(upbeat music) - Welcome to In the News for June 14th, 2024.

I am Brett Burney from appsinlaw.com. - And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhone JD.

Brett, I hope you've set aside about 17 hours for today's episode.

That's the only way we're gonna have a chance of going through all of this.

Oh my goodness. - There was a lot this past Monday, Jeff.

I mean, goodness gracious.

And okay, let's just jump right in.

I feel like, I mean, there's so many things that I wanna talk about.

You did a great job covering iOS 18 that they sort of announced and talked.

I mean, so many great things in there.

We're gonna get to that.

But I think one of the big headlines, of course, that we've been talking about for many weeks now is artificial intelligence.

I'm sorry, Apple intelligence.

Because just like anything else pretty much that Apple does, although I think this is a brilliant move on this.

But instead of saying AI as in artificial intelligence, they branded it Apple intelligence.

And it was funny 'cause this was a two hour presentation on Monday, right, Jeff?

And in the first hour, I don't think that anybody mentioned AI anywhere.

Like they didn't actually specify AI until they got to that second hour.

And then instead of saying artificial intelligence, it was Apple intelligence.

However, in that first hour, I saw all kinds of examples of artificial intelligence.

Just an interesting little twist here in how Apple introduced the world to Apple intelligence.

Okay, so there was a reason for that, I believe.

In the first hour, so the presentation was in two parts.

The first hour of it was introducing all the different operating systems.

And then the last, the second half of it, which was 45 minutes, was Apple intelligence.

Although there were some things in that first hour that you and I would call AI, Apple referred to them as machine learning.

And the distinction is, Apple has been doing AI for years and years and years.

So many things that it does on it, you know, memories and photos and so many other features are all done with AI.

In that first hour, Apple was showing off features that are gonna be just widely available.

Even if you have older operating systems, older iPhones, older iPads.

Yes, it's a form of AI, but it's the form of AI that Apple has been doing for years now, which Apple is calling machine language, machine learning.

And the second half of the presentation, and this is the part we're gonna talk about now, where Apple talked about Apple intelligence, one of this distinguishing factors, one of the most simple ones, is that it only works if you have the newest, newest systems.

So for an iPhone, for example, not only do you have to, I know people say, yeah, 'cause they're trying to sell more devices, and I'm sure they're happy for that to be a side effect.

But to have an iPhone with this new Apple intelligence, it's not even just the iPhone 15 that went on sale last fall.

It's gotta be the 15 Pro.

So you have to literally have, not just the latest iPhone, but the top model of the latest iPhone.

Now, if you have an iPad, it's a little bit more forgiving.

I think it goes back to the earliest M1 processor, which goes back a few years.

But, and the reason for that is because not only the processor oomph, but also because I think of the RAM that they have, you really have to have the latest hardware.

So when you think of Apple intelligence, maybe you're lucky enough to currently have a new model that will be ready for it.

But I think for the most part, people are gonna start to experience Apple intelligence when they get their next device for a whole bunch of people, which could of course be this fall.

But let's talk about Apple intelligence.

It's different from ML, what they've been doing before, because of the way that Apple is treating it.

And they're sort of dividing it into three tiers.

Last week, when you and I were speculating, Brett, we thought, you know, a bunch of this stuff's gonna be on device and that's gonna be Apple's.

That's gonna be what makes them different from chat GPT.

It actually is a little bit more sophisticated than that, because it's not just on device versus off device, it's on device versus Apple off device versus not Apple off device.

And the reason for that is, Apple has realized that to do the processing that's required for Apple intelligence, and of course you need to have the latest devices, as I just said, to even handle it, they're gonna do a whole bunch of stuff on device.

But for the stuff that they can't quite do on device, it's just a little too complicated.

They're gonna do it off device, but it's gonna be done off device in a server farms, which is, you know, somewhere in the world that just has a whole bunch of computers that is 100% controlled by Apple.

It's gonna be a whole bunch of Apple machines.

They've been very vague about what the machines are, but I get the sense is it's something like a, something like an M2 type Mac or something like that.

Some sort of machine that they have stripped down so that the only thing that the machine does is AI.

And that server farm is going to be super fast.

It's gonna meet all the Apple standards for environmental stuff, like it's renewable energy and everything else.

And it's gonna be completely locked down.

So locked down that they even announced that they're gonna open it up for third parties to try to hack into the system.

And they're being very open about that because, you know, as Apple goes into the problem with AI, AI is so wonderful, but AI has so many problems that it's notorious for.

The hallucinations making stuff up, which is horrible.

The safety of it, the privacy implications of, if I give my information to chat GPT, does that then become of their knowledge?

And are they now, if I upload a document, is that document now part of chat GPT's knowledge base such that they may actually reveal the contents of that document and the context of answering some of those questions.

So to address that, Apple, you know, from a privacy standpoint and from a security standpoint, they own this cloud stuff.

They're keeping it secure.

No one from a third party can get in there.

And then there's a third layer of AI, which is chat GPT, which let's put that to the side.

We'll get to that later.

That's just a structural standpoint of on-device, off-device Apple, and off-device something else.

The second thing that's important about it is what they're doing with the AI.

Apple has, you would expect that Apple would come at this from a very smart angle, and they have.

They, you know, there's so many different things that AI can do.

As a lawyer, one of the things that I do is legal research.

And for years and years and years, I've used a service called Westlaw and sometimes an alternative called Lexis.

And AI as applied to legal research, searching for old court opinions is a really promising thing, but it's a very focused version of AI.

It's a version of AI that just looks at the legal world that someone that's not a lawyer would have zero interest in it.

Apple is doing the same thing.

They're looking at AI and they're saying, "What topic can we really make AI appropriate for?"

And what they have decided, smartly, is for years people have referred to, and me too, an iPhone as like their second brain.

'Cause like so much information about me, Jeff, is in this iPhone.

My friends, my contacts, my pictures, my memories, my dates, the communications I've had with people in text messages, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

That if something is truly safe and it knows all the contents of my iPhone or my iPad, it knows a lot about me.

And so Apple has decided that what they wanna have is a version of AI, Apple intelligence, which takes all the information about me and then tries to help me by answering questions.

And so if I make comments referring to family members or referring to upcoming calendar appointments or anything like that, it knows all that stuff because it knows what's on my device.

But it's completely happening on device, so it's very, very private.

And my iPhone knows me, but nothing is being shipped up to Apple with the one exception of, if it goes to that Apple server form that we just mentioned, and because that stuff is so private and because it has no persistent memory, if a request from my iPhone goes up there, it does its work, it sends it back to my iPhone, and then it erases it.

And it has no, it's not storing anything, whereas people are always worried about Chat GPT and its competitors doing that.

It's just as if it was on device.

It might as well have been on device.

Yes, it was temporarily off device, but it was sent right back and nothing was stored.

So it's just as private as if it occurred on my own device.

And so it gives you the advantage of, if you don't have to worry about privacy, then yeah, let my iPhone have access to all the stuff it already knows and use that to give me really sophisticated answers.

So that's what I think is gonna be.

And even though we're, Apple gave a couple of examples of things that it might do about asking questions about things coming up in your life and looking at things that you've done in the past, we're gonna have to see how that's used, but I think it's gonna be really interesting to do this.

And so I like the fact that they're keeping their version of AI focused on like personal intelligence questions that are personal to you, and that can be really helpful.

There's some other things they've thrown in there too.

Like for example, they basically have a user's guide in there for devices.

So you can actually talk to your iPhone through AI of like, how do I do such and such?

And because it knows, basically the entire iPhone user's guide, it can tell you things like that.

So that's something that's a little different from personal knowledge, but that is their knowledge.

And then, so that third area we talked about, which is the things that go in the cloud, that's not the Apple stuff.

If you ask something that's not part of that personal knowledge, a quick example will be something that's world knowledge.

I wanna know, what are some of the best restaurants that I should visit when I go to Amsterdam?

Or what are the nicest art galleries in Paris?

Things that might just be like a normal Google search.

Chat GPT is pretty good with that stuff, because Chat GPT and similar GPT things that are online, you know, Google's got its bar, or whatever Google is called, and others.

They do a good job of sort of scavenging the world knowledge on the web and giving it to you.

And so if you say, how do I make an apple pie?

It has read so many different apple pie recipes that it can give you, you know, here are the ingredients you need for an apple pie.

That's not something that Apple would know.

It's not something that's on your iPhone, your personal.

And so for those things, Apple is gonna give them off right now to Chat GPT.

But before it does so, it's gonna say, hey, I can't answer this question, but do you wanna go to Chat GPT?

If you say no, it doesn't do anything.

But if you say yes, then Apple passes that information on.

But even then, there's this extra element of privacy, because it's not you going directly to Chat GPT, it's you going through Apple servers.

And so it's anonymous.

So Chat GPT has no idea that the question is coming from Jeff Richardson versus Brett Bernie versus, you know, Barack Obama versus any, it has no idea who the question is coming from.

