of people that are very influential in AI research, like Dario Amadei, Sam Altman, like people that basically have more power to dictate the future of technology than anybody, are all heavily influenced by this. This AI researcher, Eliezer Yudkowski, who is also sort of the founder of the rationalist movement, which is also related to the effective altruism movement, which is when you get people like Sam Bankman fried and the whole FTX world of people. Basically. Eliezer Yudkowski had this blog less wrong that a lot of these people were posting on and talking about things like do we have to figure out alignment for AI? And is AI going to kill all of us if we don't get smart people working on it very quickly to figure out how to rein it in. But the Harry Potter fanfiction part is that a lot of people get routed to less wrong.

Amanda Silberling [00:17:13]:
And the rationalist movement via a Harry Potter fanfiction that Eliezer Yudkowski wrote called Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which is about Harry Potter using rationalist logic to be Harry Potter and defeat the dark wizards and everything.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:32]:
So it's like a Harry Potter fanfic Trojan horse.

Amanda Silberling [00:17:37]:
Yes.

Mikah Sargent [00:17:37]:
Literally gets implanted in order to convince people to join the rationalist movement. So the little soldiers of rationalism come running out inside of the brain and. And they're all dressed like Harry Potter and they're all waving their wand and saying what is it? Expect Expecto patron. That and the Patrona is that guy that is the head of the Rationalist movement.

Amanda Silberling [00:18:01]:
Yeah. And I cannot emphasize enough like I am not making up the connections between this fan fiction and like really high up people in AI like Emmett Shear, who was briefly the CEO of OpenAI when Sam Altman was ousted and they appointed an interim CEO. He also was the co founder of Twitch. Emmett Shear is literally mentioned in line in the text of Harry Potter and the methods of rationality.

Dan Moren  [00:18:31]:
Wow.

Amanda Silberling [00:18:32]:
Also, this is a fanfiction that is like 600,000 words, which is about 1.6. Yeah, it's about 1.6 infinite jests. I did the the math anyway.

Dan Moren  [00:18:42]:
That's ridiculous.

Mikah Sargent [00:18:43]:
I'm sorry for shouting. That's ridiculous.

Amanda Silberling [00:18:45]:
The reason I'm bringing this up though is because when I was like, well let me test out Fable 5 and let me ask it to do a ridiculous task and I had just made this beautiful PowerPoint for this party I'm going to. So I go, okay, well let me ask it to make the PowerPoint and I will say that my PowerPoint is a lot funnier and my PowerPoint has memes and Claude's does not. But I did learn some new things that I did not previously know. Also, it didn't directly make the PowerPoint it made me the slides, but the design that it showed me within the CLAUDE interface was just a dark blue background with yellow text. It wasn't crazy, but it's pretty accurate. It did a pretty good job.

Mikah Sargent [00:19:36]:
And so that is, we saw, I believe it was you and I who had talked about OpenAI and the updates that were made therein and the training that people believe was done on kind of a scanned magazines essentially to make it better at producing text. It's always fascinating to think about sort of what went into the training. And honestly it's early days for Fable, so we haven't quite had anyone tried to speculate very much on what the training focused on here. And there's also a clear delineation between what anthropic is doing where sort of image generation is very much secondary, tertiary, perhaps even quadrantary to what the company is after. And so that's why even now it can view and process images, but it does not. The, the only image creation type that it does is vector because again, it's sort of like baked as code and take it from me, it's not very good and it's not trying to be. But the I misunderstood. Whenever you had said this, I thought that you had sort of given it a premise that made no sense and it was able to draw the connections.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:05]:
But so I'm learning now too that there's truly this connection between the two.

Amanda Silberling [00:21:09]:
There really is.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:10]:
That is fascinating.

Amanda Silberling [00:21:12]:
I should give it like, what does Harry Potter fan fiction have to do with Mikah Sargent?

Dan Moren  [00:21:18]:
And then we'll find.

