97: Rapid Security, Static Islands, and Skydiving iPhones

- Welcome to In the News for May the 5th, 2023.

I'm Brett Burney from appsandlaw.com.

- And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhone JD.

Happy Cinco de Mayo to you, Brett.

- Happy Cinco de Mayo.

What a great week.

This is nice way to end it here.

And Jeff, let me congratulate you on the four cents that you have earned in interest in your brand new Apple savings account.

I appreciated that you covered this today.

Indeed.

You know, it's, it's funny that Apple is becoming more and more of a bank.

In fact, what's left with a bank, you know, they have a credit card.

They have, you can store money with them.

They have a savings account.

I think there, I think they may be a bank.

So, um, but it's interesting that, yeah, I mean, Apple announcing that they, you know, four days into opening up their savings account that they have a billion dollars in savings and you know, who knows where it will go from there.

I mean, I don't know enough about banking or anything like that, or the relationship with Goldman Sachs to know how, you know, they make even more money with a savings account where they're giving you back a little bit.

But it's certainly nice for users that when you get money from Apple, you can stick it in a savings account and make some money.

Or if you've got your own money, you want to stick in there and get a pretty good rate of interest for the safety of a savings account.

What is it.

A four point one five percent yield, which is pretty good.

So, yeah.

Yeah.

Very good.

Very good.

You know, just so just to back up quickly, this is a story you link to in Gizmodo today.

And a couple of things out of this story.

Number one, I really hadn't realized maybe how elitist that the Apple credit card has come across because I just took it for granted and I signed up way back several years ago when they first let it go.

But you have to have an iPhone, right.

I mean, you can get a physical credit card.

I've never used a physical credit card.

I've only used it within the Apple, within the iPhone and the Apple Wallet app in there.

But then the second thing, the reason we're talking about this today is I love it because the Apple credit card, not unheard of for credit cards, you get 3% back in all of your, in many of your transactions, right.

At certain retailers, certainly at Apple, and Exxon, for example, and Walgreens, the rest of those, you know, if you use a credit card, the Apple credit card, and other places, it may be 2%, it may be 1%.

That said, that money comes back, and the way that it comes back is in your Apple wallet, you get it back in the Apple Cash, which I used to find this to be very confusing, Jeff, but now I love it, because the Apple Cash is like another card, but it's almost like, I can use that, like if I go to the coffee shop and I don't wanna have cash with me, but I can pull it up on the Apple Cash and almost pay for it almost like a credit card.

That's a lot of explanation there, but the reason we're talking about this is because, as you said, Apple has now expanded this, that instead of just having the cash back, you can actually have that cash that you get back on the Apple Cash card from the credit card to put into a savings account.

That's where we are right now.

We talked about this for a long time, but they finally let it happen.

- And it's nice that you can earn some interest.

I mean, I joked today about having 4 cents, but the only reason for that is because I just bought a brand new Mac upstairs.

And I used like my, I had like $700 that I'd stored up in there.

So now I think I've got like 20 bucks or whatever.

So I've got very little, and thus my interest was very small.

But you know, if I let that accumulate over the next year or two, it's gonna add up over time.

And even if it's just a few bucks here and there, sure, why not.

- I have to say that, you know, any Apple purchase that I make, I will use the Apple credit card.

- Absolutely, that's a no brainer.

- And I gotta tell you, just as another little quick tip here, even if I elect to do like a 12 month pay period, Jeff, so I go in and I buy a new MacBook Pro and I pay it out without interest over the 12 months, right.

So a monthly payment, but they'll give me the full 3% as soon as I make the purchase.

I don't know how that, how those, that shell game works necessarily specifically, but it's nice because there are been some, you know, a couple of months or so where I've bought several different products and I've racked up, you know, close to a couple hundred dollars just in making some of those purchases there, which is really nice.

Yeah.

You know, you're reminding me, although we didn't have this in the agenda for today, apple also has this bank related feature of sort of like, uh, you know, extended payments over a six week period.

And I noticed that they've been rolling out slowly.

I noticed just this past week that when I would look to my wallet app, it said at the very top, you can click here and go ahead and set it up.

And you don't actually use it until you have something.

But if I had a purchase, something big like a computer or something like that, and I'm like, I don't wanna have to necessarily pay for it all right now, but I'll pay for it within six weeks.

It just gives you a little bit more options.

So I know that Apple has been slowing rolling that out and it finally ended up on my iPhone.

So lots of things are doing in the bank system.

- Yeah, just really cool.

I mean, and so the reason we're reporting on this, you link to the story that the reports so far, I don't know if they're official from Apple yet, but the reports is $1 billion with a B, $1 billion has been put into the Apple savings accounts in the first four days.

And yeah, I don't think there's anybody stop it.

It's just gonna keep on rolling.

It's so easy the way that you can do that within the Apple ecosystem.

Something else that's gonna keep on rolling is Apple CarPlay.

We had a story, what, last week, two weeks ago from GM that I was a little infuriated by, that GM says, you know what, we're just, we're gonna do our own kind of a car interface, right.

We're gonna have, it's like, we know that there are many, many Apple iPhone users out there that must like their CarPlay, but we're just gonna do our own thing.