And everything's anonymized and private and everything else.

And so it's a different interface for these services.

And Apple has even speculated in the future, they would love it if it's not just Chat GPT.

You know, the one that Craig Federighi of Apple speculated on is much like I mentioned before that there's a legal version of AI through either Westlaw or Lexis.

I can imagine in the future that somebody like, you know, the Mayo Institute, for example, or some medical institution might come up with a medical generative AI that could basically serve as a doctor in a way, you know, answer your medical questions.

We always joke that people go to things like the Mayo Clinic online and they ask a question. - WebMD, yeah. - WebMD, and of course, once you type in one or two symptoms the next thing you know, you think that you've got some deadly cancer or something.

People always jump to the most extreme conclusion.

But maybe if you had some medical AI that could more intelligently and more appropriately give you information, that would be another thing that you might ask your, you know, iPhone, I have these symptoms, what do I have?

The iPhone might say, well, I don't know that question, but I can pass that on to blank, blank MD, Chat GPT, and it will answer it.

So, and then one last thing I'll say, and I'll pause for a second, is that Apple, one of the big problems with AI for all of its promises is things like hallucinations and giving you inappropriate content.

And so because Apple, at least for the personal stuff that it's doing, because it has control, it is being very, what Apple calls it is guardrails.

And what I call it is just being very conservative.

You know, they are making sure, for example, that they're gonna, you know, really try to watch it, that it doesn't give you inappropriate content, that if you're asking for, you know, what should I be eating?

It's not gonna suggest something that would be deadly for you to eat.

If you ask it to create a picture, it will create pictures.

Like it can create pictures within messages if you wanna create some sort of picture and send it to somebody.

But the styles are limited.

It can make a cartoon, it can make a sketch, but what it can't do is create something that's photorealistic, because that gets into the problem of deepfakes.

That if I create something that looks really realistic and the person on the other end might say, oh my goodness, I suppose this is real because this photo looks so real.

You know, other people in the world are happy to do that.

Believe me, you can go to, you know, Dolly or any of those systems, they will absolutely do that.

But Apple just doesn't wanna play that game.

And so they wanna make sure that their version of AI is trying to be safer, being more appropriate.

They're gonna have more control over it.

So I think overall, this is, I knew, you know, you and I both speculated that Apple was gonna have its own version of AI, but before this week, my simplistic version really focused just on privacy, being on device.

And of course they've done that, but they have gone so far beyond.

They've thought about privacy, they've thought about security, they've thought about the guardrails, they've thought about what is within their expertise and what's not, what should you be doing, what they should be passing along.

It's so well thought out that I just can't, I'm just so impressed.

And then to end up where I started, because you need the latest, you know, and greatest devices to run it, you know, the stock market is thrilled right now.

Apple stock is at an all time high. - They went crazy, right? - Everybody's gonna probably wanna go out and buy a new iPhone to take advantage of all this technology.

So, you know, the stock market, and whether that was an intent or just a side effect, I don't know, but regardless, it's certainly true. - Having a few days to think about this, I really do believe and agree with you.

I think it was a brilliant move.

First of all, it's extremely fortunate that Apple starts with A.

So instead of artificial intelligence, AI, it's Apple intelligence.

I thought that was really a brilliant move.

But, you know, at first I felt like, okay, that's so corny.

And I could just feel like there was groans all over the world, you know, as soon as Craig Federighi announced it.

But I've thought about it since then, and I really like it because it just, it brands this idea.

In fact, in the keynote, Craig Federighi talked about Apple intelligence as personal intelligence system, right, Jeff? - Right, right. - And, you know, at first I thought, okay, that's just marketing speak, it sounds good.

But the more that they started talking about this, and there were five pillars that they announced.

I can't remember, Tim, I guess Craig Federighi did this.

Powerful, they wanna make sure it's powerful, that it's intuitive, that it can be useful, which to me, I think is one of the biggest bullet points there.

Integrated, which you've done a great job of explaining how it can be already baked into what you're doing.

Personal, again, you did a great job of talking about like, what's on your phone, since your phone knows so much about you.

And then the privacy aspect, you know, you and I have listened to other podcasts and other people speculating today.

Some people will say that privacy is at the core of Apple's business model, right?

And we have talked about this many, many, many times.

And the fact that they have such a focus on that privacy, which is why we were speculating so much about doing some kind of an AI on the phone.

Which again, I just saw Tim Cook had a short little interview with Marques Brownlee, right?

And they were talking about, and Craig's like, or Tim is like, we have been doing AI for years.

And you and I have both said this, Jeff.

It's like, they have been doing AI.

There's so much that's baked into the phone already that we just don't, we almost take it for granted.

And you know, whether or not you use it as much, like with the photo memories or the fact that it can recognize people's faces.

And so it organizes my photos based on my daughter, for example, you know, all that kind of stuff is chock full of AI tools on there.

But the fact that they have integrated it even more, and it's just so intuitive and on the system.

I thought it was just brilliant, the way that they kind of branded this now, another person that I was listening to said it this way, like, this didn't really have a lot of the whiz bang that you may see from other AI type of presentations that other people have put on there.

And some people would say, well, it's like more mundane type of a tasks in there.

But then I'm like, yes, exactly.

Like, that's what we use our phones for the vast majority of the time.

So some of the examples here to me, I kind of differentiated this way quickly, Jeff.

It's like some of the on device tools or like the language tools.

I wrote an email, I highlighted it, and now I can say on my phone or on my Mac actually, like change the tone of this email, right?

Like I wrote it, I was very mad, or maybe I just wrote a few bullet points.

And all of that kind of modification or editing can easily be done right there on the device.

Summarizing an email, you know, a smart reply, you know, that kind of a thing like that to me, I feel like can be done.

And I mean, there is a generative component to it, but then it's that next thing that you started discussing, the way that Apple integrated some of these images that can be generated on the fly.

I mean, some of these examples, like you would almost like, right, you say, hey, I want a T-Rex riding a skateboard, wearing a tutu.

I think that was the example they came up with, right?

And you can generate that image.

You can also generate an emoji even based on that image.

They call that the Genmoji of that.

But there's so much that is capable now.

Another thing quickly, I would say that on the device, even being able to search my photos, just the other day, I was trying to find a photo.

I knew I had a picture of me sitting in an easy chair at a lake, taking a picture of my feet.

I didn't remember what year that it was.

I didn't remember, you know, I knew that it was in Maine.

So I tried searching for Maine, it could not find it.

And I was very encouraged to watch this, like, yes, I want some of those AI tools built into my phone that's a little bit more powerful so I can say, show me a picture of me sitting on a beach, you know, with my feet showing, you know, that kind of a thing.

I wish I could have just searched for that.

I tried searching for feet.

I tried searching for beach.

I tried searching for Maine, and I could not find this picture.

So some of that stuff, to me, that's the on device.

But then the generative components on there, the fact that I can generate an image or generate an emoji, that's the kind of stuff that I find very fascinating.

And I kind of put those into two camps.

Quickly, I would just say, you talked about the next level.

Like if it can't work on the device, then it's in Apple's cloud, which they call private cloud compute.

So I like how the fact, right, they put the word private in private cloud compute.

I would like to say and remind everyone, Apple's been doing this for years and years and years.

Like they have iCloud server farms in a variety of different places.

That's why we used to have she who shall not be named, when we would invoke her or him, it wouldn't work on the device, right?

It would have to go up to the iCloud servers and come back down and do whatever components that we needed to do.

When you have your password key chain, for example, that's being stored in the iCloud.

Like we're already using that.

And I like the fact that Apple, like that's not new.

Apple has already has much of experience in doing this.

And then I like this idea that- - You say it's not new.

It's new in a certain degree because it's not gonna literally be the same computers.

I really think that Apple has a special server farm focused on AI. - I agree. - Because for example, it doesn't have the persistent memory.

It's everything stripped down to be as fast and focused on AI.

So it's the same idea.

And I know that's what you're trying to say.

It's not literally the same servers.

I think it's gonna be the same idea.

It's just done in the Apple way.

But go ahead, go ahead. - Yeah, no, that was about it.

I just, I know it's gonna be a little bit different in the way they do it, but I'm saying from the infrastructure component, it's not like Apple, you know, hasn't never done this and they're gonna get into this market.

And that's exactly the same thing that Microsoft does and Google and Rackspace and all of the other big companies.

They already have humongous server farms and Apple is no different.

We just don't know as much about it because it is that private aspect.

And then just quickly on the chat, GPT, love that.

They threw that in kind of at the end to your point, Jeff.

I like how you've got the three tiers there, but you don't have to have an account on chat GPT.

You, and I don't know if it's gonna, you know, use the more modern version.

I like the fact that it asks you before it sends it up.

Oh, fantastic.

That's right, they did.

It's 4.0.