Amanda Silberling [00:21:19]:
And then it'll find out that when you were 12, you wrote dreary thick.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:22]:
And then, oh, no, how's it's gonna find out? It's going to learn my secrets. Well, that is a, a look at how people are actually using Fable instead of using it to create horrible viruses and also break into all sorts of, I don't know, encrypted devices around the

Amanda Silberling [00:21:47]:
world, you can also use it to help you with your extremely cursed PowerPoint.

Mikah Sargent [00:21:52]:
Absolutely. All right. We're going to take a quick break before we come back with my story of the week. All right, back from the break, joined this week by Amanda Silberling. And my story of the week is about a proposal sitting at the FCC right now that could fundamentally change what it means to buy a phone in the U.S. joseph Cox at 404 Media reports that the FCC, Federal Communications Commission wants to legally require telecoms to collect a government issued identification number, a physical address and even an alternate phone number from every new and renewing customer before they can get service. The practical effect? Well, it would make the burner phone, a phone that isn't tied to your identity at the point of purchase, effectively impossible to buy in the U.S. the FCC says this is about fighting scammers, fighting robocalls.

Mikah Sargent [00:22:41]:
But of course, privacy advocates say it's a register registration regime that they've only ever seen in authoritarian countries. And the people who will pay the price are domestic abuse survivors, journalists, whistleblowers and low income Americans. The proposal itself is that, you know, it's bigger than just burner phones. According to the agency's own synopsis, it's seeking comments on, quote, requiring originating providers to at a minimum obtain and retain the name, physical address, government issued identification number and an alternate phone number of any new and renewing customer before granting access to his services. And so that means it's not just prepaid phones that are bought with cash at a gas station. That's all new and renewing customers, which over time means essentially everyone who has a phone will be part of this registry. The FCC compares the data collection to what banks do to prevent Money laundering. It's also asking whether the requirements should differ between prepaid and postpaid plans, and whether renewing should mean only new to the carrier customers or if that's anyone switching plans with their existing provider.

Mikah Sargent [00:23:56]:
Yeah, not great. There's another thing that I found really fascinating. The arguably most striking reaction comes from Jay Stanley, who is a senior policy analyst at the ACLU Speech Privacy and Technology Project. He told 404 Media that for decades civil libertarians have looked overseas at authoritarian countries where the government requires people to register to get a mobile phone so they can be tracked and said, we never thought that would happen Here. With this rulemaking, the government is contemplating taking away people's ability to get a burner phone, which will hurt low income people, domestic violence victims, and anyone else who cares about their privacy. Mandatory SIM registration is actually the norm in a lot of countries, but the US has been one of the holdouts where anonymous phone access is still possible. Of course, this proposal would end that. And arguably, Amanda, the bigger issue here is that it's, you can't, you almost can't argue that this is about stopping scammers and spammers, right? Because so many of those people are using online services that are sort of virtual to create numbers on the spot and make use of those.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:18]:
It's not coming from actual phones and in many cases it's coming from people overseas who are using a service here to then spoof a number. I, I mean, I imagine you also would like less spam, right?

Amanda Silberling [00:25:34]:
But yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:25:35]:
Is the trade off worth it?

Amanda Silberling [00:25:37]:
I don't think so. I also think, as you point out, that it's not even a realistic trade off where I don't think that this proposal will alleviate spam. And it does sort of parallel in my mind with various proposals to connect Internet use with a personal identity. And this is potentially harmful for the same reasons there where like you're limiting people's access to information, you're limiting people's ability to communicate with one another, you're limiting people's ability to be anonymous. And in your day to day life you might not be thinking about this much, but then as the article points out, like, this is a really big deal for people that maybe are in like unsafe situations, situations at home and need to be able to access information and access people to talk to, to help them get away from those situations. And the, the more that our tech experiences become mediated by some sort of connection where we are registered with a government agency, the less freedom we have over what we are doing online. And I mean, it is. It's the same thing where like, yeah, there are trade offs.

