113: Lightning Eulogy, HomePod Harassment, and Doing the Pay Dance

(upbeat music)

- Welcome to In the News for September the 8th, 2023.

I am Brett Burney from appsinlaw.com.

- And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhoneJD.

How you doing Brett?

- Good morning, Jeff.

A very important update for our iPhones.

It is here, iOS 16.6.1.

(laughing)

We're waiting for iOS 17, not quite yet,

but I'm glad that it looks like Apple released

a very important critical zero day update

that I actually, I just installed this morning.

It went pretty quick.

And again, we've seen this now several times in the wild,

somebody finds an exploit and Apple seems to be

a little bit quicker now getting a fix out, which is great.

So thank you, Apple.

- Yeah, no, this is an interesting one.

You know, from what I understand,

'cause I had a link here to the Citizen Lab,

which is up in Canada, they're associated with,

and now I'm blanking on the name of the university,

But this is what they do.

I mean, they look for security holes that could be,

especially things that could be dangerous to folks

who are involved in civil rights,

so those sorts of organizations.

And apparently there was somebody working in Washington DC.

They don't say what organization that they were working for,

but they had a phone and they were just having

the citizen lab check it routinely to make sure

that they were safe.

And sure enough, they found something.

And this was a bizarre zero-day exploit.

It looks like it came from the NSO group,

which as we all remember,

is based in Israel.

They are one of the top ones for cracking iPhones.

Their software is called Pegasus.

It's expensive.

And they could claim that they only sell it to governments

so that it's not something that a true hacker could use.

Of course, some governments may have different ideals

than you and I do, just depending upon where they come from.

And so the idea is that a government would use it

for like a terrorist iPhone,

but obviously this guy was apparently

some sort of a civil rights person,

And yet some government apparently considered him to be dangerous.

And so they, they, they hacked his phone.

And the, what's scary to me is that the way it happened is they

sent him simply send him a message.

You know, just by sending him a text message or, or be more specific,

an iMessage that had a photo on it that I don't know what the photo was.

You know, let's just say it was a photo of a puppy, but because it was

some sort of maliciously crafted photo, it, it broke into his iPhone

and he didn't have to do anything at all.

So, I mean, it's not like he had to click on something, you know, we

always tell people, watch Richard, click, watch Richard open, you know, watch where

you download things from, but this one just got straight through.

So it shows you how smart the security folks for NSA group are to even come up with these

exploits.

Um, now it looks like Apple found out about it.

I think two weeks ago is what we found out and they were able to turn around this update

pretty quickly.

So for at least two weeks, you know, all iPhones and iPads and Mac computers and everything

else have technically been at risk.

Now it is patched.

Now again, these are targeted attacks.

I mean, my guess is that you would have to be a special kind of person to have this sent

to you.

And I can see many people saying, "Hey, why is a government going to target me?"

But then again, you never know.

And all sorts of things are malicious and things can fall into the wrong hands.

I mean, I'm an attorney and I represent people that have all sorts of, whether they be business

interests or personal interests, you never know when somebody is going to be targeting

you to try to make you the attack vector.

You know, many other people could be involved in industries where you may think that I'm

just Joe Blow who works for company A, but maybe somehow you're a target or maybe somebody's

even just picked you randomly to try something out on you before they use it on the real

target.

So it makes good sense to update your iPhone and it's good to see Apple doing what they

should do, which is fix these exploits as soon as they learn about them.

Yeah.

I'm always quick to make sure that people understand there's a balanced approach here,

right?

It's like, yes, this is important.

This is an exploit.

It is something that needs to be fixed and which is why I always suggest.

And we've talked about this many times when it's like a point point update, then there's

really no harm in doing it.

It's not going to change your experience on the iPhone as if we're going from 16, iOS

16 to iOS 17.

Now that's going to be, you know, quite a number of changes, but these smaller updates

are really just, I think I call it common sense more than anything else, because again,

most of us, to your point are not going to be targeted by, you know, uh, nefarious government

entities of some kind.

They're not going to be looking for that.

But on the other hand, it is good to make sure

that we do these updates.

This employee, they kind of explained it

in a kind of a generic way,

an employee of a Washington DC based

civil society organization with international offices.

And so that's where they found, I know.

So who knows where that could be?

But I mean, obviously it was something important

and somebody somewhere was trying to get access

onto their phones.

And I'm just, I think the takeaway for me is

I'm just glad to see that when this organization,

what are they called?

The Citizen Lab, when this organization found out about it,

they notified Apple through the right channels

and Apple, I think, did the right thing

and made sure that they just closed this little exploit,

this little loophole, and they did it very quickly.

And we've been talking about this for years now.

We have these ability now to do these updates

a lot quicker and easier than it used to be

back in the day, so great.

One last thing quickly on this,

they also in this article that you linked to,

encouraged everyone to enable lockdown mode.

And I gotta be honest, Jeff,

I don't know too much about lockdown mode in the iPhone,

but it looks like, they linked to the article,

the Apple support article here, which is great.

But it looks like that might be a little too far.

I think that most of us, but yeah,

if it's something that you really are truly concerned

that maybe, you know, at least be aware of the lockdown mode there.

Yeah. If you know that you work for an organization that you have a position that you feel like

you actually might be a target, you can turn on this mode and lockdown mode

does prevent a lot of the useful things. You know, it definitely limits the usefulness of

a lot of iPhone services, but it's something that you can turn on and turn off if you want.

You know, you may decide, for example, if you're traveling to another country,

that you would just feel more comfortable turning on lockdown mode when you travel and stuff like

that. So it's nice that you could do that. By the way, the Citizen Lab, it's University of Toronto,

that's the, just to give them full credit and kudos to them for doing this type of research to

help us out because, you know, unless you find exploits like this, they could just continue to

exist in the wild and be exploited. So let's stay on the security topic just for a little bit longer.

