Welcome to In the News for May the 19th, 2023.

I am Brett Burney from appsinlaw.com.

And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhoneJD for episode 99, our last two-digit episode.

99.

Wow.

Wow.

That's a little crazy.

You know what.

I just want to, again, say thank you on behalf of both of us, everyone that has been so faithful and listening to us over, wow, it's almost been two years.

Maybe it's a little over, Jeff.

I mean, it's been a while.

Just over.

Yeah.

So much fun.

I continue to enjoy doing this and we continue to enjoy all of you listening to us.

Thank you for doing that.

Well, let's jump right into the news.

I feel like this one's a little bit of a nostalgia side, but it's also got some practical linings to it, Jeff.

You were talking about this morning.

Drobo, which I think it was Data Robotics, right.

That was the name.

That's where the name came from, Drobo, D-R-O-B-O.

Something that I remember people talking about several years ago, not going so well for Drobo right now, but the important aspect is we still need to make sure we have some backups on there.

I like your little first paragraph here this morning.

- Yeah, Drobo was great when it first came out.

I thought it was fascinating.

I bought one and I was thrilled to use it.

You know, it was a multi- - Oh, you had one, okay.

- Yeah, it was a multi-array device, and you could just get these, you know, you could buy these relatively inexpensive hard drives without like a casing from Amazon for like, you know, a one terabyte drive or two terabyte, and you would just sort of fill up your Drobo with those hard drives.

And the nice thing about it is we all know that hard drives fail.

I mean, they all fail at some point.

Some last a long time, some last not.

But when you had a Drobo, because it stored things on multiple devices, if one of your hard drives failed, and that did happen for me, I mean, over the, I don't know how many years I used a Drobo, seven years I used it, I probably had three, maybe four hard drives fail.

But if one hard drive failed, that wasn't a problem because your data was backed up on every bit, backed up on at least two devices.

So you could just yank it out, buy a new one from Amazon, stick it in.

And then likewise, if you wanted to expand it, like if you had a one terabyte drive and you replaced it with a two terabyte drive, then suddenly the overall Drobo had more space.

So it was a very nice, very slick external storage device.

And as I pointed out, it was really important for me because I had a lot of big files, especially video files, that I just didn't have the space to put them on my computer.

I certainly didn't have the space to hold them on my iPhone forever, but I wanted to hold onto them because even though I might go to some event with one of my kids when they were younger and take a very long video, I might edit that down using iMovie to like a cute little two or three minute video, but I didn't wanna toss the original video just in case I ever wanted to go back to it.

Maybe when they're in college and stuff like that and I have got lots of free time, I might wanna go look at those like a full video again.

So I wanted to have something to store it on to keep it and Androbo was really a great solution.

Now the company is formally in a chapter 13 bankruptcy, now chapter seven.

So they're just selling off the company for parts.

But I've moved on from Drogo anyway.

I mean, I think it was about a year ago that I could sort of see that the writing was on the wall that the company wasn't doing as well anymore.

And now, as I pointed out, I mean, I bought, I think it's an 18 terabyte drive from Amazon.

I mean, the idea of an 18 terabyte drive, and I bought two of them, they weren't cheap, cheap, they were like 300 bucks a piece, but it stores everything that I need.

And I've got a second one as a backup.

So as you said, I mean, the real point of my post was, I mean, a little, you know, poor one out for Drobo because for the time they were great.

But, you know, we've had so many technologies that were really big at one point.

I mean, the iPod was so huge.

And then the iPhone came out and the iPod went away.

You know, everything has its time for everything.

There is a season, turn, turn, turn.

And so you need to be thinking about, you know, especially when you're thinking about long-term storage of things like memories, photos, videos, documents that are important, what are you going to put it on and how, you know, over time that's going to have to change so that you can continue to hold on to things.

I never had a Drobo, but I feel like they started sort of like, just like you said, they're starting kind of a product line.

There have been several other network attached storage options, right, that are on the market that have that have been these days, Jeff.

I think I have one from Synology, but like QNAP, I think is another one.

I mean, there's been several of them.

I don't remember, I mean, we've always been able to buy hard drives and be able to store things on them, but I don't remember anybody kind of, you know, putting it all together in one package and, you know, kind of slickified it a little bit the way that Drobo did.

And now there's several others, like you're saying, that are, you know, that are much more available.

I mean, it's just sad to see it go, but it is what it is, right.

And I think the other thing that you mentioned here that I found interesting in your post was in addition to that, it's good to have sort of like that local backup as well, but today we also have cloud backups, right.

You use Backblaze, which I think is one that I recommend quite a bit, and I know there are several others that other people use on there as well, but even in this article from Mars Technica, Kevin Purdy here even mentions, you know, the fact that a lot of people will use Backblaze.

I don't like to say instead of something like, you know, a network attached storage or something, but it is great to be able to have that so that it's in addition to.

- Yeah, for things that really matter, I mean, which is frankly everything that you're gonna, you know, everything matters to some degree.

I think that you should have a local backup and you should have a cloud backup.

You want the local backup because if your main external device fails, you wanna get up and running quickly.

And if you've got something locally, you can do that.

But you wanna have a cloud backup because if your house burns down or if both drives fail or something like that, you can get it from the cloud.

