- Welcome to In the News for January the 10th, 2025.

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

Hey Brett. - Good morning, Jeff.

It's time to talk about another big conference.

But this one is not actually held or sponsored or even involved by Apple.

Even though I love this story here that you link to that Apple is pretty much dominating this conference.

What am I talking about?

At the beginning of every year, we have the Consumer Electronics Show.

I think that's what it stands for, right?

CES. - That's what it originally stood for.

I think they just say CES now, but yeah. - And now they just say CES.

It is a humongous show every year at the beginning of the year in Las Vegas.

And it is so widespread.

Like, I don't even know why they call it, like it's not, like you said, they've changed the name from electronics because now every car manufacturer shows up.

Every like home appliance, everybody shows up.

Robotics, everything.

I've never gone and attended.

We know several folks that go every year, which is great.

Apple used to have a huge actual formal official presence at CES.

You even, you alluded to the fact that this is where the Newton was announced.

You know, I remember Steve Jobs used to have some kind of keynotes there way, way back in the day.

But even without Apple having an official presence, they're still dominating.

This is a great article in Apple Insider from William Gallagher that you link to that even though Apple isn't there, there's so many other companies that are making products for Apple products that it's almost like they're still dominating even though they're not there.

Talk to us a little bit about CES going on right now, Jeff. - Yeah, I mean, my understanding is that, you know, CES is famous for having a lot of, you know, for example, you know, companies from Asia that are just, you know, frankly, far ahead of everybody else in the world when it comes to developing electronics devices.

And so they will come to the US and although it's called the Consumer Electronics Show, it's or the CES, it's not, you know, consumers don't show up at the show.

The target is like other people that would sell stuff.

And sometimes what you'll see is somebody from a small company, you know, maybe in Japan or something, they will show off a technology and they'll have a demo of how it might work in a product.

But what they're really looking is to find another company, maybe an American company to say, "Oh yes, this looks like something that we'll adopt."

And maybe in a year or so, you know, we'll come up with something.

And so ultimately, you know, the product that you would purchase would come out from maybe like the American company, not the foreign company.

But it's fun.

I always enjoy reading the roundups of it because you get to see these previews of things.

Sometimes it's previews of stuff that you could actually buy.

You know, companies like, you know, Anker and stuff like that will show off stuff that they're literally about to start selling in a few months.

But sometimes you just see crazy stuff like robots and things that, you know, are probably never gonna be actually done.

But it's fun just to see people exploring and showing off things.

In fact, to mention robots, I'll mention that, although I didn't link to this in my post, one of the things that made me smile the most this year were all of these companies that took these, I'll call it the Roomba.

I know there's a million companies.

It's not Roomba itself, it's other people.

But we know what these little things, these things that go around your house and sweep up and stuff like that. - Vacuum robots. - Vacuum robots.

These companies that make these vacuum robots that can do other things too.

And so like there was, for example, there's one of them that has an arm that comes off the top and it can use its cameras to identify like a hundred different items.

Like for example, socks on the ground.

And it will know if it finds socks to pick them up with the robot arm and to bring them to a certain location.

Or if it finds a piece of Kleenex, it'll pick it up and put it in the trash can.

And again, will this see the light of the day?

Who knows?

But it's a funny idea.

There's another one that's, another one of these little robots that in addition to cleaning your house, it has a platform on top.

And so I guess in theory, if somebody in a kitchen puts a cold drink on it, it could then bring it out to somebody in the living room.

Again, they're silly things.

It's funny things.

We all dream of the Jetsons having, you know, Rosie the robot come around our house and do our bidding.

Exactly.

It's an exploration.

So those are funny things.

But this William Gallagher article, I agree.

Even though Apple hasn't been there, gosh, since the '90s, there was a few years ago, and he mentions this when somebody from Apple just gave a keynote presentation, not even a keynote, just a minor presentation at one of the- - Oh, privacy, yeah. - Yeah, on privacy issues.

But they haven't been like an exhibitor in forever.

They don't need to be.

I mean, Apple used to be at Macworld conferences, and they stopped doing that because, you know, this third party putting on Macworld conferences, why should they make that, you know, the schedule that they use?

Instead, they announce things on their own whenever they're ready, and that works perfectly fine.

But he's right that people are always thinking about Apple there.

I mean, one of the most infamous examples that I remember is years ago when the iPhone was brand new, and then in future years, when they came up with updates, Apple would be announcing iPhone stuff just like a week afterwards, and everybody at CES would be like thinking about the iPhone stuff that Apple is gonna be announcing at Cupertino, even though they weren't even there.

So it's, you know, they have, and so many companies make accessories.

So anyway, so with that in mind, it's fun to see the quirky gadgets, but it's also fun to see a lot of things that are like iPhone accessories or in the iPhone or Mac universe, more iPhone than Mac.

And so like, you know, there's so many examples.

I mean, the first one you brought up on the screen here is this company, how do you pronounce it, Skoosh? - I say Skoosh, but I don't know. - Skoosh, I don't even know. - Skoosh, Skoosh. - It's one of those things.

They've had products for a while.

I mean, they're a known company.

I've purchased some of their stuff in the past, and they have all sorts of things from like different MagSafe mounts that they're coming out with to hold your phone or charge it in different ways.

In fact, you literally are showing it right now.

There's one that I thought was interesting.

There's a category of devices you and I have talked about where you have like a stand and you put your iPhone on it and it goes into standby mode.

I'm literally using it right now as I'm talking to you.

I'm looking at my iPhone that's showing me the time in standby mode because it's connected to this Anker MagSafe adapter.

But this one that they showed off, it apparently, it does everything that my current one does, but additionally, you can apparently like take out of it a charging part, and then you have a portable charger with you.

So, I mean, that's an interesting idea.

Sort of it's a jack of both trades.

It's both your desktop charger, and then it becomes a portable charger.

So these are the sorts of creative things that you've seen shown off.

And in fact, that one was, what'd you say, only $35, is what the article said.

So, you know, it's not too expensive.

So that's one.

I have another I'll talk about, but anything, anything jump out at you for me? - Yeah, you mentioned another one here of the Aquara.

Is this the next one you were gonna talk about?

The HomeKit? - It was actually, yeah. - Yeah, good, go ahead. - See the thing, you know, I'm very interested in smart home technology, and I'm always looking for ways to expand that.

And of course, the Looch One devices are some of my favorite.

We'll talk about that in a second.

But Aquara is a company that's been out there for a few years now.

I have not used any of their stuff, but I hear good things about them.

One of the reasons I haven't used their things is up until CES this year, traditionally Aquara devices would require their own hub.

So you would have to purchase your Aquara hub, and you hook it up over ethernet to your network.

And then they use their proprietary standard to communicate with their other devices.

And the thing that Aquara has a great reputation for is that the devices that hook up to the hub are usually very inexpensive and they work pretty well.

One that I hear people rave about is a little device that you can put next to like a freezer that might be in your garage or a toilet or anything else.

It's a water detector.

So if you ever have water leak into the area, it can detect water.

It sends an alert to the Aquara hub, and then it sends an alert to your phone so that you get a notice that it happened. - Right, right. - And it actually, although, so it's not using the HomeKit technology, it's not using wifi, it's not using Bluetooth, it's using their proprietary standard.

But I've actually heard that that's a good thing.

I know that in the case of my Lutron lights, one of the reason that the Lutrons are so rock solid dependable is that they have their own proprietary network for communication that's just best in industry.

And so, we all know that wifi can be flaky, Bluetooth can be flaky.

I've never had the Lutron stuff or almost never had it be flaky.

That's because it's their proprietary stuff.

But again, that because I have a Lutron hub.

So, I have avoided the Aquara stuff just 'cause I didn't need to get another hub in my house, but I've always looked at it.

So, fast forward to today, what they're announcing here in this article from Hartley Charlton at Mac Rumors, I think it is, is that they, apparently, they're working with HomeKit.

Now, what I don't know is, one of the things that Apple did recently is Apple, for years and years and years, Apple has said that if you want to put on your device a little stamp that says, "Works with Apple HomeKit," you need to go through a certification process and stuff like that, which I know has some money involved and people may not wanna do that.