But thank you, Ford, for coming back around and saying, You know what.

They even estimate 70% of Ford car owners are Apple customers.

And I think they're making the right decision here, Jeff.

They're gonna stick with CarPlay.

- Yeah.

And you know, it's interesting because Ford did not initially support CarPlay.

They had their own system that, I wanna say it was like a Microsoft system or something like that, but they had their own system and then they gave that up and now have embraced CarPlay.

And at the same time, since General Motors made that announcement a couple of weeks ago that they were moving away from CarPlay, I've read reports that they've talked to some analysts of, oh, we see all sorts of opportunities for monetization in the future and selling.

It becomes clear that GM has dollar signs in their eyes of, oh, well, you know, if we have our own system, we know where all of our people are located.

Maybe we can sell that location.

I mean, I don't mean to put words in their mouth, but you get the sense that they want to explore the possibility of what personal information about its drivers could it sell to others and try to monetize.

And that always makes you feel sort of icky when people are selling the information about you, as opposed to an Apple, of course, as famously will not do that with its privacy.

So, it was sort of a nice little PR thing for Ford to say, "Oh no, we're staying.

" And like you, I also thought it was interesting for them to say that 70% of Ford owners use an Apple device.

- This story on iMore has a quote from the CEO, Jim Farley.

He said, he told the Wall Street Journal, "In terms of content, we kind of lost that battle 10 years ago.

And he's talking about exactly what you just talked about, John, in the fact that, you know, they tried it before.

They've, they've tried to do their own thing, and they realize, okay, it's not going so well.

So he goes, so like, get real with it, because you're not going to make a ton of money on content inside the vehicle, it's going to be safety, security, partial autonomy, and productivity on our eyes.

So I just, I, you know, hey, I'll pick a Ford over a GM now, almost because of that.

And in fact, I know, we've talked about this, I just rented a car.

And sure enough, one of the top priorities is, you know, it has to have cruise control and car play, right.

'Cause it's like, I gotta have both of those now in order to enjoy my experience.

And speaking of which, I know we talked about this as well.

This is another great story on 512 pixels by Stephen Hackett where he's talking about the cars today have bigger and bigger screens, right.

Because pretty much our way that we interface with our car today is by that primary screen, usually in the very center console on the dashboard.

And I hadn't thought of it this way, but I'm so glad you linked to the story today because I have been getting into cars that have bigger screens and I love it because it's just more real estate for my car play.

But there are some screens in CarPlay that don't really translate the best into the bigger screen here.

And Steven did a good job of going through this.

- Yeah, he has lots of screenshots that you can see it.

You know, obviously if you're looking at maps or something, then taking advantage of a huge screen is great.

But for some of the user interface things like the buttons, apparently the button size doesn't get bigger with the bigger screen.

And so you just have a lot more space between the buttons, but the buttons themselves are smaller.

So Apple needs to rethink this.

And I think that they actually are rethinking it because Apple showed off, what was it.

Maybe a year ago at their WWDC, that they already have their vision for a CarPlay that'll work, you know, in fact, you're showing a picture of it right now on the screen that, you know, really, really, really, really long screens that stretch from the driver's side of the vehicle all the way to the passenger side bigger screens, but I was surprised to see Steven say that he had purchased a, um, it was a pickup truck that had, what do you say.

Like a 14 inch screen, because I don't know what the screen size is in my car, but I think it's like, I don't know, six inches or something like that.

So the idea of a 14 inch screen, I mean, that's just such a completely different CarPlay experience than anything that I've tried.

Um, but I, but I know that's really good.

I've driven around in people that have a Tesla that has like a big iPad size screen and having all that information there, even though you're just glancing at it, but because you're concentrating on the road, it's really nice.

So, you know, I think this is the future to have bigger screens, more screens.

And as Steven is pointing out, it'll be great when Apple updates CarPlay to take advantage of all those different screen sizes.

And I'm fully confident that they are doing that.

I expect to see this soon.

Which by the way, Tesla still does not support CarPlay.

Correct.

If I'm not mistaken.

I just got to tell you quickly on this.

I think I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago as as well.

We just got a new Subaru, a 2023 Subaru Outback.

And one of the things that I liked about it is it actually, it has a bigger screen, but it's not in a wide aspect.

I would almost call this screen, Jeff, to be in more of a portrait aspect.

It's like 10 inches tall and maybe about, I think maybe five or six inches wide, if that makes sense, right.

So it's like a bigger screen, but it's not in a wide screen format.

But I got to tell you, for all the reasons that Steven talks about in here, I love the maps on that Subaru screen.

I love being able to pop into, you know, there was actually a couple of views.

And it's funny now that I just think about this, and this is really diving in deep into CarPlay, but today in CarPlay, I wanted to customize the screen, which is really going to Steven's point here a little bit.

But in CarPlay, there's a couple of different options here.

And this is little bottom left corner here.

One of the views is a little checkerboard, almost looks like a little checkerboard.

But then there's another view where you can put several items on.

You can have a map on like the left side and then it has like, you know what I'm talking about.

- Oh, I like that view, I use it all the time, yeah.

- I do too, I do too, exactly.