So to me, that's fascinating 'cause I still run into people all the time that have never gone to chatgpt.com, right?

They've never used it, but I am confident that if it asks them on their phone, they're like, yeah, sure, go ahead, chat GPT.

What do you come back with me?

In other words, this is really going to be, I think a secure, a trustworthy tunnel into something like open AI's tools or, you know, whatever others, 'cause Craig did say there might be others like you commented that would come down the line.

But anyway, just some really exciting stuff on the AI front.

Anything else you wanna say on that?

Yeah.

Yeah, I'll say one last thing about what Apple's trying to do with AI is, many of the current AI offerings before this week, I get the sense that really smart people have just sort of said, you know, this is so powerful.

Let's just sort of put it out there and see what people use it for.

And just sort of like, you know, let people throw stuff against the wall and see what sticks.

And there's something to be said for that because you don't always know the answer to things beforehand.

Apple on the other hand appears to be approaching AI a little differently.

They appear to be focusing on the Apple intelligence more on what, how, you know, how can it actually be useful to you?

And so, you know, they're saying things like, you might wanna use it.

You're gonna wanna use it maybe to summarize emails.

You're gonna use it maybe if you haven't looked at your messages in a while and there's been a ton of back and forth and you just wanna say, you know, what- Summarize.

I have this one, yeah, I have this chat group where there's like 30 new messages here.

What are they talking about?

And it can say, okay, well, in its head it's gonna look at all this stuff and say, okay, well, I see all these messages.

They're talking about a back and forth and what time to go to dinner next week.

And so it'll just sort of say, all of these messages are talking about what time to go to dinner next week and it looks like they decided Wednesday.

And therefore, without you having to read every single message, but Apple seems to be more focused on what it can do for you and making that useful as opposed to just, here's something we're throwing out there and let's just sort of see what happens.

And I like that because by focusing on how you can use it, I think it's gonna end up being even more useful.

And so they've given a bunch of examples, some of which you've talked about, both from writing tools to summarizations, to prioritizing things.

The search stuff is just truly amazing.

And I'm gonna talk about that more today.

Now, there are places that I do, well, I mean, I don't know, I could talk about this forever.

There are some things that don't appeal to me as much as others, but at least I think that Apple is coming at this the right way.

They have, from the beginning, they are doing it structurally for the most part, the appropriate way because of the privacy and because of the private stuff and everything like that.

And they're very focused on how it can actually be used by you in a practical way, which I think puts them above others.

Now, I will say that to be fair, there are some things about what Apple has done that make some people a little uncomfortable for the same reason that all of these chat GPT, AI type engines make people uncomfortable.

A perfect example of being that the way that they get their model in the first place is they have to read tons and tons and tons of information to use it.

And again, this is the same for people.

The reason that I, as a person, as a lawyer, I'm a writer.

And one of the reasons I am a better writer than some people is because I've been reading my entire life.

And so I've read all these books my entire life.

I haven't memorized the text of those books, but I've been influenced by the language that I've gotten from those books over the years.

And the same is true with AI, but AI on the other hand, not only does it read the entire internet, it sort of preserves the entire internet and it makes some people uncomfortable.

If I'm a publication that sells access to, I'm the New York Times and I sell access to it.

The fact that somebody has sort of scraped all this stuff that I put out there without paying me for my copyright and Apple to a certain degree is as guilty as that as anyone else.

They have been scraping the internet and you can have ethical debates over whether things on the internet are free.

It wasn't behind a paywall, but suffice it to say that there have been some complaints lodged this week about how Apple has gotten up and running with AI.

They're not unique to Apple.

It's the same complaints that people have against Google, against open AI, against all of these other companies.

I'm just saying that, it's at least worth acknowledging that while Apple has done some things so much better than the other companies, there are some other examples in which they haven't.

But I guess you could argue that's what you need to do to become a player in the AI industry and they've done that.

But I do hope that going forward, Apple is gonna try to do things the right way to put more guardrails.

And as a result, perhaps even influencing the industry in general in terms of appropriate uses of AI. - When we talk about AI today, I feel in many ways it reminds me of like talking about the internet in the late '90s.

In the late '90s, Brett, the internet was around, the web was around, it was so new.

Amazon first came out and we're like, "Wow, isn't this interesting?

"You can actually purchase things over the internet."

And we've started to sort of speculate over what the consequences of that might be, but never even thinking that whole shopping malls would go out of business because everybody buys everything over there.

And that's just one aspect of it.

We're in the same way as AI.

AI is gonna be a thing for years, for decades.

And we're at these early stages now and decisions that are made today are gonna have such huge implications on society.

I mean, not to get too, you know, asteric about it, but I mean, this is important stuff.

It's big stuff.

I'm glad that Apple is involved.

I'm glad that they're taking first steps that for the most part seem to be the right way to go.

It's fascinating.

And later on this year, we'll actually have it in our hands and start to use it.

By the way, we should mention before we close this up, this is not going to be available on day one.

Apple has said that.

You know, I don't know what date iOS 18 comes out.

Let's just say it's in mid September, but Apple has said it's gonna be slowly coming out.

So it might be later on this year before it comes out.

When it does come out, I'm sure it's gonna be in a beta version.

And I don't think that there's gonna be any one date that we're gonna say, this is the date of Apple AI.

Apple AI is gonna be something, or Apple intelligence is something that is gonna get smarter over months and decades, years and decades.

So it's gonna be an evolving thing, but it's gotta start somewhere.

I'm excited though.

I mean, this is cool stuff.

This is the future. - To your point, I'm going to predict this might be the last time that we separate out the topic of Apple intelligence.

I'm glad that I think Apple did the right thing and being able to spend some time on it.

But from what we see, how this was embedded into the upcoming versions of iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 and everything else, to your point just now, Jeff, I think it's just gonna be subsumed.

Like Apple intelligence is not gonna be a separate thing.

It's just gonna continue to be built into the operating systems.

To that point, that first hour, so the Apple intelligence was really focused on the second hour.

Apple had to do that, I felt.

They had to make sure that people, the world knew like, yes, we've been doing AI for a long, long time.

Now we're gonna brand it so that everybody's happy with it.

But we're just gonna infuse it more and more into the devices that we're already doing.

You did a fantastic job of covering a lot of the upcoming features that are gonna be built into iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, which actually many of them in here are already incorporated or they will be incorporating Apple intelligence, which I just think is cool.

In addition to just a wide variety of like really cool additional features that are gonna be coming in here.

This was a great article that I thought that you did.

You ran down like several.

I felt like this could have been, you know, three times as long just because there was a lot that they were announcing in this. - What I tried to do in the post earlier this week was not announce all the features.

'Cause like you said, there's so many.

And you know, these features as Apple rolls them out in the beta versions over the summer, we're gonna see all sorts of articles, you know, focusing deep on one issue and maybe some features will be held back and some will be more advanced.

But what I tried to talk about in my post earlier this week was what are some of the highlights, at least, and this is just personal.

But the things that jumped out at me.

And the one that I focused, the one that I started with may have surprised some people because it's not a sexy new feature.

It's just the improved control center.

But I think this is one, this is an under the radar feature that maybe I'll be wrong about this, Brett.

But I think that the new control center is gonna be one of those things that at least for power users is really, people are gonna really like because it's not just control center.

First of all, we know what control center is.

On the modern iPhones, you swipe down from the top right and you get all those little widget things.

And right now they are widgets that basically give you controls over things that Apple itself does.

The volume, the focus mode, the Apple calculator, those sorts of things.

The new control center on the other hand is going to first of all be infinitely customizable, including third parties.

So for example, if I don't use the Apple calculator, I use P-Calc.

I could have a little P-Calc in there, which you can't do now. - Exactly. - You're gonna have multiple pages of these things.

You might have one page that's on sort of your general system stuff.

One page focused at media, playing and pausing and changing the speakers that your music goes to.

One page that may focus with your home stuff, turning off lights in individual rooms and doing scenes through HomeKit and stuff like that.

And you can have all these multiple pages.

And third-party apps can develop, not just like if you click this, it'll launch my app, but it could even be more sophisticated.

Like if you click this, it'll do this function in my app.

And so that's gonna be cool.

Plus it's not even just in control center because the same little widgets can be used.

For years now, we all know that right on the front of our iPhone, there have been these two little buttons.

On the left, it's turned on the flashlight.

And on the right, it's turned on the camera.

And those are good features.

I like the flashlight, I like the camera.

But like, let's say I don't use the Apple camera.

What if I use a third-party camera app?

I can now make it that on the front of my iPhone, before I even unlock it, I can make that widget launch a third-party camera app.

Or what if I don't take pictures that much?

Or for that matter, what if I have a new iPhone and my action button already launches the camera? - Exactly. - I don't need a button to get me to the camera.

Maybe you say, I want my button to get me to, you know, whatever, you know, Microsoft Word, or, you know, if you're a lawyer, my time and billing app.