Amanda Silberling [00:27:00]:
Where, like, you could see how age verification on the Internet might be appealing if you're like, yeah, like, I don't want my child to be looking at things that are not appropriate for children, or I don't want my child to talk to some random 40 year old on like a gaming forum. But then at the same time, it's also at what, like you're creating new problems by alleviating those potential problems. And they're both problems.

Mikah Sargent [00:27:36]:
Yeah, exactly. They're both problems. There's just so much that frankly needs to be, that needs to be broken apart in all of this. That, that people that I think the FCC is either not considering or is considering. And it's just, frankly, this is more about creating a registration. I don't think that it matters that many other countries have a registry. I think that this was like one place we could look to and go, hey, at least we're not authoritarian here. And getting rid of that is rather troubling.

Mikah Sargent [00:28:11]:
Plus, again, if the argument is the fact that it's trying to stop spam and scam, then you, you're like, you, you, you started off with a basis that's incorrect here. This is not going to solve for that because of where those robocalls come from, where those robotexts come from. So this isn't a fix. That is I, I've been checking the time and we are running out of it. So I do want to thank you, Amanda Silberling, for taking the time to join us today on the show. Always A. If people would like to keep up to date with the work that you're putting out there, where maybe check out some of your PowerPoints. Where should they go to do so?

Amanda Silberling [00:28:54]:
Well, you can find my writing on TechCrunch. And if, if you're watching this and you're like, actually, I am kind of interested in learning more about these really insane connections between weird Internet culture things and actual people in power in tech and politics. Politics. Boy, do I have the podcast for you. Check out. Wow. If true, wherever you listen to podcasts.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:17]:
Yes, Head there, do it.

Amanda Silberling [00:29:20]:
Where you can learn a lot more about the unfortunate ramifications of fan fiction in society and sometimes fortunate ones.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:28]:
But also, you know, sometimes it turns out all right.

Amanda Silberling [00:29:31]:
Yeah, sometimes fan fiction is just fun. Other times it's Harry Potter, the Methods of Rationale.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:37]:
Indeed. Indeed it is. Thank you so much for your time and we'll see you again soon.

Amanda Silberling [00:29:41]:
Yep. Cool. Bye.

Mikah Sargent [00:29:43]:
Bye. All right, we are back from the break and we are joined this time by Dan Moren of Six Colors. Welcome back to the show, Dan.

Dan Moren  [00:29:51]:
Always good to be here, Mikah, to talk about what are we talking about today?

Mikah Sargent [00:29:56]:
So, Dan, you were boots on the ground or, I don't know, tennies on the ground, hopefully not bare feet on the ground at WWDC and got a chance to see it all go down in person for people who maybe have had their heads in the sand, as it were this week. Could we start by talking about what exactly was announced at WWDC and what can we expect when, I don't know, the fall hits?

Dan Moren  [00:30:29]:
As Apple says, when the fall and the, and the leaves start turning. Yeah, well, so Apple broke its keynote down into three distinct parts. So just for, you know, simplicity's sake, we'll, we'll use their organization. The first of these was what they call platform improvements. These are these little tweaks, enhancements, quality of life updates. They are, they put down a, a giant slide that had 250 ridiculous things or more on it. And it basically limits, like lists all of the things that they've tweaked. And some of them are incredibly minor.

Dan Moren  [00:31:04]:
You know, there are things like, oh, we added this thing to shortcuts, or this thing works faster or this thing, you know, is, it's, it's more likely that when you walk away from your house, your phone won't think it's still connected to wi fi for like five minutes and instead will switch to cellular more quickly. These are like the bug fixes, all these little enhancements and things that I just consider like nice little updates, but not necessarily things that are going to set the world on fire, not like giant new features.

Mikah Sargent [00:31:34]:
Could I ask with that something that people will probably hear others saying and it feels a little inside? Baseball is, ah, this is a Snow Leopard year. Could you explain what that means?

