110: The Apple of Our “i” and a (Potential) Fast Pass to Space Mountain!

(upbeat music)

- Welcome to In the News for August the 18th, 2023.

I am Brett Burney from appsinlaw.com.

- And I'm Jeff Richardson from iPhone JD.

Hey Brett.

- Good morning, Jeff.

Just wanna say thanks again to our friends at SaneBox.

They are sponsoring today's episode.

You can learn more at sanebox.com/inthenews.

And now let's get to the news, Jeff.

I thought it was great you started off your post today

with something that I guess I've always had

on a very far back burner there,

but hadn't really considered it.

But a couple of people have been talking about it this week.

Is there a possibility,

a possibility that Apple could purchase Disney?

Hmm.

- Yeah, it seems crazy, doesn't it?

And yet there are some signs

and something that people have talked about for a long time.

You know, 10 years ago,

when before Apple even had Apple TV Plus,

if somebody told you that Apple was gonna be making movies

get oscars and tv shows that get emmys you would have said what what are you talking about ridiculous

and yet here we are and that's the world we live in so things definitely change over time for sure

and um you know disney is having i mean not that they're they're doing fine but there's there's a

lot of financial issues with disney they spent a lot of money to get their disney plus service up

and running and they've got a lot of debt to pay that off and one of their big cash cows espn is

going to be making a lot less money in the future you know ESPN makes all of its money because when

you subscribe to cable you have to pay for ESPN whether you use it or not and so every cable

subscriber has pays for ESPN and yet so many people are moving beyond cable companies and

cutting the cord and stuff that that revenue stream is starting to dry up so you know people

are sort of wondering what's disney going to do in the future and you know there's been some

pressure in the company at the same time the tech companies out there are buying up content left and

right and you know will you know what you know amazon purchase what would they get the you know

james bond and stuff like that and will some of these companies like paramount and stuff will

they continue to be independent or will they be purchased you know it's it's a possibility i still

wouldn't say it's probable but it's if there was ever a time when it seemed like it made some sense

it's it makes a heck of a lot more sense today than ever before although there's a serious number

of questions about you know apple is traditionally so focused on just doing a few things although

although they do a lot more now than they used to.

It would, gosh, it would change so much

to have Disney under their control too.

It's an interesting question though.

- One of the articles you linked to was from Jason Snell,

who has been around for a long, long time.

He was the editor of the Macworld Magazine for a long time.

And he was just writing here that the speculation

about Apple purchasing Disney was always ridiculous to me.

But like you said, Jeff, these are different times

and Disney and Apple are different companies

than they were a couple of decades ago.

And while he used to roll his eyes at that speculation,

he's like, well, it could, it could happen.

And we've always known,

in fact, we talked about this several times,

there has always been a close relationship

between Apple and Disney, right?

Steve Jobs and Bob Iger, and you know,

just a lot of the things with Pixar and everything going on.

So I guess it couldn't be too far fetched,

but hmm, it's fun to speculate if nothing else,

I think it's kind of neat.

Yeah.

And, you know, a lot of these merger stories, lots of times they seem

bizarre until they actually happen, you know, for years and years ago.

I mean, I remember, gosh, in 1980s, you know, one of my favorite companies was

Activision who made the games that I played on my Atari 2600 and Activision

Blizzard are still around today.

And then Microsoft is going to buy them.

And, you know, if you had told me in the eighties or even the nineties, you know,

Microsoft, you know, that that company that makes the stuff you use to do word processing

would be purchasing Activision to be like, what are you talking about? But of course,

they have companies over the years, including, you know, the folks that made Halo way back when.

So, you know, things, things seem bizarre, until they're suddenly not bizarre, and then they happen.

So that's the thing. That's why you can't say that it will never happen.

It is hard to picture Apple CEO Tim Cook wearing Mickey Mouse ears. But then again, you know,

Never know. Maybe so. Maybe so. It's only weird until it actually happens.

Well, let's jump to this because you kind of alluded to this about cable and ESPN.

And I saw this story a couple of times this past week that, am I getting this right now? We used

to say cut the cable, right? Because cable television, I mean, I remember we were paying

150, $200 a month, maybe even more, several years ago for cable. And I was paying for hundreds of

of stations that we never even watched, Jeff.

And I remember my wife and I had this conversation

and sure enough, several years ago,

we cut the cable, cut the cord

and we started just doing streaming.

Now, I did realize maybe about a year and a half ago,

it's like, wait a minute, we're paying for Netflix,

we're paying for Hulu, we're paying for Disney,

we have Amazon Prime through Amazon.

And I'm like, wait a minute,

like, wait, the math is getting a little crazy here.

Like I we're almost to the point where we were paying the same amount just on

streaming services that we were paying for cable TV.

And it sounds like that, uh, that balance is actually being realized now by

several other people this past week.

Yeah.

I mean the article here, I mean, the one that you're showing right now is from a

Ben Lovejoy, but I've seen another, other articles that say the same thing that,

you know, when you look at the tradition, the mix that most people purchase for

streaming video services, and you sort of compare it to what an equivalent package

have been through cable, you know, we've gotten to the point that because the services get a

little bit more expensive, Apple TV plus raised their prices, uh, Hulu and Disney are raising

their prices right now. Um, it's gotten to the point where it's pretty even. And I'll tell you

this, you know, he may be right for most people just to speak anecdotally for me personally,

I looked very seriously at cutting the cord or in my case, it was cutting the satellite

because I pay for direct TV. Um, I'd looked at it about a year, a year and a half ago,

because it just seemed like I heard about so many people like you who cut the cord over the years.

I'm thinking, gosh, why am I still paying this? And so I did the math. I actually looked at,

you know, admittedly, like you say, Brett, there are so many channels that I get through direct

TV that I never watch. I'm like, if I could just not pay for the XYZ channel, boy, I'd be saving

so much money, but it's not that simple. As you know, it's really not, you know, things,

things just are part of the bundles. And so when I said, okay, so if we're going to cancel direct

TV, that means we're not getting our local channels anymore, which means I'm going to

to have to subscribe to a service that provides my local channels and I need to use their

packages and of course I would want to have HBO or the service formerly known as HBO,

whatever they're calling it now, Max.

