Welcome to In The News for February 7th, 2025.

I am Brett Burney from AppsinLaw.com.

And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhoneJD.

Hey, Brett.

Good to talk with you again, Jeff.

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Moving on, Jeff, I want to say happy birthday to your lovely Vision Pro.

It was one year ago today.

In fact, I think you linked in here that we recorded a podcast just minutes, literally like minutes, maybe an hour after you had gone and picked up the Vision Pro at your local Apple store.

And wow, what a year it has been.

I should have brought it in today to wear it again because that was a really funny video.

And it's funny because that experience of using, you know, your Vision Pro with your persona, it actually improved quite a bit over the past year.

There has been a lot, you know, the Apple Vision Pro was such a early beta device and it still is, of course.

Apple really has done a good job of improving it.

It's funny to look back at the last year because as I pointed out in the post, it is just so easy to say that it is not ready for prime time because it's not.

I mean, that's why, you know, there's very few apps for it.

There's a number, but they're not as much as you would hope.

And if I was a developer, I would not be spending much time doing apps for it, at least not if I was trying to do it to make money because I don't think there's a lot of users right now.

But regardless of all of that, the things that it does, it's unlike anything else.

I am absolutely convinced that this is the future.

You know, of course, it needs to get less expensive.

Of course, it needs to get lighter.

But when you are, you know, computing, I mean, just last night when I was using the Mac virtual display mode to sitting in front of my Mac mini instead of having, you know, a 27 inch screen, which is pretty nice.

But I had this big wide screen so that I could, you know, have different windows.

It is just, it is just amazing.

And you know, and I described some reasons it's not ready for primetime, but I still like using it.

And obviously for entertainment, I mean, goodness gracious, when you're watching a TV show on what's the size of a movie screen, not to mention if you're watching Apple's immersive videos where you're literally inside of everything, it is, it is just amazing.

You know, Brett, you and I are going to see each other in person not too long from now at the big lawyer convention, ABA tech show.

And I'm going to be doing a session there and talking about the Vision Pro and similar technologies.

I cannot wait.

I did last week, I had a little pre-prep show with my co-presenter, a professor, a law professor, Kenton Bryce.

And we had him and my brother on.

And the three of us were on Vision Pro, just talking to each other, using these personas.

And I tell you, Brett, it's like, I mean, you and I are talking to each other using Zoom right now.

So I can see your face in like a little window and you can see mine.

But it is not the same thing.

When you're using a Vision Pro and everyone is just sort of around you, almost as if you were hanging out at a restaurant or a living room or a bar or whatever, you just see each other.

You see the faces, you see the hands.

It doesn't take long before you just feel like you're there in person, even though people are around the world.

So this is such the future.

I cannot wait for the technology to mature.

And it's just, it's just exciting.

So, but again, I will end by saying, don't get it.

It's too expensive right now, unless you really want to be an early adopter.

Right.

Right.

Well, just to underscore, you were just saying there, now I'm looking back at our podcast recording from a year ago, Jeff.

And I remembered, you've got two Jeffs on the screen.

So I'm there on Zoom.

You have your regular Zoom camera.

So we see the physical Jeff in your office.

But then you also joined Zoom through the Apple Vision Pro.

So we saw that early version of, I forget what they, what, what, what, what the persona here.

It was the persona, the persona, thank you, of, of, of Jeff.

But this was like, again, hours after you picked up the Vision Pro.

And I know that over this past year, we've talked about that as one of the things that they have improved is the fact that it looks better.

It looks just a little more realistic.

Obviously it's nowhere near, you know, what I think the physical, it's not a picture, but it's close enough to your point there that people feel a little bit more natural than they would if they were like, you know, animated Memojis or something like that.

But those personas continue to get better.

And I think that's just, I don't know, that along with several other things, I know you link to a couple of articles here also from other folks that we've been following over this past year, Jason Snell, of course.

I mean, he even has sort of the same comment that you did.

He goes a year on, and I can't in good conscience recommend that anyone buy one.