Dan Moren  [00:31:46]:
Sure, yeah. Snow Leopard was an update to Mac OS back in the mid-2000s where Apple basically said, look, we're not going to do any new features. All we're going to do is bug fixes and performance enhancements. That's, that's all we're going to do. We're going to fix, you know, all the slowdowns and we're going to fix all those little weird bugs that you run into. Now that was always a bit of a misnomer because those things themselves are kind of features. There were new features, they were just small. They're features that might appeal to a small subset of people.

Dan Moren  [00:32:15]:
But weren't necessarily going to be big marquee features. And I've also heard Apple refer to iOS 12 as this same quality, you know, type event where they, they featured more on performance and more on improvements than on actually shipping like, like big tent pole features. So, you know, I think that's People, you know, have a feeling that they want to see Apple pay attention to the details. And that's something that they mentioned themselves during the keynote was this idea of sweating the details and being detail oriented and making sure that everything works well and works the way that people expect it to. And so obviously there's a lot of desire for that, for people to have, like, oh, I have this feature, this great new feature you introduced five years ago, but it doesn't work. Right. Right. Or it's always been broken or whatever.

Dan Moren  [00:32:59]:
And this is Apple's opportunity to say, look, we heard you. We're listening to feedback. We're going to fix all these little things that bother people. And so there were a lot. They called out a handful during the keynote, but they also had that giant wall of text that listed tons of other new things. So there's a lot of little things in there and a lot of speed improvements, which is something else they really hit on the head there. Yay. We.

Mikah Sargent [00:33:20]:
I know. I'm, I'm happy to hear about those, those changes. And it was interesting, you know, that's how Apple kind of kicked things off, was that focus on making things better. And we even got to see a little bit of highlights within. But that was. It kind of felt a little bit like delayed gratification for sure. As Apple's going along, did you get a sense of that being there in person? Was there a little bit of whispers of like, oh, when's going to talk about this? That the other. Or was it really just a focused thing? And then also I'm curious if being there on the ground during this, this part of the, the video that I'm sure you watched with everyone else, was there, Were there any cheers during this part?

Dan Moren  [00:34:14]:
Sure.

Mikah Sargent [00:34:15]:
That you remember.

Dan Moren  [00:34:16]:
I mean, I think this is one of the places that actually is kind of a softball in some ways for Apple because they do get the opportunity to respond to feedback. So one of the most prominent things that came up was, of course, last year's highly contentious Liquid Glass update. And Apple mentioned that they had been making tweaks to Liquid Glass. They had changed the way it worked, especially they drew out, especially on Mac os, which was one that was a big source of discontent to a Lot of Mac users. And so among other things, they've now added a slider that lets you tweak basically how transparent the liquid glass effects are. I will say even without that slider, it's definitely been toned down like then refined. And I think this is something that many of us who have, you know, watched the company for a long time expected. Apple rolls out a big new design, a big new change, and then they spent some time walking it back, they spent some time refining it and making it easier.

Dan Moren  [00:35:06]:
But that definitely got some cheers on stage. Honestly, the first thing I heard was there, and it was pretty early on, they said, oh, we've made sure that every window in Mac OS now has the same corner radius. Only at WWDC will you get a cheer about window corner radius.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:20]:
That's a good point. Yeah, that's the place for it for sure. That's funny. Then the, the next category after sort of making things run a little bit better was all about safety and security and did feel a little bit like this is from and for lawyers.

Dan Moren  [00:35:44]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:35:44]:
Can you tell us about that part?

Dan Moren  [00:35:45]:
Yeah, this part really focused on some of the things that Apple has done before, but it drew together a couple different things, you know, including parental controls and safety for kids. Now what was interesting, I think in part here was this section was sort of spearheaded by Dr. Symbols. Sorry, I just lost her name, but she is Apple's head of VP of Health. And so that was kind of an interesting move. Right. They provide this to sort of take the angle symbol to psi of health being the aspect into. This is not a software feature, it's a health feature.