And, you know, of course I want this, of course I want that.

And when I did the math and I put it all together, I'm like, it's basically the same cost.

And you know, maybe it was a slight difference, like $10, but the thing that stopped me about

a year ago was like, you know, this is current prices.

All that's going to take is one of these streaming services to increase by two or three bucks

a month, which of course is happening as we speak.

Um, and it's, and it's going to go the other way.

Um, and although I really very rarely turn my direct TV on for we, when I sit down

at TV, I am mostly watching streaming services through my Apple TV device.

But the reason I'm watching those channels is I'm not paying, you know, because I

pay for HBO through direct TV.

That is why it's on my, you know, Apple TV device because I'm paying for X, Y, Z.

So I'm still paying for it, even though I'm not necessarily using the direct

TV interface very often.

And then every once in a while, I actually do want to jump over to DirecTV.

So it's not like I never use it.

So I did the math and it did not make sense for me to cut the cord.

And that was an exercise that before I started to put pen to paper on it, if you

had told me, you know, after you do this analysis, Jeff, you're going to decide

not to change anything, I would have said, you're crazy.

No, I'm figuring out how much money I'm going to save.

Right.

But when I did the math, it really wasn't that much.

So it's, it's interesting.

And so what's going to be the implication of this?

Does it mean that people will start staying more with the cable company?

What is the future going to be?

Are these streaming services going to stay separate?

Will some of them start to combine to make things that are more reasonable package that

you get multiple things?

But then the next thing you know, you're going to end up back at basically the cable bundle

again.

It's just that you'll be paying one price to company X.

It's very interesting and it's changing.

It really is.

To underscore that quickly, the main thing that people told us

when I would tell them that we cut the cable,

or the two things that always comes up,

it's like, well, how are you going to get local channels

and slash local news?

Although I find today that I can usually

get as much local news as I need just from other outlets

or online.

That's an interesting point, yeah.

But the other thing today that people would say, Jeff,

of course, is sports.

How are you going to be able to watch the football games

and the baseball games?

And, you know, we have talked about this over the last couple of years.

That's one of the reasons that I stay so interested in seeing some of these sports

deals, right.

Specifically apple, the fact that they had, you know, major league baseball, and

they're starting to bring that on now they have major league soccer, which obviously

a lot of people have been talking about, you know, that I don't know if they're

all that excited about it, at least here in the United States, but.

I'm sure.

I mean, that's why I keep asking, like, is there anything happening like with NHL,

You know, NFL, the NBA, I mean, you know, the, the, what we consider to be like

some of the very, very big markets, because if one of those, if one of those

sports, major franchises, Inc, some kind of a deal with a streaming service,

cause they already have, you know, to some extent, right.

It's almost like they're tested.

They've been testing the waters, but if something like that happens, that could,

I mean, I, I feel like a lot of people would be making some, um, additional

calculations on that, and it's just been interesting to kind of see how

this has changed over the last few years too.

Yeah.

I mean, the big one in the United States, of course, is NFL football.

I mean, they are the king of ratings and Apple was in negotiations with them

recently and right at the end of the day, NFL decided not to go with them.

Um, and so, you know, things have been decided for the next, I don't know if

it's the next five years or 10 years, whatever, whatever that period is, but

you do tend to wonder what's going to happen the next go around.

It's, uh, it's, it's very interesting.

And like you said, this, this, this ties into the whole Disney stuff

because it's the whole, you know, what are you bundling with?

What are you owning?

I mean, it's the reason why Amazon and Apple have their streaming services and might be

interested in expanding and getting more.

I mean, there's one of the rumors is that Disney might want to sell off ESPN.

You know, is it possible that even if Apple doesn't buy Disney, it just buys ESPN?

Wouldn't that be interesting if ESPN was, or, you know, if it was not owned by maybe

some extensive partnership with, or, I mean, there's just so many possibilities and nothing's

written in stone.

You know, everything can be done just because it's been done the same way for years and

years or decades in some cases doesn't mean we can't have something brand new going forward.

So it's exciting, but it's also confusing to try to make the decision of what's best

for individual consumers.

It's just a lot going on.

One other thing quickly before we, there's a happy birthday in order, but real quick,

you mentioned that you made a link to another, speaking of streaming, it's just interesting

to kind of, again, see the evolution of this Apple TV plus you and I talk about a lot of

other shows, but it sounds like they have been filming a Godzilla series, like a TV

series of some kind, right?

It's like, I don't know how many reincarnations of Godzilla could happen.

But anyway, the interesting thing about this that you pointed out today is that it's being

filmed partly in 3D, not for like an IMAX theater necessarily, but for Vision Pro.

That'll be interesting to see how this goes.

And Brett, this ties into the exact same story we were just talking about.

First of all, we should say Apple has not admitted this.

They haven't said publicly anything about Vision Pro, but many people on the internet

are saying that they can confirm that not only do you have the regular cameras on the

set, but you also have the special 3D cameras.

And again, this goes into the franchise things too.

Apple did recently get the rights to do the gods, even though it seems like, oh, Godzilla

has been made so many times, but it's another one of these franchises that were out there

They have the rights to, and I think it's going to have Kurt Russell, I think is going to be in it

and stuff like that. Hopefully it'll be good. But you know, when, you know, the vision pro,

we all know it's coming out, it's going to be out at some point, your early 2024, you know,

of course, Apple is going to have some interesting content. I mean, you know, that the Apple TV plus

and vision pro are a potential marriage made in heaven. And so why not have some of their marquee

shows that have features where maybe it's not the entire show, but parts of the show while

you're watching the show, suddenly when the, when the Godzilla comes out, he'll be like in 3d and

almost, you can touch him, which, which is a little scary perhaps, but you know, of course,

they're going to want to do these things. And this ties back into the sports that we were just

talking about, because people have said that one of the reasons why a partner like Apple might be

perfect for a sports network, whether it was the NFL or ESPN or college sports, which is something

that they tried to do until a couple of weeks ago is that, you know, wouldn't it be interesting if

If you can actually have a seat that's, you know, the perfect seat on the basketball court,

the perfect seat in the football stadium where you could look around and you can see things,

you can see different camera angles, things that, you know, when you currently, when you

watch TV, it's a very passive experience.