And I mean, I think I've mentioned this before, but I've been using back delays on my own computer and on computers of some of my family members.

And it has, I don't think I've ever had to use it for my own computer, but I remember years ago, my grandmother did something and lost all sorts of data.

I was able to pull it down from back delays and my mom's computer as well.

You know, back delays or any, I mean, it doesn't have to be that one.

It could be another online service, but back delays works great.

It just runs in the background.

You don't even think about it.

And then if something horrible happens, you can just go onto the website and say, send me a hard drive with all this data that somehow has been destroyed or lost and they just do it and it's great.

So I strongly recommend that people do it because if you have no backup at all, well then just you're risking everything.

If you just have a local backup, that's good, but not great.

You know, Apple's time machine is great too.

I mean, plug in an external drive to a Mac, turn on time machine, that's a way to go.

And it's nice because your iPhone can be backed up to your computer, like the photos can be synced over and then that's synced over to time machine.

So that's great, but then it's also nice to have something in the cloud as well.

I love this picture on this RS Technica article that you linked to because it's the first Drobo and then in the background on the wall, you can see a movie poster for the Matrix, which came out in 1999.

And that's when the first Drobo was released.

Man, you know what.

Yeah, I think of the Matrix when it comes to computer technology, because when I got my first iMac DV, which was the first, you know, Steve Jobs came back to Apple in the nineties and they came out with the iMac that had the colored plastic on it and stuff like that.

I didn't get the first generation, but I got a second generation called the iMac DV and it was the first time I'd ever have a DVD drive.

And I'm like, what do I do with the DVD.

Cause my, my television had a VHS on it.

Right.

So I'm like, well, I have to get some sort of a DVD.

And so I got the matrix movie on a DVD and I thought it was so cool that I could watch this high quality DVD.

I mean, by today's standards, DVD is not high quality.

But at the time I was thinking, oh, what a great computer-ish sort of movie to watch on my high quality.

So anyway, that's my matrix memory that goes back to the nineties, but go ahead, I interrupted you.

- Well, on that DVD drive, you were able to, what.

Rip, listen and burn, right.

That was, we are not done with the nostalgia yet, folks.

This is fantastic.

I cannot believe that you linked to this only because I did the same thing.

So you had a story in here that 20 years ago, I remember specifically in 2003 that you could go and buy a bottle of Pepsi and under the cap, Jeff, there would be, I think it was a code at the time, right.

You would have to type in the code in your iTunes software and you could download music that way.

And this is the time when you had to go on the computer, you would have to pay 99 cents to buy whatever music or sometimes $14 or $10, whatever to buy the whole album.

we would download it onto a computer, then you mentioned the iPod earlier, you could copy it over to the iPod so that you could listen to it while you're walking around.

I had forgotten all about that, but I'm so glad that you linked to that today, all the way back in the day, because they're doing it again.

Not quite the same way.

This time it's a little bit easier with QR codes, but I'm so glad that you linked to this story.

You even linked to the actual press release from 2003, Jeff.

That's wonderful.

Yeah, it's funny that it's still on the Apple website.

Yeah, so now the new special, of course, is that if you buy certain Pepsi products, you can get different prizes on it.

But one of the prizes that you can get is three months of Apple Music.

And the reality is that there are probably other ways you can get you can get at least one, if not three free rights of Apple Music.

I mean, I think with new devices, there's all sorts of things you can do.

Yes, but exactly.

You know, it's nice.

And it's especially nice for you know, if you're, you know, a little bit younger, and maybe you know, money is more of an issue for this, you know, to to get free music for three months is pretty good.

But so it's nice to see.

I was surprising to me that it's been almost exactly 20 years since Apple and Pepsi got together to do something like this.

You did that, too, though.

You right.

Did you buy the Pepsi products.

Oh, gosh, yes, yes, I absolutely did.

And, you know, it's not like 99 cents was that much for a song.

But just the idea that like I could get a free song.

I mean, absolutely.

You have to get the Pepsi first or the Mountain Dew or whatever your product was, but you would get your free song.

And I was absolutely getting those.

And I mean, I remember that there are other people I saw, like sometimes would be on the street and they'd see like a cap on the ground and they go pick it up to see if I would try it.

Yeah, I wasn't ashamed.

I would do it.

I would.

That's so funny.

20 years later, they're still doing it.

That's fantastic.

Some other Apple music news on here.

I don't know if I needed to know this, but now we know the most popular Apple music song ever that has been played is from Ed Sheeran, right.

The the shape of you, 930 million streams.

Good night.

That's crazy.

So I have to admit, I wasn't exactly sure what song that was, but my daughter's like, oh, dad, of course, you know.

Oh, come on, dad.

Once I played it, I had heard it before.

And I also mentioned that Ed Sheeran had a concert last Friday or something like that on Apple TV Plus that I watched.

Oh, yeah, because it's recorded and it was actually a pretty good concert.

Apple likes to sort of do that every once in a while, show a live concert.

So, yeah.

- And then one other thing that you linked to as well, I saw this, but I hadn't had a chance to look through it.

In the Apple Music app, if you like have some favorite artists or so, you can now see if they are coming in concert, right.