Dan Moren  [00:36:20]:
And so what they did was talk about the controls that have been available under this sort of screen time features and related features over many years. And they said, we're making some changes to the underlying architecture. We're making some changes about adding new features, things like schedules, so you can differ like how much time your kid might have access to their device during the weekday versus the weekend. We're adding more filters for types of content that might be objectionable, like violence content. And so all of these things are sort of, let's expand what's possible with parental controls. Now this is an area that's gotten a lot of flack and a lot of criticism because in for another reason, things just haven't worked in the past. A lot of parents have expressed dissatisfaction because, you know, screen time limits get ignored by the system or are easily bypassable. And so I think Apple kind of, you know, had an opportunity to take a shot at that and sort of try to improve it so that it would be something that parents actually use.

Dan Moren  [00:37:19]:
As for why we got this in this particular day and age, well, I think you can chalk that one up. As you said to the lawyers, to the regulators and the governmental bodies as well. You know, we have seen a lot of states and countries increasingly adding provisions for things like age gating. I think this is Apple's attempt to sort of, you know, throw down a gauntlet. Exactly. But sort of say, look, we're working on it, we're working on. We realize this is important and this is an area that a lot of people have concerns about. And so this is definitely an area that we're actively working on.

Dan Moren  [00:37:52]:
I couldn't help but notice it came the same day as the UK Prime Minister, Keir Sarma announced sort of a new initiative where platforms would have to be responsible for content on their platform, which made me wonder if somebody there had a heads up one way or the other that these things were coming. And sort of, you know, looking at all of this sort of from a holistic standpoint, I think it is Apple's recognition that these devices do occupy more and more central parts of our lives and that kids are getting access to them younger and younger, and that parents really do need the tools available in order to make changes and allow themselves to sort of manage their, their kids device time. So, so, I mean, that was all a big thrust of this section. It's kind of interesting to see whether or not these things will actually deliver on that. I've heard critiques of the announcement saying it doesn't go far enough or that we have to wait and see exactly how effective this whole infrastructure is. But it's certainly clear that Apple was paying attention to something that they kind of have dropped the ball on for the last several years.

Mikah Sargent [00:39:00]:
Then of course, that, that, that's one. But it's not the big announcement that took place. Apple rounded things out with a I. What, what is new there? And what is perhaps Apple kind of. I mean, did Apple take an opportunity to answer any of the questions that we had about announcing Siri New Siri a long time ago and not, I mean, yeah, tell us all about that.

Dan Moren  [00:39:37]:
Yeah, so Apple spent a while talking about Apple intelligence and Siri, while they didn't necessarily, you know, tip their hat and say, look, look, we, we dropped the ball on this too, because it was something we announced back in 2024 and we never really shipped. I think there was a certain degree of tacit admission of that for one thing, all the demos in the video were shown kind of in a, in a single take with dual cameras on the presenter and on the device, which made it very apparent when they would, you know, ask it a thing and it would spin for a minute because it is a, it's an AI, it's an LLM chatbot, essentially. And so they would, you would get a sense this is real time, right? This is not, not any sort of video fakery. This is us like just showing you on camera what we would show you if we were standing here live. And so to me, that was the biggest sort of, you know, if not mea culpa, at least acknowledgement that what we saw two years ago wasn't necessarily them truthfully representing the product as it was available at the time. And, you know, we know that because it never shipped. And so I would also add, before we sort of get into the features, that they followed up the keynote with a press demo for certain members of the press, wherein Craig Federighi, Mike Rockwell and a couple other Apple executives basically walked through all of the Siri architecture and explained it in more depth and talked about the process of building it. And that was, I think, also a moment of them being cognizant of the fact that a lot of people were giving, not, not willing to give them a lot of latitude on delivering this.