You see the camera angles that they show you, but wouldn't it be interesting if you could

control the camera angles yourself?

If you could say, I want to, I want to, you know, be on the camera that's flying over

on top, or I want to be in that front row seat, or I want to have the perspective, or

I want to be able to look all around me in 3D.

These are the sort of, you know, it's a technology issue that a company like Apple could bring

to television, live sports, that would just completely change the viewing experience.

And when Apple first announced the Vision Pro, what was that, at WDC a couple months

ago in June, you know, they allowed this very small number of people that had a chance to

try the early production units.

They were able to watch about a 20 minute, you know, video.

I was thinking about this.

It had all sorts of things.

It had movies and TV shows and stuff like that and pictures that people had taken at

their kid's birthday.

But one very small segment of it was live sports.

I think it was soccer.

And the people that watched it said, or maybe baseball, one of the two, but the people that

watched it came away and said, even though that segment was just like 30 seconds, it

was the most impressive sports watching experience they've ever had short of actually being in

the stadium.

In fact, maybe it's better than the stadium because you don't have the perfect seats.

And so if that's just the 32nd version, you know, how cool would it be?

So Apple has this relationship with major leagues, with American soccer, major league

soccer.

And so you've got to think that at some point in 2024, 2025, you know, maybe people that

are not huge soccer fans might become soccer fans because of this ultra realistic, totally

immersive experience that you can get watching it, having a vision pro and you know, there's

the vision pros are not going to be a ton of them sold in the first year, but they will

eventually I'm sure get more popular. You know, it would be really interesting if five years ago,

one of the reasons that this whole entertainment, you know, content world has changed is not just

because of the things you and I were talking about before about who owns what and which

companies have merged with which companies, but also just because the viewing experience

can be so different because of something like the Vision Pro. There's just endless

possibilities out there. It's really interesting. When you started talking about the journalists

they went to WWDC and they had the opportunity to put on the Vision Pro. I thought you were

going to talk about this little clip that all of them discussed where they put it on

and they looked at a wall and a dinosaur came out of the wall, crashed through the wall.

And I'm like, huh, well that's not that far of a cry from Godzilla. Now I don't think

that a Godzilla in 3D made for Vision Pro would want me to go out and buy a Vision Pro,

But I got to just think, Jeff, it would definitely get me to an Apple store where I would want

to try on a Vision Pro, right?

In other words, this maybe it's just a kind of a publicity stunt for Vision Pro, right?

It's like you can go and watch, you know, 30 seconds or a minute of the of the movie

or the trailer, even, you know, something like that.

I think that'd be cool.

I would do that probably several times over.

Sir, can you please leave the Apple store now?

You've been here for three days.

Um, okay.

Happy birthday is in order for something that is, I would say it's

pretty near and dear to our hearts.

Uh, Jeff, this is part of our journey of technology over the last, well,

25 years, because the IMAC this past week turned 25 and I have heard some

of our favorite journalists and folk, you know, technology thought leaders,

uh, including Jason Snell, talk about this over this past week.

And Jason wrote, I thought an excellent article

for the Verge, how the iMac saved Apple.

We really take this for granted today, Jeff,

and what we're talking about,

but a few other times we've gone down history lane

and we've talked about how Apple was nowhere near

the same company that it is today.

And there are some pretty important turning points

in the history of Apple and the iMac 25 years ago

was definitely one of those turning points.

I mean, Apple is now the number one company in the world in terms of revenue and profit

and everything else.

But those of us that have been watching the company for a long time, remember the nineties,

the nineties were dark days for Apple.

I mean, they were on the brink of bankruptcy.

They were not making any money.

You know, people were talking about a company like Sun, you know, speaking of mergers, you

know, buying Apple and, you know, the, the Michael Dell of Dell, you know, famously quipped

that somebody should just buy Apple and sell it off for parts.

Which was obviously something that a competitor would say, but there was also some thought.

Apple was at a horrible place and when Steve Jobs came back into the company because the

company decided to acquire Next, thank goodness they did, that Steve looked around and said,

"What do we have here?

What can we do?"

And he saw a lot of confusion.

He saw that Apple was making way too many products.

There was millions of different Macs with different numbers.

They all looked the same.

They were boring.

But he found some good stuff.

He found Johnny Ive for one thing.

He found some ideas for these computers.

And one of the things that he saw was sort of this idea of something like an iMac, which

was very true to the original Mac idea.

You know, the first Mac that came out in 1984 was this all in one device that seemed personal.

You could carry it around, not that it wasn't heavy, but it did have a handle, which meant

that it was okay to touch it.

You know, it's not this computer thing that you have to be worried about getting close

to it.

Of course, now we have the most personal devices ever with the iPhone and the Apple watch and

everything else.

But the iMac was transformative and people think about the translucent blue color of

the original model and now people sort of tsk tsk and say, "Oh, well, that's just,

that's the way it looks.

That's not important."

But Apple has always married how something looks and how something works.

So many things you could say about the iMac.

The USB was around at the time, but not many people were using it.