But to your point also, Jeff, it is a glimpse of a potential future and developer kit for Apple platforms.

That's what Jason said here.

And that's great because I think I know we followed him over this past year, and he has also had several friends that have an Apple Vision Pro, and they continue to talk about how they interact a little bit different, like even playing games.

I remember they've talked about and just, you know, kind of on that cutting edge.

But he says the same thing as you also from the entertainment aspect, that there's nothing that can compete with this right now.

Very cool stuff.

Yeah, great thing.

Happy birthday, Vision Pro.

Let's, you know, we maybe you maybe you could have sent a brand new Apple invite or invitation to the birthday party for the Vision Pro.

This was something I didn't even know that Apple was really working on.

But this is the new Apple invites app.

In fact, the way that I found out about it is because my good friend Jeff Richardson sent me an Apple invite through text messaging so that we could record our podcast this week.

And it was like it was so cool.

The picture is literally this sort of emoji, right, the sort of the drawing of it.

And it had you with your earphones on ready for the podcast.

But then it just added it directly to my calendar, of course, which was really, really cool.

The brand new Apple invites and you also link to a story from John Voorhees today going through all the details as well.

Yeah, about a week ago, there was a rumor from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg, who often is, you know, a source of Apple leaks.

And he said that Apple had a program.

The code name of it was called Confetti, which I thought was a cute code name.

And he said it's going to be an invitation app.

And then just, you know, a few days after that leak, the app came out.

It's called Apple invites, not confetti.

OK, excuse me.

And it is it's iPhone only.

You open up the app and you create the event, you know, like a party or, you know, whatever is give it a date and give it a place.

And then you choose a background picture for it.

You can either choose choose a real picture if you want to select something from the photo library.

You can select one of their pre-done pictures, like, you know, a picture of a football for a football game, watching party or something.

Or you can use Apple's Apple intelligence image generation, which is what I use.

So I said, you know, take do do a picture of me doing a podcast.

And so that's why it took a cartoon version of my face and put like headphones on me.

And it had a microphone in front of me because I said, you and I are going to record a podcast together on Friday.

And and so then when you send it out, you select the people that you want to send it to from your contacts or you can add stuff to it.

The people if to use the app, you have to subscribe to iCloud plus.

And what that means is, you know, iCloud plus is the service that, you know, most people subscribe to because it gives you extra iCloud space.

And there are programs that range from like 99 cents, I guess it's a month or whatever, for just a little bit extra space all the way up to you can get, you know, two terabytes or even more if you want.

I have, as you do to the Apple one bundle.

And so along with Apple TV plus and other services, I have it through that.

So anyway, so I could use it.

But I mean, if you don't subscribe to iCloud plus, you do need to do that.

And then but the people that you receive it, they don't have to when they receive the invitation.

If they have an Apple account, as of course, you do, Brad, it will ask you to sort of log in with your Apple account so that Apple knows who you are.

And if you did not, if I sent it to an email address of somebody that was just like an Android user or it wasn't their account, you could just log in through another way.

But then it allows you to sort of keep track of who's coming.

There are companies like, you know, Evite is one of them.

There's a whole bunch of them on the web that have offered these types of services, these party planning services.

People use them to plan.

I remember when my kids were younger and we used to have countless birthday parties for kids in the class.

People would often send these services out to keep track of who's coming to the party and how many people are going to be there and stuff like that.

And it's the same idea.

But as I pointed out in the post today, those services are infamous for, you know, just collecting all the email addresses and sending them and they've got ads.

And it's a great it's a great.

You know, this reminds me of many, many, many years ago, Brett, you are going to remember when Apple first got into services, they had a program called iCard where this was when sending an e-card was a new thing.

And so for somebody's birthday, instead of going to Walgreens and purchasing an actual card, you could send them a digital card.

And there were services like, I don't know, Blue Mountain Cards and these other ones had the same thing.

They were sort of scammy, but but people would send electronic cards and they were all the rage for a while.