But here's the thing, Jeff, I like having the map on the left side and then it would have like the next turn direction on the upper right.

And then it would have like whatever music is playing on the bottom right.

So it would have like three little panels, it was great.

The problem was, however, that in the bottom right, if I had a calendar appointment, it would pop up there.

And it's like, wait, that's too much on the screen.

Like, I don't want that much on the screen.

I just want the map, the next turn, and the music.

Well, I gotta tell you, that kept annoying me because that map, the calendar would come up and then it wouldn't have enough information to show me what song was playing.

It would have like a little icon of the, again, I know I'm being very nitpicky here, but it took me a while to go into the CarPlay settings and fine to say, I don't want you to send calendar notifications to CarPlay, if that makes sense.

- I did not know you could do that.

- I searched for a long time, Jeff, you can tell this was really putting a burr under my saddle and I wanted to fix it.

And so just to the point when you, I'm so glad you linked to this because I wish that I had an easy way that I could have customized my CarPlay interface, because I had to go like three different places to turn off all the notifications and specifically just within CarPlay.

So I know that was a lot of explanation.

- No, that's a good, again, I didn't know you could do it.

And so you could sort of hack your way to making the display show what you want by turning off certain notifications.

But when you think about it, specifically this mode of CarPlay, it really is like widgets on an iPhone that you have like one piece of information on the left and a small box on the right.

And it would be great if much like you can now on the iPad and the iPhone control, This is the widget I want here.

Here's how I want this one bigger 'cause I wanna see more information.

This one can be smaller.

I don't see any reason why Apple couldn't do that and give us the customization.

And people like to have things just so in their car.

I think that would be a really well-received feature.

So good idea, I agree.

- Well, and I'm getting excited because in about what, a month now, right.

I think it's June 5th at WWDC and we are looking for announcements.

Like I'm really anticipating that.

Everybody gets excited about what's gonna be brand new.

And I'm sure there's gonna be something new and funny.

We've talked about that, but I'm really excited about, I want some tweaks, some improvements on CarPlay.

And I got to tell you another area, you saw some of these same headlines this past week too, in the Apple Watch.

Like, are there going to be some new improvements in the Apple Watch interface, which I'm pretty excited about.

- Agreed, I would love to see that, yeah.

- Let's go from CarPlay to security.

So if you have an iPhone and use it with CarPlay, you might have seen something interesting this past week.

You saw it and decided to install it.

The first rapid security response update, Jeff.

- Yeah, it's a really great feature that Apple announced months and months ago, but they finally have implemented it.

And I still haven't heard for sure that the one that they pushed out this week was a real security fix, or whether it's just a test to make sure that it worked.

But I mean, either way, I like the idea of it, which is that if there's a security flaw, Apple should update it quickly.

I mean, you don't want to have a security flaw on your phone.

And if you go to a malicious website, the next thing you know is it's done something to your phone.

And so if Apple has a fix for some sort of flaw like that, they should push it out immediately.

But for years and years and years now, Apple has waited until the next version of an update was available, whether it was a big number like 16 or like a 16.

2 or even a 16.

2.

2.

But the thing is, is, you know, they have a lot of things planned for those and it was difficult for them to separate out the security update from the features update, but now they can do that.

And so they have the system and it was done this week where it's a relatively, because there's very few things in it.

It's a short download, much shorter than typical security updates.

It takes much less time to install.

By default, it's turned on to install automatically, although you can change that if you want.

And what I did not realize when I wrote about it later this week, but I had linked to this article by Adam Angst and tidbits is that it's actually pretty sophisticated.

I mean, you don't need to understand it at this level, but it's pretty sophisticated what they're doing because since the operating system is so important, obviously Apple has that encrypted so that no third party could come monkey around with it.

And so Apple had to find a way, like one thing that they did is they took the part of the operating system that deals with Safari, because web browsers are a notorious source for hacks, Safari and some other things.

And they sort of separated it from the main part of the system so that, and they were separately encrypted as I understand it, so that they could just focus on the part of the system that needs to be updated to fix the security hack without touching the rest of it.

the reason that the downloads are smaller and that they're faster.

So I love that Apple now has this nimble ability to push out a fix as soon as it happens.

Um, because again, you know, obviously, hopefully none of us will be exposed to it, but you hate to be the person that it's like, Oh my goodness.

I little did I know that I clicked on this website and it caused a problem for me and Apple had a fix.

They just didn't push it down yet because they weren't ready.

Hopefully those days are over.

So that's fantastic.

I have been traveling this past week.

So I did not actually update to 16.

4.

1.

- Which you needed to have this.

- Which you need to have this.

In fact, I just upgraded this morning and sure enough, my phone says, "Hey, you can upgrade now to 16.

4.

1 paren a.

" It's like, it's now a parentheses.

Like you talk about it.

- The letter tells you that there's a security update.

Exactly.

And I'll also tell you, Brett, that even if you had updated, you might not have received the update at the same time as me.

- Yes.

- Apple still does, because they're pushing this out around the world to who knows how many iPhones.

And so they do like, you know, this, I don't know if they do it by parts of the country.

Actually, I know that they don't because within my same household, I got the alert on my iPhone, I installed it.