And this involves something that is a little stomach churning and in some aspects here,

but we've been talking about this now for a couple of years and it's really the, they call it CSAM,

Child Sexual Abuse Material. And two years ago, the reason we started talking about this in August

of 2021, as you reported here on iPhoneJD, that an Apple was going to, I guess I don't really

understand exactly what they were going to do, but they were trying to put some protections in place

to make sure that if they found some of this extremely offensive and illegal material,

you know, mostly photos, right, on phones, that it would alert the law enforcement or something

along those lines. And we haven't seen anything really come about. Apple's kind of touched upon

it. But you link to another story today from Wired that Apple has now decided to officially kill

the CSAM photo scanning tool, which on one hand doesn't seem to make any sense at all,

Jeff, but on the other hand, I can see where Apple, why Apple made this decision as well.

Yeah. So, I mean, the issue here is obviously, you know, everyone's going to say we're against

child abuse. I mean, that's the easy part and you certainly don't want to have, you know,

photographs of children in inappropriate, you know, situations going around. So here in the

United States, we have something called the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

And they are a national clearinghouse. They're like the only person in America that actually

has permission to collect these inappropriate photographs. Because one of the things that they

can do is they can take the photograph and they can do a computational analysis on it and then

come up with a hashtag. And so the idea being is if somebody else has a photograph that matches

the same hashtag, then you know that it is the same photo, or at least statistically within a

certain degree, it's the same photo. And so what it means is that if somebody says, I have a folder

of a thousand photos and I just want to double check that none of these are inappropriate,

you can run the hashtags from this national clearinghouse against it. And if it'll let you

know if there's a match. So that's where all this comes from. And so Apple, as it was allowing

people to upload people to iCloud, it's iCloud, it's online service. It doesn't want to have

have images up there that are inappropriate.

But at the same time, Apple wants to protect those images.

It doesn't want to say, "I'm going to look at all the images you upload," because that

invades your privacy.

So how do you balance wanting to protect your privacy, but also Apple not wanting to have

these photos on its service?

And what Apple decided a couple of years ago, and it was announced two years ago, is that

before your iPhone or your Mac or whatever, before you upload pictures to iCloud on your

actual device where your photos live before they've been shared with anybody, that your

iPhone would download all of the hashtags from this clearinghouse and will double check

your photos as they're being uploaded.

Now, if you choose not to upload them, nothing would ever happen.

That's just your own problem if you have inappropriate photos on your device.

But when you go to upload it, it would double check each one before it reaches Apple service.

And so that way, Apple could keep the photos encrypted on its service and they could honestly

say, "We can't see your photos."

And yet they would also know that there were no inappropriate photos on its service.

So all of this sounded like a good solution to this problem when Apple announced it two

years ago.

But shortly after they announced it, a number of people started to object and some objections

I thought were going too far, but there were other ones that were legitimate.

And the real problem was a slippery slope argument.

I always get worried about slippery slope arguments because you can argue against everything

with a slippery slope argument.

But the one here was, once you start using this service in the US with the US National

clearinghouse to have it work in other countries, you would have to use the appropriate clearinghouse

from those countries.

And for every country, they're going to designate different things.

Apple themselves would not know what's in those clearinghouses.

And the danger is, what if you have a country that says, you know, our country legitimately

believes for example, that being gay is a crime.

And so any, you know, photographs showing any homosexual activity of any kind, they

would say is a crime against the state.

And if you have those photos, then you're a bad guy, just as bad as if you had some

child pornography.

Well, if Apple was using those clearing houses, how is Apple going to say yes to the US clearing

house, but say no to some other government's clearing house?

And so the idea is that once you create the...

Or another example might be in China, this is almost a humorous example.

There are people that would say pictures of Winnie the Pooh are used to criticize the

leader of China.

And so China literally stopped people said, you know, in China, you can't talk about Winnie

the Pooh or you can't share Winnie the Pooh pictures, which sounds almost comical.

But what happens if suddenly anyone, you know, in China can no longer upload to the Chinese

iCloud pictures of Winnie the Pooh?

I mean, just as an example.

And so Apple realized that once they start a service like this, there's no way that they

could turn down government's ability to tell Apple, here's what you need to search for.

And then suddenly, essentially, although it's all happening on device, governments are having

the ability to search your device for photographs that the government considers to be inappropriate.

And sometimes that's the right thing.

Sometimes that's the wrong thing.

It all depends upon your perspective.

And you can understand that that is a legitimate slippery slope argument.

So what we've all known publicly is that Apple announced this system two years ago and then

they never came through with it.

And we were all wondering what's the story.

And so the reason that this is a news this week is because there was a statement released

Wired Magazine by somebody at Apple that he's a little coy in the description of the reasons,

but basically is saying that it is this slippery slope argument. The quote there is Eric,

gosh, I can't pronounce his last name, Noonan Schwander, but he says, "We concluded it was not

practically possible to implement without ultimately imperiling the security and privacy

of our users which that's a statement that is not very specific but there's you know you

understand where he's coming from there that you know we can't as a practical matter it's

in and it's a shame because it's you know you start with good intentions apple had the right

idea here but as a practical matter they're very smart system that they came up with when you think

through what are the implications of actually implementing this you suddenly find yourself in

a place that you don't want to be and so you know it's the old argument of one bad apple can one

it for the rest of us. That's sort of what ended up here. So I think it's a fascinating story.

And much like the last one that we talked about, this one, like the NSO group, I mean,

it involves privacy, security, governments around the world. It's the same themes.