Or if you're, you know, into Instagram, you know, every time I press this button, it goes straight to Instagram.

Whatever you want these buttons to be, you can control them.

You know, as nice as the flashlight is, do I need to have the flashlight on my, I don't know.

I at least, like, when I think about that. - I want the option to change it. - I want the option to change it.

And so whether it's within the control panel itself or on the front of the iPhone or wherever it's going to be, I just think that this is, I mean, no question a power user feature, but anyone listening to this podcast sort of by definition is more interested in the ins and outs and sort of the cool little features than the general public.

And I think that this has the potential to be interesting.

So maybe not the sexiest new feature, but some cool stuff. - I know.

Actually, to me, it's a little bit of a bigger picture here because you can have multiple pages now in the control center.

You can customize a little bit more.

Another story you'll link to was even the fact that there'll be some updates in the settings app.

I think what I like about this is that they're just recognizing, hey, the users want to have a little bit more customization options.

You know, a lot of Android users over these last few days have been like, oh my goodness, finally, we've been able to do all this, you know, for years and years, finally, Apple's waking up to this.

But I feel like Apple has a predetermined way, you know, to go about this.

People are used to the control center now.

To me, I saw some of this and I'm like, oh my goodness, that's almost overwhelming.

There's going to be so many options there, you know, to customize.

And sometimes I kind of like it, the fact that I just have a set little system there.

But I don't know, I just, from a bigger picture, looking at this with a control center, with settings, with a couple of other things you mentioned too, the fact that you can customize even your screen and your apps, I really just like, I don't know, I just got really excited about some of the announcements here from a bigger picture aspect of like, yep, everybody's familiar with it.

Now we're going to give you a little bit more options here in how to customize everything. - Yeah, so let's talk about photos.

I mean, I think that one of the biggest changes in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 is going to be the Photos app because it's got a brand new interface in which, you know, you will see not only the grid with, you know, dozens of your photos, but you will also see these larger squares that you can get to for memories and your folders and stuff like that.

And it's going to all be in one interface.

And when I first saw this, I was a little concerned.

In fact, when I wrote about it earlier this week, the thing where I wrote, I had a little screenshot of it and I said, I'm not quite sure if this design's an improvement or not, although it's certainly different.

I've since heard from people throughout the week that have started to play with the beta.

And what I'm starting to hear, and I hope this is true because it's promising, is that it's going to take, you know, once you take that first minute to get used to it, it actually makes a lot more sense because it's a single interface to get to everything.

It's customizable.

You can have whatever show up in there you want.

If you like memories more, if you like, you know, other organizations more, it's something that really does, it does a good job of making it easier to see things, to get to information that you want.

Not just looking at your latest photos, although of course it still has that too, but getting to sections, to collections of photos and stuff like that.

It makes the whole universe of your photos and videos more discoverable.

And so I'm excited about that.

And of course, you know, a feature of this, and we're going to talk about this perhaps more later too, but you know, by incorporating Apple intelligence to this, you know, you gave that example before of trying to find an example of you relaxing when you're in Maine.

Because it's got that built in, you'll be able to find photos with so much more ease and power than ever before.

And since all of us today have tens of thousands of photos, not all of us, but so many of us have been taking photos for so long, that, you know, you get to the point that you know you have this photo.

You really want to see it.

You remember it. - Where is it? - It's like, oh, where is it?

You know, what year was it?

Was that in 20, not 2009, was it in 2011?

Was it, oh, was it in San Francisco?

Was it in LA?

You remember some of it.

And so using these tools, you'll be able to surface it.

That's going to be awesome stuff.

Photos is a major, major change in iOS 18.

And I can't wait.

So cool stuff. - And quickly, can I just say on the photos, you saw some of this too.

Very, a lot easier now to like take out background items, right?

I mean, part of that's the whole Gen AI that you can circle, you know, somebody in the background that photo bombed a picture and it will fill that in.

Again, many Android users, they've been doing this on Google photos for a long, long time.

But I gotta say, I like the fact that this kind of stuff is what's going to be on device, right?

That's the kind of Gen AI or the AI implementations that are going to be on device.

And I like that a little bit better.

I trust that a little bit more.

Maybe it's the same on the Android phones as well.

I don't know quite as much, but I like the fact that it's going to be doing on device. - Yeah.

I like the idea that there's going to be a new passwords app, which is in some ways taking the password features that were there before.

I will tell you though, it looks to be a good app.

I mean, it surprised me that not only can it be multi-user, you know, which is certainly it has now, but even multi-platforming.

When Apple said that they're going to bring this passwords app to Windows, I mean, that's pretty rare that Apple brings, you know, it's not going to be an Android, but I think if you have an iPhone, you don't care about Android.

But you know, if you're someone like me who uses not only a Mac, but a PC, you know, if this app was not available on my PC slash Windows that I use at work, well then I would never be able to use it by definition.

But the fact that it is available, it's going to at least make me think about it.

Now, I will probably stick with one password because I am going to probably prefer the more sophisticated features, but I tell you what, this is going to be an attractive option.

And for those people that had not yet purchased a password manager for whatever reason, they now have no excuse, it's fantastic.

I mean, that's going to be a cool one. - Good point. - I mean, I guess we should talk about math notes.

This is cool.

This is, I mean. - This is amazing. - So many levels of all of this. - First, you got to talk about the fact, and you did a great job putting aside the jokes for a calculator, but I was just listening to another podcast where they were like, you know, this was one of those kind of Easter eggs, right?

Craig Fritter, I'm like, Apple knows, Apple knew that there's a lot of people saying like, why don't we have a calculator on the iPad?

Look it up, folks.

It's true, it's been there for many, many years.

And even Apple kind of had like a moment to where like, okay, finally, there's a calculator for the iPad.

And everybody saw, you know, it's like, it looks just like the one on the iPhone.

It's like, great.

And then they put a little twist in it, Jeff. - They did.

It took them 14 years to finally get that calculator built into the iPad.

But what they have is new.

And the exciting part, of course, is not the calculator itself, which is just a big version of the old calculator, but it's a feature that's not just in the calculator app, but it's throughout the operating system called MathNotes.

And I sort of think of it as like, you know, math for the rest of us.

What, you know, so much of the math that I do is first of all, pretty simple.

I'm just adding up a couple of numbers, you know, multiplying, dividing, stuff like that.

But so much of the math that I do is also, well, what if I change this?

You know, if I'm doing, you know, simple additions in one of my legal cases, and I'm trying to add up some costs in a case, you know, I'm gonna have this cost, this cost, this cost, and what's the total, I can do that in a calculator.

But invariably, the first thing I do after I add them up is I then say, okay, well, what if I change that first cost to this?

Or what if I divide this in terms of four, in terms of three? - All clear. - And those sorts of things that I'm making little changes, this is what MathNotes is made for.

Now, let me first say that the way that they've done this is so fun because on an iPad, if you're using the stylus, you can just write things, like you can write a problem, you know, two plus two equals, and it will actually put in the answer for you.

But even better than that, you can so easily make variables.

Like for example, I can say that, you know, I'm trying to figure out the cost of this home project.

I might say kitchen equals, you know, this much money, and bedroom renovation equals this much money, and the, you know, the landscaping equals this.

And then I can just say, you know, bedroom plus landscaping, and then it will automatically add that stuff up.

And that way, if I go back and I change and say, okay, well, that kitchen cost is a little high.

What if I changed it from, you know, $10,000 to $8,000?

And then what if I increased the landscaping?

And then it will make the changes appropriately throughout because it's all dynamic.

And it's just very simple.

It's right in front of you.

It's a great use of the pencil.

I just think it's amazing.

You don't have to use the pencil.

You can also just use, you know, typing, and even on your iPhone, you can have seen that picture there.

You can just use text.

But I think in terms of the way that it looks from a format standpoint, it looks beautiful and incredibly intuitive and useful on an iPad.

That may be the best implementation of MathNotes.

But, so this is really cool stuff.

And it can be sophisticated.

I mean, you can use things like sine and cosine and variables and exponents and things that are far beyond the math that I remember from high school.

If you want to, it's there.

And for students, this might be the ultimate cheating device when you're doing your homework after school.

You know, no question about that.

But, well, let's not say cheating, perhaps learning, because you would hope that you would understand it and learn it. - Yeah. - But it's the ultimate for that.

But for those of us adults that are just doing, you know, important math throughout our day, you know, but really not that complicated, this is going to be perfect and so much more powerful than a calculator.

Now, let me just say, you know, you always talk about Sherlocking and things about that before.

There has been an app out there for years and years and years called Solver, which does some of these same things.

And this is the same idea.

But of course, when Apple does it, not only is it done very elegantly, but it's accessible throughout the operating system, not just in a particular app.

And so, you know, again, I may, they may not have been the first to come some of these ideas, but they have done it in incredibly powerful way, used throughout the system.