And then my wife heard me talking about it and she had not yet received an alert that it was available.

Now she went ahead and updated it manually, which you can always do.

But, you know, I'm sure that Apple had some, was it a 24 hour period or 48 hour period.

But regardless, it's relatively quickly that they're letting everybody's iPhone know about this update and get it installed.

- Yeah, so the takeaways here, make sure you're updated to 16.

4.

1.

That was a few weeks ago, I think, right.

A couple of weeks ago or so that that was out.

And then just wait, because that rapid security response will come out.

And I think you did a good job of explaining it.

Adam Inks did a good job of explaining it here in this tidbits article too, that the good news is you don't really have to do anything manual, like this.

- Exactly.

- Design it to where it's gonna happen.

And if it pops up on your screen, well now you know you can accept it and don't be too nervous about it.

In the vein of updates, you did another great link just quickly that if you have a pair of AirPods, know that the firmware will be updated on those.

This is even maybe a little more confusing to tell people how to do it.

Because there's different ways that Apple will update the AirPods firmware.

there's really no interface where you can go in and say, hey, make sure that I'm updated the AirPods to the latest firmware.

But again, if you just use your AirPods normally close around to your phone or connect to your phone, at some magical moment, they should update it.

You can go in and check.

You can go into the AirPods and settings and you can check to see if they've been updated.

- Yeah, there's certain classes of devices that Apple doesn't give you the ability to click a button to say update now.

And AirPods are one of them.

Another update that went around this week is the battery pack that I have for the back of my iPhone MagSafe battery pack.

It's firmware was updated this week, but there's no way for me to say, go update that now.

It's just at some point when it's connected to my phone, my phone will notice that there's an update available and it will push it out there.

So, and maybe that's just as well because that low level of things, I don't know, probably not as big of flaws, although as Apple pointed out, or whoever figured this out, I don't know if it was an official Apple statement or if the article from Michael Simon from Macworld figured it out that this particular update for the AirPods solved a flaw that's set, I guess, in the Bluetooth protocol.

And so, and this is, you know, would this ever happen to you.

Hopefully not.

But while your phone is in the process of pairing to your AirPods, or I guess any other Bluetooth device, there's this very short period of time where if a hacker happened to be nearby, they could sort of get themselves in there and and make it that you pair to them instead of you.

And so, I mean, I guess in theory, you think you're listening on your iPhone, on your AirPods to your own phone, but you're listening to their device.

And again, I mean, if somebody makes me listen to a, to a bad rap song, is that, I don't exactly know the security applications of this, but it's a very hypothetical attack, but hey, if it's a flaw, let's go ahead and fix it.

And so you now, no longer need to worry about you go to listen to your music and suddenly you're listening to something else to the extent that was ever a risk for any of us.

- Jeff, it's time for our where are you at segment.

- Where are you at.

- I feel like we have to explain this maybe a couple more times until people get used to what we're talking about.

Where are you at segment.

You do a better job of explaining my friend, please go ahead.

- Well, we're talking about Apple's technologies that help find things or people or devices or everything in this world.

So what's the first story we got here today.

- Oh, this one is interesting.

New York City tells car owners that they should be starting to use air tags to stop their cars being stolen.

And they're actually going to hand out 500 free air tags, I think mostly around the Bronx area.

Little curious about this, but hey, maybe, you know, we just reported last week on a story about a car being recovered because there was an air tag in it.

Now the car was a little totaled at the time, But hey, if this can help at least maybe deter some car thefts, I would go for it.

- Yeah, and I think that's the big thing is that by, they're hoping that thieves hear the story and 'cause the thief will perhaps not know that there's a hidden air tag in the car, but now will this actually deter people from carjacking.

Who the heck knows.

And New York City did not pay for these.

It was a private donation, non-profit organization.

In fact, I was trying to do the math there.

Let's see, 500 air tags.

- I know.

get four for a hundred dollars.

So then you would pay what.

$2,500 for a hundred of them.

And this is five.

So, you know, somebody paid, you know, maybe they got a discount for that.

You know, maybe they paid $10,000 instead of 12,000.

Exactly.

It's a tax write off.

So it's probably, you know, more, you know, subtleness, but Hey, some people got some free air tags from this and put them in their cars.

And, you know, maybe there's a deterrent effect when the bad guys hear about this, or if your car was stolen, then we do know that air tags are a way that the police can sometimes track them down.

So, you know, it was just interesting to see such a public embrace of air tag technology for this, especially considering that Apple itself doesn't officially say that the air tag is for finding a stolen item.

They are always very careful to say that air tag and other devices are made for you to find lost items.

You know, I don't know where I put, you know, where's my car, dude, whatever.

I don't know where I left something and you can use this to find it.

So, but nevertheless, we all know that it can be used for this purpose as well.

- And to be fair, I thought this was good that the police department said, it's not just AirTags, right.

They're going to use this in conjunction with some of their drones.

They have another technology called StarChase technology, which I'm assuming has gotta be, I don't know, something similar to maybe, what's that in-car service.

I don't really know what that is.

The point is, is that air tags could just be another factor that they could use to do some tracking.