It's really interesting. How could Apple win in this situation, Jeff? I mean, honestly,

I remember talking about this a couple of years ago when it first came out and we were, again,

Who would have been against it?

You know, from the goal, at least,

that Apple was putting forth on this,

is like, this is great.

I mean, we're gonna finally, you know,

from a technology standpoint,

be able to maybe tamp down some of this illegal activity.

We're like, go for it, like, let's do that.

But obviously, there's a lot of folks that can point,

you know, have a counterpoint to that.

And it's exactly, in fact, another quote that Eric said here,

scanning every user's privately stored iCloud data

would create new threat vectors.

And he says, it would also inject the potential

for a slippery slope of unintended consequences.

Scanning for one type of content, for instance,

opens the door for bulk surveillance

and could create a desire to search

other encrypted messaging systems across content types.

And so, I see exactly where they're coming from.

But then in the next paragraph here,

there's another individual here

that is at another nonprofit that they work to combat

child exploitation online and sex trafficking.

And she wrote a letter to Tim Cook and said,

this is extremely disappointing.

She said, Apple is one of the most successful companies

in the world with an army of world-class engineers.

In other words, how can you not find a solution to this?

But I just don't see how Apple is going to win.

I mean, I can see that they're trying to navigate this

and frankly, I'm glad that they're thinking about it.

And there's a lot of other people

that are thinking about this, you know,

and trying to do it to it in the correct way, I guess.

But at the same time,

some of this activity may still be going on, right?

In other words, we could point to things that's unfortunate

that are still continuing to happen

while we're trying to figure this out

from a technology standpoint.

But yeah, we'll just continue to keep watching this,

I guess, because I don't know how anybody is going to win,

you know, in doing this.

But maybe there'll be something

that Apple will come up with here pretty soon.

We'll have to just have to see.

So maybe if you're in China,

they've already fixed the problem.

China bans iPhone use for government officials at work.

This was really interesting.

I saw this reported from a couple of other places as well.

So I'm not really sure exactly the reason

that China, the government has banned officials on this.

Jeff, maybe you can enlighten me a little bit here,

but it doesn't surprise me, I guess,

but I don't understand it completely.

- There's a good reason you don't know the reason, Brett.

There is not really one.

Okay, good.

But you know, to be fair, to be completely fair, you know, you hear in the United States

over the last couple of months, it's been in the news that certain sectors of the government,

both federal and state governments have said that they ban the use of TikTok on government

phones.

Has anybody TikTok of course is based in China, although folks that use TikTok in the United

States are supposedly using US servers and it's a separate US company, although I'll

be affiliated with the Chinese entity.

And so when you use TikTok, if you decide to spend your time looking at a certain type

of video on TikTok, let's just say kitten videos, cute kittens, is the government of

China finding out that Brett Burney likes to look at kitten videos?

I don't know.

TikTok claims no, but I guess it's theoretically possible.

And so because of that, that has been enough.

That fear has been enough for government officials in the United States and certain sectors to

ban the use of TikTok on government iPhones.

So I've found some of the employees.

So I got that in mind, you know, knowing that people in the United States have also made

decisions that, you know, you can argue about the basis.

China has decided we are banning if you work for the government.

And of course it becomes, well, if you work for the government, you can't use an iPhone

and you can't even bring for your government work and you can't even bring an iPhone into

work.

And of course, working for the government in China becomes a tricky concept because

so many industries are nationalized there.

It's, it's a question of how far it extends.

Now as for the reason, they say it reduces reliance on foreign technology because the

idea is if you can't use an iPhone, you're going to use like a Huawei or one of those

Chinese manufactured phones.

And also they say it protects cybersecurity, not that China is actually saying that there's

anything inherently insecure about iPhones.

In fact, I would argue that as the recent, on the one hand that NSO group showed that

there were exploits to be had, but the fact that Apple fixed it so quickly shows that

Apple is incredibly concerned about security.

I don't think that that was a real excuse.

So, you know, some of this is posturing.

Some of it is, you know, you do this, I'm going to need to respond.

Apple's relationship with China is so complicated because Apple relies upon China for manufacturing

standpoint and China is one of the biggest markets in the world in terms of emerging

use.

You know, here in the U S it's pretty saturated, you know, pretty much everybody in the United

States that wants a smartphone owns a smartphone and they've already made the decision of iPhone

versus Android, and maybe you can convince some people to switch.

But in terms of future growth, you know, some of the areas that Apple, you know, can look

to are countries like China and India, um, in places where there is a burgeoning middle

class that can, that can more and more afford iPhones.

So you know, it's a big deal to perhaps be losing the argument.

And again, China is not banning the iPhone throughout China only for people that work

for the government.

But again, there's a question of how far it goes.

So it's an interesting thing.

And again, this is now the third story in a row, Brett, where we're talking about, you

know, government decisions.

It's, it's, you know, the, this, this relationship between governments and technology.

It's just, it's really interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's, it's almost at first seems a little tit for tat from the China perspective.

I'm not really sure.

But of course I did see where somebody contemplated that China is saying, Hey, you know, it's,

really for the safety, we want to have Chinese made devices.

And of course the first thing I think of, well, the iPhone is made in China,

designed in California, but made in China.

So, but I understand you did a really good job of explaining this.

So thank you.

And, uh, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll see.

Uh, I, to me, I'm just interested in like, how, how, how good is that going to work?

Because if somebody is really, you know, uh, uh, tagged to their iPhone, I don't

know if they want to give it up that easy.

- Well, we are a week away now from the Apple announcement,

not even a week, what four or five days?

- Yeah, we're almost hours.

- So we're excited to see what is coming,

but then we also may need to have a eulogy

for the lightning cable.