This is, I think this one's going to be super useful. - And just to be clear, like, I told everybody, 'cause if you're listening, you may not have caught this, 'cause you can see this if you're watching the YouTube video but it was amazing because there was a lady on the announcement that was holding an iPad.

She had an Apple pencil and she started writing out the calculations.

And as she was writing the iPad within calculator, so you can see in this picture here, the white handwriting is what she's writing.

And then the orange numbers, which the numbers appear similar to her handwriting in this calculator.

I mean, there's just so many, there's a few layers going on here that it's just like, you're wrapping your head around in the sense that like how accessible that this math can be.

And she can scratch out a number to your point.

And there was another one where it was some kind of a like, they were calculating the trajectory of a ping pong ball or something, right, Jeff?

It was like, and she was like moving the number with the pencil.

I mean, there was multiple layers here that I think it's really going to take some time for everybody to kind of play around with it enough to see.

But anyway, that was real good.

So that was math notes.

Man, oh my goodness, what is it?

We're on three now of, you know, 583. - There's a million to pick out.

I mean, I guess I'll quickly mention mail because mail is something that a lot of us use a lot that Apple has, and they have changed mail in a million different ways.

They have broken it up so that they can automatically sort emails.

So for example, instead of your inbox being cluttered by all the emails you get throughout a day, it might take all of the, you know, not necessarily spam, but like, you know, things that might not be spam, but it might be from a commercial institution.

You're trying to sell you something.

That's not, you're not trying to get business.

So it's going to stick that in one folder.

And if it's got things like, you know, your receipts from your airline and stuff like that, it's going to sort things in different folders so that your inbox can be just the stuff that you are most interested in.

And then you have those alternative folders that you can go to and you can see stuff.

So that's nice.

It can group things together.

I mean, the airline example is, you know, you can just say, you know, Delta, and it will take all of the emails from Delta and it will put them together in a nice interface with a nice logo at top. - Right. - And it will put it in an organized way to make it easier for you to get at the information that you want.

Of course, they're going to have some AI features built into mail that's going to help you find stuff. - Right. - It's just, there's features built into mail that will help you to draft messages.

I mean, this gets in more into the pure language type, AI type things that if you want it to, if you write something and you want it to try to change the style of it, you can do that.

If you want it to draft something for you.

Again, I have mixed emotions about how much I'm going to want mail to draft for me. - Yeah. - But at the same time, much like autocomplete, you know, we're always amazed that if you're using your thumbs to type in a message, autocomplete on the iPhone has gotten good enough that it often does predict the next word you want to do.

Right? - Right. - You know, so we often find that I don't have to type that next word.

I can just tap the word significant right here because that's what I was going to say next anyway.

And that's instead of me typing all those different letters, bringing that same type of analysis to mail where it can start to type ahead and help you get things done more quickly.

It's useful.

This is a, this predictive texting, and this is a big unknown to me.

Like I'm going to have to see this to see how useful it is, but in my brain, it at least has the potential to be incredibly useful.

Look, I'm going to be cautious.

Let's stay on the sideline and watch.

But you know, this could be something that a year from now, we're all saying, oh my goodness, it's so much easier now that mail has been improved. - Okay.

Yeah.

Another thing quickly, I want to hear your thoughts.

Cause I thought this to me is going to be some of the bigger things is messages and iMessages.

Man, they announced a few things. - So many changes. - Coming in this.

But even like from that predictive aspect, you know, and being able to reply to different messages, I think my wife was so thrilled that she could schedule a text message to be sent later.

And I know this has been around and some other others, but even just little tiny things like that.

The fact that I could do rich text.

I love the fact that I can bold some texts, underline some texts, some really cool stuff I think coming into the messages app. - Yeah.

Tapbacks as well.

Tapback is a feature that I've used a lot more than I thought it would.

Cause so many times someone sends you a message and you're like, that's, you know, you want to acknowledge that you appreciated, you know, their funny joke, but you're not going to type a whole response.

And so the idea that you can currently hold back and just have it say, ha ha, or a thumbs up or a heart. - Right. - It's really nice.

But sometimes those, what is it?

Six reactions that are built in right now, that that may not encompass the entire universe of the expression that you want to. - Right, I want more. - Now you'll be able to, first of all, those six look better because they're in color.

And second of all, you can have any emoji.

And so if the appropriate emoji response is like somebody going, ah, you know, that little, I don't know emoji.

You can have that as a tap back or shoulder shrug.

Whatever, you know, whatever the appropriate thing is.

And I think that tap backs is already something that I enjoy using and having the entire emoji library available to do tap backs.

That's going to be, that's going to be really cool. - Yeah.

One other thing I'm assuming this, see if you've heard this in order for all of this to work though, your recipient also has to have an iPhone.

Would that be correct?

I mean, a lot of this to me, I feel like it's on the messages layer.

Maybe some of it would come in some other aspects, but what do you, what do you think?

Have you heard anything on that? - Yeah, well, it depends.

I mean, tap backs is already, you know, only iPhone, iPhone, and I guess I'm lucky that.

Pretty much everybody in my life has an iPhone, you know.

Now I will say that Apple is adding support for this thing called RCS, which is, you know, it's really only is, it doesn't matter for your iPhone people, but for the Android people that you communicate with, if they also support RCS, it allows more sophisticated features.

And it's things like as simple as, you know, on the iPhone, the dot, dot, dot, while you're, you can see that somebody else is typing something and you know that.

I think that's part of RCS, whereas in the current world, if you're communicating via SMS with someone on Android, you don't know that they're still typing something.

There's a million others.

So RCS is going to bring SMS communications, you know, the green bubble communications, a little bit closer to Apple communications.

But for most of these, you know, fun, you know, whiz bang features, you're going to probably, it'll probably be for people communicating with iPhones.

Having said that, I mean, a lot of it will work.

Images will work, you know, other things will work.

So. - Oh, there's so many more things in here, Jeff.

Okay.

You know, but we're probably going to move on, but just a few things, like you even mentioned phone call transcripts.

I mean, that's going to be really cool.

I think that that's going to be extremely helpful.

Cause some of that's already there, like with, you know, voicemail and stuff like this, but this is actually a phone call.

Accept or reject calls with your head. (laughing) I don't know how that's going to work out.

It's, you know, you have to have your AirPods, I believe, right? - If you're wearing your AirPods, I couldn't sense it.

Can I mention one? - You can say no. - So silly that I, I just, it's so silly and it's so wonderful.

And this is the silly thing that apparently, - That's the best. - If you push the button on the side of your iPhone, - Oh yeah. - The picture on the other side of the bezel, it'll sort of like move in a little bit.

And it's like, it's as if you're actually squeezing the button and you're seeing on your screen.

And of course it's fake. - Here it is, yeah. - But it's just like, there you go.

This picture that you're showing now sort of shows it in action.

It's like, who thought of that?

That's just a silly, but wonderful feature. - I love it. - I give, I give claps to whoever gave it.

It's a tiny thing that's in the consequential.

And yes, it's, it's awesome.

I love it. - It's just, to me, it's just a little bit of a polish, Jeff.

It's just a little bit of a polish.

Another thing that you quickly linked to also was I had no idea, nobody talked about this, but now the iPhone flashlight in iOS 18, you can change the beam thickness of the light.

I don't even know how they would do that necessarily. - I didn't even know that was a possibility. - But I'm loving that.

I know, you can't do it.

I mean, I figured you have to do it with hardware.

'Cause you know, I've got flashlights where you twist the top, right?

And the beam goes, you know, smaller.

Either way, just really, there's gonna be, I think so many tiny little things like this, Jeff, that are just going to thrill and delight us.

And I think that's what Apple does.

They put these little tiny things in that are just delightful as they go through.

Okay, there's so much more in iOS 18 and iPadOS 18, but those I think are very good from like the highlights, the main things people are gonna be talking about.

Okay, let's do a quick rundown of some of the other things.

How about the Apple Watch?

I thought this was pretty cool.

My big takeaways from the Apple Watch announcements were pretty much, again, all focused on health aspects.

What do they call this?

The totality load?

No, what are the training load?

Which I feel like is kind of a funny thing, but just really some neat ways to continue to track, delightful ways to track your general fitness, you know, your activities throughout the day. - Yeah, and it's not just throughout the day.

I mean, for, well, let me start with throughout the day.

One of the features that I have wanted for a very, very long time is the ability to pause your statistics on streaks.

You know, that's something that there was a time period years ago that I used to try to get my, all of my circles every single day.

And then every once in a while, something would come up that, you know, I just can't do it today because I'm traveling or, you know, for whatever reason possible.

And I used to try to find ways to fake around it because I knew that, you know, I know it's just a silly psychological game with myself, but the fact that I had this, the fact that my streak still exists would be the thing at the end of the day that would encourage me to work out that otherwise I wouldn't have the encouragement because I have the streak.