Apple had its thing called iCard, which was clean.

It was beautiful.

It was, you know, no ads, no privacy or anything like that.

And there was a time period where I would often send it to my grandmother and stuff like that.

And she thought they were great.

So, you know, it's been a long time since Apple's had iCard that was back in the day of iTools.

But this is this sort of reminds me of the spirit of that.

So and and and it's not just the invitation you can.

I mean, there's two things that Apple that you add right now.

One is you can create a shared photo album.

It'll create one in your photos.

And so I did that.

So I created just an album and threw some pictures in there.

And the sample one that I sent to you earlier this week, I just had that album.

And so as I understand it, we you and I and anyone else that I was going to invite to this party would have access to the shared album.

And so I guess the idea is like after the party or during the party, if different people take pictures and add them to the shared album, it just sort of gives you an automatic way for everybody to share pictures.

And that's pretty cool.

I've done this before, not with Apple invites, but I've had, you know, a year or so ago one of my cousins got married and we had a big party at my house the night before.

And we had like a shared photo album and including, you know, there were people at that party that I didn't know because, you know, when people getting married, you know, there's some people you do know at the wedding and some people that you don't know.

So there were people that didn't really know, but we had a shared album.

And it was fun that like I had my pictures that I took, but other people shared their pictures from the same event.

And I was in some of those pictures that I wasn't in the pictures that I took.

And that was really fun to have a shared album.

So I like the idea that, you know, that's built in.

And then you can also even have a shared playlist so that, for example, if I guess if you're going to be playing music at your party, you know, I could, I could throw in 10 songs that I want to play and someone else could throw in songs and it's the same idea.

So it's cute ideas.

Now, I don't know.

Yeah, I don't know what's going to be the future of this app.

You know, Apple comes up with these cute little apps from time to time.

You know, a perfect example is, you know, some very smart people at Apple came up with this app called Clips a couple of years ago that you can create little video clips and stuff sort of like a light version of like a Final Cut Pro.

And not a lot has happened to it over the years.

And you wonder, you know, does Apple still care much about the app?

So I don't know what's going to happen to this Apple invites app.

Is it going to be a big deal or is it going to just sort of not see a lot of love in the future?

I don't know.

But it's a cute idea.

And, and, you know, I'm not this free, so why not?

I see right here.

It's already number one in the lifestyle cat.

Oh, there you go.

I'm on the, on the app store.

Now that typically happens when something brand new has come out.

But you know, again, it just every where I, when I go out into the world and, you know, interact with people, I mean, just the number of folks that still like continue to see have an iPhone.

And if you can utilize something like this, which I, I think it's nice because it doesn't have to go to even, uh, an iCloud hosted calendar, right?

It can be, it can be applied to any calendar, which I know, you know, some people are like, well, that of course, like, why wouldn't it?

But it's like, typically, you know, if you have a Google calendar invite, typically it'll go, it wants to immediately go to a Google calendar of some kind, or, you know, or if I have an outlook, it's typically going to somebody an outlet.

And sometimes it just gets a little confused.

Anyway, when I originally accepted your invite, it went on, I think a Google calendar, because that was just the one that was defaulted at the time.

But I was able to go in and change it.

And I added it into my iCloud account just because that's, that's where I typically will host my personal, um, calendars.

But I do like the fact that you don't have the other side doesn't have to have an iPhone.

They don't even have to have the iCloud plus subscription.

I feel like that sometimes maybe the iCloud plus subscription is going to limit this a little bit.

Like, I don't know why they, they, they limited it because I'm sorry, there's many, many, many more people that have an iCloud account.

They're just not subscribing to iCloud plus, but Hey, maybe this is where they're starting right now.

And it, yeah, maybe they're just going to start there and, you know, over a couple of months, you know, they'll, they'll expand it to everybody who knows.

Um, so it's a cute little app and I mean, it's always nice to have a way for an upcoming party.

You can, you know, let people know that you're coming, see who else is coming.