I thought this was a great article you'll link to here

from Dan Morin in Macworld,

RIP lightning in lieu of flowers, please send dongles.

We may see the end of the lightning connector in four days, Jeff.

One of the things that was interesting is that lightning was announced in 2012,

as we've talked about in the past.

And Dan Morin has a quote from, uh, Apple's, uh, vice-president Phil Schiller

here, where he says that it's going to be a modern connector for the next decade,

which probably sounds like a long time back in 2012, but it's now been more than

decades, more than a decade.

Exactly.

I guess you could argue that Apple told us at the time that lightning was

announced that about 10 years later, or maybe in this case,

11 years later, it's going to be time for something new.

And again, you and I just talked about this a little bit

last week, too.

I wonder in my head if it wasn't for the fact

that the EU is demanding that smartphones sold in Europe

starting next year have to support USB-C,

would Apple have made the change?

I don't know.

I mean, I think that there are some clear advantages to USB-C.

Like we talked about last week, the ability

transfer data faster for downloading a 4k video and stuff like that. On the other hand, a lot of

the advantages of lightning and USPC are identical. It's a small connector, it's reversible, so it

doesn't matter what way you split it in there. And lightning of course has the advantage of being a

proprietary technology. I mean advantage if you're Apple is what I mean, because that means that

Apple can make a little bit of money every time that a third party sells a lightning connector,

whereas USPC is an open standard. So Apple doesn't make money off of people having USPC.

But you know, whatever the reasons, the, the wides, I mean, the number one rumor that you

just have to accept is probably true is that in just a few days, Apple is going to say,

we're on the new iPhones and moving to USBC. And I'm looking forward to it. Cause I think

that there's going to be a lot of USBC third-party devices that will suddenly be able to use

that you can't currently use. Since I already have USBC on my iPad pro I'm just as happy to

move more towards a universal connector. I'm going to still have some devices perhaps that rely upon

on lightning, but maybe not too many.

So, but it's a fun little article that Dan has

sort of his eulogy to it.

- The thing that struck me here was this little picture

that he had right in the middle,

where he has the lightning cable in the middle

and he's got the USB-C over onto the right,

which is fairly similar in size,

but then on the left, he has the old,

what we call the 30 pin connector,

which is what lightning replaced.

And it's just, I hadn't seen one of those in so long, Jeff.

And it just brought to mind is like,

wow, that was a humongous plug with a 30 pin connector.

And then we went to the lightning

and I remember what a revolution it was

to go to something so small.

And the fact that you could turn it upside down,

it didn't matter.

And it made so much more room in the iPads and the iPhone.

And that's one of the reasons obviously

that Apple made that switch.

But yeah, we'll see.

I know there's gonna be a lot of grief

about Apple making the switch, but it could happen.

- That's the funny thing.

When you show that picture, Brett,

If just by looking at the picture, even if you just woke up from a cave and you have

never seen either a lightning or a 30 pin connector.

And if you looked at these things, you'd say, wow, why would anybody want to use a 30 pin

connector versus lightning?

But of course you and I lived through it, Brett.

And we remember that at the time, many people complained about Apple making the switch.

They were just trying to make us spend more money and buy Apple stuff, you know, and all

that sort of stuff.

And so if people complained about that switch 11 years ago, it makes me wonder whether or

not, we're going to hear complaints to USBC.

A lot of us who are more geeky and have a lot of technology,

we're familiar with USBC, but we already have those cables.

There's does, you know, Joe and Jane iPhone user really know much about USBC.

And are they going to be, you know, complaining, ah, why Apple?

Why are you making us do this?

So we'll have to see.

I'll be curious to see the public reaction and what makes the, the, the, the, the

newspaper headlines of the USA today's of the world and stuff.

So we'll see.

We'll see.

Jeff.

I know you like your HomePods, but do you like AirPlay as well?

Great article from Felipe Esposito in nine to five Mac HomePod two is exactly what I wanted.

But then he has to deal with AirPlay.

I know you've complained about this a couple of times as well.

Yeah. AirPlay has so many nice features when it works.

The problem is it just doesn't always work perfectly.

And, you know, people that I know that use Sonos speakers

always talk about how the technology that Sonos uses is superior to Airplay.

And although I've never used them, that's what I hear people say.

You know, Airplay works pretty well, but I mean, literally just this week,

I was sitting there in my living room, Brett, and I was listening to some music.

And suddenly the, actually, you know what it was? It was a couple of days ago. I was listening to

Jimmy Buffett stuff. And after Jimmy Buffett passed away last weekend, and as my songs playing

on the Airpod Mini, suddenly they just stop. I'm like, why did you stop? What happened?

So then I had to go back to my iPhone and start it up again.

There was no good reason to stop.

It just, it just stops sometimes.

So, uh, apple needs to, and the thing that, that annoys me a little bit is that

airplay and now airplay version two had been around for a long time.

And I, I feel like, you know, and again, I know nothing about what I'm speaking.

Let me just say that clear, but part of me feels like if apple could just put a

few more engineers on this product, let's clean up all the problems.

Let's let's work out the bugs.

You get the feeling that Apple put it out there in the world and then put its

engineers on some other project.

Maybe they're working in the Apple vision pro that's coming out next

year or something else.

Like it's like, if you, if you, you know, AirPlay is almost there, it is 98% of the

way there.

I just wish they would close that final one or 2%.

So maybe Apple wants you to use AirPods instead, Jeff, speaking of which happy

birthday to the AirPods, which launched seven years ago.

And you believe it's been seven years.

I cannot, I cannot.

And I remember having, just like you, I think you ordered,

it was December, 2016, as you talked about

in your post today, but you ordered one immediately,

but you didn't get them until January,

the middle of January or no, January 5th, sorry.