And so, you know, for years I've said, wouldn't it be great if they could just add it?

Now for me personally, I had a surgery about a year ago that I was, you know, I couldn't work out.

And so since then it's been me trying to get back on track again.

But when I do get back on track, I like the idea that it'll be a more gentle streak.

Yes, it's a streak, but if I need to take a pause for a day, that's fine.

And again, who cares?

It's my own personal, I mean, it's not hurting anybody else in the world.

If I say, give me Friday off for goodness sakes, you know, I'll start up again on Saturday.

So that's a silly thing.

Another one that was interesting- - A rest day, a rest day.

My wife is excited about this.

She calls it like a Sabbath.

We need to have a Sabbath day.

You know, for those people that need a day that they're not working out, it's just tell the watch, like, listen, I'm taking off today.

Just don't bug me about it.

Anyway, I'm happy about that one too. - So that's during the day.

Another interesting one is during the night.

You know, as you mentioned, Brad, it's so much about health and Apple has been, you know, for years, they've had all these smart people, doctors, et cetera, that have said, what information can we get from the data that an Apple Watch gives you?

And apparently they have decided that this thing called the vitals feature, that if you wear your Apple Watch overnight, there's a number of things that it can measure during your sleep, such as your heart rate, your respiratory rate, your wrist temperature, Apple Watches, oxygen level, sleep duration.

And apparently, according to people that know a lot more about health than I do, if you put all of that together, it actually can give you some interesting information about how you're doing.

And so this feature, if you wear your watch at night, which again, not many people do, you gotta make sure you charge a little bit during the day since you're not charging overnight, but it will, if you do this, and I think you have to do it for like about a month, you know, 28 days in a row, but then once you start to give it that information, it can start to give you some feedback.

And you know, Apple is always walking that line between they want to be giving you information about your health, but they also don't wanna be crossing the line into what the FDA or whoever, what our agencies are saying that it becomes a health device and so it's subject to all these requirements.

So they're trying to get as close as possible to giving you actionable, interesting, and useful health information without crossing over the line into becoming, I'm a doctor.

But they get closer and closer to that line every day.

And this is another example of it.

And again, I don't know personally, you know, how useful this is, but the fact that Apple through, you know, it's the smart people that they work with have said that this is gonna be interesting.

It'll be another metric that will, you know, perhaps get something out of. - Absolutely. - There's also some more improvements to the smart stack.

You know, I'm just barely getting used to the feature that in the current watch, if I'm looking at my watch face and I push up, then it brings up that little stack of things.

It was a whole new interface.

It took me a long time to get into, but I'm starting to get into it now.

And now they're gonna be improving them.

So instead of just like right now, it's static information, you know, what's now playing, what's the weather, do I have any medications to take?

They're gonna be able to be more interactive in the future, which sounds good.

They're gonna even be smarter.

I mean, they gave an example of if rain's about to start, something that you're showing on your screen right now, it can show, you know, because we think rain's about to start outside, here's when it's likely to start, here's when it's likely to stop.

Normally it wouldn't show that, but during the one period of the day when it's about to rain, so that's when that would be useful.

So let's go ahead and add that.

So, you know, making that stack even more useful, of course is a great idea, and it will help people like me get even more useful to it and appreciative and stuff like that. - Agreed. - I'm trying to think if there's anything else that jumped out at me.

Of course there's new workout types, you know, changes to that. - The double tap gesture, which I guess you only have to have, that's the one that you have to have like a certain model of the watch in order to do that.

But you know, you could tap, you have the ability to tap with your finger and thumb together, but now you can do a double tap.

I thought that was really interesting on there.

Okay. - They say they have a new feature that's, yeah, I'll just mention real quick.

If you'd like to have a photo on your watch face, the new version's gonna do an even better job of picking out really good photos that look good on the watch and frame them appropriately and stuff.

So anyway, go ahead. - Couple of announcements for the Vision OS 2.

The Vision, Apple Vision has not even been out a year, Jeff.

Not even a year.

And now we're on Vision OS 2.

What were a couple of things here that got you excited?

This is an article from Jason Snell that you'll link to. - Yeah, so some of them make sense.

It's not until something is actually out there in the wild that you really start to see, oh, does that feature make sense or should it be changed?

And a good example of it is when you're using the Vision Pro you often wanna get to the control center.

We just talked about how on the iPhone you swipe down from the top right.

And so given that, with that idea of top, in the current Vision Pro, if you want to get to your control center, you look up.

And if you look up, you see this tiny little dot at the very top.

And then if you pinch your fingers together, and sometimes it's hard to see that dot, then it will sort of come down and it can do things like volume control and all those sorts of things that you might wanna control in control center, connecting Bluetooth headphones and stuff.

But Apple realized that it's actually, it sounds like it makes sense, but it's actually a little obnoxious to have to look all the way up like that.

And so they came up with a better idea of just putting your hand out flat in front of you.

And when you put your hand in that position, a little control panel will show up right next to it.

And then you can control it with your hands.

And if you flip your hand over so that your palm is facing up, it can do some other controls.

And so these are the sorts of examples of things that, it's not that the initial implementation was bad, it's just that now that people have tried it for a while, they could say, you know, maybe we can do a better way.

And they wouldn't have even known if the first one had not been put out in the wild that there's better ways to do it.

So I think that's a cool thing.

One of the interesting GWIS features is, I often talk on the Vision Pro that anything that's in 3D, spatial, those things are what makes the Vision Pro so special.

And so watching a movie on a Vision Pro, pretty cool 'cause it's a really big screen.

Watching a 3D movie or an immersive movie, that's where it's something really special.

And so I have very, very few photos on my Vision Pro that are in 3D.

And I only have them because I've taken them with my iPhone where it uses the two cameras like this to sort of make a 3D picture.

So I have very few of them and they're only from the last, gosh, not even a full year, six months of pictures that I have like this.

Apple is gonna take this feature that they can analyze any photo in your photo library and they can sort of make a fake 3D effect.

And I've seen this before, like for years now on Facebook, I have some friends that use this filter on Facebook that as you scroll up and down your Facebook timeline, it sort of makes the picture look 3D.

So I've seen this type of technology before, but that's a 3D picture on a 2D face of an iPhone.

This is gonna be a 3D picture in a 3D world of the Vision Pro.

And again, I haven't tried it yet, but for the developers that have started to use the betas this week, they have said things like, "I have gone back to my wedding photos from 20 years ago."

And when you go to a photo, you have to say, turn on this facial feature, it takes about 15 seconds to analyze it.

So it's not like it's gonna do your whole library at once, now at least.

But if you take that photo that you're very familiar with and you turn on the effect, now the photo sort of comes to life in a way that just is, according to the people I've read online, they say, "Wow, this is really a tearjerker.

"It gives this new life to the picture."

So recognizing the fact that the Vision Pro is really best when you have things in that sort of 3D effect being able to bring that to old pictures is cool.

And then there's a whole bunch of- - It looked amazing when they showed it on the video, Jeff.

And then I reminded myself, that's only a 2D representation.

I can't wait for you to see something on your Vision Pro with a 3D, like this spatial video.

Even Jason Snell here, the link to it, he goes, "I've yet to see a photo that failed to become "more interesting after it is converted."

And I don't think that they convert the original one, but in other words, it says it takes about 15 seconds to spatialize that photo.

But apparently he was blown away.

Like he thought it was just really cool.

So I'm excited to see what that's gonna look like. - Yeah, and that other little just life improvements that they have throughout it, the things that are, one that I mentioned is keyboards.

Right now, if I am, I tend to use my Vision Pro where I actually have it in an augmented reality world, where I can actually see my outside world.

So that way, if my wife or my kids walk in the room, I can see them.

But every once in a while, you want to put yourself in this completely immersive mode where you pretend like you're on the moon or you're on the top of a mountain or something like that.

And when you do that, you can actually still see your hands, but you can't see other things that you're touching.

So that if I pick up my AirPods Pro case, I will see my hand, but I actually won't see the case.

Instead I'll see the mountain or whatever.

And one of the reasons that that's a problem is that if you're using a keyboard to try to type something, and so if you're in this immersive environment, I mean, I don't have to look at the keys to type because I know how to touch type, but sometimes it's sort of useful to sort of see the keys. - Sure, yeah, you want to look down. - So Apple is using AI to, at least if you use the Apple Magic Keyboard, which is actually what I use, or if you're using the keyboard that's on your Apple laptop computer, it will actually show the keyboard in the immersive environment.

Again, this is the sort of thing, it's a technical detail that I can understand how people didn't think about this at first.

And yet once they start to use the Vision Pro, they're like, "Oh, you know what?

We sort of forgot about that."

Or, "We didn't get to that yet, we need to fix that."

And these sorts, and this is what I expect to see for the next three years, five years.

Apple is going to slowly figure out in this whole brand new platform, what makes it more sense, what makes it more usable.