Um, you know, the, the idea here is a sound one and I like that, you know, Apple uses its typical style.

I mean, it looks very pretty as you would imagine for something, you know, from Apple.

It's, uh, and you know, if you put a place you're showing right now on the screen that if you put a place of where the party is going to be, it'll even show you things like what the weather's going to be like and a map to it and stuff like that.

So you know, it's, it's got some cute little features to it.

I even like just quickly in here as I'm looking through, cause I can, I can pop in, you just texted it to me and it was a beautiful little image, but then it goes to the page where I actually had to do my face ID to log into my iCloud account, but it has that guest list.

Again, nothing new, but I find sometimes when somebody sends me an invitation from like Outlook and I put it on my Google calendar, sometimes those names get messed up.

You can't really track who was actually, you know, going or accepted or didn't.

Uh, you can put that note in there.

Sometimes the notes come through, sometimes they don't, depending on the calendar.

And then that photo album was really cool.

You put some photos in there and it allows me to add photos in there as well.

And I assume just last thing quickly that I can go back to this event pretty easy.

In other words, there's a, there's a home button here that shows all of the invites that I've received.

So I can tap on this now and I can go back and that's a way that I can get into that photo, um, uh, the, the shared photo album, I guess.

Although I think it also shows up in my photos app as well, but it just kind of neat that you can do that.

It like, again, it just so much more cleaner than some of the other, you know, hurdles and, and loops that we have to jump through sometimes when people are using different a calendar, uh, background.

So we'll see how much better it gets.

Yeah.

I see right now on my iPhone, I'm holding up to my screen.

Like when I opened up the invites app, it actually tells me that the event is happening right now, um, which is true.

And then if I tap on it, I can see like details of it.

And even it has a QR code here.

I didn't see this.

People who scan this QR code will be able to see event details.

I guess I could share it that way.

Um, I could see our photo album.

So, you know, it's got some little features here and we'll, we'll see how Apple adds to it over time.

But, um, Hey, it's free app.

Why not?

You know, the thing you have the, the invites app, I have not downloaded the app yet.

So I just want to point this out.

When I tapped on it, Jeff, it actually went into my Safari browser, could have gone to any browser.

I had to log in through my iCloud account.

So I'm actually looking at the same thing, but just in the Safari browser, as opposed to the invites app.

So I think that's good because I can still access that information.

Even if I don't have the invites app, cause I may be using Android or something else.

Uh, is there a link on that?

Is there a link on that webpage to download the app?

Is Apple encouraging you to do that?

They yes.

If I, so since I've logged in, there's a, there's buttons at the top that I can tap into and it has a list of the apps in there and one of the apps is invites.

So I think it'll just jump me to the app store on that.

But it also, it's weird because, because I've logged in, it allows me to access things like my iCloud storage.

You know, I can do my hide my email.

Like in other words, there's a few features that I can tweak on there as well.

Just just really cool.

I just like the fact that they, they allow you to access it through a web browser as well.

So yeah, I didn't even know that.

Yeah.

Following that.

Well, that's a happy story.

Let's go to a concerning story.

This was a story you linked to from Julie Clover about malware or like screen reading malware.

Is that how you would describe this?

Jeff, just a little crazy here, a little scary.

So many of us have seen before that, like you download an iPhone app and then you want to like send a picture with it.

Right.

And for, for a while now, Apple has had this security measure that like a pop-up will come on your screen and say such and such an app would like to see your photos.

Do you want to give it access?

And you could either give it access to your entire library or just photos you select, whatever you choose.

Right.

You know, that makes perfect sense because like if you're using an app that you want to send a picture, of course you need to give it access.

And so apparently there were a number of apps in the app store that were asking for permission for your photo library.

No big deal.

People do that all the time, but it turned out what they were doing is once you said, yes, once you gave it access, it was then looking at the pictures in your library and the app was being told, look for certain words in pictures.

You know how it can like see the, the, the text and pictures and stuff like that.