I think I waited a few more months

and I was able to get my first pair.

And that's probably one of the first things,

like that's one of my immediate purchases now,

every time that they have released a new set of AirPods.

You know, today I know we were both using the AirPods Pro.

My daughter I've mentioned has the AirPods Max,

which at first I thought

that's the one thing I did not purchase.

But I gotta tell you, it's on my short list

just because they sound so good.

And now of course I see them everywhere now,

especially when I'm traveling, people use them all the time.

But seven years ago, the AirPods launched

and boy, I say Apple,

keep, uh, put, put some of those engineers on this as well, because we want more

and better.

And I know there are going to be some changes that we expect to hear

about next Tuesday as well.

Yeah.

I wouldn't be surprised.

I mean, AirPods are something that almost since day one have really

been universally loved by people.

Um, every once in a while you hear a tiny complaint along the edges, but

you know, so many people, whether they be a real geeky techie person to just

a regular person that just wants to use something that works, people love their

AirPods and for good reasons.

I mean, they sound good.

They're easy to use.

They're easy to charge.

They work really well.

They've come out with new models.

When they came out with the model that I'm using now

that had the noise cancellation,

you know, it's so nice to have the AirPods Pro.

And I'm sure that we're gonna see at the very least

a version very, very soon that works,

that just charges via USB-C instead of lightning.

If they do that for the iPhone,

you gotta think they're gonna do that for the charging case.

But who knows what's gonna come next.

But I mean, these are just great devices.

I use them all the time.

I've got them in my ears right now

for me listening to you speak.

- Same.

- I mean, I use them every day.

I use them to listen to music, to podcasts.

I use them for video conference calls.

Every single day I use my AirPods.

- When was it that, was it a year and a half ago or so

where then, you know, on these AirPods Pro

you could turn the volume up and down.

I love that.

You could just use your finger and swipe up and down

on the little stick there.

And I love that.

And then, but I know it's specifically

that we've talked about,

they are gonna change a couple of the actions

with iOS 17, am I correct, Jeff?

So in other words, now if I'm on a phone call

with my AirPods Pro to hang up the phone call,

I'll just click my AirPods Pro

and that hangs the phone call up.

But I believe they're gonna change that

to where it'll mute me on a phone call, right?

There's gonna be a few of those little changes.

Anyway, we'll pay attention to that by next Tuesday

and hopefully get a little more information

to share on that.

Let's keep talking about music,

and specifically classical music.

You know, we don't talk about the Apple Music app

very much, I'm just realizing,

although we both like it very much,

but something we don't talk about even,

we talk about even less is the Apple Classical Music app.

Other than when it came out, I remember talking about that.

And it feels like Apple to me is

kind of on a quiet streak here.

They acquired a couple of other companies,

whatever that was that they acquired

from the classical music,

and that's what turned into the music app,

Prime Phonic or Prime Music or something like that.

- Yeah, okay.

And then now you link to a story today,

which wasn't about a specific piece of software,

but it's a library of classical music

that's been around for years, for decades.

What was the name of this company?

BIS. - BIS.

- Yeah, Revered Classical Music Label out of Sweden,

that they're actually joining Apple.

You know, reading this, I'm just thinking to myself,

that's fantastic that Apple is,

I think putting resources into,

And frankly, I think, you know, a genre of music that they don't have to pay attention

to Jeff is what I'm thinking, right?

They have plenty of time that they can put, you know, for Taylor Swift focus, right?

And all the pop and everything else.

But I'm thrilled to see that Apple has continued to make some investments in the classical

side as well.

It's a fun story here because this company, BIS, was founded by this guy in Sweden, Robert

von Baer, who is now in his eighties.

So you know, it's time for him to be retiring soon.

And so this, this, this company that he's built on, uh, he's, he's found a new home

for it by, by selling out to Apple.

And he says he and his entire team was going to continue to work for Apple after the, uh,

the purchase and stuff.

So from that standpoint, it's sort of a feel good story.

Um, but if you step back, it's also sort of interesting because BIS, they don't just,

it's not just a collection of songs like, like prime phonic was, but they're actually

a label.

I mean, if, if you are a modern person that plays classical music today, you could sign

up for BIS to be your record label, just like any other record label you might sign up for.

And so I think if I'm correct, that this is the first example, Brett, of Apple owning

a record label.

And again, it's not the record label that's going to be working with Taylor Swift or anything

like that.

It's going to be a very niche area, but it does make you wonder, will Apple do more in

the future?

And just for example, I mean, if I have signed with BIS as my label, now that Apple owns

My songs of course are going to be available on Apple music classical. Will they also be on Spotify

or is it now going to be an Apple exclusive? I don't know. I mean, there are current,

the company BAS has its own existing contractual arrangements that at least until the contracts

expire, I'm sure they will honor, but it does make you wonder going forward. I mean,

will there be a time in the future where certain labels are owned by Apple and certain labels are

owned by Spotify. And the idea is if you want to listen to this artist, you have to do it on a

certain service. Much like if you want to watch the latest Disney movie, you got to do it on

Disney plus you can't necessarily do it on Amazon Prime or Netflix. So I don't know. I mean, that's

just sort of interesting thing. But that could be a potentially negative implication down the future,

or at least more limiting implication of the future. But for this particular story,

This is beloved, apparently classical label.

It sounds like it's a perfect home for them.

It's a great way for the company to continue on as a part of Apple.

So it's a different world because it's just like you said, I didn't think about it that way.

This is a technology company owning a record label.

Now, Apple knows how record labels work because we remember back in the day with Steve Jobs

had to do some fantastic negotiations with the record labels at the time, right?

to actually even get them to agree to let him, you know, put 99 cent songs on iTunes,

for example.