And as a result, you have all these products out there that don't work with Apple, or at least they don't advertise that they work with HomeKit, even though they work with other standards like the old Google standard.

But because we have this Matter protocol that all these companies have come together, Apple, Google, and everybody else has come together for, what Apple recently did is they have said, and this is recently as in just a few weeks ago, they have said that if you work with Matter, which is this open standard, you don't have to pay anybody for that, you just use it, you can advertise that you work with iPhone just by supporting the Matter standard, which is a nice little advertising thing.

And I think HomeKit too, so that gets back to this article.

I don't know for this particular article if what they're saying is that Acara has done something to work with HomeKit specifically, or what they might be doing, and I don't know, is just now working with Matter, which anyone could do with their stuff, and by virtue of that, they have the ability to say that they work with HomeKit.

But it doesn't, I mean, for us as users, I could care less whether it's HomeKit or whether it's Matter, all that I need to know is that it's gonna work great with my devices.

You know, the Home app on my iPhone is gonna be able to control all of these Acara devices that do all sorts of different things, there are different kinds of sensors, and different kinds of switches. - Doorbells and touchscreens. - Doorbells.

And so this is what I have been waiting for for years, and it's been so slow in coming, but I do think that we're gonna get to this point where because of the Matter standard, you'll be able to just buy things.

You can just buy a smartphone thing with confidence that, oh, I assume it's gonna work with iPhone, you know, it says on here that it does, whereas the old days where you really had to like, look at your labels and say, is this gonna work with Apple?

Is this gonna work with Google?

Is this gonna work with Amazon's ecosystem?

And you know, that's pain when you can't get the things you want.

So that was what really jumped out at me about the Acara stuff. - So Jeff, real quick, so on your Lutron stuff, do you have to have a separate app to control that with that hub, or can you control that through HomeKit?

Because that's probably one of the things that I continue to hesitate on, is I don't wanna mess with all of these different integrations, right?

And you and I both listened to MacBreak Weekly where Alex Lindsay, you know, has always said, it's like, I almost just wish Apple would just come out with their own, just come out with your own set, Apple, of all of the HomeKit automation, and that's what I'll go ho-hogging, right?

'Cause I'm already in the Apple ecosystem.

And I just don't wanna have to invest in another hub and a different hub and just all these things.

So are you able to still operate everything within that HomeKit app, even with your Lutron stuff that you have right now? - Yeah, so the answer is both.

I mean, Lutron, all of the Lutron things I have in my house, there is a Lutron app that I have, and I can use that Lutron app to either set up new devices or to control them, everything else.

But they also work in the Apple Home app because they are HomeKit compatible.

And so that's one of the things that I've enjoyed from the Lutron.

And you might say, since you could either use the Home app or the Lutron app, which one do you use?

And to tell you the truth, I don't necessarily even know that I have a rhyme or reason.

I usually use the Home app for everything, because like you say, it's that one central app that controls everything.

But then sometimes, like when I'm setting up, just the other day, I bought another one of these little Lutron devices to hook up to our Christmas tree this Christmas.

And when I set it up, I thought to myself, "I could do this in the Home app, I could do it in the Lutron app."

I was like, "Let me just do it in the Lutron app," because it's one of their products.

And I just found that the onboarding process was better 'cause you could select a specific Lutron model number and stuff like that, 'cause they know their accessories.

But ultimately, I could have done it either way.

In fact, I could have just, if you don't even wanna install the Lutron app, I suppose you don't have to do so.

You could just stay with Matter and just do everything there.

And this is the way it works for the other smart home stuff that I have too.

I have Eufy devices that are smart home compatible with HomeKit, and those, I can either use the Eufy app or I can use the Home app.

The same is true for the, there's a manufacturer called Eve, same way.

There is an Eve app.

And sometimes there will be special features that only work, like things that go beyond the HomeKit standard.

And to get access to those features, you need to use the company's proprietary app, but often the most common features of the product will work with Home too.

So, but we're getting closer to the point where companies can have their own apps, but you can just control everything from within Home. - But I'm almost to the point, we have been talking about this, even you and I for like at least two years, maybe longer.

And I know that there's other people that we follow and read all the time that are just as frustrated with some of this.

It's just, there's so much out there and I get it.

And this is part of the way that the technology industry works.

And at some point I feel like that there's going to be a focus or a standard that we all settle upon, but man, it's sure taken a long time. - It's taken a long time, but I think we're getting there. - Yeah, I do.

And I agree, I know that we're getting there and I can just see because I've been kind of living the home automation life through you 'cause I haven't invested in it yet.

Maybe I'm just out of ignorance, but I just, I'm hesitant just because I don't want to invest in something and then have to change it.

And if something better comes along, and of course that's always the danger, I get that.

But I just don't have a comfort level with the fact that this is the good standard to base on.

I mean, obviously just listening to you all these years, Lutron to me seems to be like one of the best.

The Sikara I've heard about a few times as well, but I'm glad to see that they are continuing to evolve and continuing to put out there.

I would love to see Matter, I guess, get a little bit more acceptance.

And just like you already alluded to, Apple I think has already made another good large step in that direction saying that if you are Matter compatible, then you'll be able to be useful within the Apple ecosystem as it were, with the iPhone or the HomeKit and everything.

So anyway, just good stuff.

There was one more article you linked to here that included talking about Lutron.

Sounds like you might be buying some more Lutron things in the future. - A few years ago, we were renovating our living room.

In fact, you've been at my house not that long ago, Brett, when you were in New Orleans.

And so we have a living room that's got like these five sort of windows and sort of a bay sort of window set up.

And when we were renovating the area, we're like, okay, so you've got these big long windows.

Would it make sense to have shades on those windows?

Would it make sense to have some sort of smart shades that we could remotely make them go higher or lower?

And so we thought about it.

And because of the experience that I've had with Lutron, we looked at their, a product that they've sold for years called their Serena shades, S-E-R-E-N-A.

And they're beautiful.

You can get them in any custom size you want with like hundreds of different fabrics you can choose from.

They're really nice.

But I tell you, Brett, they were expensive.

When we looked at them, I think it was gonna be like a thousand dollars a window.

And I'm like, we have five windows in this space.

Are we gonna spend $5,000 on shades?

And I'm like, that was, we just couldn't justify it.

And so we went a different direction.

We didn't do shades.

I mean, we just have, you know, regular old, you know, regular shades.

And the reality is for my house, we don't actually, I mean, maybe we would do it more if it could do it through an app.

But we don't actually raise those shades ever.

They just stay in one position and it's totally fine.

But if you're in a room that, for example, has direct sunlight, whichever direction, you know, that is, you may have a room where you're like, gosh, I really am gonna wanna have this shade closed during parts of the day and open during parts of the day.

And because that's something that you do every day, you know, having shades that are motorized to make it easier for you sound nice.

And if they work with the, you know, home kit type stuff, that would be even better because you could remotely do it or even have it on a schedule, you know, automatically go up at a certain time of day and go down.

And so the Serena shades have gotten great reviews.

They're just expensive.

So what Lutron announced at CES this year is they're using another one of their sub brands, the Caseta brand, which I'll just note parenthetically, they also use the Caseta brand name for a lot of their like in wall, like, you know, you replace the switch on a wall with a light switch.

And I have some of their Caseta stuff and they work really, really well.

But so they're using that same more consumer friendly Caseta name for their new brand of shades.

And as I understand it, they don't have quite as many features as the Serenas do, but they cost only $399 for 48 inches. - That's where it starts right there. - Yeah, to get the price on the Serena, you have to go through like a million questions to get to it.

But I mean, my rough guess, as I put it in my post, I think it's about half as much.

So if I were in the market today, this is absolutely what I would be looking at.

You know, why not have all of the features for half as much?

And maybe you have fewer choices on fabrics and stuff like that.

But they're obviously recognizing the fact that people might wanna get their products, but the Serena was just too expensive.

So why not come up with something that's, you know, so much less expensive. - I see that.

So I clicked through on this.

You have to select your style, whether you want roller or honeycomb, your fabric type, whether you want light, filtering or blackout, your fabric color, which apparently, like you said, they only have white or gray, I think. - Oh, that's just for the back part, yeah. - The mounting style.