Dan Moren  [00:41:16]:
As for what we actually saw, you know, Apple Intelligence was launched a couple years ago with some basic features. Some of those features got updates here. You know, we saw improved image generation and image playgrounds, including photorealistic images, which was not something that was initially available. But the big part of this was obviously the new series, which they've dubbed Siri AI. And Siri AI, I think, is very much what they were kind of shooting for two years ago when they first announced these features. And it takes advantage of some of the things they talked about at the time, like personal context. That's this idea that Apple is building a giant index of all the information on your phone and using that to inform series responses so that when you ask it about something, well, say, oh, when my spouse said this, it. It knows who your spouse is because it has access to your emails, to your messages.

Dan Moren  [00:42:02]:
It can divine and derive these contexts and relationships and it can figure those things out. A lot of what they showed off is stuff that people obviously have come to come to expect from their dealings with ChatGPT and Claude and other LLMs. It's very conversational. It's back and forth. It doesn't require you to be as specific because you can reference something that happened before. You can do a couple things at once in some cases. And so a lot of those features, you know, that we had kind of expected, it seems like they are delivering on. And this Siri also has the ability for on screen awareness, which is something else that they talked about at the time.

Dan Moren  [00:42:35]:
It can, can you can just, you know, summon Siri and ask it about something on your screen and it knows what that is. It can interpret that. It can also take actions in some of your apps. So you can have it send an email or make a calendar appointment or a reminder or something like that. Things that we've become very used to with the older Siri, but it's good to see them continued here and then in kind of a newer edition. It's got this world knowledge, which is the kind of thing you expect from some of those online LLMs where you can ask it about stuff going on. Many of the examples they used were about the World cup cup, for example, like, hey, tell me which teams are playing or hey, when, when can I watch these two teams play? So, you know, all this goes into kind of delivering those promises that they set out back in 2024. And it certainly seems like this is something that they have managed to deliver on during that, that talk with the press afterwards.

Dan Moren  [00:43:29]:
Mike Rockwell, who is the VP in charge of Siri, basically says, we had something like a year ago and it wasn't good enough. So we tore it all down and we started fresh. And so, you know, this, this seems like a pretty significant update from everything they've said and so far it seems as though it may deliver.

Mikah Sargent [00:43:47]:
Now, I know we don't have a whole heck of a lot of time with you, so I want to take a quick break and then we will come back to hear more about kind of your experience in particular and some of the things that you may have learned since the event. All right, we are back from the break, joined by Dan Morin of Six Colors. Dan, you were at WWDC in person and something I've always appreciated about the work that you do is that, you know, following the event, there's now an opportunity to see what Apple has put out that maybe was not part of what couldn't make it to the keynote stage. Right? Like what, what wasn't there? And then also to ask you the question that I'm sure everybody wants to know, which is A, have you installed the betas? And B, do you have access to new Siri? So if you could Tell us about some of that. That'd be great.

Dan Moren  [00:44:41]:
Sure. Yeah. Well, I have installed the betas for both Mac OS 27 and iPad OS 27, and I'm actually in the process of installing Vision OS 27 as well. So I've gotten some chances to play around with it. And yet, yes, new, New Siri is my best friend. We're really close. I do have access to Siri AI on my laptop and iPad and I've been trying that out for the last day or so and putting it through its paces. It has been very interesting to sort of give that a chance again.

Dan Moren  [00:45:11]:
You know, we talked about they. They showed off all these features back in, in 2024 and none of them ever shipped. And here we are thinking, all right, is it going to live up to it? And so far my experiences is, yeah, it's pretty good. Honestly, I, I really have been impressed with the things it can do for. For example, I got a. An email while I was sitting at the airport yesterday and playing around with this from a. A producer at a radio segment that I do sometimes. And he asked, hey, can we move this.

Dan Moren  [00:45:38]:
This segment we were going to do to this time? And so I asked Siri, can I do this? And it went. Looked at my calendar. It's like, yep, you've got a, you got a gap in your schedule right here. You can do that. Do you want me to draft a reply to the producer telling him that that's good? And I actually missed that part of it. I just told it like, oh, yeah, move the event on the schedule. And so move the event on my schedule. And then it popped up a draft of the email, which surprised me at the time, but it was fine.