So it's just kind of interesting that now, you know, full circle coming around, they're

owning a label.

And again, it's great that it's like, you know, preserving a lot of this music that

I, you know, I'm afraid, unfortunately, a lot of people maybe don't pay as much attention

to but good on that.

Hopefully once they do incorporate the BIS label, you will be able to not only play it

in CarPlay in your own car,

but you can have a listening party

amongst your friends and other cars.

I don't know, I gotta see how this is gonna work,

but this story from Chance Miller

that you linked to from 9to5Mac really intrigues me.

This is using CarPlay, which I use all the time,

and I listen to music all the time,

but now there is SharePlay that's gonna come out on iOS 17

so that if I want to have a listening party

listen to the same song that a friend is listening to

in their car, I can do that.

I don't know if I have a use case for that, Jeff,

but I'm intrigued to see how it's gonna work.

- Yeah, I mean, the one that I thought of,

in fact, just to back up a second,

SharePlay is a technology that's been around

for a little while.

It did not exist at the height of the pandemic in 2020,

because if it had, when we had friends and family

that you just literally could not see because of COVID,

I might've actually tried SharePlay

so that we could both be in our own respective homes,

and yet we could watch the latest blockbuster movie

the same time and text back and forth with each other.

Having said that, I have yet to try SharePlay with anybody else.

Maybe you and I will have to do it, Brett, if we want to watch a movie together from

across the country at some point.

So taking that SharePlay technology from your TV room into your car with this new technology,

you know, you and your car and somebody else in another car can be playing the same songs

at the same time.

If one person pauses it, it'll pause for the other person.

If one person adds something to the playlist from one car, it'll be added to the other.

you know, the example I can think of as people that are taking a road trip and traveling in

multiple cars, you know, hopefully the driver is not doing it, but maybe the person in the

passenger seat could be acting as the DJ, not only for their own car, but for the other car as well,

which could be interesting. Of course, it also means that somebody in one car could decide to

play, you know, 100 poop sounds and then the other car gets to listen to that too.

So there's definitely a potential for there. But, yeah.

And by the way, to your point, I think here, Zach is, is, or, um,

Chance is talking about, you don't have to both be in the car.

Uh, the gentleman that he was sharing with Zach, which is another

writer at nine to five wasn't in the car with me, he was at home in

Mississippi and I was driving around town in Texas, so they were able to listen.

You know, so I can see where maybe that would be fun.

You know, if my daughter's driving, you know, I could, we could listen to the

same song at the same time as she wanted to, you know, so anyway, just be

interesting to see things coming out from iOS 17 as well.

- Yeah.

- Time for the where are you at segment.

- Where are you at?

- You got a couple of fun story.

This one I thought was great.

I always feel like we have a fun story

and then we have, you know, one that's like,

thank goodness that there is this technology out there.

This person where they were driving around in Wisconsin,

flipped the car and it says it was at dark,

at night in the dark and the car landed

100 feet away from the road.

So the point is you really wouldn't be able to see the car

out in this field, unless you knew what you were looking for.

Thankfully, this person had an Apple watch on their wrist.

It had fall detection enabled.

And so immediately, I think it sounds like

when the accident happened, it contacted the local,

like the fire department, and they were able to track

exactly where this car was located.

And we even have the fire chief is making a statement here

that just we would not have been able to discover the car

were it not for this technology.

- Yeah, he says he thinks it could have taken

another two hours to find the car

if they didn't have the precise GPS.

And since the driver was unconscious,

that two hours could have been the difference

between life and death of that person.

So this is crash detection working exactly

as you want it to work and it's a great story.

- Yeah, good one there.

Okay, another one that you had here.

This is a little bit of, it's unfortunate,

but boy, it has a happy ending, but a kind of a fun.

I think what this gentleman says

at the end of his little video

is that if you're gonna steal a MacBook,

just make sure it's not from a tech nerd

that has a lot of time on their hands.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Do you wanna tell this story?

This gentleman was in Brussels, I believe, right?

And he had his backpack stolen.

You take it from there, Jeff.

- Yeah, this is somebody who used to work for Google AI,

so he definitely understands technology.

His backpack is stolen at a train station in Belgium,

and he was able to track it for a short period of time

using the AirTag, but then I guess the thieves,

And at some point, you know, those air tags start to beep.

So they must either found the air tag and disposed of it, or maybe they tossed the entire

bag and just took the contents.

But suddenly the air tag is no longer helping them, but it was his MacBook.

And so since the MacBooks have fine mine on them too, he was able to continue to track

it.

But the thing that's, there's two interesting parts of the story.

I believe it was just last week or two weeks ago that we were reminding people, we were

urging people, don't take the law into your own hands, contact the police and get them.

And he tried to do that in Belgium, but unfortunately, the location information that he had was not

precise enough for the police to know exactly where they were located.

So this guy did-

They had to have the apartment number.

Right.

They know the building, but they said, "You have to have the apartment number," and he

couldn't give them that.

So he did what is absolutely a dangerous thing to do.

He decided to become his own investigator, and he staked out the building.

And he finally, through watching Find My and watching people moving in and out of the building,

was able to figure out where they were located and where they were going back and forth to.

And oh my God, did he figure it out? Because once he finally did find the information and

preside, provide the more precise information to the police, they did come in and make the arrest.

And not only did they recover his Mac book, but hundreds of other devices. So this was not just

a one-off theft. This was a crime ring that had been doing this a lot. And I didn't mention this

in my post today, Brett, but did you notice that a bunch of the equipment that they had stolen,

they wrapped it in like aluminum foil to try to protect it as if it was a Faraday cage.