I think that's kind of the way that it does.

I'm used to this on the Spotify side.

They've been doing this for quite a bit and I kind of like it because Spotify knows where I live.

It knows the artists that are the ones that I listen to more than not.

And so if those artists are coming anywhere in concert close to the Cleveland, Ohio area, it'll give me a little email.

And I love that because I think I've gone to a couple of concerts that I probably would not have like paid attention to or seen.

So I'm glad to see that Apple Music is doing this too.

- Yeah, and I've seen other services, third-party services that do the same thing.

Like you let it know what bands you like.

And if they're coming to your town, they let you know, those are great.

So it's nice that, you know, I guess there were sort of two related Apple announcements that are both in the same press release that you're showing right now.

One is within the Apple Music app, they'll do what you said for selected artists.

They will show you what their schedule is for the tour.

And then they'll also even give you a playlist of what they're playing at their concerts.

So just sort of a way to get ready for the concert by listening to the music beforehand or something like that.

So I thought that was a cool feature.

And then the other one, when I first saw this, I'm like, wait a minute, that's where they're putting it.

But sure enough, they're putting it in the, it's in there now, in the Apple Maps app.

Like if you go to the Apple Maps app, And I mean, I just think of the Maps app as a place where you go like, look at a map.

But if you get in there and you scroll down to the bottom or you hit the special webpage you just went to, if you scroll all the way to the bottom, you'll see that there's guides and then you can go over and there's music guides.

And there's a very small number of cities.

I mean, maybe a dozen or so around the world.

- Detroit, New York, Chicago, right.

- Yeah, Chicago, for example, where are the places to go to see live music in Chicago.

And I was listening to a podcast earlier this week where attorney John Voorhees of Mac Stories, who used to live in Chicago and now lives in North Carolina, he was saying, you know, he knows the Chicago music scene and Apple did a really good job of describing the good places to go in there.

So as I marked, I was sort of hoping that they would have New Orleans in there too, because if you're talking about- - Yeah, how can they not.

- If you're talking about live music, you know, you gotta mention New Orleans.

It's like saying the best restaurants in the world, but we're not gonna mention the ones in New Orleans.

I'm like, huh.

- Right, come on.

- I'm a little biased since I'm a New Orleanian, of course.

But it's a nice, it's an interesting idea.

It just, it never even occurred to me to be using the Apple Maps app that way.

And it does relate to a map because ultimately you can see where the venue is, but these guides go far beyond that in terms of, you know, narratives, descriptions and recommendations.

- I mean, that's it.

Like I could always go to, you know, open up any of the Apple or Google Maps app and just be able to put in like, you know, blues or, you know, blues clubs or something like that.

But I mean, this is a little bit more, like you said, a description, like I want to know a little bit about the location maybe, you know, the kind of music that it is.

This is really neat.

So I just clicked through to the website here, 'cause most of this is in the app itself, but as you pointed out, you can also go to a special webpage, so I'm even on my computer now looking through some of this, and it's really, really interesting.

Like, when I travel, you know, if I've got a free night or something like that, this would be a nice place to kind of just go and check out initially.

- Yeah, yeah.

- Good stuff on that.

- Well, we can't get away from chat GPT.

I mean, we've tried, I think.

We've only talked about it a few times, but no more.

Today, you link to a story, which I feel like was kind of inevitable.

I think that there was already a way to get access to chat GPT from your iPhone, but the company that owns chat GPT or runs it, OpenAI, officially released an iOS app this week.

- Yeah, and it works really well.

I have an account for it because I've been playing around with chat GPT.

And so as soon as I started the app, I put in my account information.

And so it gave me a choice of either using the older 3.

5 version or the brand new 4.

0 version.

- Oh, nice.

Okay.

- If you have a free, if you, yeah, there are guys that cost, is it 20 bucks a month.

I didn't realize it was quite that expensive.

- 20 bucks, yeah, yeah, yeah.

- If you don't pay for it, I think that you can just use the 3.

5 version and you have a limited number of requests.

But it works and it's a fun way to play around with chat GPT.

Chat GPT is so fascinating to me because it is such this, I mean, it does a great job of showing what the future of artificial intelligence is.

It's got some flaws though too.

It will definitely tell you things with lots of authority that are just wrong.

So I put in something the other day, this portrays some of my own narcissism, I suppose, but I'm like, tell me about iPhone JD.

And it had something about my website.

And then I said, well, tell me more about Jeff, Jeff Richardson, and it says, Oh, Jeff Richardson, he's an attorney in New Orleans, and he practices appellate law.

That's true.

And he practices are so good.

media law, media law.

I've never presented a newspaper before in my life don't know much about it.

But according to chat GPT, I was a media law attorney.

So maybe it's all the word graduations in terms of like, you know, disks and hard drives.

And it's an old mid the wrong type of media.

I have no idea.

So you know, you got you can't trust GPT all the time.

Yeah, but it's really fascinating for what it does.

Well, some companies don't trust it either, including Apple.

This was an interesting story as well.

I'll be honest.

I've seen other companies or heard about other companies, maybe saying, or even law firms to an extent, Jeff, we're not really trusting this GPT, so we're going to restrict it, right.