Dan Moren  [00:46:04]:
It was like two sentences like, yep, that sounds good. And it had some other extraneous sentence. And they was like, all right, I would never say this. So I just deleted it. But it didn't send it for me. Right. It's not an agent in that way. It is something that's like, I'm going to help you out, but I'm not doing this job for you.

Dan Moren  [00:46:18]:
And so I appreciate that aspect of it because I would want to vet any email that sends before it gets sent off. But that and it. Move the event on my calendar, all that. That worked pretty well. I've tried it a bunch this this morning and previously with asking it questions about stuff that's in my mail or messages, and it's done a pretty good job of picking up. I mean, honestly, in most cases where there are shortcomings I think the shortcomings are probably related to the information that is actually available. Sometimes that's about what the index knows. And I will say, like, if you're installing the betas now, be prepared that indexing takes a long time because it's chewing through all your data and really building this semantic index and think of the enormous number of possibilities and terms that you might be searching for.

Dan Moren  [00:47:03]:
But I could ask you things like, hey, my wife said we were going to go to a pool party this weekend. When is that? And it was like, oh, yep, she texted me. Texted you? Here it is. It says it's Sunday. I was like, oh, what time was it? It's like, well, no time was specified. I was like, all right, that's fine. And even mentioned, she mentioned like a couple other people who would be there in the text message. And I was like, well, one of those names is kind of vague.

Dan Moren  [00:47:24]:
You know, it's like, oh, which, which Nate is it that will be there? And it went back. It's like, oh, well, it was mentioned along their spouse. So we assume it's this person. And it was correct. I mean, so all those are things that we kind of want, right? We want the ability to access our own specific information and have it know about our lives and about the people we know and about the places that, and events that are important to us. And so I think that's, you know, certainly a one up on them from the, the web based LLMs, which unless you are finding ways to feed it all this information, it doesn't necessarily have all this information. And, and Apple has stressed, obviously, as always, it's, you know, security and privacy are at the forefront of this. So I mean, I mean it has potential downsides, right? When they focus so much on the security.

Dan Moren  [00:48:10]:
For example, when these indexes are being built, they're per device. So your Mac, your iPad, your iPhone, they're all going to have to build these indexes. Which does mean there are cases where the index on one machine might have information that the index on another machine won't. But Apple is very stringent about the idea, like we're not going to send your index into the cloud and then download it on your other devices because there's, you know, we don't want your personal information ever put in the cloud, even though I think they are very, very, you know, very much trying to make the cloud as secure as possible. If they can do it on your device, they want to do it on your device. And so even when they do have to send requests out to the cloud. They're being very careful about what information is actually being sent there. So yeah, so I've played around with that a bit in the last 24 hours and I have been very impressed with what it can do so far.

Dan Moren  [00:48:59]:
I'm really interested to see as we it gets more wider adoption and as apps find ways to work with it and as we all just have more time and start trying different things with it, what it can actually do.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:10]:
Yeah, absolutely. Then I guess I don't have access to it yet. But I'm glad you do. I'm glad you had an opportunity to try it out. Is there anything that stood out to you kind of post WWDC that others have found that you have found that that you feel bears mentioning? I know Christina Warren of MacBreak Weekly was very excited about the Linux Virtual Machine update thing.

Dan Moren  [00:49:38]:
That sounds like a Christina thing. I sure.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:40]:
Very much so. Very much so.

Amanda Silberling [00:49:42]:
Yeah.

Mikah Sargent [00:49:43]:
I don't know about any of that, but yeah. What else?