So they were, I don't know if that's, I actually can't tell you if wrapping things in aluminum foil

prevents Frye and May from working. I suspect it does not, but at least the criminals were

smart enough to try to cover their tracks. And they were aware of the possibility of people

tracking these devices and yet they still got caught. So it's a happy ending, but you could

almost understand this guy's outside of somebody's house and the bad guys see him out there and

and decide, you know, we're part of a crime ring.

We're going to take matters into our own hands

and get rid of you before you can contact the police.

So we certainly do not encourage

stalking your stolen MacBook in Belgium.

- Always safety first, but I have to tell you,

if, well, I don't even want to say it this way,

but you know, if you were going to follow it,

I think this gentleman did a good thing.

He, you know, he stayed outside.

He kept his distance.

He did follow the thieves for a little bit,

which I wouldn't have probably have suggested to do.

But Jeff, I feel like he had no other choice.

In other words, he did the right thing.

He went to the police.

He couldn't get them to take action.

And rightfully so.

I'm not putting a finger at the police

because they do need to have a precise location,

even like down to the apartment number or so.

And this gentleman just kept following them

until he could provide a precise location.

At the very end of the story,

I don't know if you watched the video all the way through

and I'll link to it in the show notes,

but he said if the police had not come at that time

and it took him like four hours

once he finally was able to give them that.

His next step was he was gonna fly his drone

through the open window of the building

where his computer was at,

so he could try to take more pictures of his computer

and the thieves that he could get to the police.

Now that would have been going too far.

We do not recommend that at all.

Please don't do that.

But at least, anyway, it's a good story

and I'll make sure that you link to the video.

It's worth watching on that.

Last little video that you'll link to quickly

and then we'll get to our tips here

was a new one from Apple called the dance.

And when I first saw that you're linked to this Jeff,

I'm like, okay, well, you know, is this just gonna be,

you know, some nice colors and people swirling around?

No, I call it the pay dance.

It's a hilarious video, I'll link to it as well,

where it's somebody at a grocery store register checkout,

Jeff, and they have a credit card,

a physical credit card in their hand,

they're trying to pay.

And it just is something that I relate to so much.

You got to slide it in and then you wait for the beep.

Like, do you remove it?

Oh, I removed it too quickly.

No, you got to try it again.

Let me restart it and reboot the process here.

And anyway, it's just a funny thing.

While a gentleman in the background just uses Apple Pay

on his iPhone and walks out in two seconds.

I love this because Apple Pay for me

has become my go-to way to pay.

And I don't think it can come even soon enough.

Like I want everything.

I get annoyed now when I go somewhere

and I can't use my iPhone with Apple Pay, Jeff.

I like it so much.

- Agreed. It's just so much faster to use,

but the video does, it's an effective and a humorous job

of showing how much faster it can be to pay with Apple Pay.

- So that gets me into my in the know tip,

which is a couple of things just quickly on Apple Pay.

In the know.

So this happened just, I think about a week ago for me.

I was in Texas at a very large grocery store chain.

I'll let them remain nameless, but their initials are H-E-B.

But I love it.

I love the H-E-B, the stores that are nameless,

except that I go and pay and it's got this little,

what do you call it?

It's almost like the card reader, right?

These little black boxes or, you know,

different colored boxes that are next to the register.

And we are familiar with those because in the past,

that's where we would either swipe our physical credit card

or most recently today, we would insert it into a slot

so the little chip can be read,

or in many of them, they have the tap to pay options

with a physical credit card, right?

Where you just simply take your physical credit card

and tap it on the little box there and it pays.

Well, this particular grocery store chain,

not that I'm singling them out,

although I guess I am a little bit,

they don't even have tap to pay.

So I'm using my iPhone and that's how I wanna do.

I wanna use my Apple wallet

and I wanna use a credit card in my Apple Pay wallet to pay.

So I'm like, pow, pow, pow,

like tapping the iPhone on the box.

'Cause sometimes you have to be in a different corner.

Is it at the top, in the middle?

Is it at the bottom, on this corner, wherever it is?

And I'm just banging it around on this box.

And every time the checkout person is like,

"Sorry, we don't have tap to pay."

I'm like, "Wait, you mean I have to get my wallet out?

I don't even know if I have the physical credit card

with me or not.

And I have to like insert it or swipe it on this box?"

I'm like, come on, what is this, 1992?

I mean, I don't wanna deal with this anymore.

So my quick little in the no tips are Apple Pay.

First of all, you can set a default card.

So I exclusively use Apple Wallet now when I go somewhere

and it's so easy to use

and probably most of you listening already do this,

that when you go up to the register,

you can click, click, double click the side button

on your iPhone and that immediately brings up by default

your Apple Pay.

And when you set a default card,

That's the card that comes up when you double click.

Now you can set the default card

by going into your settings

and then going to wallet and Apple Pay.

And then if you scroll down

there's the default card option there.

And so for me, I'm a little bit of a collector here, Jeff.

I've got about 12 credit cards

that are in my Apple Pay wallet.

And I love it because even if I set the default card

to my Apple card, my Apple credit card

I can just use my thumb to swipe down on that.

and then I now can select any credit card

that I wanna use through Apple Pay,

and that works out brilliantly.

And the other little quick tip I'll just add on this

after the default card is when you go into your Apple wallet

since like I said, I've got a list

of about 12 different credit cards here,

you can actually rearrange the credit cards.

So I've got a couple of American Express

and a couple of Chase cards,

and I like to put those together, right?

And then I've got one for an airline card

and one for a hotel card.

If you go into your Apple wallet

and you tap and hold on a credit card,

it looks like you're pulling it out of the wallet.

And then you can just use your finger

to slide it up and down so that you can rearrange

how the credit cards come up.