You can't, you can't access it.

I, I, I, I, I'm still, my jury is still out on whether that's a good move or not, because I feel like you're not going to really, you're not going to be able to stop a lot of people, but it's interesting that Apple kind of went out on this and did it.

Yeah, I think one of the problems is that chat GPT does a fantastic job of summarizing text.

So if you give it a whole bunch of stuff, it can create a summary for you that's really, really good, but everything that you feed into it goes into its brain and is then used to generate answers elsewhere.

And so what I think Apple was, well, let me just talk about ourselves because I can't get into Apple's mind, but you know, at my own law firm, you know, we don't want lawyers at my law firm saying, you know, help me write this brief and here's some information because then that information is perhaps going to be it's, it's basically taking the confidential attorney client information and putting it up on a sign and walking around the street and say, Hey, somebody want to help you summarize this.

You would never do that a million years.

And so, but again, that's why I see, you know, all of this new, next generation of AI is, you know, people are going to find ways around there.

There's going to be legal specific solutions.

going to be things that are appropriate to use.

I'm sure that Apple itself is looking at the same type of technology and will probably incorporate something, which was the Wall Street Journal article speculated that, you know, Apple may have something else, like some new improved version of Siri coming in the future or something.

And I'm sure this is all coming and hopefully we will get past the days of all of the mistakes that chat GPT generates and all of the security risks with disclosing confidential information on it.

But for the time being, I'm not at all surprised to see businesses concerned about security, telling their employees, please do not use this as a part of your work.

Yeah.

I mean, it's just even, you know, just the whole idea of being able to use some of that information.

I mean, I, I, I'm fascinated by it as well, but obviously a lot of the business professional, legal professionals that I run into, I'm like, you know, use it for, for some fun party tricks maybe right now, but just be wary about certainly uploading any kind of confidential information.

Yeah.

You know what.

Yeah.

I was just going to say, you talk about fun party tricks.

I'll give you a great fun party trick for chat GPT.

- Oh, good.

- Tell it some things.

Say something like, you know, Bob is this guy, his favorite movie is this, he loves the color red, he likes to drive cars, write me a poem about that.

And like in a second, it will write you this poem that rhymes and that works and it's got the information.

And like, you know, I probably could have come up with a poem like this, - Oh, that's so cool.

- but it would have taken me like 20 minutes to do.

And then you could say, okay, that's a pretty good poem, make it a limerick.

And next thing you know, it's got this limerick.

- Really.

Okay.

- That sort of stuff, it's a party trick, but it's really make, write me a song and it will put together a song with the information that you give it.

Give me a song about lawyers in New Orleans and it will do a pretty good job of doing it.

It's really interesting and fascinating.

- And I think I've heard other people do that.

Like if they need to write a speech for like a wedding or something like that, like you feed all that kind of information in there and it at least gives you a place to start, right.

Instead of looking at a blank screen.

That's pretty funny, I like that.

- But be careful about the confidential information about the bride that you tell ChatGBT.

(laughing) - Yeah, you only wanna go so far there.

- Right, right.

- Where are you at.

Here's our favorite, this is becoming my favorite segment.

I love this, Jeff.

Where are you at.

So, business owner tracks stolen AirPods to, I think this was a Motel 6 is where they found it.

What a fun story.

This came out of Utah, I think, 'cause if I'm not mistaken here.

It was a yoga company.

Somebody broke in, took a bunch of stuff, included the AirPods, but they were able to track it down at a Motel 6, it sounds like.

- Yeah, in fact, let's talk about both of these stories at the same time, because this is the one that was in Utah with the Motel 6, and the other one was-- - What's the other one here.

- She left her jacket on an airplane, and then as soon as she got off the plane, she had somebody bring her jacket to her, but during that time, somebody had reached in her pocket and taken out her AirPods, because in both cases, you had the bad guy stole something, for the one in the plane, the only thing they stole was the AirPods.

For the yoga studio, they stole-- - Yeah, they left her jacket.

- Including it.

- Right, right.

- But the point is that you can track these things.

We think about how you can track an iPhone, you can track a Mac, a laptop, you can track, of course, AirTags, which is what they're made for.

Tracking AirPods is, there are fewer options.

Like if you have one of the earliest AirPods, the only time that you can really track them is if they're in someone's ears connected to a device, like when they were last used.

But with the newest AirPods, like the ones that I have, the AirPod 2 Pro, which I think you have too, right.

- I do, yes sir.

- You can track them a lot more often.

You can actually get precise tracking.

And I know at least the woman on the plane, she absolutely had the latest generation of the AirPods Pro.

And I say that because when United reimbursed her for them, they gave her 250 bucks, which is what the cost is.

But those things, I mean, you can track them just like you can track other devices.

And in both cases, these people gave the information to the police.

The police went to the place where it pointed to and sure enough, they found, one of them was the employee of a company that works at an airport, that he had the device there.

And the other one, like you said, was the Motel 6 where the thieves had stored all the stuff that they stole from the yoga studio.

So, you know, thieves need to be careful about stealing Apple technology because you can be caught.

- I feel like I don't even want to report on this.

It's like, if you, I mean, I hate to say it this way, but if you're dumb enough to take something and steal products, then, you know, you may not even be aware, like you're going to be tracked.