Now, I don't know what those words were, but I have to imagine that, you know, maybe it was something that would be associated with like, you know, a political group that you were involved in or whatever it was.

And if it found those pictures, it would then secretly in the background without telling the user, upload those pictures and information about the user to who knows where.

I mean, this was serious spying on you, you know, this is spyware and you know, people didn't realize it.

So there was a report on it by Kapersky labs, which is one of the virus malware companies that's actually located in Russia and is sometimes has controversy because of that, but they are, you know, say what you want, what we want about their connection to the government of Russia.

They are definitely one of the recognized malware virus, you know, companies in the world.

And so once they discovered it, then Apple very quickly pulled those apps from the app store, banned those developers from ever having apps, you know, et cetera, et cetera.

So, you know, the good news is it was caught, but I mean, it just reminds you that even if something is in the app store, which gives you a certain degree of comfort that this was not just some random third party, you know, there are ways for bad guys to sneak things past Apple.

And what the funny thing is, Apple, uh, Julie points out this article that after, so the first thing Apple did was ban the apps that Kapersky labs identified.

And then what Apple did is they looked at these bad apps and they figured out the code that they were using and they scanned the app score and they found some other apps that also had that same, you know, malicious code in it.

And so they banned them as well.

And so it's nice that Apple has that ability to do this, but it just reminds you, you know, if there's some brand new app that you learn about from a source that you don't know, that's asking for access, you might just want to pause, you know, maybe let's wait for the app to be out there for, you know, it's one thing when Apple releases the invites app, we trust Apple, but you know, the other brand new app, you know, you might want to think about, um, about whether you want to download it.

In fact, I didn't even link to this today, Brett, but what it reminds me of another in the news story is we talked to last week or maybe it was two weeks ago about this new, uh, large language model, AI, uh, source that was created by a company in China that was much more efficient than things.

Thank you.

Then chat GPT.

And it's, that's now like the number one app in the app store for AI is the deep seek app.

And I saw just yesterday that there was some Senator in Congress that was saying, Oh, well, you know, we don't know what information this is sending back to China, you know, let's pause before you use it.

And yet given the fact that it's so highly downloaded in the app store, I'm sure lots of people are throwing caution to the wind and saying, let's try the next big thing, which is fine.

I mean, it's, it's fun to check out the new apps, but, um, but you know, who, I mean, maybe that, maybe that app's perfectly fine, or maybe it's sending, you know, information about you to the, the government of China.

I don't know, who knows, we'll find out, but it's just, it's just something to be worried about.

It's always worthwhile to pause and ask, why is this app asking for access?

Not just to the photos.

The other thing that comes to my mind all the time, Jeff, that I'm always saying no is my entire contacts.

Agreed.

Mostly because, I mean, first of all, I don't want some of my personal friends to, to potentially, you know, be seen by certain apps, but between you and I, in our profession, we have client names and information of, of, of contacts that, you know, or could be confidential.

Like it's not something that we can allow out.

I mean, I don't even allow something like Facebook to have access to some of my contacts all the time.

And I know my kids look at me like, what's the matter, dad?

Come on, you know, you're too like, this is fine.

Like, because if you don't do that, then you have to like get, you have to jump in and you have to do it all manually or WhatsApp is another one, but it's like, I'm fine with that.

I just don't trust it all the time.

And even when it's asking, you know, access to photos, cause things like Instagram and some of these other apps that we do trust a little bit more, but I, I, maybe I'm not that trustworthy on that.

It's like, you know what, I'm just going to let you have access to this album.

And if I want to add a photo into Instagram or upload it into a certain app, I'm going to copy it into this album.

And that's what you can have access to.

I feel like sometimes, you know, I, I, again, it's my kids, most of that I'm thinking of, but it's just like, they just, Oh yeah, just click away, like allow, allow, allow.

And I'm like, I'm just not so quick on that.

But anyway, it's good.

It's a good reminder on that.

And again, you know, number one is like, if it's a, if it's an app that to your point, that either just came out or it's not well known, or it's, you know, not one that's in the mainstream, like a Facebook, like Tik Tok or something like that.