Dan Moren  [00:49:47]:
You know, we talked about the platform improvements and I think that's one of the places where you really do see tangible improvements, even if they're small or located to specific things. Like one of the things they mentioned was Airdrops faster. I dropped a file from my iPad to my laptop and I was impressed with how quick it was. There's little features that get added in different places, like shortcuts. Shortcuts now has an else if option, which it didn't before. And that was just a thing that I really got frustrated with when I was building Shortcuts. A feature that I haven't seen as much talked about, but I kind of dig is on the Mac side, if you have, say, a folder full of files that are all named in a specific way, let's say you have a collection of all your bills. You know, here's my electric bill for June, or here's my electric bill for July.

Dan Moren  [00:50:28]:
When you download a new file, new version of that, you go to rename it. If you wait a second, it will pop up a suggestion because it's looked at all the other files in that folder and be like, hey, do you want to name it the same way you named all these other things? And then if you grab all those and put them in a new folder, it will suggest the folder be told like electric bills or whatever. Like it could look at the content and look at your other files and figure out, well, what makes sense. And I think that's just a nice little implementation of an intelligent feature because it's Something we all do every day and it's a pain. And then you don't really think about it because you just got used to doing it. But it's like, hey, we can do that for you. So there's lots of little stuff in here that I really appreciate because we talk about quality of life improvements and, and I always say, who doesn't want their life's quality improved? Right?

Mikah Sargent [00:51:14]:
Like, so you make a good point there.

Dan Moren  [00:51:17]:
I, I try, I just, I just enjoy this. So it is, is a lot of fun because I think it also opens up an opportunity for a lot of people who have used and been frustrated by little details to realize, oh, hey, this thing works better now. I mean, I, I was just looking this morning and I was amazed to see they actually have a feature now that deals with all your menu bar items scrolling under the notch. Like it's not a super impressive feature compared to a lot of the third party things. But like it realizes that this is happening. It doesn't just shove them under there. You're like, oh, finally. Like somebody remembered that all our laptop displays have notches in them and sometimes the icons get hidden behind the notch.

Dan Moren  [00:51:57]:
So, you know, I appreciate when they take little moments like that and be like, hey, let's just make life better for the people who use these features. So, you know, whether you're pairing homekit accessories, which has been speeded up, or you're like, hey, I hated the way that the workout app on the Apple Watch was so slow to start workouts. I mean there's a little something for everybody and hopefully it makes everybody life, everybody's life just a little bit that better way.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:24]:
I will see about the home kid pairing thing.

Dan Moren  [00:52:26]:
I know, I know that's for you. I threw that out there for you because I know how much you love your, your home kids.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:31]:
I love my home kids stuff and I hate how long it takes.

Dan Moren  [00:52:33]:
It takes forever.

Mikah Sargent [00:52:35]:
Let's see about that. Dan, I want to thank you so much for taking the time to join us today. I know you've been incredibly busy just getting back from WWDC and probably the talking to everyone about all the stuff I know, especially today, it's a busy day for you. So thank you for being here. If folks want to go want to check out the stuff that you're working on, of course they can head to 6colors.com but is there anywhere else they should go?

Dan Moren  [00:52:57]:
Absolutely. My website is dmoren.com that has links to all the places I write, has links to my books which you should go buy and has links to my podcast, including Clockwise with Mikah, which we record every Wednesday over on Relay and so you should check that out as well.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:13]:
All right, thank you so much and we'll catch you again soon. Thanks, Mikah. Alrighty folks, that is going to bring us to the end of this episode of Tech News Weekly. Thank you so much for being here today. If you would like to, if you're not already subscribe to the show Twit tv, TNW is where you go to subscribe. If you would like to follow me online, I'm @mikahsargent on many a social media network or you can go to chihuahua.coffe. That's C H I H U A H U A.coffee where I've got links to the places I'm most active online. Be sure to check out my other shows that publish on the network, including iOS today, Hands-On Apple, and Hands-On Tech. In fact, tune in this Sunday, no next Sunday, for more of of Hands-On Tech.

Mikah Sargent [00:53:58]:
Thank you so much and I'll catch you again next time for another episode of Tech News Weekly. Bye bye.