Okay, the mounting style.

And you have to actually provide the measurements of your windows here, which I just, I really think that's kind of cool because, you know, I'm almost thinking immediately of like custom cabinetry, which is always so expensive, right? - Yeah, same thing. - And I know that if you get a professional interior decorator or so, they would probably do a lot of the same thing.

But man, the fact that you can design this and answer all these questions here in a website, in a browser, and then get custom draperies, or custom shades that you could then operate through your phone, that's pretty cool.

That's even something that could be tempting for me as well.

That's pretty nice. - I'll say one last thing before we move on to the next topic, Brett, which is, you know, I'm so happy that I have been doing HomeKit stuff for all these years because it just makes so many things in my life easier at home.

My family uses it.

We all really enjoy it.

And my home has gotten even more of a smart home over the years.

I'm so happy we did it.

I wouldn't trade it for the world.

But for anyone out there that's in the same boat that you are, Brett, which is that you haven't quite made the jump because of all the competing standards, which is totally legitimate.

I will say that, and maybe I would have said this every year, but I really believe that 2025 could be a good year for people like you.

And the reason I say that is you and I talked about a week or two ago in our preview for the next year show, that Apple is rumored to be coming out with some sort of a device that might be like a HomePod with the screen, but that the rumor is that it will be sort of your central hub for your home and it will control things in your home.

We don't know what Apple is gonna announce.

The rumors are they might announce it this spring, but one possible version of the year 2025 is that number one, Apple comes out with this smart hub device that makes it even easier and better to control things in your home.

Number two, more companies now have this matter standard.

Apple knows that.

Apple has this new device, work with it.

Apple even has third-party partners that they're working with now to be part of their announcement.

Wouldn't it be great if everything makes a big step up and then maybe that'll be the perfect time to buy stuff.

Now, people like me that have prior things that have had things for a while, will they work with the new standards?

I hope so.

I hope that we're not left behind.

I don't wanna have to buy new stuff, but it could be that we'll see what Apple announces this year if they do it, they're just rumors.

It may be false, but I think that there's something there to the rumors.

If they announce it, then going forward might be the perfect time for people that use Apple devices like iPhones and iPads to say, okay, now I'm ready to make this step in a HomeKit and I'm gonna follow it.

And in fact, one quick thing on that is one of those rumors is that Apple is gonna come out with cameras.

Cameras are a category that are finicky.

I've talked about this in the past.

I use Eufy cameras, which are good, but I don't use the latest version of Eufy cameras because they don't work with HomeKit, but maybe I should.

And the quality would be, it's a mess.

It's a mess.

And it's one of these things that I wish Apple would just come in and say, here's a camera.

This is the one you should use. - Exactly, exactly. - It's gonna work great.

And I'm sure it's gonna cost a little bit more 'cause it comes from Apple, but it's just going to work and I'll know it's dependable.

And that's what, you know, and then I have to decide for me, since I already have cameras, do you pay to replace them?

But for someone who hasn't yet made the plunge, it'll be easy of, oh, that's the one to get.

So we'll see. - Not only that, but I remember what I was talking about this a couple of weeks ago is that if the camera is positioned somewhere like that to where it can be embedded within like a home product of some kind, you know, some kind, I'm so encouraged by how the cameras work on the Vision Pro to be honest with you, because the way that it can recognize the gestures so well, right, you talk about this and I see so many people.

I mean, so I'm not just interested even in like, I want a security camera kind of a thing.

Like I wanna be able to like wave, you know, here's a quick thought, which is sort of silly, but like if I have my iPhone playing music, like when I'm taking a shower or something like that, and I don't like the song that comes on, I have to like yell out of the shower to ask for Siri to go to the next song.

But sometimes it doesn't hear me the same way, Jeff.

Is that makes sense?

And so I would love to be able to have some kind of a gesture, maybe not the shower. - What an interesting idea. - But it's something along those lines, like instead of yelling at Siri, you know, for a command or something, because there's something else going on, a music or so, I would like to think that that camera could be sort of more useful in the way that they've been using those cameras within the Vision Pro.

To me, that's some of the biggest stories that's coming out of the Vision Pro. - That's an interesting idea. - Of course, with all the other things, but just the way that they've used that.

Last thing quickly, I wanna say on this, 'cause it just, it occurred to me at the bottom of this paragraph here on this Lutron, you know, we were talking about Lutron Hub, and then Aqara has their own hub.

And I guess I was thinking about it from those independent companies and like their own standards or the things that they're using from the hub.

But not only that, but you and me, Jeff, are sort of in this Apple ecosystem.

But I guess another layer here is, while I would like it to all you use and work with Apple Home and the HomeKit and Siri, but there's Amazon Alexa, there's Google Assistant.

And you and I both probably know a lot of people, we go into their homes and they've already got one of these, you know, Amazon products or a Google product.

And so they may not want it to work with the HomeKit.

They want these companies to also work with the Amazon ecosystem and the Google system as well.

And anyway, I'm just bringing that up.

Like that to me is another layer that I wasn't specifically thinking of that also has to be taken into account. - Well, that's why Matter would be great because Matter allows, it's the great equalizer.

We can all finally talk to each other.

It's the tower of Babel, you know, for HomeKit as it were. - Okay, let's move on.

One thing you didn't mention, but I'm gonna say, happy birthday, 18th birthday.

It's like the iPhone this past week is old enough now to get, I guess, a driver's license or, you know, whatever it needs to do.

I was reminded of this 'cause my wife, I think two days ago, it came out on a news story.

She was reading some news and she's like, "Hey, happy birthday to the iPhone."

Right, this was in 2007 is when Steve Jobs announced the iPhone and I just in passing wanted to recognize that. - Speaking of conventions, that was at a Macworld convention.

And that's a perfect example of, you know, way back then Apple had to time its announcements with whenever a third party was hosting convention at Macworld.

Nowadays, Apple will announce a product like an iPhone whenever they darn well please, because they no longer show up at these big trade shows and have to work to their schedules. - Even my mom has an iPhone and probably one of the biggest complaints that I hear from her all the time is she'll call me or text me and say, "My iPhone has run out of space."

Now, we've all heard this for a long time from many, many people.

And of course, I know by now that probably doesn't mean that the actual iPhone has run out of space, although it could, but often it's because the iCloud storage is out of space.

I saw this story earlier that you linked to this week as well from Fast Company, I believe, is this where it is?

And this was great, three quick tips if you keep running out of iCloud storage.

I thought this was great and I'm glad that you linked to it this week. - Every phone comes with some free, every iPhone comes with free iCloud storage space.

And currently that number is five gigabytes.

And 1,000 years ago, the number was also five gigabytes.

Apple has not changed that number in forever.

And this is one of my- - 18 years ago. - Headpiece with Apple is come on, Apple, you're the biggest company in the world.

You make so much money and you haven't changed that five.

The one thing that they've changed about it is they now say, and this was a few years ago, that if you're upgrading from an old iPhone to a new iPhone and you need to, you wanna back it up to iCloud before you update and the five gigabytes is not enough, they will temporarily for like a month or something, they will temporarily raise your iCloud limit so that you have enough to back up your phone and go to the new phone.

I mean, what a minor thing that, so Apple needs to really raise this minimum five gigabyte tier, but I'm not, I'll get off my soapbox on that.

You can pay Apple for higher tiers.

And the way that I do it is just by being a part of the Apple One service.

And there's one tier of Apple One that has like 200 gigabytes.

And the one that I have, because it's the family plan, in fact, I think the lowest level family plan has 200 gigabytes, but if you get their top of the line plan I have two terabytes.

Yeah, but even, so that's why I was amazed that with my two terabytes, my family and I, as I put in the post, we're using 1.5 terabytes.

So we are so far beyond that, like if I just wanted to do the regular family plan, which has 200 gigabytes, I couldn't even think, I mean, I don't have nearly enough space.

And so a lot of people that are not doing the highest level, of course they're running low on iCloud space.

So now to be honest- - I'm getting close too, Jeff.

I saw your post today and I'm like, I'm gonna check it.

And I'm like, goodness gracious, I'm almost probably maybe about 40% of the two terabytes that I'm using.