In fact, I heard somebody else in another podcast say, you know, in some cases, they're just using all these technologies to track the list of stolen cars, 'cause sometimes it's not a one-off, right.

Sometimes it's a network and they're, you know, stealing.

And so they can see some patterns in that.

So anyway, I just thought that that would be interesting as well.

And along those lines with the air tags, I thought this was a good story you linked to.

- Yeah, me too.

maybe Apple and Google are gonna shake hands, at least in the area of making sure that they can have a collective technology to track some of these things, right.

So it's not just AirTags with Apple devices or whatever Google, they're rumored to have a similar technology with Google devices, but what if we could track different devices across different phones and mobile devices.

I mean, I think that's kind of what they're proposing here.

- Yeah, they haven't been specific.

They haven't given us all the specifics, but I agree.

I think the idea is in order to prevent an air tag or a similar device, like just an iPhone, for example, from being used improperly, like let's say one person is trying to stalk another person.

So they hide an air tag in their car or they hide an iPhone in their purse or something like that so that they can track that person.

Nobody wants that to happen.

And so Apple has tried to make it that when you, you know, when something like an air tag, for example, is traveling with a person that's not the owner, it will eventually be beep so that the person has an alert of, wait, why is there something in here beeping.

And they can find the air tag.

And that works if you have an iPhone, but it doesn't work the same way if you have an Android, although Android does have more limited ways it can work with air tags.

And likewise, Apple's approach works with its Apple technology, but there are other companies out there like tile and others that sell similar things.

And so I think the idea is that if the, if the two major phone manufacturers, Apple, the operating system manufacturers, Apple and Google with Android, if they come up with sort of a common system of standards that any tracking device can communicate with a smartphone this way, including communicate that.

I don't belong to, to the person that owns this phone.

And yet here I am traveling with you in case someone is being stalked, then there's better protection for people.

And it just goes to show you, I mean, these technologies can be used for good, like finding your lost items or tracking down the car thief, but they can be used for bad.

And it's a delicate balance between the both.

I mean, if you're just trying to follow car thieves, you wouldn't want your air tags to beep at all.

But if you want to eliminate or reduce the risk of stalking, then it has to announce its presence.

So there's no easy answer.

It's all just a matter of balancing.

But I'm glad that Apple is thinking hard about this.

And you know, Apple and Google may be fierce competitors in many aspects of mobile operating systems.

But this is absolutely something when it comes to public safety, that it would be a better world for them to work together.

So this is a very promising development.

I always like to see stories like this.

I just hope that they put it on a fast track, right.

Sometimes I hear stories like this, Jeff, and it just takes years and years, you know, like the matter, the standard and stuff.

However, this obviously is a little bit more people conscious, so anyway, good thing on that.

That was our where you at segment.

Let's move to, so the Dynamic Island, is that available on both the regular iPhone 14 and the 14 Pro, Jeff, or is it just on the 14 Pro.

I think you're right.

We talked about the Dynamic Island a lot several months ago, obviously when the iPhone 14 Pro come out.

And I gotta tell you, I just take it for granted now.

It has completely gone into my normal mode of interfacing with my phone.

Even to the point where I pick up somebody else's phone that's not an iPhone 14 Pro.

I'm like, wait a minute, why can't I access the Dynamic Island.

I love it.

And so I was thrilled to see that two more services are going to start using the Dynamic Island, including Uber Eats, which is great.

'Cause when I travel, I sometimes will get Uber Eats and I like have to open the app, the phone and the app every single time that I want to go and check on the status of my order.

I love the fact that it'll be up in the top now 'cause I've been using the Dynamic Island for the flighty app all the time, which is great.

And what was the other app that you mentioned.

- Google Maps putting its directions in there.

- Google Maps, yes, very good.

- So, you know, turn by turn directions.

And it doesn't even necessarily mean driving.

I mean, if you were using Google Maps So just walk around a big city, you know, how nice to be able to glance at the front of your iPhone to see I'm turning left, you know, two blocks ahead, turning right.

So so I think, you know, these, these are two sort of heavy hitters, you know, these are really going to add a lot of usefulness.

And as you said, not many people have the dynamic island because you have to have the newest higher end phone.

But my hope is that this is a technology that Apple, you know, continues with, and we eventually get to the point where multiple generations of iPhones have it both the high end and the lower end.

And by the time that happens, if all of these companies are supporting the technology, then it'll be great because, you know, third party support is what you really need to make it truly valuable.

Valuable.

I, yeah, I think the Apple maps have been supporting obviously dynamic Island from the very beginning.

One.

Yeah.

I happen to be one of those folks that I still think Google maps is superior in many ways.

And I would typically do that.

Although I will tell you when I'm like walking around a big city, urban area or something like that, I will turn to Apple maps.

I just like the turn by turn and that works on my, on my Apple watch as well.

And I love having the dynamic island.

So I was thrilled to see that story that Google maps is going to be including that as well.

And if you do have an iPhone 14 pro and you are looking for some lovely new wallpapers that will basically take advantage of the dynamic island.

This was a great story.

Thank you.

I think I've already downloaded like three or four of these.

I love any kind of creative, innovative wallpaper that can take advantage of some of the additional components on the screen.