And Apple made the bold decision that we're going to be all USB, which caused all these

third-party manufacturers to make USB versions and it definitely made USB a lot more popular a lot

sooner than ever before. It did not have a floppy disk drive because Apple decided that was part of

the past. It had the CD-ROM drive. There's so much to say. That was big. You know, I didn't purchase

that first iMac, but I got one of the next models, the iMac DV. And from that point in the 90s,

all the way through to this year, because I bought a Mac mini earlier this year,

mainly because apple is not selling an iMac 27 inch and I didn't want to get the smaller iMac

but for almost 25 years my home computer was an iMac of one form or another and they've changed

over the years and they've had some interesting designs but this was a big computer you know

it's less important today when most people have a laptop people like me with desktop computers or

are the minority now but um but it really saved the company and the angle and one more thing I'll

say is that the angle the angle that I mentioned today is you know one of the things iMac did

You're so silly but it brought the word i to apple which i don't use it anymore you know i wrote about this back in two thousand nine that you know why did they come up with the idea of the eye and then once you had an iMac

the same i was used a whole bunch of other devices including the ipod and then of course now the iphone and nowadays apple

uses a different branding technology where they like to say you know whatever the product is use a generic term for it and then apple so apple tv or apple watch these other things but for many many years it was i and the iphone itself is such an iconic name that i don't think they'd ever change the name of it to the apple phone it's gonna be called the iphone forever cuz everybody knows the iphone so you know but the iphone would not have been called the iphone if the iMac had not been called the iMac so just so many things that have changed for the company back in 1998 so.

- I remember your post, this is from January 2009,

why the I in iPhone?

And I was just looking back here,

I had forgotten even things as iPhoto.

I still call it iPhoto, even though formally, officially,

it's just photos, the photos app, right?

But they even had iChat, we had the iLife software,

we had iWork, we had the iWeb.

I mean, it wasn't just like the actual products,

the physical products, it was also--

- Services too, yeah.

- Some of the software and stuff on that.

Just real quick to underscore the idea of the universal serial bus.

Just like you said, it was around, USB was around, but it wasn't like you can go

down to circuit city at the time and get, you know, I mean, there would be a couple

of USB mice, but I just remember even Jason was talking about that, that, you

know, that the next couple of months after the iMac came out, every manufacturer

was scrambling to come up with a USB interface or, you know, a device, because

It was something that wasn't, we were using SCSI

and parallel ports, I remember,

you know, and all the other kinds of things.

And then the other thing quickly that you mentioned,

the iMac did not come with a floppy drive.

And obviously today we're like, well, of course it didn't.

But back then that was huge.

That's, we booted our computers that way.

And I also remember then it was,

wasn't the first iMac a sliding CD tray, right?

Because at that time it was like CD,

but of course CDs at the time were only readable.

they weren't writable.

So didn't your iMac DV, wasn't that DV,

wasn't that a nod to like, you were able to write?

Like, didn't you have the ability to do DVD ROMs

then at that point?

Or you could even read or write,

or maybe just read on that?

I mean, those were big things then.

- It was called the DV because the idea is

it was the digital video that you were using your iMac for.

You know, the original iMac--

- Okay, okay, gotcha. - The focus was on

using the internet.

And the idea is you don't need floppy drives

because your files are gonna be on the internet.

And of course the internet was such in its infancy in the 1990s compared to today, that

it was still very revolutionary to say that.

But the reality is, is that people were moving away from floppy disks.

And although a lot of people would get an external floppy drive as an accessory for

their iMac, just to sort of, you know, get through those first few years, it wasn't long

before people stopped using floppy disks completely.

And nowadays we look back and say, you know, ha ha floppy disks.

But but it was transformative.

I mean, USB as a standard, we're still using USB today.

I know that USB-C is the hot new thing, but people still use USB ports.

And you can still take like something that you plugged into that first iMac in 1998 through USB,

whether it's a floppy drive or a mouse, you could still use those peripherals today,

25 years later, which is pretty amazing, you know, staying power for, I mean,

SCSI is long gone. It did not last that long, you know, other technologies did not last.

So, you know, USB was, was pretty good for Apple to pick those things at the time.

And then on the drive, there's a funny story that Apple, Steve Jobs rather, did not want to have

the tray come out the front of the iMac because he wanted it to just to be a clean slot. But the

problem was nobody was making one that you could use in quantity for the iMac. And so he finally

relented. But then they did in the next generation have one that didn't actually come out. You just,

it was just a slot that you slid the CD in, which is what the one that I owned.

But like you said, you could use DVDs and stuff like that with it. And that was,

that was very moving the industry forward and everything else. So, God bless the iMac. It

changed so much, but it really was part of saving Apple. And thank goodness for that, because that

was the first thing that we needed to do was save Apple in the 90s. And then they could focus on

making good products, introducing things like Wi-Fi, which is sort of a big deal nowadays.

and then the iPod and then the iPhone

and then the iPad and et cetera, et cetera.

And maybe next the Vision Pro.

- In Jason's story here,

just if you wanna go back and see an Apple ad,

television ad from 1998,

this was pretty amazing to underscore your point

about being online because the iMac ad say,

"Hey, you get the iMac and there's three steps

to get online, right?

Plug the power in and then they have,

it wasn't wifi, but they actually have the phone line.

you know, to plug in for the modem. And then the ad goes, step three. Well, there is no step three.

That's it. Like that's all you had to do. One thing quickly, I do want to say on the downside,

the iMac for all of its glory, the one thing that people did not like about it was the round mouse.

Do you remember that? Yeah, I did. Because that's what came with that. When Steve Johnson

introduced it, he said, it's the best mouse ever. No, it was the worst mouse ever. It looked cool,

but you had no idea what direction was facing up. It was horrible. And thank goodness Apple

finally replaced that. But it did look interesting. That was an example. If people are going to use an

example of something that looks good, form over function, that is, I think, perhaps the best

example in the history of Apple as a company. It was the worst thing that was done because it

It looked interesting, but it was, it was non-functional.

There's a rumor that I've heard many, many, many times over the years.