I mean, even though sometimes I have questions, but the point is, it's like, you don't know what you don't know sometimes with these and it's just nice.

It's well, it's a better approach.

I would, I would say it strongly suggests to, to have a little bit more caution on, on some of that.

We are suckers for tips all the time, or I guess I'll speak for myself, Jeff, but I know that you like some good ones too, because you lead to some good stories today.

Number one, not 10 iPhone tips, not 20, not 30, but 50 iPhone features that Apple has added to iOS 18 since September.

This was a great list on here.

Thank you.

This is from Mac rumors by Tim Hardwick.

Thank you, Tim.

What a, what a great scroll through today.

Yeah.

It's nice because what he's done is he points out that, you know, whenever Apple has a brand new iOS release, iOS 18, in this case is the most recent one.

There will be additional features that they come out with an 18.1, 18.2, 18.3.

And so what he's done here is he's just basically compiled them all.

So these are all tips.

You know, most of them have been discussed in the past.

You and I have been talking about them for the last couple of months, but it's nice to just scroll down the list and see them all.

And and just like, Oh yeah, you can do that.

You know, like, you know, the searching for items and proofreading texts and, you know, things like that, the Apple intelligence stuff that we've talked about.

So it's, it's, it's nice to sort of, you know, run through this list and take a look at it.

He's got a bunch of, yeah, track Safari download process.

Like I just, I, I don't do a whole lot of downloading from Safari on my phone, but it's like, I do like to see on my computer when I hit something to download a video or a PDF or something that I do, it will show me in the Safari browser, that download process.

And I had just forgotten like, yeah, of course that you could do that on the iPhone as well now.

And, and I'll just point out quickly at the very top here, something that reminds me, I've got to get in to my phone and figure out the control center now.

Like every time I go into the control center, Jeff, I guess maybe just cause I'm used to just having that one page and have the buttons there and limited customization, but now it's wide open.

And in fact, when I go in there, sometimes I have to flip up and down, you know, to different pages and I haven't done that, but he has a few tips on here that I really appreciate it reset your control center.

So if I really just get, you know, wonky and, and things that I've done, you can reset it back to a place where you can start fresh if you need to.

And there was a couple of other ones in here about the control center that I liked more control center buttons.

I feel like there's too many right now for me, but I've got to take some time to get in there and, and, and fix that for me, because I know every time I go to the control center, which is pretty often every day, I get a little frustrated.

Cause there's like, I haven't taken the time to do this, but I was glad for those tips for sure.

I'll throw out two of them in here that I liked on the list.

One is that with air tags, you can share them with somebody else.

You know, even for my own family, we are all on fine mind together.

So we could, we could find each other that way and stuff.

And I can, even because we're in the same family, I could find devices.

And so for example, you know, if my, if my daughter happens to have her iPhone turned off, but she's wearing her Apple watch because it's got cellular in it, I can actually see, Oh, here's where she is.

She's at school.

She's at her friend's house, whatever through that.

But what I can't see is her air tag devices.

I can see all of my air tag devices, but you know, if she had an air tag device in her book bag, let's say she can't find her book bag.

She doesn't know where it is, but you can now share that with another person so that you could both be looking forward or something like that.

So that's one to know about.

And of course there's the sharing with the airline, which I think we might talk about in a second.

And then another one that's in here that's nice is if you have a lot of pictures and I know I'm a big photo person, but I love the idea, you know, of the Apple intelligence features, which in my mind, most of them are not ready for prime time, but I do like the one where you can create a memory.

You have it on the screen right here.

You can create a memory movie from a short description.

And so it's nice that my iPad or my iPhone will often just like say, here's a memory we created and that's sort of a cute one.

But sometimes I'm going to come up with something myself, you know, show me pictures of my family, you know, in the snow or show me pictures of my dog at the beach or whatever it is.

And you can, and it will go through and it will create something.

And it's, it's fun.