I think my favorite down here was the static island, dynamic island wallpaper.

That was great.

- To be clear, we are talking about, you know, just wallpaper backgrounds.

These are not taking advantage of dynamic island the way that Google Maps says.

This is just taking advantage of the fact that there's a big circular, you know, black area of the screen and how could you draw the picture underneath it so that the circular, the black oval is incorporated into the picture.

The one where the oval is one of the two eyes I thought was particularly cute.

And the one that sort of turns the oval into a cat or the one at the very bottom.

Those are sort of cute ideas.

The one that it's like an astronaut holding a camera or something like that.

- I love that one, the binoculars, yes, yes, yes.

- We've got some clever artists that have come up with the clever uses of it, so.

- Back in the day, when you got an iPad, you had some limited options for getting a keyboard with that iPad.

Until one day, Apple decided, "Hey, we can make our own iPad connected keyboards.

" Which I gotta tell you, since Apple started doing that, those are the only keyboards that I typically will get for my iPads.

Another company we've talked about several times, I know we've linked to some stories, Logitech makes some very good keyboards for the iPad.

And I will run into folks every once in a while that either they just didn't like the keyboard, the way the keyboard felt, you know, from Apple's keyboard, and they preferred the Logitech keyboard, and that's great, it works.

One of the companies I remember from a while back, Jeff, is Brydge, B-R-Y-D-G-E.

And way back in the day, before Apple offered their own keyboards, Brydge was like the high end that you could get for an iPad keyboard.

I didn't even know that, I guess 'cause I hadn't been paying attention, that the company is no longer with us.

And this was a really in-depth story from 9to5Mac from Chance Miller that you linked to today, which is just, it's a little sad, a little bit of sweet, I think, but this is a very good example of Apple Sherlocking a company is the phrase that we use simply because I don't know if people had much use for the Brydge keyboards any longer.

- Yeah, Brydge was innovative when it came out because it was, although there had been many Bluetooth keyboards that were separate, it was one of the first that sort of combined into a clamshell.

So it basically turned your iPad almost into a laptop computer where the keyboard was at the bottom and it was connected to the iPad screen at the top.

And it used these little clamps to do it.

But what it did not offer, I mean, it was just a keyboard when it first came out.

And so then Apple comes out with the magic keyboard, which not only has a, it's a different design, but it's the same idea that your iPad can work the same way that a laptop computer would, but Apple's incorporated that touch area.

So you basically had a touch interface, almost like a pointing device.

And that made it instantly superior to every third-party device.

And then what Apple did is they partnered, Apple has a long time partnership with Logitech.

Logitech's an independent company, they make their own things, but they often get sneak peeks from Apple.

And my sense is that Apple engineers help Logitech to understand the technologies so that Logitech will often come out with their own keyboard, but it will have a touchpad that's just as good as Apple's.

Whereas other third parties like bridge didn't have access to some of those same resources.

Although this article describes how they got some of that, a little support over time, but not enough.

So, I mean, it was just sort of inevitable that, unless the third party just had endless financial resources to develop things, you know, they were going to always be at a disadvantage compared to Apple's own projects and the Logitech products that were, that were developed in cooperation with Apple.

And even though bridge had some interesting ideas for their products.

It fell apart earlier this year.

So there were two interesting things about the story.

I mean, one, just like you said, it was, I also had not known that bridge was no longer as of a few months ago in operation, but this is not like a four paragraph story.

This is an in-depth story of the highs and lows of the company.

And just from sort of, you know, if you enjoy reading business stories about how businesses, you know, start off promising and then ultimately due to external factors cannot succeed.

I say external, maybe some of it was with some internal mismanagement as well, but whatever the sources, they are no more.

And yet, there was an article I did not link to today, but it was from Jason Snell over at Six Colors.

And he pointed out that while he was really interested with bridge keyboards in the beginning, the day that he started using his Apple Magic keyboard, he no longer had a use for bridge keyboards 'cause there was just never a reason when you needed to have a bridge keyboard if you could instead have an Apple keyboard.

So, you know.

- Yeah, good point.

- Yeah, and that story is actually good too, because as you mentioned, that one point Bridge did work with Apple and they were trying to collaborate, but anyway, just with some interesting insight into, people ask all the time, well, why doesn't Apple work with this company or why can't I work.

Well, that's a little bit of an insight on there.

- Yeah.

- So we just mentioned Apple Maps a little bit ago, and this was a neat article on how to geek that you link to 10 Apple Maps features that you should be using.

I think I knew most of these in here, but it's always good of course, to see some additional tips and features.

- Yeah, it was some nice little tips in there.

In fact, two that jumped out at me that I'll mention.

One is if you do prefer Apple Maps, and you know, in some parts of the country, Apple Maps is even better than Google Maps or the alternatives.

And if you want to use it in a web browser, I don't believe Apple gives you a way to do it, but Apple has a partnership with DuckDuckGo, which of course is an alternative search browser to Google.

And so if you go to DuckDuckGo and you type in an address, you know, it will actually show, just like Google will show you a link to a Google map that address, DuckDuckGo will show you a link to an embedded in your browser, Apple map for that address with, I mean, I actually, you know, Apple maps to me are perfectly fine.