Because if you have, you know, maybe five or six or so,

and if you wanna select one quickly

while you're standing at a register,

you can double click the side button,

Apple Pay comes up, your default card is shown,

but if you wanna swipe down,

then you can select another credit card.

And I like just rearranging them

so that they make a little more sense to me,

like the ones that I use more often than others.

So those are my Apple wallet tips for in the know today.

- Yeah, those are great tips.

In fact, I was following along as you were describing them

and that's all interesting.

I guess I had set my default credit card a long time ago

and forgot about it and it is appropriately set,

but that's neat stuff.

So my tip today has to do with

some cool, fun things to watch.

And you know, I'm reminded,

I don't know if you can tell I'm wearing

my Saints t-shirt today,

because of course football season starts

in earnest this weekend and I am,

Are we ready for some football?

But you know, it reminds me of many, many years ago.

One of the reasons that I, like I'm sure many people,

upgraded my TV to something that supported a high definition

was for watching football games,

because that was, you know, sports and HD

had the promise of being just so much better.

And I used to, I mean, I remember times where I,

in the early days of HD, you know,

I'm watching a football game and I enjoyed the football game

But I was just amazed at the quality of HD

because it's so much better than what I had ever seen before

with standard definition television,

which when you look back at nowadays is just horrible.

And then of course, technology has advanced

and now we're at the stage

where people may have a 4K television,

so you can even buy an 8K television nowadays

and you can have an HDR.

And so one of the things I was realizing the other day

is if you want to,

I am no longer amazed when I watch a football game in HD,

I'm now immune to that.

But if you want to get,

if you want to restore that sense of wonder,

here's my recommendation for you.

- Okay, let's go.

- And if you want to blow your mind,

no, here's the ingredients that you need to do this, Brett.

- This is gonna be expensive.

This is gonna be very expensive.

- Well, hopefully it uses equipment that you already own.

- Okay, good.

- The first thing that you need is an Apple TV 4K.

Those have been out for the last two years now.

So, you know, as long as you have one

that you've purchased in the last two years,

you have an Apple TV that supports 4K.

The second thing that you need to have is a television

that supports not only 4K, but also HDR.

And this is important because even though I have some,

excuse me, I have, for example, my computer at home,

I use an Apple studio display monitor, which is 5K.

So even better than, at least from a case standpoint,

in terms of the number of pixels,

it's better than the television I have,

but it does not support HDR.

You have to support HDR for this to work.

And then once you do that, once you have that Apple TV,

the new one and you have a television that supports HDR with 4k next on your Apple TV,

simply download the free YouTube app and the YouTube app for about a year now has supported.

They've supported actually 4k and AK for a long time, but they've supported HDR.

And so there's a number of channels and the one that I'm recommending today is one of

many, but the one that I'm recommending is a channel that happens to be called eight

K vision.

And I don't know who's behind this or anything like that.

Exactly.

If you go to this channel on your YouTube app, and if you have the equipment that I

discussed, you can watch these videos.

Now, the videos are often advertised as being in 12K or 8K or 24K.

The reality is that you're not going to see better than 4K anyway, but it doesn't really

matter.

It's not really the 4K version of it or the 8K version of that makes it impressive.

What makes it impressive is the HDR.

videos, some of them are of nature. Some of them are close up macro photography. That's in like a

lab with a really black, deep black background and very colorful things in the foreground that

are well lit. Some of them are overviews of cities. You can go through, you know, New York

and Paris and places around the world. But any of these videos that you watch, if you look at them

on a computer screen, I guarantee you, if you go right now on your computer screen, you look at

them, you're going to say they look good, but they're not going to blow you away, Brett. But

if you turn off the lights and you turn on your Apple TV and you watch them with a great HDR,

I promise you, if you've got good equipment, you will be blown away by these videos. It is one of

these. And it reminds me of how breathtaking, like I said, it was way back when, when I first

encountered HD, you know, the videos are just, some of them are just completely jaw dropping.

And the difference between having HDR and not having HDR is it's just it's just beyond.

You can just turn these things on and watch for a long time and get mesmerized.

If if you wait until five minutes in the video and you turn on Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon,

they'll say no, I'm just kidding. They won't sync up. But it is.

It is sort of one of these experiences that that does make you so it's really cool. And again,

And in the future, we're going to have 8K TVs and HK YouTube and stuff that's even better.

And, you know, we'll see what comes in the future.

But for now, if you just have that set up, it's pretty darn cool.

It's pretty darn cool.

I think, yeah, it's the HDR that I am lacking.

That's the key part.

And darn you, Jeff, because I might have to make an investment here.

It's funny because I've actually seen some of these other videos.

Like you said, there's several different channels that you can subscribe to.

And they, I mean, even without HDR,

as you were talking about, they look amazing,

even on my 4K television.

- You're saying that, Brett,

but I'm telling you, 'cause I'm watching too.

You may say these look amazing,

but when you truly watch them in HDR,

your jaw will drop and you're like,

oh my goodness, I had no idea what was missing.

So yeah, it's impressive stuff.

- Well, I guess I'll go shopping.

'Cause I remember when you got your LG television,

like you did a lot of research on this,

And you ended up, we talked about your LG television a while back.

And, um, uh, even I remember even the way it was delivered was kind of funny too.

But you've been using it and I know that you've talked about it, uh, many times.

And, uh, that is, that's, that's great.

Okay.

Well, I'll I'm off to, uh, get a second mortgage on my house

and get a new HDR television.

So in the meantime, we'll talk to you next week.

This went pretty long.

I assume next week we might even go a little bit longer as well, because

We're going to all be waiting to see what Apple is talking about on Tuesday.

So I'll be very excited to talk with you next week, Jeff.

I cannot wait.