I just like on this yoga studio, it looks like the police officer, he said that he took the victim's phone.

In other words, the owner of the yoga studio allowed him to the police officer to take his phone because he was literally walking around door to door at this Motel 6 it sounds like until he found the right room.

They even put the room number in there and they waited until the thief came out and they were arrested and they found a lot of the other stolen goods that were inside on there.

But that's just amazing that he was able to track it.

This airline.

- Which makes me think that it may have been the newest AirPods because the new AirPods have a feature where you can move the phone you know, have like an arrow, like more to the left.

So you're right.

That may have been the newest AirPods that they had as well.

AirPods Pro.

- And this airline story, just incredible.

Like she was flying a long trip.

She left her jacket.

The jacket was left on the plane.

It was apparently the, what was it.

Somebody either putting food in the plane or cleaning the plane after.

And she didn't realize she had her jacket with her 'cause she was able to get her jacket back 'cause she was right there on the jet way or so.

But when she was on the next flight, she reached in her pocket, tried to get them out, and they were gone.

So she was able to track this.

Now, I will say, quite a little bit disappointed and united here.

This lady apparently tried to reach out to everybody and say, "Listen, I'm tracking the AirPods.

"I can see exactly where they are.

"Can you please grab them.

" And they just kept kind of blowing her off or not really doing, say, "Oh, well, it's not us.

"It's somebody else.

" Anyway, finally, some detective listened to her and they were able to track it down.

It was somebody in San Francisco, I believe, you know, whoever had taken it off and on there.

But United did try to make it up.

Like you said, they reimbursed her for the AirPods 'cause when they finally found her, apparently they had been smashed or broken.

Probably, I'm thinking because it was pinging, right.

It was making sounds 'cause she put it in lost mode.

And then United also apparently gave her 5,000 United miles, which I think is nice, but I'm like, come on, 5,000, like, you know, for all the things, come on, How about 20.

How about 50,000.

Like be a little nice, right.

It's just some points.

Anyway, just really a fascinating story.

And I'm glad that CNN, this is on CNN, by the way, that she even has screenshots on here.

Just really good, I think, for people to be aware of these stories so that you know that when it happens to you, not if, when it happens to you, that you kind of have an awareness of how to track these things as well.

Apple can toot their own horn for many things, including, kind of an interesting story here, how much fraud that they stopped in 2022 from the App Store.

Is that the right way to say that.

They had a press release this week that you reported on, App Store stopped more than $2 billion in fraudulent transactions in 2022.

I'm not exactly sure how they tracked all this, Jeff, but this was an interesting press release nonetheless.

- Yeah, I have sort of two thoughts on this story.

On the one hand, if you believe Apple, they, and I hope that they're telling the truth, You know, they definitely are stopping some apps that are, you know, developers are trying to trick.

That shouldn't be there.

Right.

So that's good.

So thank goodness they're doing that.

Thank goodness.

They're trying to protect people.

You know, like, like you say, how they computed the number 2 billion, who knows.

But it's clear that they, I mean, that's the whole point of having an app store curated by Apple is that while they make mistakes, they will catch stuff that does not belong on there and you can feel safer going there.

Right.

Full stop.

No question.

I will admit that I do, maybe this is just the inherent cynic in me.

I do wonder about the timing of this story because, you know, Europe is in the situation where they are thinking about, or maybe they're starting to announce rules that they, the rumor is that, that Europe is going to tell Apple that you need to allow third party apps stores.

And I think, you know, Apple's argument is, Hey, if third parties can do app stores that don't have all of the safety mechanisms that we have, it's going to make iPhones more unsafe and we don't want to have that happen.

So I do wonder if part of this story being posted was to try to instill some fear in those who might be wanting to force through regulations Apple to open up the app store.

And then another thing is, there have been some isolated examples, but they have been widely reported of people complaining about the app store, that things do come through.

Legitimate developers will make an app that's sort of unique.

And the next thing you know, because it's successful, there's a copycat app that has almost the exact same name.

That's a complete junk of a piece of app, but it tries to trick people into spending, you know, two bucks to get their, their junk version.

And those do go through.

And I mean, I guess the app store is not perfect.

The reviewers are going to miss things from time to time, but some of the examples that I've seen are a little glaring and I'm like, wow, you know, how did this get through the app store review process.

So so, you know, Bravo to Apple for doing a good job.

They could be doing more, you know, based on stories that we see.

And, um, and we know that there are people threatening regulation.

I don't actually know if I have an opinion on installation of third-party apps.

I mean, certainly on my Mac on a computer, I could either buy things from the app store or I could just download it directly from the developer.

And that's my choice to whether or not I trust the developer and, you know, my computer hasn't exploded or anything like that.

So I don't, I don't know.

Um, but at the same time, I do understand where Apple's coming from on the app store, I mean, it's a tough, you know, I don't.

- Right, it is.

And I don't develop apps, so I don't kind of see how the sausage is made on the back end, but I do hear from app developers that I think their main criticism would just be, this is great, Apple, just like you said, Jeff, but how about a little more transparency, right.