And I just looked at that and I'm like, are you kidding me?

But I think you also mentioned this in your post, the biggest culprit is photos and videos.

And that's also what you were getting to hear from the Fast Company article too. - And what the article points out is when you think of photos and videos, you might naturally think, oh, my photos app.

And that's true, that's a big place where they're located.

But one of the things this article points out is, someone could like send you via a text message, a bunch of photos, a bunch of videos.

And if you have your messages set up that they automatically remember all of your old messages, which I like to do, 'cause sometimes you wanna search for a message from like a year ago.

It also means that these videos that people send you, even though individual videos are not that big, they add up over time.

And so that's a place where you could have a lot of space being taken up to record some silly video that someone sent you a year ago that you really don't care about anymore.

And you might realize it's taking up space.

And likewise, if you use the iCloud service, or even if you don't use the iCloud service, but you have for mail, mail attachments.

And so those are places that you might want to take a look to see if there's extra stuff there.

I know that for me personally, and I mentioned this in my post, I'm taking almost 750 gigs, and that's because of my photos library primarily.

The entire rest of my family, my wife, my son, my daughter, they in themselves are just over 500 gigs, which is far less than me combined.

Although, like I said, if we had that 200 gigabyte plan for a family, it wouldn't be nearly enough.

So the point of all of this- - By the way, I was just gonna say, if you go into your iCloud settings, and if you are on a family plan, you can tap on this.

And I think this is where you got your numbers.

You can actually see every member of your family.

So it'll tell you how much storage you are taking as like, I'm the owner of our family account, right?

And then, so if you want to like point a finger at somebody in your family and say, "Hey, you need to get rid of certain things," or follow, here is this great article that you can follow to basically clean up some of these things.

The next biggest offender after me is my daughter, who does a ton of videos and photos, and she's getting up to, she's over 200 gigabytes just on her own.

Anyway, I just, there's a bonus tip in there.

Like, if you go into your settings and go and tap on your little picture at the top, which is your iCloud account, you can go in and you can see some more detail.

I think Apple's done a good job of providing a little bit more information on like, here are the biggest culprits of what are taking the biggest space aspects on there.

So that can help if you're going into this article here. - And it gets very granular because it's not just by person, although it is, but like if you click on the managed storage stuff, I mean, I can actually see on my Apple devices, 'cause remember, it's not just my iPhone.

My iPhone and my iPad are sharing my iCloud space.

My Vision Pro as well, they're all sharing it.

I can actually see, you know, I'm using this much for messages.

I'm using this much for, for example, the iMovie app.

I haven't used, I don't use the iMovie app very often, but apparently I've got two and a half gigs being taken up by that.

I can see, you know, different apps that I might not even use that much, how much space that they are taking up.

The journal app, which I don't even use is taking 82 megs.

I guess 82 megs is not that much, but so it's just interesting.

So if you go through here, it can, you can help find things that, oh, I don't need this anymore.

I can delete it.

And so it's a good way to, you know, they're really, it's a good tool.

This is, if using this portion of the settings app on your phone or on your iPad, Apple does make it easy to manage your space.

Having said that, I do wish that Apple would just, you know, give us some more space. - Just like, okay.

So anyway, get back to this article just quickly.

These are three great tips.

I saw this article, like I said, I think I may have sent it to two or three people.

The message attachments, like you were talking about, is a great place, but I hate, you know, taking some of that out.

Actually, when somebody sends me a picture or a video, what I have taken to do as a text message, Jeff, there's that little box with a down arrow, like a download button next to the picture.

And I will typically just tap that, save that out into my photos.

And sometimes I guess I'll delete the picture from the text messages, but most often I probably don't.

I just like to make sure that I save it. - Yeah, so that way it's part of your collection, right? - Exactly.

So the second tip he mentioned here is videos in the photos app.

We just talked about that.

You know, that's probably the biggest one.

And then, but the third one here, I thought was interesting, old unnecessary emails.

Now I think this would only be in your iCloud.com account, is that correct in this?

But yet a third place to look for some things where you can kind of, you know, call out some unnecessary storage there. - I'll just mention one more thing about photos though, or specifically the photos app and videos, because really iPhones nowadays, where you can take optionally 4K video, HDR video, you know, all these things, 60 frames per second, your videos are very good quality.

That's one of the nice things about the iPhone is it's a video camera, but they take up a ton of space.

And so if you take a lot of videos, you probably already know what I'm about to say, which is that you need a way to manage them.

I mean, I will, just last night, for example, I went to one of my daughter's basketball team's games, and I took a bunch of video basically throughout the game, and those clips together are taking up a huge amount of space.

If I left all the videos from every basketball game in a season on my phone, it would just, it would balloon beyond control.

And so what I do, and it's annoying that I have to do this, but, you know, over time, I'll take those videos and I might make a little movie out of them or something like that.

But at the end of the day, I will take those on my, I use my Mac at my home, and I will select those videos once I'm done with making a movie with them or whatever I want to do.

I will take them, and I actually have an external hard drive that's connected to my Mac at home.

And I have a folder in there for, you know, videos that I've removed from my phone.

And I move them over there.

And Apple makes it easy in the photos app on a Mac.

You can export videos.

And so once they're exported to that external device, I delete them completely from my photos app, which means that I have, I have the video clips.

If I ever want to go back and make another movie or something like that, I can find them.

And of course that's backed up both locally into the cloud because, you know, hard drives fail.

But I don't keep most of those videos in my photos app because they would just be too large.

Now, having said that, although that's the type of video that I don't keep long-term in my photos app, you know, when I'm going around or somebody does something cute at Christmas and I'll take a little video or I'll take a video of that, you know, those are the videos that I do keep around and they add up over time.

I mean, I, again, that's the reason I have, you know, three quarters of a terabyte of photos data on my iPhone is because of the videos.

Photos can be big too, but videos are so much bigger.

So, you know, it's great that we have the ability to take these high quality videos so easily, but they really eat up iCloud space. - Interesting stuff, yeah.

Good article, I'll make sure we have it linked in the show notes so that maybe you can send it around to people that complain about their iCloud storage as well.

Something else you linked to today, I can't say that I have ever heard my AirPods Pro emit a chime when I didn't like either, you know, open them or close them and it started charging, but apparently this is something that's been going on.

You linked to a story in Mac rooms today.

Hearing a mysterious chime from your AirPods Pro case, it's a feature.

And then I think you also had another link here that goes to John Gruber.

There's some people talking about this.

I don't know that I've ever experienced this.

I think you mentioned you haven't heard it in your AirPods Pro case either, but it kind of an interesting story going on here. - Yeah, the story may have first come up on the Accidental Tech Podcast, ATP, but then people started talking about it on social media and Julie Clover wrote an article on Mac rumors and then Darren Fireball, John Gruber wrote an article about it.

But the issue is it all started with somebody noticing that, you know, their AirPods Pro are just sitting there, you know, with the AirPods inside of them, the case closed, and they made this little beep sound.

And you're like, what does it do?

What does that mean?

What is it doing?

And apparently it turns out that just a few weeks ago, when Apple introduced, and we've talked about it on this podcast, this new feature where you can use AirPods Pro as a hearing aid and stuff like that, they also added, and Apple says this in one of their support documents, they added this feature, this, I don't know, that we'll get into in a month.

Every once in a while, Apple will make a tiny sound from the AirPod speakers and will listen for that sound from the AirPods microphone.

And it's a way for them to sort of double check that the speakers, the microphone on these tiny little AirPods are still working.

So it's sort of like a self-check, you know, it's much like I have, talking about smart home devices, I have these Nest things in my house that are like smoke detectors.

And like once a month, they will beep and make noise and do a self-test.

And it drives my dog crazy because of the high pitch noise.

But you know, it's just one of these self-test type things.

And so I didn't realize this, that apparently AirPod Pros, I don't know that regular AirPods do them, but AirPod Pros do a self-test.

And so if you're ever just like, why did my AirPods just make that random noise?

So that is one aspect of the story.

But the other aspect of the story, which is epitomized by the John Gruber article and was also mentioned on the ATP podcast is how are people supposed to know what these sounds mean?