It's a fun way to relive memories through some of the photos and videos that you've taken.

Those are 50 iPhone tips.

You also linked to a story from CNET or sent seven, which is fine.

Apple watch tips, only seven here because it's a little bit of a smaller device, but, but still worthwhile.

Nonetheless, a lot of this is, is again, you know, happy for me just to go back and like, Oh yeah, I forgot that it's a lot easier.

Maybe the switch back and forth between the watch face, or I can turn that off if I need to a reminder about the smart stack, some good ones in here, seven Apple watch tips.

Yeah.

One of the ones that I liked the best is the very first one, which is swiping on the front of your Apple watch face to switch between watch faces, because, you know, as much as I complain that the Apple watch, it wouldn't be great if we could have third party watch faces and have like thousands of them for the Apple watch.

There are still a number of really good watch faces.

We talk about them sometimes in the podcast.

And I know that, you know, some people just pick one Apple watch face and they never change it, but you can now, well, I say, you know, it used to be for a long time, you could just swipe left or right to switch watch faces.

So I just switched between my main one to Snoopy.

And now I'm looking at the one that came out last week for the, the unity bands, which is really cool.

But if you want to be able to once again, have that feature of swiping without doing anything else between watch faces, you need to turn it on and you're showing on your screen right now, how you do it.

It's in the settings app and you go into clock and you turn that switch on for swipe to switch watch faces.

So it's, if I, as I understand it, it used to be, everybody had it and then Apple turned it off and then Apple turned it on again, but only if you go in the settings on your Apple watch to enable it.

So it's one of those things that I very quickly enabled.

And I do that because there are a lot of watch faces that I like, but I only like them in particular circumstances.

You know, a perfect example is I have a watch face, which I've mentioned before.

It's one of the, of course, it's one of the built-in ones, but it's one that has like really big, really big numbers on it.

I forget the name of it.

And it's useful because the numbers are so huge that they're easy to see.

And I have noticed that even with my current Apple watch, which has a much brighter screen than the ones that I used years ago, if you're like outside at a festival and it's super sunny and bright, you know, it's a little bit harder to see your Apple watch screen.

But if you have that watch face with the largest numbers, you know, you can, even from afar, you can glance down and see what time it is.

But I only want that one in very specific circumstances.

So I don't want it to be my watch face all the time.

I just want to be able to switch to it, use it when I'm outside in the sun.

And then once I'm done with that, go back to something else.

Yeah.

Great stuff on there.

Always enjoy the Apple watch tips.

Jeff, you've got something happening in new Orleans.

What in two days now, the Superbowl is being there.

And I love this little story you link to here from one of your local television news channels that apparently boy, you got some laser light shows happening down in the French quarter, all kinds of stuff going on, which is that's pretty exciting.

I bet it's fun down there right now.

Yeah, it's fun.

There's also other things going on to the city and, you know, it's also crowded and stuff like that.

In fact, it's so, you know, so many people are downtown in New Orleans right now that my often even announced that, you know, if you wanted to work from home today, that's fine because, you know, I park in my building, but if you're going to park like one of the parking lots, those parking lots are, you know, raising prices and stuff like that because they have all the tourists there.

But there's a ton of fun things going on in the city right now.

And in the post today, I was just pointing out that if you want to use your Apple devices to watch the Superbowl, you can do it.

And so the one that, you know, Fox, unlike, you know, CBS got the Paramount app and NBC has their app.

Fox doesn't really have Fox, who is running the Superbowl this year, doesn't really have a big Fox app that they use.

And so the one that they own is this app called Tubi, T-U-B-I, which is something that I have been aware of, but I had not downloaded before.

And so I just downloaded it and signed up for a free account so that I can watch it, you know, on my Apple TV this Superbowl Sunday, because they're going to show a nice version of the game.

And so I was looking at the Tubi app.

I mean, to be honest, Brett, there was a lot of things in there like shows and movies.

And I'm like, there is almost nothing in here that really appealed to me.