I just, I always hear the frustration from a lot of app developers, like Apple, I mean, they have their guidelines that they put out there that you're supposed to follow, but then just like you said, Jeff, sometimes it doesn't seem like it's being followed correctly.

And again, I know these are, you know, There's millions and millions and thousands of apps that are submitted every year and stuff like that.

So it is really just kind of hard to keep the chickens and the cows corralled on this.

But anyway, I just know that that's sort of the criticism that I hear a lot from the app developers.

It's like, we wish Apple would be a little bit more transparent or sometimes communicate a little bit better on this, but be that as it may.

We talked about iOS 16.

5 a little bit last week, I believe Jeff, and now it's here.

So you might want to upgrade all the things.

There was quite a number of security flaws or somebody said 39 security flaws.

By the way, sometimes I know that Apple doesn't report on that.

So there could have been more or less, you know, in the past or so, but three were actively exploited here.

You link to a story from Michael Potek from nine to five Mac, which was good.

Yeah, he I think he actually is linking to the Apple report.

So, I mean, this is what Apple is saying.

So, I mean, and we always say that.

I mean, every iOS update, every computer update is always something that you want to install eventually because it's going to patch the security issues.

But there's some other things too.

I mean, there's not a lot in 16.

5, but I noticed it came out yesterday.

I installed it on my iPhone yesterday.

I installed it on my iPad this morning.

And I was playing around with like, if you go to the Apple News app, if you subscribe to Apple News, which I do because I get that package that has all of it, there's a new tab there called Sports, and you can go into Sports.

And when you go there the first time, it says, you know, pick your favorite teams and recommend ones that you're likely to want to pick based upon your location.

So for me, it said, you might want to pick the new Orleans saints and the new Orleans Pelicans basketball team.

You might want to pick LSU, but then it had a full list.

Like if I, if I decide I want to follow the cubs or whatever, it had a full list of people, and then once you choose the teams that you're interested in, in the future, you can go to that tab and you can see news about your teams.

So that's something that I'll probably be using, especially this fall.

once the football season starts again, 'cause I'm a fan of the New Orleans Saints.

So that's an interesting feature that came out.

I also noted that they released some of the things that are associated with the new Pride watch band and stuff like that.

And I'll mention one.

There's a- - Looks nice.

- Apple has been showing off previews of the new Apple Watch Pride watch face, which is called Pride Celebration.

And the one that you're showing on the screen right now that I've seen the previews of, it's a white background with sort of like these colored pieces of confetti, which I thought was fun.

- Yeah, looks like confetti, right.

- It is.

Once I put it on my Apple Watch this morning, I actually recommend don't use, I mean, the white background's fine, but I actually think it looks better.

You can change, you can have either a white background or a black background.

And the black background actually, I think, looks better on the screen of the Apple Watch.

And the one thing I did not know is that this is one of these screensavers that is animated.

So like when I'm looking at it, And again, it's called the Pride Celebration Face.

The little pieces of confetti sort of spin around.

- No.

- It's one that if you touch it, like they will scatter and move around.

(laughing) And it's totally silly.

Now also the hands of the watch face change colors based upon what color confetti they're pointing to.

And as a result, it's actually harder to read the time with this watch face than any other watch face I have.

(laughing) And yet it's sort of fun.

And I will admit, I'm gonna probably get over it and I'll go back to my standard watch face.

But for right now, when I look at it, and again, I've had it installed for like about an hour so far.

- For right now you're playing with confetti, it's good.

- It makes me smile.

So if you wanna have a smile from your Apple watch, check out the new Pride Celebration watch face.

And you know, at least until it gets old, it's something fun to play with.

- And this is in watchOS 9.

5, right Jeff.

So like, in other words, you need to upgrade.

So we talked about a 16.

5 for your iPhone and iPad.

- And you gotta get that first.

First you need to update your iPhone, I believe.

- Of course.

- And then you can update the Apple Watch, yeah.

- And then you can get to watchOS 9.

5.

That's funny.

I haven't upgraded everything yet.

I've been traveling, but yeah, the confetti, man.

That's gonna be fun.

I like that.

So you would also, I don't think there's any updates to the iMessages app, but you had a great little link to five hidden features in iMessage.

Really, anybody can get this.

This is from D Griffin Jones on Cult of Mac.

I liked even the first one that you mentioned here as well.

Very cool.

- Did you know about that, Brad.

I didn't know you could do this.

- Well, okay, so this is write a message with bold text.

I will tell you, Jeff, that there have been many times that I wish when I'm writing a text message that I could just bold like one word or I could italicize one word out of the rest, but of course we don't have like the rich text formatting in iMessages, but D.

Griffin Jones talks about how you can have a message with bold text.

So it's kind of a little bit of a workaround here, right.

you have to turn on the show subject field.

Now I leave this turned off.

So in other words, I knew you could turn the subject field on, which is kind of weird because it's almost like, wait, this isn't an email, but I can have a subject line and a text message, right.

And I get it, but I just always turned it off because I don't want to have to have the extra thing.

I think my wife has it turned on and every time I look at her iMessages, I'm like, that looks weird.

Like, why aren't you doing that.

But apparently, De Griffin Jones says, and I didn't even try this this morning, you can actually put the, or the subject field does show up in bold.