And, you know, they mentioned on the podcast on ATP, why doesn't Apple just have a single page on their website that, and John Gruber mentions this too, that just has like samples.

If you hear this sound, this is what it means.

It would be so easy for them to do that.

And that way, if you hear the bizarre sound, because, you know, as I think ATP podcast is like, if you hear a bizarre sound, you know, how do you Google for that?

How do you say, you know, what does it mean when I hear?

(imitates airplane engine) You can't type those words in. - Right. - You know, Apple does a great job with their sounds.

I mean, like when you're, we've all heard if you use AirPods, at some point you've heard the sound when one of the AirPod batteries is really low and it's the sound that, (imitates airplane engine) and even without telling you what it is, intuitively it's a sad noise and everybody's brain can intuitively say, you know what, that's a sad AirPod.

I bet it needs to be plugged in.

So that one maybe has some self discovery, you know, or some self obviousness to it, but other ones are not so obvious.

And so it would be, I hope that Apple reads this discussion and says, you know what, let's do that.

Apple has a million support pages.

You show them on our podcast all the time.

Why not have a support page that just tells you how to decipher the beeps and the boops that the AirPods and other products. - Well, you know, I don't know, according to John Gruber here at the bottom of his post, years ago, Apple was a successful company and documented how their products work.

But these days Apple is struggling financially and the last can no longer afford to produce something even as simple as an interactive webpage with examples of the sound.

That's so funny.

Okay, obviously that's a test. - Tripping with sarcasm there, yeah. - But I do like that, like the, that would freak me out if I just heard, 'cause the only two sounds that I can probably recall from the AirPods Pro is if I place it on a charger, it has like the ding, it is, that's the best way I could describe it, a simple ding.

Or if the case needs charging, if I put the AirPods in the case and close it, there's like a little, I can't even describe what the little chime is, but I just know, and like, and I think it vibrates just a little bit.

And basically it's just telling me, hey, if you want to use these again, you probably need to like put it into charging.

That's the only two sounds that I think that I can recall even hearing from the AirPods Pro case, Jeff.

So anyway, I'm glad that you linked to that because now at least if it does happen, I'll have some kind of an inkling so that it, you know, I won't panic or like, what's going on here?

Don't like that.

We just talked a little bit about text messaging in the context of like, if people are sending you pictures, how to get rid of, but we also covered with iOS 18, there were some big changes to how text messages or iMessages were working.

And Jeff Carlson here, this article you linked to from CNET, even talks a lot about, more specifically in 18.2, which was what, maybe two, three weeks ago, maybe a little bit longer than that. - I think December 11th, maybe, yeah. - Yeah, just, okay.

So early December that 18.2, iOS 18.2 came out and there were some pretty exciting changes in messages.

We covered it pretty extensively, but they were different enough that I'm glad that you linked to this today, because even for me reading through this article that I knew that some of these things, I had either forgotten about them or I hadn't tried them out yet.

So thanks. - That is 100% the reason I linked to this article because we talked about this when 18.2 came out a month ago, but now that it's been out for a month and pretty much everybody has upgraded, most people have upgraded, you forget that these things were added.

I mean, a very simple one is, I have to admit until I read this article, I had sort of forgotten that we can now use bold and italics in text messages. - Yeah, that's so great. - It's not something I necessarily need to use all the time, but every once in a while, you wanna put something in bold or you wanna, and so it's like, now I remembered that I can do that.

And there's other little special effects you can use when you're sending messages, but I had forgotten half of this.

And so this is the perfect time to go back and just give yourself a little reminder of what are the things that you can do in the messages app as long as you've updated to 18.2, which I suspect that most people have by now. - You can animate your text messages, that's great.

I think he may have said something in here somewhere, like before all of this, the only way that we could really emphasize a word is we would do all caps, right? - Right, right, exactly. - You can do like bold or italics.

Now, is this correct, Jeff, that if I do a bold or italics now, the receiver has to have an iPhone using iMessages or does some of that change now because Apple, he also mentions this in here, Apple is now supporting this RCS messaging that you can communicate with Android users.

Does that make a difference on that as well? - Yeah, I actually don't know because there are so few people that use Android that I communicate with, I don't know.

But what you're asking is, do bold or italics, is that supported by RCS?

I haven't tried it yet, so I don't know.

But it wouldn't surprise me if it is. - I agree, the only thing I would say is that there's a few people that are RCS that I do Android.

And it seems like the one difference that I've seen, Jeff, is in the past, if I just did a thumbs up, which would be a tap it back, right?

If I knew that the other person had an iPhone, I would tap and hold on the message and do the tap back of the thumbs up.

If it was an Android, it seemed like it would send that thumbs up as a separate message. - Exactly. - But I think now, I think that the tap back looks like a tap back on their end as well, even if they're online. - If they use a messaging program on Android that supports RCS, yes, it'll look like a tap back with a little sort of connected to the actual message.

That's correct. - Very good.

Okay, okay, good.

So yeah, it's some more experimenting, I think, with that.

But anyway, great article here in CNET.

Thanks for linking to that.

In the Vision, I'm gonna come up with a little, kind of like a chime that we can use for In the Vision.

But I love us talking about this.

Just a quick little story that you linked to today about the Apple Vision Pro.

And it sounds like you've tried this as well.

Instead of standing or sitting, why not lay down, relax all the way, and watch your favorite movie with the Apple Vision Pro.

That way you can be like Tim Cook.

Apparently this is how he enjoys entertainment on the Vision Pro as well. - Tim Cook mentioned in an interview last year, and I think we actually briefly mentioned it, that one of the things that he loves doing with the Vision Pro is lying down on a couch and watching a movie up in a ceiling.

And I have to admit, I've never really thought about it.

And then Ryan Christoffel, the reason that he mentioned it in this post this week is that he is saying that the Vision Pro is a little heavy for his head, and that when you lie down, it distributes the weight a little bit better.

I'm lucky enough that, I mean, I can, the Vision Pro, it's, I guess I can feel the weight, but I've never really considered the Vision Pro to be too heavy on my head.

And then I recently started using this Belkin strap that I reviewed a few weeks ago, which helps that even more.

But regardless, I don't necessarily have the same issues with the Vision Pro that Ryan does.

But the point of his, of what he's suggesting is still a good one that, you know, we have these old paradigms.

Our entire life, if you wanted to watch TV, it was sitting across the room.

So you would have to be sitting to look at the TV across the room.

But with the Vision Pro, that's no longer true.

So, you know, sometimes I will be on my couch and I'll sort of lean back and I might not put it on the ceiling, but I might put the virtual screen, you know, sort of up much higher than a TV would ever be located, just because that's the convenient way to look.

Or if you wanna lie down on a couch or a bed, look in your ceiling and it sort of changes your paradigm.

Your brain's like, how can we have visions?

In fact, I've actually seen, there's a couple of months ago, I saw some company that was selling a projector so that it would actually, you know, project straight up in your bedroom.

And their selling point was that you could watch movies on your ceiling.

So, I mean, I guess there's another way to do it even without a Vision Pro.

But the nice thing about the Vision Pro is you can watch it, whatever.

And I mentioned in my post, I've done this before where I've wanted to watch like a TV show and my wife wants to go to bed and I just wanted to lie down on the bed with my head on my comfy pillow.

And with a Vision Pro and with your AirPods, you can watch a movie and you can listen to it.

And the person that's in the same room with you, even if they're trying to sleep next to you, they can't tell, there's no noise or anything like that.

And so it's interesting.

So it's, you know, it was a nice reminder that you have a lot of, many more options.

And this idea of lying down to watch a TV show or a movie, it's not a bad one.

I don't do it all the time, but I do it sometimes. - Yeah, it makes me think of the app, that theater app that we talked about last week for, I'll call them Sandwich Vision or whatever it was. - Exactly. - And it's like, 'cause I was thinking, when have I ever laid down flat to watch a movie?

'Cause, you know, the paradigm has always been that we go to a theater and we sit and now, you know, most of the theaters have those nice little, you know, automatic recliners, but I'm not laying down all the way.

But when I have gone to a planetarium, right?

That's when I've laid down.

So anyway, that's what I was thinking about that app from last time.