And this is great stuff because that means that five years from now, when the cost comes down and more and more people are using whatever the next generation of Vision Pro is called, they will have worked out all the kinks.

And so that's what we're doing right now, is working out all the kinks. - One last thing that I thought was so amazing is right now you can use your Vision Pro with a Mac that's in front of you.

And one of the things that they show, Jeff, is that you can see in your Vision Pro, your Mac desktop.

But then they showed you could expand the Mac desktop.

And that just blew my mind.

I'm like, that I might have to get, that would make me want to get a Vision Pro because the fact that I can have my desktop, I mean, I'm already using three monitors.

And it's like, 'cause I want more screen real estate.

The fact that I could just like blow that up and just massively expand my desktop screen is pretty cool.

I'm excited about that. - You know, there's that old phrase that Henry Ford, apparently is alleged to have said that, you know, I don't ask people what they want because if I ask people what they want in the early 1900s, they would have said faster horses, when in reality they want a car.

And the same idea before this week, people were saying, I wish I could have multiple monitors in the Vision Pro so that I have a left monitor and a right monitor.

What they didn't realize is what they really wanted was not two monitors, but a single long monitor that stretches from left to right, which is technically the same number of pixels as two or two and a half monitors.

But it's just one, I mean, why even have the monitor, you know, and this is an example of, if you really think through it, this is a better way to do it and very, very cool. - I am so on board.

Okay, how about TV OS, the Apple TV?

A couple of things here, the Insight. - That's the big one. - I don't know, yeah, to me, I thought that was really interesting. - I'm one of these people that I'm often, and maybe this is just me getting older, I don't know.

My wife and I are constantly watching a show and then we'll pause it and we'll say, wait a minute, who, why do I recognize that actor?

And then we'll think about it, - What else was he in? - Oh, they were in such and such, or they were the bad guy in this show.

And sometimes we're smart enough to think of that ourselves.

Oftentimes we will be checking, I used to check an app called IMDB, right now, later I've been using an app called CallSheet.

But you know, you look up the name, you're like, oh, why do I know them?

Yeah, that's right, they're who they are.

So Amazon, I don't actually watch Amazon Prime video that often, but when I do, one of the things I like about it is that whenever you pause, it will have this feature called X-Ray, where it actually says, here are the actors that are currently on screen, here's their names, everything.

And so Apple has sort of done their version of it, which is a little bit more than X-Ray currently gives you, that you'll be able to see, you know, the name of the actor, the name of the character they're playing.

So if you can't remember, you know, especially in like these Game of Thrones type shows, you know, their names are so bizarre, middle-earthy and you know, who is this?

Oh yeah, this is Goghashepurda, right?

You know, oh yeah, that's who that is.

So you can see the name of the actor, see the name of the character, get a little bio on who they are.

You can even see like the soundtrack, like it's almost like a Shazam type thing.

What music's playing in the background.

And what's cool is, of course that can be on your TV, like X-Ray is, but because Apple has this app on the iPhone called Remote, which people will sometimes use in place of the hardware. - Sure, I do. - The iPhone app.

You'll be able to see that on the iPhone.

And so that's what I think would be cool, is like my wife and I are watching a TV show and I don't want to interrupt the show, but I can just pull up my iPhone, go to the Remote app.

I don't even need to say, I mean, because if you're saying what actor is on the screen, I'd have to, you know, look up the series, try to figure out who it is.

I don't have to do any of that stuff.

I could just look at my phone and it'll say, that person you're looking at right there, here's their name, here's why you know them.

And like, oh yeah.

So I actually think this is going to be a really cool feature that I'm going to be using quite a bit.

So that's the big one I'm looking for in tvOS.

You know, there's some other little improvements too, but that's the one that jumped out at me the most. - That's the big one.

Okay, iPhone, iPad, we did those.

Apple Watch, Vision Pro, the Apple TV.

How about CarPlay?

Couple of things, this was a great article you linked to on Mac Rumors.

Joe Rosen, I'll talk about the five new features in CarPlay.

I don't know that I'm terribly excited about these, but I am always happy to see some improvements to CarPlay. - Yeah, I remember it was pretty recent Apple added that if somebody calls me, not only do I see their name, but I also see their picture on my CarPlay screen.

And now it looks like they are also using pictures in the messages app.

So, I mean, as you're driving, you know, you want to obviously keep your eyes on the road.

And so glanceability is pretty important.

And you know, if I glance right now and I see, you know, John on my screen, that's fine, but I might switch away.

Did I read that correctly?

Who is that?

Who's John is it?

Whereas if it's a picture too, you know, a picture is a thousand words, blah, blah, blah.

I think that's a good idea that I can more easily glance, immediately see who the message is from and then know who you're communicating with.

That's a nice little improvement.

The other things that they have coming out with are just more on-screen alerts for things and different modes of silent mode settings and stuff.

I mean, it looks like it's mostly incremental improvements.

Of course, Apple has their huge improvements that we've talked about behind the scenes.

And we've been talking about this for a few months now of integration with the car capabilities and stuff.

But so much of that stuff is dependent upon manufacturers and some manufacturers don't want to do it and some do.

So like there's big, big, big CarPlay improvements behind the scenes, but you may have to wait for your next car to take advantage of those.

And even then it's only if the car manufacturer uses it.

But what interests me are the ones, like we just described, things that everybody's going to have in CarPlay and that sort of stuff's coming.

So it's nice to see that CarPlay continues to roll on forward. - Speaking of cars, how about a brief, where are you at segment? - Where are you at? - This was pretty incredible.

This was a story from your backyard, apparently, Jeff.

Let me go turn off my ad blocker here. - You have to continue without whatever on that screen.

Yeah, so the story is that this was in the New Orleans area.

It just happens to be our local CBS affiliate, WWL.

But a guy had his car stolen.

You know, we've had so many stories we've talked about recently that people hide an air tag in their car so that if it's stolen, they can track it.

I have that on my cars.

I have air tags on my cars.

But this gentleman, it never even occurred to me this is a possibility.

Apparently he left his AirPods in his car.

And so after his car was stolen, he was able to track the car because he looked on his iPhone at the location of where his AirPods are located.

And as I think about that, I'm pretty sure I know the AirPods Pro have that feature.

I don't think that the regular AirPods do, and somebody will correct me if I'm wrong, but I know for an AirPods Pro, that's one of their selling features is you pay a little bit more, but you can actually use Find My with it.

And so I just thought that was really interesting that he was able to find his stolen vehicle because his AirPods were in it.

Very, very interesting.

Now, this particular story then leads to the caution we always have that if somebody steals your car, do not confront them on your own.

Please get the cops involved, but be safe.

Because when this guy goes to confront them, somebody had a gun and tried to shoot him.

And apparently they grazed him.

So it's not, I mean, in fact, I don't even know from this story if he got his car back. - Don't take the chance. - Hopefully he did.

But the thing is, so use this information wisely, please get the police involved.

But even if you don't have an AirTag in your car, apparently you can use AirPods to track a car.

That was one I had not thought about before. - That's amazing.

Yeah, good on the AirPods.

Which I just am realizing how much during the day that I use my AirPods, Jeff.

Like it's almost constant with me with my phone.

Because the fact that I love the transparency, and then I have the adaptive sound.

Like I know that I can walk around the house, and if somebody like needs to talk to me, that the adaptive sound will adjust.

Anyway, I just really, really like that, I have to say.

Now I'm glad that I could justify the cost of my AirPods, because it will also help me track down my stolen car potentially.

All right, in the know, I thought quickly we could just run down some of our favorite announcements, even though obviously we've covered some of them already.

Here's my quick list.

The photo searching.

I already mentioned that, Jeff.

I am so excited.

And again, it's not like that's brand new.

We could always search our photos.

The fact that I can search photos now using natural language.

That's the bigger thing on there, right?

Instead of just saying, hey, I want a picture of me with feet.

I mean, that alone is pretty amazing.

But if I can say feet on a beach or something, where was that photo that I took when we were so-and-so?

And the fact that there's already so much information about the photos already on the phone.

The location, the time of day, all that kind of stuff.

I thought that's pretty good.

There was another one.

We didn't talk too much about the new updates to Mac OS, which is gonna be named Sequoia.

Sequoia?

Sequoia?

Anyway, they didn't spend a lot of time on it in the announcements, but one of the things here, I don't know if they're gonna actually show this.

I gotta see how this is gonna go.

It's called iPhone mirroring.

Now, there's not a lot that I would need to see my iPhone screen on my actual Mac, but as part of the continuity now, I can connect my iPhone to my Mac, which it's already connected anyway, and I can see the entire screen.

Even more importantly, Jeff, I can interact with my iPhone on my Mac.