So you can have some of your texts in bold and then the rest of the actual message is not apparently.

- Yeah, so that's my recommendation.

I think you should keep it turned off too because it's a little annoying to have these two lines.

But if there's ever a point where you want to send somebody else a message and you sort of want to emphasize it in some way, just temporarily go into your settings, go to messages and turn on show subject field.

And then you'll be able to type a subject which will be in bold.

and you could put your regular text right below it and then send it.

And the other person, they don't have to have anything special turned on and they will see it that way.

And then you can go back and you can turn your setting off after you do it, but it's just a way to get someone's attention.

And I suspect that many people like me did not even know that this exists.

And so when they receive it, it'll just be something a little new.

It'll stand out a little bit more.

- Right.

- And so- - Like, hey, I didn't know I could do that.

- It's a cool feature.

So I had no idea you could do that.

- I feel like there's so many like little things in there, you know, sometimes I'll do a reply to a previous text message and you know, that shows up unique and people are always like, "Hey, how did you do that.

" Or you know, how you can send like, speaking of confetti, you can send confetti or those balloons, right.

Or a big heart that blows up.

I mean, and people will say like, "Hey, how did you do that.

" There's so many hidden kind of messages, you know, things in iMessages.

The other things here, I think I knew most of everything else here, like filtering the messages list or cleaning up the list of apps, which is really nice because there's all these.

Anyway, we'll make sure that we link to that in the show notes and you can go and find out those hidden iMessages features as well.

Last story here, I like this because I want this so bad.

We reported, it's been several months now, right.

That there were three states that would allow you to put your driver's license in the Apple Wallet app.

Let's see, what were they.

Arizona, Maryland, and Colorado.

And today you link to a story from Mac Rumors, Jeff, that Georgia has become the fourth state that allows residents to put their driver's license in their Apple Wallet app.

I cannot wait until this rolls out to more states.

I know there's a lot of challenges and things here, but man, I would love to have it in Wallet app.

Yeah, anyone who lives in Georgia, I went to college in Atlanta, so I have lots of friends that still live in Atlanta.

You know, if you have a Georgia driver's license, I recommend that you turn this on.

And I can say that from personal experience, because although I don't live in one of these four states, as I've mentioned in the past, we have an alternative system in Louisiana where you can get a digital driver's license.

And it's so nice.

I remember you wrote about that.

If you just want to jump in your car and you don't have to worry about having your license, your wallet, as long as your iPhone is with you and my iPhone's always with me, we have your driver's license and it's really, really nice.

So I there's, there's, I don't see any reason not to do it.

It's nice.

I wish mine was as nicely integrated that was part of the wallet app, but you know, the external app that's the state of Louisiana issues, it works fine too.

So but the idea of a digital driver's license is a big two thumbs up for me.

It's just to me, it's almost a convenience thing.

So you know, when I travel today, I don't print out my boarding pass.

Even when I go to a hotel, I don't like pull up my my actual physical card because it's on my phone.

If I go to a store and I need a credit card, I don't have have the physical credit cards with me.

It's on my Apple wallet app.

And even if I need like a number for, you know, a flight, you know, for an airline or a hotel, you know, a membership number or so, I've got all those, or even my Panera card is in my wallet app, Jeff.

Like I don't carry all these things with me anymore.

I would love to be able to not have to carry my physical driver's license as well.

Again, I know there's challenges back and forth, but I just have a lot more trust in something like that digital driver's license.

And yeah, let's keep going on that.

Keep rolling.

- I like it all.

In the know.

- In the know.

- All right.

Here is my tip for today.

It's something that probably a lot of people might know about, but I feel like at some point, Jeff, we kind of circle back around and catch people that like, I know this is something that you may know about that a lot of people may not know about.

Quite a while ago, on some of the older iPhones, or maybe it's been around for quite a while, that the battery icon on the iPhone could just be basically a little battery that fills up.

You could kind of see the level of your battery just by that little icon and how full or how low that little icon was looked to you.

But at some point, I can't remember exactly when, Apple allowed you to turn on a percentage on that battery.

So you could say, you know, instead of just seeing how full it was just from a visual perspective, it would give you a number like 58%, right.

It's 58% full.

Now I remember I turned that on the first time that I had the ability to do that, Jeff.

And I gotta tell you, for a while it was great 'cause I'm like, oh, okay, that's how much I'm good.

I felt like it started getting me like a little anxiousness inducing 'cause I would be like, oh, oh my goodness, I'm at 54.

Oh no, it went down to 52%.

And you know, so at some point I just kind of turned it off again.

'cause I'm like, I just don't need that additional level of stress in my life.

Like it's gonna go down, it's always gonna go down, but I just don't need to see the number.

Well, I turned it back on maybe, I don't know, about four or five days ago, just simply because I think I really needed to see like how much that I had, especially when you travel and stuff, it's good to have.

So if you have an iPhone today with Face ID, you can go into the settings, you go to battery, and you can turn on the battery percentage.

It's just a little toggle that you can put up there.

Now, what I find interesting today, it's just a number.

It doesn't even have a percent sign on there 'cause I think most of us are gonna know what that means.

Right now, for right now, I like having it on there.