And I'm like, okay, maybe this could work.

It just sounds strange for some reason, like entertainment, you wanna lay down all the way and look straight up.

But now that I've read the story and heard you talking about it, I think that could be very viable. - Yeah, you know, another related product that's been out over the years is they have these stands that will either sit on your bed or will go next to your bed.

And they have an arm and you put an iPad on it.

And the idea is you can lie down on your bed and watch on the iPad.

And I've seen those before too. - I've seen those too. - So people have tried to do versions of these things for years, yeah. - In the show. - In the show, okay. - Let's talk about a couple of things.

I'm gonna start quickly with "The Severance Show" because I know you are just chomping at the bits.

I think next Friday, right?

I don't think you're gonna see the second season before we have the show, but next Friday, season two of "Severance" is coming out.

If you haven't seen it, like me, the first season, you have no excuse.

Number one, I think Apple TV+ still has their freebie, right, or maybe that expired last week.

They were giving people like a free game. - That was last weekend, yeah. - Yeah, you could have a free.

But if you have Roku now, you can watch the first season of "Severance" for free on the Roku channel for a limited time.

I think this is great that there's like a cross promotion going on here, you know, that Apple is letting some of their most valuable content maybe be on another, you know, another program here.

But hey, if you wanna get caught up and you wanna be ready for the second season, I know you're already ready.

This is great.

You had another article in here from somebody that has been watching the second season of "Severance" already, and I'm sure that just made you even more anticipatory for this, Jeff. - Yeah, Apple knows that not a lot of people subscribe to Apple TV+, so they wanna get their top shows out there so people get interest.

If you watch "Severance" on the Roku channel, I think it has ads if you have the free version of the Roku channel, which I'm pretty sure you can sign up for for free.

So, you know, watching a show with ads is obviously not as fun as watching a show without ads, but at least you can see the show.

You know, "Severance" is just such a fantastic show.

Brett, I know that you enjoy entertainment.

Why?

You haven't watched it yet.

But the advantage, so, you know, like with the HomeKit stuff, maybe it's good because you have an advantage, Brett, that none of the rest of us have, which is you can watch season one, and when that cliffhanger comes at the end of season one, you can immediately stop watching "Severance 2," whereas the rest of us have been waiting like two years.

So I guess, bravo to you, but I don't know why you haven't watched it yet.

You need to watch this show.

What I'm trying to decide right now is the new season starts, is it next week?

I put it in here. - Yeah, the 17th. - Yeah, okay. - Next Friday. - Am I going to re-watch season one before I start watching season two?

You know, I don't re-watch television shows very often, but I have done it every once in a while for really good shows.

I did it for "Ted Lasso" way back when.

I recently did it for, there's a great show on Hulu, I think it is, that stars Keri Russell, and I'm forgetting, "The Diplomat" is the name of the show, where she plays this diplomat who used to be in all these war-torn regions, and suddenly she's the diplomat in London.

It's a fantastic show.

And before I watched the second season, my wife recommended it to me.

She's like, "You know, Jeff, "I would recommend you re-watch the first season "to remember," and I did that over the holidays, and it was so good, I loved it.

I'm not a person who re-reads books, I'm not a person who re-watches shows, but if it's a really good show, I'm gonna do it.

So I haven't decided yet if I'm gonna re-watch season one, and if I do, there's no way I'll probably get through it in a week, so I may have to delay.

But I'm very excited for season two of "Severance" coming out.

I was thrilled that the article from "The Verge" says that at least the first half of season two is just as good as season one, which is awesome, because we all know that shows can have their sophomore slump where the second season is good, but sometimes the second season is just as good or even better, and that's what gets us all excited.

And so I'm happy that "Severance" did that.

So I'm excited about "Severance." - You mentioned "Mythic," right?

"Mythic Quest" is coming out with season four.

Haven't got into this either.

I think you've dabbled in it a little bit, but season four, if you are into that, season four is gonna be coming out soon.

It's a quirky show.

It stars, and I think it's produced by, is it Rob McElhenney?

Is that his name?

He does "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia," which is a show I've never seen, and I hear it's great, but he has a particular type of humor that I find very funny.

"Mythic Quest" was a show that when I started to watch the first season, at first, there were some parts of it, well, I would admit, I was like, "This is a little too silly," but it ultimately became endearing to me, and there are some really big, broad laughs in the show, and they've now had three seasons.

In fact, every season, I think we mentioned this years ago on the podcast, that there was a thing that they used to always do that the episode in the middle of the season would be a different type of episode.

Like one of the seasons, their middle episode was like a flashback to like 20 years before.

It didn't even have the same actors.

It was a completely different, 'cause it was long before, it was like the prequel, as it were, and that one standalone hour of TV was one of the best shows I had seen that year, and so "Mythic Quest" has moments of greatness, even though sometimes it's just like a sitcom you might see on TV, and so I'm hoping that season four, my guess is it's not gonna be uniformly the best show ever, but I'm hoping it has those moments of greatness with the prior seasons have done. - Last but not least, if you want something else, "Slow Horses," this one, I have binged all the way through, even the most recent season, which still continues to surprisingly be amazing, but this was nominated for, oh, with the Screen Actors Guild Awards, both "Slow Horses" and "Shrinking."

The "Shrinking" one I have not gotten into, but glad to see that "Slow Horses" is still getting the comeuppance that it deserves.

I mean, it's just so good.

I just love all the actors and everything in there. - So good, it's so good, and "Shrinking," I will tell you, season two, I think it is, of "Shrinking," is I haven't finished yet.

My wife and I have been watching it.

I think we only have two episodes left, but it's seriously good.

"Shrinking," we've mentioned before, comes from the same people, Bill Lawrence, who's done a million shows like "Ted Lasso" and "Scrubs," and a million, he's one of the great people in Hollywood.

He is behind it.

The guy who plays Roy Kent in "Ted Lasso," Brett, I forget his last name. - Goldstein. - Brett Goldstein, thank you.

He is a producer of "Shrinking," and he's a writer of "Shrinking."

He doesn't appear at all in season one, but he does have a very important role that I won't describe 'cause it's a spoiler, in season two, and he's really good. - Thank you. - I loved season one of "Shrinking."

I mean, it's got Harrison Ford in a TV show, which you never see.

I really liked season one.

I think season two is better.

It's really, in fact, I don't wanna give spoilers, but there are specific things that happen in season two that at the end of the episode, my wife and I turn to each other and are like, "That was a great, great episode.

"It was funny, it was touching, it was just really good."

So I will encourage people. - That could be worthwhile. - You might read about it and say, "Oh, it's a show about psychiatrists "that are treating patients."

And like, I don't know if that interests me.

Ignore that.

It's a good show.

I recommend it. - From movies and shows to music, a love that you linked to Shazam. - Oh, this is interesting, yeah. - Fast forward.

I had no idea that Shazam, which we've talked about many, many, many times, it's now a company that's owned by Apple.

I mean, it is Apple, basically.

I don't know why they haven't rebranded it yet or anything.

I just always anticipated that they would, but I love Shazam so much.

I mentioned this, I think, a few weeks ago.

It is a widget on my lock screen, just because I want to be able to quickly access Shazam when I'm out in a store or going around somewhere.

And I'm like, "What is that song?"

And I just love this capability.

It's been beautiful.

But they have a page up now, Shazam Fast Forward for 2025.

These are Shazam's predictions for breakthrough artists in 2025.

You know, I always like to read this, you know, from the Billboard magazine and other places where people would say, "Here's what the breakout artists are gonna be.

"This is gonna be, you know, "the hot people to watch in 2025."

But I always thought, "Well, that's your opinion based on your taste."

But I think from this, it sounds like that this is Shazam data that they base this on.

Like, these are the songs that so many people have at least been Shazamming.

I don't know if there's another word for that.

If they've been Shazamming for these songs, that this is a beautiful page.

I love the way that this page looks.

And the fact that you can go through and you can listen to even little snippets of these songs to be like, "Oh yeah, that is somebody "that I might wanna follow on this."

Great, great page.

Thanks for linking to this today. - I think it's great.

I don't remember seeing this in past years.

And if so, maybe I'm just forgetting it.