And I've heard it stated again this week that the people inside of

Apple who hated that round mouse, whenever they would have a meeting

with Steve jobs, they would take the computer that Steve was going to be

working at and they would take that round mouse and they would turn it

about 15 degrees so that when Steve first touched the mouse and moved up,

the cursor would actually move a little to the side and they just wanted to

annoy him a little bit,

that he would finally give thumbs up to their plans

to have the next mouse not be round.

So I always thought that was a fun story.

That ad, by the way, the is no step three,

you can't mention that ad without saying Jeff Goldblum,

because the actor Jeff Goldblum did the voiceover for that.

And his very distinctive voice,

I think it was a part of the ad.

Apple has had times over the years

where they've used very distinctive voices

for their very distinctive and memorable ads.

And he did a great job with that one.

So what about 15, 20 years after the iMac came the iPad,

maybe not quite, but then 25 years later,

it's been a long time.

We have apps for the iPad.

So we're changing gears just a little bit,

but I want you to talk quickly about a review

that you wrote this past week on the GoodNotes app.

So GoodNotes has been around for the iPad for a long time.

This is your preferred note-taking app on the iPad.

I like it as well.

although I usually tend to go to notability.

So I find a lot of people are in either the camp

of good notes or notability.

They're very similar in what they can do.

It really comes down, I think, to a personal preference

in the way that it looks.

But I was very excited to read your review this past week

of Good Notes 6, take handwritten notes on your iPad.

- Yeah, I've talked about good notes in the past

on the podcast, I love it.

It's, I just, I love being able to take handwritten notes

and have them all right there on my iPad

so that if I need to go back and find notes

from six months ago, they're just right there.

And it's just so convenient.

The Apple pencil works so great.

GoodNotes is great.

I've been using it for, I don't know, a decade.

The new version that came out this week

has got some interesting new features

that make it just some nice, some new gestures

that make it a little bit faster to use the app.

Like for example, if you want to select something

instead of actually changing to the lasso tool to select

and then move something from one part of the page

to the other, now you can just draw a circle

and then hold down on the circle with your pen

it changes the circle into a lasso selection. I mean, it's a little, that's a little geeky

little thing, but it does save you some steps. And oftentimes when I'm taking notes, seconds matter

because I'm someone else's speaking and I'm taking notes and you want to write things as fast as

possible. So that's great. But the thing that, that struck me as most interesting about GoodNotes

is like so much other technology that we're talking about nowadays, Brett, artificial

intelligence is all the rage now. And they used AI in GoodNotes 6 to automatically be looking at

your notes as you're typing it, to reading it, to try to mimic your handwriting. So the end result

is we all know how if you're typing in a word processor, Microsoft Word, and if you misspell

a word, it will put little dots, red dots underneath it so that you can see that you

have a misspelling of autocorrect and you can go do it. But I never would have thought that live

autocorrect would work on and handwriting and yet with good note six it does so as I am taking hand

written notes and you know sometimes my handwriting is pretty bad but good notes does an amazing job

of reading the handwriting and if I misspell something it'll put the little dots under it

and again unlike a written thing in a word processor where I'm going to provide it to a

court or to somebody else and I want all the words spelled correctly I don't always care

if my words are spelled correctly in my notes sometimes I use silly abbreviations just because

they are my notes. But then again, sometimes I do want them corrected. And what's funny is that you

can just tap on the word just like you would in a word processor like Microsoft Word, and it will

give you, you know, corrections. And if you tap one, it will put it in handwriting and GoodNotes

attempts to mimic your own handwriting. It's not perfect, but it looks like it looks pretty close.

I mean, it looks like handwriting. And it's just sort of funny that they're adding something that

they're doing using handwriting that looks somewhat like my own handwriting. So it's a,

it's a really interesting feature and it can also first has an auto complete to that i can you start to write a word you can try to offer to auto complete for you and stuff like that it's it's just the first generation of using a in this but i'm in my mind handwriting.

And auto correct and spell checking were like two different worlds right here and they're starting to come together so this is this is the first version of good note six who knows what they'll be doing and six point five and seven and everything else but it's really interesting.

I was just looking the first time you reviewed good notes on your blog Jeff was 2012.

And the first thing that strikes me is just the difference of the icon that looks like a little

Bondi blue. I Mac there. It does 2012. And now today they got this much cleaner logo,

but a look is I think they've added this little smile. I don't remember that smile being in their

logo. That part's brand new. Yeah, yeah, that's that's interesting. Good stuff. Another link from

John Gruber at Darien Fireball. I had to read this twice at least, Jeff, to kind of understand this.

But really interesting. John was talking about pinned links in Apple Messages. Really, really

neat. It works. I think I understood it on the iPhone, but he was actually talking about it on

the Mac OS here. But either way, really kind of a cool, neat little tip. Yeah, so I mean,

the idea would be, let's say that you and I are having a conversation with each other in the

messages app, we're chatting to each other. And then you say, Hey, Jeff, you know, the next time

that you were up in Ohio, you got to go to this museum or whatever. And you send me a link to the

website. Okay. So I'm like, you know what? I'm not going to be in Ohio anytime soon, but you know,

I'm going to want to find that link again. And, you know, six weeks from now, of course, that,

that link, that message between the two of us will be so far up our stream of messages that

it would take forever to find it. Right. And so the idea is if you just hold down on the link,

that's in messages that you sent me a little pop up menu will come up and one of the options is to

pin it and then in the future when i'm you know looking at my chat with you if i just tap right

underneath your name you'll go to a page and one of the things that page showed is whatever i have

chosen to pin from you so maybe uh and right now i think it's just for links but you know maybe it's

it's a link that you gave me today and the link that you gave me six weeks ago and a link that

you gave me four months ago, but whichever ones I thought I want to, you know, when I think of

Brett, I'm going to think of this link that he sent me. I can just pin them. It's an interesting

feature that I had zero idea was even out there. And like you, when John Gruber first described it,

it took me a second. Like, what are you, wait, wait, what? What are you talking about? But then

once I tried it out a few times, I'm like, wow, this actually could make some sense.