And in some ways I sort of prefer the graphics and the icons that Apple uses.

So if you're in a situation like you're doing a presentation and you want to have a little clip of a part of a map that you sort of want to use in your presentation.

And if you, instead of wanting to have the Google maps approach when you use Apple maps, you can now do that from a browser.

So it's just interesting to know that DuckDuckGo has that available.

And another feature that I thought was interesting in here, and this is sort of an old tip, but find your parked car.

Even if you don't manually do anything, if your iPhone is with you and you park your car, the iPhone will sort of sense, Hey, I had been in a car that was driving around and then we stopped.

And now the person is walking around.

And then at the end of the day, you're like, where did I park my car.

you have, even if you didn't manually set it, you can look in the maps app and it will show you where it thinks you parked your car and you go, Oh yeah, I'm like to the left or to the right.

Oh, I see.

I'm over here to the right or to the left, whichever it is.

So it's, um, and some other features here too.

So there's, there's all sorts of tracks, tricks and Apple and Apple maps that you should know about.

Good stuff.

I'm glad you'll link to that.

If you were ever questioning, uh, whether or not that the iPhone could survive skydiving.

The answer is yes.

In fact, I love this little video that you linked to here.

You don't even need to worry about giving the iPhone its own parachute.

Apparently it can fall, what's it, 14,000 feet.

Now it may embed itself a little bit in the ground, in the dirt, in the mud.

- And this one did have a case on it too.

This one did have a case.

- This is great.

Thank you for linking to this.

First of all, I think it may be the first time I've linked to a TikTok video on iPhone JD, but it's only like 15 seconds.

- Nice embedded.

- But you see the person jump out of the plane and you can very clearly see from the video that someone's taken, you see the iPhone going out of his back pocket and you're like, "Oh no.

" But somehow they managed to find it, which is as impressive as anything.

That's probably another where you have story, how they even find the iPhone, using Find My Technology, and then to find that it had fallen on a soft enough place that it still worked.

That's pretty impressive.

Pretty impressive.

It was funny, like you could hear one of the other gentlemen there when they find it, it's like a scalper, like you're pulling it out of the ground 'cause it was about halfway buried in the ground because it literally, and he picked it up and he's like, "Just fine, it kept on working.

" Yeah, he does have a case on it, to your point.

I didn't even realize that initially, but it's probably an otter case, one of those high-end cases.

But yeah, as soon as he jumped out of the plane and I saw that fly up, I'm like, "Oh.

" You know, it's just like I panicked immediately on that, but I'm glad that they recovered it and happy ending to that story on there as well.

In the know.

- In the know.

- Something that I will take my Apple Watch and wear it obviously when I am out running.

But even if you have your iPhone.

Something that I like is if I'm running and I get a text message from my wife or the kids or something, and I have my AirPods in, right.

The Apple Watch or the iPhone will read the text message to me.

So Siri will do this.

I think they officially call it announce notifications.

It'll happen automatically, which is what I love about it.

It does it in CarPlay, exactly.

And I like that.

The problem is, Jeff, that sometimes I'm out running and I'll get a text message about an update on an order.

Or it'll be a text message from a company that I've purchased things from.

And it's like, "Hey, happy Mother's Day.

"Here's a 25% off coupon.

"We hope that you come and visit.

" And it just goes on and on and on.

And I'm like, "Siri, shut up.

I don't need to know the rest of that text message.

I don't want to hear those text messages.

Well, so a couple of things that I found on there, because I don't want to, I tried to not want to turn it off completely, 'cause I do like having those announced every once in a while.

So this is only when you really need to have AirPods in, and for me at least, if I've got my Apple Watch that can receive text messages, I've got a cellular plan on it, or I've got my iPhone with me.

So a couple of things quickly.

You can go into settings, and you can go into notifications and you can actually go down into the specific thing.

Like for me, I went to messages and I can just say, don't announce the text message notifications.

Now that's kind of, that's a little more than I want to do, right.

Because that just kills all of those notifications.

But if it's something that, you know, annoys you the way that it annoyed me, at least on that aspect, I can just go into settings, notifications and go to the announce notification section.

and I can say turn off announce notifications for specific text messages.

Now, another thing that I think I like a little bit better is I didn't know this, but you can add the announce notifications widget in the control center.

Well, I call it a widget, that's not the right.

- Yeah, that's useful, I didn't know you could do that.

- You could go into your settings, go to control center, and there is a button called announce notifications.

It looks like a little bell with a sound wave on it.

Now, in order for this to work, you have to have your AirPods in and connected to your either your Apple Watch or your iPhone 'cause this will appear in Control Center in the same place.

And if you tap and hold on that announce notification button in Control Center, you can turn announce notifications off for the entire day, or you can say mute for one hour.

And this is what I'm choosing to do because it's like I wanna go running.

And even though I'm gonna mute announce notifications for the time that I'm running, which means I'm not gonna get my text messages from my wife, but at least then it silences all the announced notifications, so I don't get bothered while I'm doing that.

And then, okay, it's something else I gotta remember to do, but if I just mute it for one hour, then after an hour it comes back on.