Again, when I travel a whole lot, it's just good for me to really keep tabs on it because now I have the MagSafe battery pack that I can put on the back of it if I need to, just to give it a little bit more juice for the rest of the day.

But we'll see how long it goes.

Some people say, well, you can just add a widget to your screen today or even your home screen.

And that pretty much solves the same thing as well.

You could always go into the control center, just swipe down from the top right corner and it would give you the battery percentage there even if you had it toggled off in your settings.

But if you like just having that number in that statistic right there, and it doesn't create feelings of nervousness and anxiousness inside you like it does for me sometimes, you can go into settings, battery and then toggle on battery percentage.

That's my tip for the day, sir.

- Yeah, and as you were talking, I was just looking it up.

It used to have the percentage up there when Apple came out with the iPhone 10, which was the first one with the notch.

- Oh yeah, okay, yeah.

- That's when they removed the percentage.

And then it was when iOS 16 came out just this past fall.

So just a few months ago is when Apple restored the ability to have the percentage.

And I know that some people don't like the percentage because as you said, the number, it doesn't have the percent sign.

the number of years superimposed over a battery icon, which as the battery goes down, part of it is colored and part of it is blank and it can be harder to read the number.

Plus as you pointed out, looking at the number can maybe induce some stress as well.

But I actually turned it on when the feature came back in iOS 16 and I actually prefer have it up there.

I mean, I know it's a joke.

I know that, or it's a guesstimate.

When it says 57%, that doesn't mean it's precisely 57%.

Maybe it's 65%.

Maybe it's 48%, but there's just something about a number that it just is the same reason that I typically prefer having a digital watch versus an analog watch.

Although I have an analog watch right now with my silly confetti on it.

But, you know, I normally prefer the number.

And so I've turned it on since iOS 16 and I've left it on and I've enjoyed having it that way.

- Excellent.

- My tip of the day is just another messages tip, which has to do with deleting and recovering messages.

I've long known, you know, lately Brad, I've been getting a lot of junk text messages, you know, whether it's a political thing that I don't care about or somebody trying to sell me something.

And so as soon as I see those messages in my message list, before I even open them, I just swipe left on them and I hit delete and they just go away.

And then of course, there's a new feature that came out in iOS 16, I believe, where when you're talking with somebody, if you say something by mistake and you want to delete it, you can hold down on the message and you can, you know, tap on the side and you can delete a particular message.

So you can either delete an entire conversation or you can delete specific messages within conversations.

But what if you do it by accident.

What if you want to go back and get it back.

Well, what you can do is when you're looking at your list of messages, if you tap edit at the top left and then there's an option that comes up in the pop-up menu.

And one of the options is show recently deleted.

And when you do that, you'll see the recently deleted messages and with like little circles next to them.

So you can tap a circle and say, I want to restore this one, and I want to restore this one.

And right next to the message, it tells you how many days you have left to bring it back because it's only 30 days.

So something that you deleted today, you may still have 30 days, but scroll to the bottom and you may see something that, you know, this is the last day before this is gone forever.

And so you can restore it.

If you use messages the way that I think most people do, which is how I recommend it, where you have messages in the cloud turned on, which means that your iPhone and your iPad and all your other Apple devices are all synced together.

Then when you delete something from one device, it deletes it from all devices.

And when you restore something from one device, it restores it on all devices.

So, if you wanna delete things, feel free to do so and just know that you've got 30 days to change your mind if you ever wanna do it.

- I did not know.

I had seen the edit button up there.

It's in the top left, right.

So if you're looking at your list of messages on the top left and sure enough, show recently deleted.

Although the little icon next to that is a trash can and I don't know why that kind of makes me nervous.

I'm like, wait, no, I don't wanna delete it.

I wanna see the recently, I mean, I see the trash can but I wish it would have done something different.

But this is fantastic, Jeff, thank you for this.

I mean, there's some things on here that yeah, I meant to delete and I don't wanna see them again.

'Cause even sometimes now when I delete it, I can swipe to the left and I can either just delete or I could say delete and report junk, right.

That's another thing that Apple put in.

- And I often use that delete and report.

- I do too.

- Absolutely.

- I do too.

- That shows up on the iPhone and it reports the junk to your carrier.

But on the iPad, if you have an iPad that doesn't have cellular like mine, if you have a wifi only iPad, I know that your only choice is delete.

Maybe if you have a cellular iPad, you also have a choice to report to carrier.

I don't know, 'cause I don't own one of those models.

- So you may have mentioned this, but I just to see that when I look at my recently deleted, I can select them all and say, delete all, right.

I can just get rid of it.

if you really, really, really wanted to delete it all because you can see that you didn't want on there.

But oh, that's neat.

That's a neat thing.

I'm so glad you mentioned that.

Again, more hidden.

We should just do a whole episode just on the iMessages.

I mean, I feel like there's so much in there, but that's some really good stuff.

Episode number 99 is in the books now, Jeff.

Next week is 100.

So again, I know we started everything off just saying thank you to everyone.

We really do truly appreciate you guys listening And thank you for sticking with us.

And Jeff, we'll talk to you with you next week for episode 100.

So exciting.

- Sounds great, Brad.

Talk to you then.

.