So it's a great tip. And in fact, I'm going to have a related tip when we get to our

tips of the week today, but it's really good. Okay. Okay. We'll come, we'll come back around

to that in the meantime, let's do the, where'd you at segment. Where are you at? You got some

good stuff. This, uh, as always, I'm almost looking forward to this segment every week.

Now I love it. Hidden air tag comes to the rescue for a woman in the Netherlands after a thief

nabs her bicycle. I think she was able to get it back on this one. Is that right?

Yeah. So here's the, uh, you know, sometimes we see a theme in different articles and of the two

links today. Here is the theme. The theme is thieves are getting smarter. And so you need to

hide your air tags. So this woman in the Netherlands, you know, bikes are super popular in the

Netherlands and she hid a air tag on her bicycle. And so when it was stolen, she was able to go to

the police. They found the bike, they recovered it. But she had it in sort of a hidden location.

And I know that there are companies that sell all sorts of different ways that you can put

at air tag on your bicycle and it's hidden, maybe it's hidden behind the reflector or

something else. And that seems to be the theme that if you want to find your stolen bike,

don't put your air tag somewhere obvious, put it somewhere that the thief might not see it.

And remember, air tags will make noise to let people know. So they may find out about it anyway,

but again, you've got your best chance if you hide it. So that's the success story over in

in the Netherlands and then if you switch to the other story up in Vancouver, somebody

had her car stolen and she's like, "Ah, fear not.

I put an air tag in my car."

And so she follows the air tag all the way to a winery only to discover it's not her

car because the thief took the air tag.

It looks like she must have had some sort of magnet thing to attach to her car.

He took it out of the car and he put it onto one of these public share cars that you have,

these Evo car, you know, car sharing services.

And so she was not following her car, she was following a different car.

And it almost seems like part of a movie plot or something.

You think you found the thief and then you pull the mask off and oh no, the thief fooled

me.

So the bad guys know about air tags and so if you're going to use one, just keep in mind

that you put it in a place that's not obvious and keep in mind that even when you do that,

it's going to beep from time to time.

So the thief may well hear it.

I've heard some people talk about putting two air tags in a vehicle or a device, because that way,

if the thief finds it, they'll just find one, but maybe they won't realize there's a second one

there. But anyway, just interesting. And can I just ask, because I'm trying to figure this out,

if the thief has an iPhone, is there a notification that would come on their iPhone, Jeff,

that would say, "Hey, there looks like there's an AirPods, it's in your vicinity," kind of a thing.

I've seen that a couple of times now and I'm just wondering, you know, maybe that they

could hear it because everyone's on a little beat, but also if they have an iPhone, they

may know that, okay, this, this, there's actually an air tag here and they can either try to

get it out or maybe they'll just go to the next car that doesn't have one.

I guess.

Yeah.

And it's there for stocking purposes because the idea is we talk about, Oh, this is my

car.

I should be able to hide an air tag in it.

But if it's your ex girlfriend or your ex boyfriend's car and you want to stock them,

You could try to hide an air tag on their vehicle and then they're being followed and

that of course is not what you want.

And so Apple with that in mind will if you know if you own an iPhone it will and after

the air tag has been with you for a certain period of time and Apple doesn't tell you

what that period of time is they purposely keep it a secret.

I've heard it could be as few as a couple of hours and it couldn't be up to two days

but somewhere between six hours and 48 hours it will give you an alert on your iPhone that

says, Hey, there's an air tag that you don't own that has been the same place that you are for the

past two days. So do you know that this air tag is following you around? And maybe it's fine that

you do know it. For example, when my wife takes my luggage to go to a trip up to New York, it's my

air tag following her up to New York. And that's fine. She says, okay, I know about that. That's

okay. But then again, maybe it's not. But if you don't have an iPhone, because that's a possibility

as well. The device will also beep every once in a while just to sort of alert anyone out there

that it is away from home, so to speak. It's not with the person that owns the AirTag.

So it's an interesting device. And although this is the way that Apple does it, you and I

reported a couple of weeks ago, months ago, I forget now, that Apple's trying to come up with

an open standard that everybody in the business would use so that iPhone and Android would all

sort of work the same way so that to protect against stalking while also... So that's why.

But you know, ear tags are not perfect for finding recovered things.

The best stories are always like, you know, finding lost luggage where, you know, it's

not it's not like with with the thief or anything like that, but it can be used for finding

stolen items.

Well, one more quick story I found because I think last week we talked about a mother

flying to find her daughter's lacrosse equipment.

Right.

I saw this story this past week that apparently I did not know that this was a thing.

There are foot archers.

This young lady uses her feet, uh, as an archery.

Well, she had very specialized equipment for that.

As you can imagine.

Since I wouldn't know about foot archery that much, but apparently,

uh, Southwest lost her luggage, but thanks to her air tag that was in

that equipment bag and some fans that she reached out to, they were

able to recover that equipment.

So just like, I don't know, it just, there's, it seems like a sports

team going through for air tags equipment on there as well.

So that's good.

All right.

Let's talk quickly about the insanity of non-air tags

and finding stuff, but the insanity of your inbox.

We are grateful that SaneBox has been working with us

over these last couple of weeks as a fantastic sponsor.

And I got to tell you, Jeff,

I wasn't a huge SaneBox user before,

but the more I'm using it,

I am just so thankful for the different features

that it offers.

And one that I'm going to highlight this week

is something that's called the Daily Digest.

So I've known that some of these other services

were available and I've talked with folks that have used them

and there is almost like that learning curve/period there

where it's like, okay, I'm gonna let Synbox look at my email

which has been great because they have successfully

filtered out things that I don't wanna delete

and I want to still see like a newsletter for example,

or maybe an announcement from somewhere,

but I don't want those messages to necessarily be

at the top of my inbox because I want to be able to get access

to the emails that I need to reply to or something similar

to that.

But as I'm going through this, one of the things

that that same box will do is say, hey,

do you know there's a few messages that we're

pretty confident about.