I think this might be the first time that Apple's done it.

I guess I should have researched this before the show.

But regardless of whether they've done it in the past, I'm so glad they did it this year.

And you know, as I said in the post today, what a great idea.

You know, if you're trying to figure out what artist is starting to catch people's attention, why not?

Like, these are the ones that so many people are Shazamming, as you said.

What a great indicator.

And I mean, maybe like you said before, you know, one person who is an influencer, they may have their own personal taste, but this is sort of like crowdsourcing the idea.

And they have so many different genres.

They have artists from different countries.

So like, if you wanna see like, you know, who's the Spanish pop star that's up and coming.

And if you just, you know, country, and they even have like traditional country and new type.

So, you know, whatever genre, indie music, whatever genre of music you like, I would encourage you to check out this page, look at the artists that they feature, see what you think.

It's got like a little 30 seconds snippet.

And if you like it, you know, if you subscribe to something like Spotify or Apple Music, I'm sure Apple would prefer you say Apple Music.

Then you can just go check out the artist.

And I've done that before.

I know that you have too, Brett.

You hear one song, you're like, I really like this.

And then you look at the artists and you're like, oh, they did these other songs.

And the next thing you know, you know, you've been listening to this great music for an hour or two and you have another artist that you've downloaded into your playlist and stuff.

And it's great.

So bravo to Apple for doing this.

If this is the first time they've done it, they should keep doing it every single year.

I love it. - Great, great, great stuff.

Yeah, thanks for linking to that.

All right, in the know, let's do a couple of tips real quick.

Last week we talked about CarPlay a little bit and we were talking about like, I think it was some kind of way to customize something in CarPlay.

Because of that though, I went back to my CarPlay settings.

We were talking about how to customize the CarPlay screen.

And I said, you know, if you go into the CarPlay, if you go into settings and general and CarPlay on your iPhone, you can customize the CarPlay screen for the different cars you might go into.

Like if you've got one of your kids has a car, you've got the family car, whatever.

Or a lot of times I'll get a rental car so it'll connect to that way and then have that.

Well, I went through and deleted a bunch of them.

And I actually even deleted our family car, but then I re-added it, I reconnected it, right?

Well, that meant that I lost a lot of my settings.

Everything was okay.

In fact, I even changed the wallpaper.

We talked about that, I think last week as well.

I just loved being able to go in and do some customizations.

And I made sure I had the right apps on that first page that I wanted.

But one of the things that I had changed a while back, and I remember this was a tip a long time ago, Jeff, that annoyed me when I reset everything is there is a view on CarPlay that has, half of the screen is like the map.

And then the other, there's a widget on like the top other side that has like a view of home.

Exactly, I do too, I love this view.

Because that other widget has like, you can tap home or you can tap work.

There's like quick shortcuts to like directions for the map.

And then typically on the bottom right side, at least in the screens that I'm using, the bottom right, there's a widget that's like the now playing app.

It'll be if you're playing music or Spotify, if you're playing a podcast, whatever.

I love those three widgets.

However, by default, there's an additional widget that pops up, which is the calendar widget on the bottom of that.

And when that does pop up, it minimizes or makes smaller than now playing widget.

And I don't like that.

I like to see the, like the album art, if you will, of whatever is playing right there.

And frankly, I just don't need the calendar app showing up on CarPlay.

Now, I saw a little TikTok video that it can be useful if you're going to drive to a meeting and that calendar appointment has an address in there.

'Cause you would just tap that little calendar widget and it'll immediately map you to that location.

That's nice.

I don't do that very often though.

Maybe I either put it in manual.

I just don't want that calendar suggestion to be there.

And I gotta tell you, Jeff, I know that I did this before and fixed it, but it took me like three days to find this setting again, because you can go into your iPhone CarPlay settings and you can say, turn off suggestions.

I did that.

I went into my calendar notifications and said, don't show in CarPlay.

I tried all these things and it would still appear in my CarPlay until the last thing I tried, which worked, is I went to my car, I got in my car, turned it on, CarPlay connected.

In the CarPlay screen, not on your iPhone, in the CarPlay screen, there is a settings app in the CarPlay screen, in the car.

And if you go in there, there is another, one of the options in there, in fact, I even just took screenshots on here because I wanted to remember this for next time.

There is now, with iOS 18, there is an Apple Intelligence and Siri component there.

It used to be like Siri suggestions, I think is what it called.

But if you tap on Apple Intelligence and Siri, if you go in there, there is a toggle that is called suggestions in dashboard.

And if you toggle that off, that is what finally made sure that the calendar little widget did not appear in my CarPlay app.

I know this is very specific in what's going on, but man, it just made me so happy because it was so annoying to me 'cause I always have calendar appointments popping up, whether it's something for the family, something for work calls or whatever.

And I just didn't need that in CarPlay and I could not find exactly how to turn that off.

So the way to do it is not on your iPhone, it's not in the CarPlay settings, which I think it should be, but you have to get in your car, turn on the car, go to the CarPlay screen on your car in the settings app there, and you go into Apple Intelligence and Siri, and then you toggle off suggestions in dashboard.

And that'll refrain from seeing those calendar appointments pop up in your CarPlay.

So if that's bothering you, the 0.03% of people that may have been caring about it, then that's the way to go about and turn that off. - Yeah, that's a great suggestion, Brett.

I think that in the past, I have done what you just suggested and turned off calendar for the very same reason because I don't see them show up in my CarPlay, so I must've done it in the past.

But again, I did it so long ago that I don't even remember how I got there.

You mentioned just now that as of the current iOS, or I guess iOS, 'cause it's your iPhone that controls CarPlay. - That's right. - One of the new things is that if you have a newer iPhone, like I do, Chat GPT is part of Apple Intelligence, and Chat GPT will actually, as you indicated, it will work in your car, but you can turn that off is what you're telling me.

And I'm gonna think about doing that.

Literally just yesterday, I was driving to a courthouse and I knew where I was going, but I just thought it might be nice to instead of just have my direction show up on the screen, to actually have my car tell me the directions, like take a right at exit 16 or whatever. - Right, right, talk to you. - But as I was driving, I was forgetting.

I know that you can touch the screen and you can touch a button to turn on having it talk to you, but I didn't want to do that.

I wanted to pay attention to the road in front of me.

And so I'm like, can I just use my voice to tell you know who to turn on?

And so what I did was I activated Siri and I spoke, I said something like, turn on the audio for navigation or whatever it was.

Instead of doing it, what it did is it said, here's what ChatGPT says about that.

And then it said something about how you gotta give me more information about what kind of car you have for chat.

It's like, what in the world?

As I'm driving to court, I was thinking to myself, am I going to ever want ChatGPT in my car?

I mean, this is not a time where I am exploring the knowledge of the world.

This is a time where I'm paying attention to the road.

I just want to turn my music on or off.

I just want to turn on the map.

You know, I may turn that off.

If it happens, it was a little annoying when it happened yesterday, 'cause not only did it not answer my question, but and not do what I wanted, but like, I don't need to be talking to ChatGPT in the car.

If it annoys me one or two more times, thanks to your tip today, now I know how to turn it off.

Because I don't know if I need ChatGPT in my car, but who knows, maybe it'll be helpful.

Maybe it'll describe something.

Maybe like, you know, what does this thing look like that I'm looking for this kind of building?

Maybe it'll describe it for me.

I don't know.

Maybe it'll be a way to use the board. - Well, report back, because my understanding is that I actually didn't turn off ChatGPT in there.

So if I talk to it like what you're talking about, Jeff, it may still work.

What I wanted is I just didn't want any suggestions to pop up in the dashboard. - I understand that's different. - Yeah, okay, yeah, yeah.

So that's the only thing, because, you know, we talked about this just quickly, 'cause I remember Alex Lindsay talking about this as well.

There might be a time, just like you're talking, if you had a passenger in the car, you know, you might be talking about like, you know, the Roman civilization.

There might be a time I could see, Jeff. - I guess, maybe a long car trip or something, yeah. - Exactly, and I know Alex will, like, you know, you just kind of reiterate those prompts and keep talking and, you know, dig a little bit deeper.