And of course you can always go in and look and see in your notification center, right, that somebody had text messaged you or something like that if you wanted to manually look at it.

But this annoyed me until I found this and just a couple of tips on how that you can stop announce notifications.

You know, I wish Jeff, that there was just a way that when it started, I can just say, Siri, shut up or something like that, right.

So that it just stops.

'Cause I don't wanna turn it off.

I just want it to pause.

Like I wanna stop, but I can't find a way to stop it.

I would try to like unlock my watch and go to something different, but she just kept on reading.

And I'm like, I just want you to stop because I got it.

I know what that message is.

So short of having that option, this was the next best one that I could find.

- That's a great tip.

And I agree with you.

I didn't realize that there wasn't a way to stop it from reading something long, but I've definitely been there before.

But I can also see a scenario in which you just want to listen to something in your AirPods, whether it be music, maybe ambient music, and you just want to tune out from the world for a period of time.

It's nice to know that there, you have this option that you can add a button to just say, you know, for the next hour, no notifications.

That's a, that's a cool feature.

So I have a, so sort of piggybacking on that, I have another feature.

When Apple, when Siri does announce to you, you know, you have a text message from your spouse and they say such such, Siri will ask you if you want to reply.

And if you say yes, you can say, you know, you know, you can reply, you know, whatever I'm leaving the store now.

I should be home in 20 minutes.

Um, but Siri will then read back your reply to you, which is good because every once in a while Siri makes a mistake and doesn't hear what you said correctly.

And you may want to re-record it, but I will tell you, maybe it's because I sort of purposefully speak a little slowly and more specifically the Siri.

Siri 99% of the time for me gets it right.

And it is a little, it can be a little annoying to have a read back the response.

You might just want to say, just go ahead and send the darn thing.

You know what I said.

Plus it's informal.

It's a text message.

If you messed up one word, the other person will get the gist of what you're trying to say anyway.

So if you want to turn off that read back to you, and by the way, to be clear, this is a feature both if you're using your AirPods or if you're in CarPlay, it's the same idea.

I read the text to you and you reply to it.

So in both cases, what you can do is it's the same part that you were talking about the iPhone, you know, on the iPhone, you go to settings and the notifications and then announce notifications.

And then there's this thing called reply without confirmation.

So if you switch on reply without confirmation, you say your reply and it just goes.

And there's another way you can do something similar on the Apple watch.

You go to settings, Siri, announce notifications, and then you go to turn on reply without confirmation.

and you have it shown on the screen right there from Apple's own support website.

So if it annoys you that it reads things back to you, just know that you can turn that off.

Or if you feel like Siri gets things wrong and it's probably a good idea to reread your response before it's sent, then you can leave it on, but you have a choice which way you wanna go.

- I see at the bottom of this screen, it says stop using Siri to read a message.

And it does give a couple of different options here depending on what version of AirPods that you have.

- Yeah, look at that.

Say you can say stop or cancel.

I'm wondering if that would work.

I feel like this is so confusing.

It's so convoluted in the way that this goes and maybe Apple will kind of work on this.

But like, that's all I want.

Like I just want to be able to quickly, you know, click something or tap something to say, okay, stop reading, I got it.

And maybe I'm going to try this.

I've got the AirPods Pro second generation, press the touch control.

So I'll try that.

What do they mean by touch control, et cetera.

That's the, oh, that's the, okay.

Yeah.

- Squeeze the stem of it basically.

- Squeeze the stem of it, exactly.

Okay.

I thought I tried that before.

Because I'm like, I'm clicking everything.

Like when it started, 'cause I don't want to stop, right.

And look at my watch.

I'm just like, I remember I'm tapping everything, like tap this song.

No, I want to go back to Spotify.

I want to hear the song.

I'm going to try it again.

I'm glad that you linked to this as well, because I actually did turn off the reply with confirmation.

I think I did that a while back because I just, you know, I think she asks you like, would you like to reply.

Do you want to reply.

want to say something and I'm like, you know, I don't need you to do that.

Just listen for a second and I'll tell you if I want to reply.

Anyway, I just, I feel like there could be some easier ways to kind of customize this.

I don't have a better idea yet, but hopefully, you know, some bigger brains in mind at Apple are working on this on there, but anyway, that's, that's good.

It's, it's good to know that there are some options here that we can certainly look at.

Good stuff.

Good tips.

Always good tips.

Thanks, Jeff.

like this and happy Cinco de Mayo.

Last night, I just got to tell you, I finally got my family to watch.

This is, let's see, well, I call it the sixth Star Wars movie, right.

'Cause yesterday was, of course, may the fourth be with you.

So we ended up watching, what was that, "The Revenge of the Sith".

Is that number six.

How can I not even remember this now.

Anyway, it was good.

It's like happy fourth, may the fourth be with you and everybody and Cinco de Mayo and thanks for joining us.

I appreciate it.

- Star Wars out of the way yesterday.

- We got it all done.

- Today we all get our margaritas for Cinco de Mayo.

Lots going on this week.

It's a busy week.

- A lot going on this week.

Okay, great.

We'll talk to you next week, Jeff.

Thanks again.

.