But you might just want to look, like just verify for us.

I almost think of it as like if I had a personal assistant,

that they would say, hey, we've taken care of filtering

all of these emails for you.

Don't worry about any of these emails

unless you wanna go and look at it.

But there's a handful here that we just want you

just take a peek at and make sure

that you don't wanna see them.

And then we can train, we know for going forward.

And that's exactly what the SaneBox Daily Digest

has been doing for me.

I gotta tell you the first few days

when I started SaneBox,

I would look at the Daily Digest almost religiously

because I'm like, okay, I gotta,

is this doing what I think it's doing?

Am I trusting it?

Is it filtering out the messages?

And sure enough, it did.

There may have been one or two that I said,

yeah, I'm glad you put that in my inbox,

but I would actually prefer that one

to go into the newsletters, the same news folder,

'cause I can look at that later.

And so the more I've used SaneBox,

the less and less I feel like

I've had to go to the Daily Digest,

but they will still send me a Daily Digest.

And sometimes now it's maybe just four messages, Jeff.

And they're like, hey, we've taken care of this for you,

but you might just wanna look at it.

It's a webpage, a special webpage that opens up immediately

when you click into the link.

And I can just say, yes, this is all, I confirm all of this.

You did the right thing.

You moved everything, these messages to the same news.

Or if there's one that I'm like, you know,

I'd like for this one instead to hit my inbox.

So just make that change for it real quick.

And immediately it just, it's just a couple of clicks

and it's been trained now and it works.

So anyway, that's the daily digest.

I almost feel like that it's being trained

on the backend anyway.

And 'cause I can move things in my Apple mail, for example,

or my email on my phone,

I can move it into those different SaneBox folders.

So it's really training on the backend anyway,

but the Daily Digest, at least initially here,

has given me a little bit more confidence that,

okay, yeah, I can look at these,

just verify and confirm

that everything's working the right way.

So thank you, SaneBox, for the Daily Digest,

because it's great.

Although I gotta tell you,

I feel like I'm gonna use it less and less.

Like I've gotten that confidence level now, Jeff,

that it's like, you know what?

You're doing a great job.

Keep on going.

That's my little tip for today from SaneBox.

I've been using SaneBox for like a year now.

And I had daily digest on for maybe about a month.

And it was great to sort of see what was going on.

And then I was like, you know what?

You're doing great.

You don't have to bother me, but I will tell you one cool

thing about the daily digest.

This is just, this just shows that they pay attention to the details.

Let's just say you get a daily digest on Tuesday and you

don't look at it on Tuesday.

And then on Wednesday you would get another daily digest.

So does that mean that you have two daily digests?

No, they're smart enough that they will go back and delete

one from Tuesday and then make the Wednesday one include the last two days.

So by the time you just get one and no matter when you last looked at it and it's got everything

that you need since the last time you look.

I'm like, what a smart little feature.

Although I now have the daily digest feature turned on, one of the features that I have

turned off rather, one of the features I have turned on now is called the sane no replies

folder.

And what this does is it's again, same box doesn't look at the content of your message.

if you send a message to a person and from the the header and stuff it seems like this might be something that you might want to

respond to like for example if I'm if you send me an email and I reply to it

It's not going to be triggered, but if I initiate the email to you

It says you know this might be something that you want to reply that I wanted to get a reply from Brett

And yet I never did so what it'll do is it'll take a copy of that message

And it'll put it in a folder called saying no replies and so every once in a while

I can look at the folder and it'll just have all these messages in it and some of those messages are like well

didn't expect anyone to reply to that folder. I was just telling, I was just sending an email to

Brett saying, you know, have a great day. So no reply necessary, but I might see one or two of

those and I'm like, oh my goodness, I sent that email like four days ago and I haven't gotten a

reply to it. That's important. Like I need to follow up on that. And so that's what the same

no replies folder does. It just keeps a list of them. And again, you don't have to check it all

the time, but once a week or twice a week, just take a look. And you know, many of them, you don't

need replies, that's fine, but it will save your bacon. And again, it's like the analogy that you

used before, Brett, of like having a personal assistant. It's a little personal assistant,

just tapping in your folder, you know, excuse me, did you want to get a reply from Mike? Because

he never actually did reply to you. And you're like, oh, thank you for reminding me. I need to

follow up with Mike. So great little feature. And SaneBox has, you know, tons of these features and

you decide which one you want to turn on and turn off. So again, thank you again to SaneBox.

- Although I got to point this out real quick, Jeff.

It looks like the same no replies is actually included

with all the same box plans.

- Cool.

- So you get that by the way,

because I know we haven't talked too much

about the pricing aspects on here,

but exactly what you described that depending

on the actual pricing plan that you want to purchase,

you can pick which features are going to be most important

to you, but then saying no replies sounds like it's

in all of them.

And by the way, whichever plan that you choose,

if you go to sanebox.com/inthenews,

First of all, you get a 14 day trial.

So you can try this out and you can look at that daily

digest for those 14 days and just make sure

it's working for you.

And then in addition to that,

if you go to sanebox.com/inthenews,

you get a $25 credit toward whatever subscription level

that you want to try out with SaneBox.

So we'll have that post, that link in the list

in the show notes, of course, sanebox.com/inthenews.

Just all one word there and you can get a little more

information about it.

Thank SaneBox for working with us

and sponsoring the In The News podcast.

Thank you, SaneBox.

In the know, let's go through a couple of tips quickly.

I'm gonna cheat on mine just a little bit, Jeff.

I admit, because it's something we talked about

I think at least maybe a couple of weeks ago.

But it is saving camera settings on the iPhone.

So yesterday I took my son, who's very big

into like World War II memorabilia, tanks and everything.

I had no idea that apparently in Conneaut, Ohio,

which is in the upper Northeastern section of Ohio

on Lake Erie has a eerily similar beach

to the Normandy beach.