I could see that happening, but to your point, if you don't want it, like, it's worthwhile going in, not just in the settings for CarPlay on your iPhone, 'cause there's a lot of, there's several settings there, but I would just never even thought about going into settings in CarPlay in the car.

And so, and I wish that there wasn't any difference in there, but apparently there is that one difference, and that's just the one thing that, like, you know, bugged me a little bit.

But if you, you know, to your point, if you did want to get a little bit more granular in turning some of those things off, you might want to look at the settings app in CarPlay specifically, as opposed to just the settings for CarPlay in your iPhone. - I'll have to check that out, okay.

Good tip.

My tip of the week, let me tell you what started my tip of the week.

Just this morning, I was thinking about this.

My wife told me that she had, I wish I had a solution to this, but this morning my wife told me that her watch, her Apple watch had stopped communicating with her iPhone.

So that when her iPhone rings because a call is coming in, her Apple watch was not ringing, which meant that if she left her iPhone upstairs and she was downstairs wearing the Apple watch, she wasn't being notified of calls.

I haven't, she just mentioned that this morning.

I haven't figured it out what's going on there yet.

Maybe next week I'll have a solution to that.

But it reminded me of another tip, because the first advice that I gave her, and unfortunately she told me this one didn't work, but the first advice I gave her is whenever you have problems, and we've all heard this before, turn it off and turn it on again.

And you hate to give that as troubleshooting advice because it's so obvious, of course, turn it off, turn it on again.

I do it with my Windows computer at work all the time and it solves things.

But the reason that it's a, the reason that it's a trite overused piece of advice is because it often does work.

And so when, you know, what I wanted to mention today is restarting specifically.

Let me start with the Apple watch, because it's something that you do so infrequently that you may forget how you even do it.

On, there's the big side button on the right of your Apple watch.

And if you press it, a screen will come up.

And when I told this to my wife this morning, she very smartly told me, "Hey, I don't want a long press on the side button because doesn't that call 911?"

Which was a totally smart thing to say.

Because the thing is, if you hold down that side button, one of the things that will do if you're in an emergency situation is it will eventually call 911.

Now, let me tell you, it doesn't do it right away.

You'll have a countdown timer.

It'll count from 10 to one.

And so you have an option to cancel it.

So you don't have to worry about calling the police by mistake.

But the fact that she said that, I'm like, "Oh yeah, this is something people get concerned about."

But no, it's fine.

If you press the side button, if you hold down the side button, it's totally fine.

You'll see a screen come up first.

Like if you hold it down for 10 seconds, it calls 911.

But if you hold it down for like two seconds or three seconds, it will bring up a menu.

And one of the things on that menu, it's not obvious 'cause it's so tiny, but in the top right corner, there is a tiny little symbol that is the icon for power.

It's the same one that you've seen in a computer before.

It's circled with a line at the top.

And then if you tap that, it will give you the option to shut down or restart your Apple Watch.

So since this isn't something you do very often, I just wanted to have a reminder of that's how you do it.

Since I'm talking about restarting the Apple Watch, let's also talk about restarting the iPhone because there's a couple of ways to do it.

The main way, if you have like an iPhone that doesn't have a button on it, you know, the modern iPhones, you hold down the home button and the side button, and then a slider will come up to turn it off.

And I guess people have probably done that from time to time.

And so that's a good tip as a reminder.

But my secondary reminder is, and this hasn't happened to me in a while, but every once in a blue moon, you will just have your iPhone completely freak out.

Like it is just not, it's just dead or something like that.

In fact, I've had it happen when my screen was black and my iPhone wouldn't turn on.

And I'm like, oh my God, did it die?

What's going on?

There is this little sort of a secret thing where you force restart an iPhone.

And it's sort of funny how you do it.

You're showing the page on the Apple website that describes it.

And I'm just gonna say this out loud, press and quickly release the volume up button, then press and quickly release the volume down button, then press and hold the side button, then wait for the Apple logo to appear and then release the side button.

No one's gonna remember that.

But those are the steps. - It takes a while. - Those are the steps.

But like the idea that you quickly do the volume up, then quickly do the volume down, then hold the side button.

You know, you may have to re-listen to this episode or find this support page.

But if you ever get to a point where your iPhone is just, it looks like it's not working at all.

You can't get it to turn off.

You can't get it to turn on.

Whatever it is, this little tip, up volume up, volume down, side button, it works.

I use this tip about once every three years.

Not very often, but when I do, it's the lifesaver.

Have you ever had to use this before, Brett? - I probably use it about once a month, Jeff. - Oh, that. - And it's, well, it's- - Not just the regular, but this force reset specific? - Honestly, this is what I do.

If I'm gonna redo, if I reboot a phone, this is where I usually go.

It's a force, I call it a force restart, which really sounds a lot more ominous than it really is.

It's, to me, this is a, almost like a reboot.

I think Apple used to call this like a fresh reboot. - Yes, yes. - But we call it a force restart because this to me is like what you and I remembered you still do is when you reboot a Windows computer, you don't just like sign out and sign back on.

You do a full restart of the computer and then you have to, you know, usually lock back on.

So this is what I tell people.

So the reason, one of the reasons that I do it as often as I do, Jeff, is because many times when I travel, sometimes the network settings, like don't rejigger when I land or something like that.

And I have just found that instead of going through and, you know, and trying to do something, you know, to tweak it, I would just do a force restart.

And that just restarts everything after coming off of airplane mode.

So, you know, you're not hurting anything.

It doesn't do anything other than it's like a full reboot of the computer.

I probably don't need to do it that often, but this is what I tell people all the time.

When I say reboot the phone, I don't mean just simply turn it off and then, you know, turn it back on.

'Cause I feel like that's almost just like signing off and signing on.

I like doing this force restart, but I'm glad that you bring this up because it is, it used to be where you would just hold the buttons down, just like you said, right?

But now you, this is how quickly I tell people, like you gotta go up, down, and then side hold.

And you gotta keep holding and you gotta keep holding.

And what happens a lot of times, Jeff, I'll just quickly tell you, 'cause I guess I do it more often than you do, is that you'll see that slider come on, but I tell people don't do the slider.

Then if you keep holding the side button down, the screen will go completely blank.

Now, most people at that point will release the side button, Jeff, because they think that that's enough, but no.

You have to keep holding it until exactly what it says here on number four, until you see the white Apple logo appear on the screen.

Then you can release the side button.

But I cannot tell you how often people will not hold it down long enough, Jeff.

And so it doesn't do this forced restart.

But I mean, almost 10 times out of 10, if there is something squirrelly going on with it, just like you were referring to, this will fix it.

Like this will basically reset the network settings.

I mean, not reset as in like it'll wipe them out, but it's like a reboot of a Windows computer.

This is rebooting an Apple device.

Now, again, most people don't need to do it as often.

Just because of my travel, I just find that sometimes this helps to get kind of everything just rejiggered back to when I land somewhere.

But for my wife, it's probably about the same, Jeff.

I would say for her iPad, something wasn't syncing when we came back from Europe, for example.

And what did we do?

We just did a reboot on the iPad and the iPhone, and basically everything started syncing again.

So this is a great, great tip to remember. - Good, cool, I didn't know that.

And that's interesting that you do it so often, but you're right.

Sometimes it just does make sense to sort of flush everything out and start over from scratch.

Not scratches and erasing your iPhone, but just, you know, let's get everything reset to square one. - Yeah, yeah.

By the way, I'm also gonna say this page that you linked to for the restart Apple Watch, there is a way to force restart the Apple Watch down at the bottom here as well.

And that involves holding down both that bottom button and the digital crown for like 10 seconds, like what you were saying. - Good advice, and I've done that before, yeah. - Maybe once or twice in the entire time that I've had my Apple Watches.

You don't have to do that as often on there, but one or two cases, like something didn't install all the way or something like that, and it was just working a little weird.

And so I did a force restart on that Apple Watch as well.

Great, great tips on there.

Worth noting once a year for folks that we haven't remembered on there.

All right, great stuff.

Good talking with you.

Can we still say happy new year to people?

I guess we can.

If this is your first publicity after the first of the year, happy new year to you again.

Always good to talk with you, Jeff, and we'll talk with you next week.

Thanks, Brad.