Now, unless you kind of see this happening, it's a little mind-blowing, but even better for, I think, for folks like us, Jeff, I'm assuming I could do the same with my iPad, although they only show the iPhone on this, but sometimes I wanna move or copy files to my iPhone as opposed to going through like Dropbox, and I can drag and drop on there now, which is pretty incredible. - That's really cool. - The other thing I liked was, we talked about the emoji tap backs.

I think that's gonna be, I predict that's gonna be the biggest thing that people are gonna like within iOS 18.

The fact that you can customize an emoji, you can create your own emoji, and we only barely addressed even the fact that you can customize your home screen, which I don't know, that's gonna be a little bit interesting how people are gonna be, if I was an app developer, I don't know that I want people to have the ability to change the colors of my app icon, that kind of a thing.

But anyway, the emoji tap backs is another one that I think is gonna be a pretty big deal.

We already talked about the rest day on the Apple Watch.

Again, I think that's brilliant.

They should have been doing that from early on.

Like there are gonna be some days you just can't get the workout in.

And then one other thing quickly that I think we barely touched upon this with the messages app, my last one here, Jeff, is they talked about the fact that messages now will work through satellite.

So I don't feel like that they went too deep into this.

We already have this capability when you do not have cellular access and you can send messages through satellite.

And when I started seeing that, that was several months ago, we were all pretty excited when they came out with this.

You have to have a certain model of phone in order for that to work.

But I predict, I think this is another direction that Apple is gonna be going because what if you could send and receive text messages without having to rely on your cellular carrier?

I believe that one day Apple is gonna go this route.

I don't know if Apple is gonna start launching satellites, although I have predicted that in the past, but the fact that they could do an in run, maybe not for everything on the data, but certainly for text messages, I feel like that certainly could be something that Apple is going.

Again, they didn't go into a whole lot of detail on this, but I predict that that's gonna be a pretty big deal. - Yeah, I have questions.

I mean, before today, before this week, what you could do is if you were in the middle of nowhere with no cell phone coverage, you could access emergency services and say, I'm lost, whatever.

What the new thing is, is that you can send a message to somebody that will then send through the satellite to go to the other person.

So I can, I've arrived at the campsite and whatever.

And in fact, could you, on the screen that you're showing right there, can you bring up that information again?

Because one thing that was unclear to me is whether it's sending and receiving.

And it says when texting people on iMessage, you'll also be able to use key features like sending and receiving messages.

Okay, so this- - Right, emoji and tap that. - Until literally just now, I did not actually realize it went both ways.

So apparently it's not just that I can send you a message, but I can receive.

And that second part's important because the only way this works is if you go through the trouble of holding your iPhone in a special way that it communicates with the satellite.

So I won't necessarily know that you, Brett, have sent me a message when I'm sitting here in the middle of nowhere at my campsite.

I guess I would just have to sort of hold my phone up and wait for the satellite and just see if you happen to send me something.

So I have questions about how it works.

Also, it's amazing to me that I have not yet seen Apple say that they're charging for this feature because if you have like a Garmin satellite texting device, then you're absolutely being charged for the feature.

Maybe Apple's not gonna charge for it, I don't know.

But however, those are just the details of it.

And maybe the devil's in the details.

But it's a very cool technology.

And I love the idea that if you've got your iPhone with you, you know, wherever you are, you're safe.

You get in a crash, it's gonna call 911.

I'm in the woods, I can't find anybody.

You know, I can contact my friends or I contact 911 if it's necessary.

So I think that's a really cool announcement.

I was glad to see Apple do it.

As for my favorite announcements today, I think we've talked about most of them.

Much like you, the photo searching is gonna be fantastic.

The control center, we've talked about that.

I'm looking forward to that.

Math Note seems like it's math made for me.

Math made for Jeff.

It's the very types of math things that I wanna do on my iPad. - That's what they should call it. - Can't wait to do them.

And the last thing I'll say is I love the fact, and again, I always feel like I have to use the caveat.

I know nobody has a Vision Pro but me.

They're so expensive.

So many people have it.

So few people have them right now.

It's all early days.

But it's just fun to see Apple developing this product.

And you know, adding more spatial things like the spatial photos and stuff like that, it's fun.

I just saw a day or two ago that Apple is adding this new thing that if you are in a spatial persona mode where I'm talking to somebody else, but instead of it being like a FaceTime thing where you're within a screen, it's just your friend's image is over there as if they're sitting on your couch talking to you.

I'm over here, they're over there.

And it really, spatial persona is very cool.

It really does make it seem more like the person's in the same room as you.

And now one of the features they've added is that if the two of you, you know, high five or touch fingers together or do a fist bump, you apparently feel some haptic feedback or something like that, or some sound that- - Ooh, okay. - Basically in the same room.

You know, that little feature is a gimmick, but it sounds pretty fun.

But what excites me about it, it's not just that particular feature.

It's the idea that these are the sorts of things that they're starting to explore.

And as they build up one, two, 10, 20 of those little bitty features, it's gonna make the whole idea of spatial persona that I will be able to have conversations with people, you know, just as if they're really in the room.

And it's the same way, you know, just the other day, I saw my wife and my sister-in-law were having a FaceTime conversation.

And I was thinking, you know, years ago, that would have to be a phone conversation.

But thanks to FaceTime technology, they could see each other, they could show things off. - So easy. - You know, video, it's just, it's completely changed it.

And we're going to get to a world where this, you know, spatial personas through communications, it's going to become the norm.

You know, it's gonna be like, you know, having this hologram communication with your loved ones.

And not just when you're talking with each other, but even as you're sharing things together. - Right, right. - There was a, let me end with this.

There was an event this week in Cupertino, you know, after WWDC on Tuesday night, one of the people that I often link to, John Gruber of the website, Daring Fireball.

He always has an event in Cupertino for people that are there at WWDC.

He calls it the Talk Show Live, because his podcast is called the Talk Show.

And he is often lucky enough to get Apple executives.

This year, it was a Craig Federici and Joswiak, and also John Gianday, I can't pronounce his last name.

He's the guy that does AI for Apple.

The three of them were up on stage.

It's an event that you have to buy tickets for, the tickets always sell out, and you gotta be there in Cupertino.

So of course, I have never been there in person.

I have watched it on video when they put it on YouTube about a week or so later.

This year, for the first time ever, they had this thing that if you downloaded this third-party app called, I think it was called Theater, which is made by Sandwich Video, who does all sorts of videotape things and commercials and stuff like that, Adam Lissagor, I think he does it.

If you downloaded this free app, you could get into an environment where it appeared like you were in a theater.

So if I look around me, I saw theater seats and stuff, and right in front of me, I was able to watch the talk show event live as it happened.

So it was live streaming video, but Brett, it wasn't just live streaming video.

It was live streaming 3D video.

And so I felt like I had a front row seat and you could actually see, and sometimes 3D is like, "Woo, this is really in your face."

But sometimes 3D is not used for a whiz-bang effect.

It's just that it adds to the realism of the moment.

And when you're seeing people sitting on stage, on a couch or on a chair, asking questions to each other, the 3D was not essential, but having a 3D component, I literally felt like I was sitting in the front row of the audience watching a presentation and it was completely immersive.

It was amazing.

And my only regret was that I couldn't share it with somebody else or somebody I was talking to during it.

And it was difficult.

I wish there was a way that we could have put spatial persona in there so I could turn and I could see him and he and I could have spoken during the event, but this is the future.

That was the first time I believe, the first time that a 3D, that an event has been streamed in 3D to my knowledge.

And I participated in it and it was amazing.

And I can't wait to do more of that.

And again, it gets back to the Vision Pro.

So many times when I use the Vision Pro, I tell myself, "This is the future."

And I can't wait until the masses have this.

It's going to be so incredible.

And so again, just to sort of end up, some of my favorite announcements for the Vision Pro, again, just the fact that we're seeing the future and Apple's marching towards that future, it's just exciting stuff.

So, and that's a good way to sort of sum up the whole overall event, whether it's the iPhone that we know and love or the iPad or the cutting edge technology like Vision Pro, Apple is marching forward some ways incrementally, some ways with taking major new steps, like with Apple intelligence.

I mean, there's just so much going on.

And although maybe Apple's not doing everything the way that I would love them to, and some things are slower than I might like, but gosh, they are, you can't help but be impressed at the quantity and the quality of what they are showing off this week. - It was really impressive this past Monday.

And I know we, I appreciate everybody sticking with us 'cause there was so much to really cover and talk about.

And there's so much more.

I mean, we've already started seeing some folks as you've alluded to a couple of times, Jeff, that are using the beta versions of iOS 18, and there's just going to be more and more things that are coming out.

So we will talk with you next week.

I mean, I feel like next week is just going to be a little bit more of the same, but we're really going to hone in, I think on some of the things that are either going to be most exciting that we've seen or things that they didn't officially formally announce, but people are going to start finding them within those little Easter eggs within iOS 18 and a little bit more detail coming out.

So in that case, we'll talk with you next week, Jeff. - Thanks, Brad.