And so yesterday we went up to a D-Day reenactment

and I had no idea that there were people

that got heavily into this, Jeff,

but it was absolutely fascinating.

So there was like the German camp and the American camp

and the British camp and the French Revolution,

Maquis camps, it was great.

They had full-on rifles, pistols.

We had Sherman tanks on the beach.

We had a plane that was like flying over.

There were like explosions happening on the beach.

There were bunkers.

There were machine guns and rifles.

It was incredible.

Just to kind of see, even though this was a much smaller

scale than obviously the D-Day invasion,

but you know, all of these years later,

I mean, and some of these equipment is like 85 years old.

Okay, anyway, that was interesting enough.

So thank you D-Day Ohio.

But I was obviously taking a lot of pictures

and video on the phone.

Well, we talked about this last time.

I hate it every time that when I opened up my camera app,

Jeff, that I would have to say,

okay, do I wanna take a video or do I want to take a photo

or do I wanna take a portrait mode?

And then, you know, right above the little button,

the camera button, you have to swipe back and forth

to select which mode that you want.

And by the time that I finally got on the actual mode,

'cause sometimes you swipe too far,

or you don't go to the right one,

the moment has lost sometimes.

And it just would frustrate me.

Well, you pointed this out a few weeks ago

that if you go into your settings and go to camera,

there is a little option there called preserve settings.

And there's actually several of them on there.

The only two that I really do though,

is right at the very top in preserve settings,

it's the camera mode.

So what this means is that if I open the camera app

and I take a picture, put it back in my pocket,

you know, the iPhone locks.

Once I turn the iPhone on again and go to camera mode,

guess what mode it's in?

It's in camera mode.

Or if I did a video at the last,

it would be back in video mode.

It was just very helpful to be able to jump back into that.

The other preserve setting that I do is at the very bottom.

It's called live photo.

Now, the only reason I do this

is because I don't like the live photos very much,

or I just don't do them

'cause I feel like it takes a little bit more room

necessarily like if I want a photo, I just want a photo, but I turn on preserve the live

photo settings.

So in other words, if I turn my photo off, that means the next time I open my camera

app, the live photo is off.

What I find many times is that people don't have that toggled on.

And so every time they open their camera, the live photo is on.

And so when people send me pictures, it usually is a live photo, which is okay, but I'm like,

I don't really need the live photo.

I just want like a static picture on there.

So anyway, there's several other settings

that you can preserve settings in there,

but this is settings, camera, preserve settings.

And I got to tell you, yesterday,

it saved me quite a bit of frustration

because if I took a video, turned it off

and came back to it, it was back in video mode.

And it was just really neat to save, you know,

those five nanoseconds on there, but it was good.

- Yeah, that's an absolute fabulous tip.

Fantastic, I use it all the time.

It makes a huge difference.

My tip today is sort of a follow-up

on what we were talking about.

post from John Gruber where he talked about pinning a link in messages.

And that's great if you remember to pin the link.

But my tip today is much broader, which is that if you have people that you have messages

back and forth with, you know, they're going to send you pictures over time.

They're going to send you, you know, sharing notes.

They're going to send you all sorts of things, you know, a location, you know, here's the

location of the store that we're going to meet up.

They may send you documents.

And then later on, you might want to go find those items.

The way that you can do so very quickly is, you know, here's the way that you probably

are going to do it.

You open up your messages and you just start swiping and swiping and swiping and swiping

until you finally found the picture.

And because it was so many months ago, you got to swipe so far, it drives you crazy.

Don't do that.

There's a much better way.

What you do instead is open up your conversation.

Like I opened up my conversation with you, Brett, and at the very top of the screen,

it's got your name.

And if I tap right under your name or right on your name on the iPhone, it's right under

on the iPad, it's right on.

then go to a second screen. Now this is the screen that we were talking about before that

as John Gruber pointed out has pinned conversations, but just below pinned or if you've never pinned

anything then just, you know, if you just scroll down a little bit, you will see collaboration,

which is any shared notes. So if you and I had shared something in the notes app, it

would be there. You will see photos. So it's any photos that I've shared with you and that

you've shared with me. And this is great because you could then, it'll show you like the first,

in front of you, maybe like the first nine of them, but if you do see all, you'll see them all.

And so that way, even if there was a photo that I have this vague memory that you sent me like

two years ago, I could go back and I could find that photo without having to scroll through two

years of messages, which would take me, you know, almost two years to do. So photos, it'll have all

the links that we've shared with each other, all the documents. Like if you sent me a PDF file,

you know, and so it's a great way to get to just those. It reminds me of in the mail app,

There's a mode that you can like only look at emails that have attachments on it,

which makes it finder because faster if you know you're looking for an attachment on an email,

don't even show me the ones that don't have attachments because I know I don't want to see

those. But this is really better. So this is a great tip for anybody. I mean, really anyone that

uses messages, really just about all of them. You vaguely remember that you sent something to

someone else or they sent it to you. This is the way to find those attachments from the conversation.

- This is so cool.

'Cause especially even with my wife,

there's like links she'll send me for like things like,

hey, can you pick this up please?

Or, you know, like purchase this one on Amazon

with whatever, you know, discount that you have or so.

And sure enough, I'm swiping back and forth on there.

But, and I guess I knew that this screen was there.

It's almost like I call it an info screen, Jeff,

but I guess I just didn't scroll down long enough.

- You have to scroll down.

- To see all the links or see all the photos

that we've shared.

And yeah, that's a great like clearing house.

one stop location that I can grab all that stuff.

That is fantastic.

I like that.

Now there's more people texting me.

So that's good.

I like it.

All right, good stuff.

I know we went a little bit long today,

but man, only because there's so many good things

to talk about.

Happy birthday, iMac.

Thanks for all the memories.

It's been great.

And we also thank you, SaneBox for sponsoring today.

Go to sanebox.com/inthenews to get some more information.

Jeff, always great talking with you.

and we'll talk with you next week.

- Thanks, Bret.