There was, I saw there was a TV series that I watched years ago called The Magicians, which I did like, but there was a whole lot of stuff that didn't do any.

So I don't know if I will become a big Tubi watcher after the Superbowl, but for the Superbowl, they're actually going to be offering the game in, they say 4K.

It's 4K with an asterisk.

It's the highest quality version of the game you can watch.

You know, they are showing a 4K stream.

So if you want to look at the Superbowl in the best quality, you can use the Tubi app or if you subscribe to YouTube TV, they're going to have that screen too.

Now I will tell you that the actual, some of the cameras being used at the game are 4K, but the actual switches, you know, it's the least common denominator.

All the video comes into switches and the switches are not 4K.

And so the video will not technically be 4K.

However, what it is going to be apparently is HDR.

And I actually think that high dynamic range often makes an even bigger difference because if you watch like a nature show on Apple TV plus that's shot in, you know, 4K HDR, you'll notice those super rich colors that make like the animals and the, everything just looks like it's so true to life because of that high dynamic range.

And so I'll be interested to see what the Superbowl looks like.

Because in HDR colors will look just a little different and in theory richer.

So even though it will be 1080p HDR for much of it, it'll still be a good look.

So anyway, if you want to see the Superbowl and the best possible quality, it looks like Tubi is the easiest way to do that.

So I'm going to give it a shot and see what I think.

I had forgotten that Tubi was Fox owned.

So what a marvelous marketing aspect there because they're going to have millions of downloads probably on this because I like how this article points out that is really the only free way that you can, well, the free legitimate way that you can watch the Superbowl.

They go through and list if you have an NFL plus subscription, which is a lot, right?

$15 a month or something like that.

You could, if you had paid for YouTube TV, apparently you can watch it on the Fox channel there.

If you pay for Hulu plus, you could watch it there.

But if you wanted the free legitimate way to watch the Superbowl is downloading this Tubi app, which is wow.

Just so I've been on your device.

Brilliant.

Yeah.

Yeah.

On your device, of course you can watch on TV, of course, but then that's not going to be, I don't think that's going to be the same high quality signal.

So anyway, we'll see.

Well, so, so we talked about putting it on the, on the iPhone, but you know, I think most of the people, this is what I would do is I would download the Tubi app for the Apple TV, right?

If I have my Apple TV and then in my mind, I'm thinking, okay, well really that's just, that is, that is on, on, on TV there, but you can download it on your iPhone or your iPad or your, or I guess even your Mac, maybe I'm not really sure.

I think that there's other ways to do on the Mac, but the iPhone, iPad and the Apple TV, Oh, and the Apple vision pro that's what you need to be trying out this.

Yeah.

I'll have to check that out.

You should try that just as I want to hear how that goes over, over there.

Because that's, that's really fun.

Let's talk about chargers.

One of the ones that we both have now and both enjoy very much is the anchor.

I think they still call it the three in one or the Mac safe charger stand.

Love this.

I even travel with it now, Jeff, just because I love having it there by by my bed, for example, but you are mentioning a new one today.

This was somebody on Mac world.

It's a company called ESR.

Is that right?

And it's never heard of it.

Yeah.

G two, three in one charging set.

And so what we're talking about here is these are charges where basically your phone can, you know, magnetically adhere to the stand itself.

And then if you put it in landscape mode, then it goes into the standby mode, which is great.

But most of these will also charge just not just your iPhone, but your Apple watch and even potentially your AirPods as well.

But this one has a neat little twist to it here.

I like this one.

It is a really cool stand, quite literally, because literally we all know that if you use MagSafe or if you use Chi, which is, you know, the industry standard version of essentially the same thing, this quote unquote wireless charging it, it heats up.

You know, if you pick up your iPhone or even your your your your iPads, if you pick them up and if it's been charging, you'll feel that's warm this morning.

So Brett, I actually I picked up my AirPods while I was sort of getting ready.

I picked them up off of my charging stand.

I put my AirPods in my ears.

They had been actively charging on on my wireless stand.

And I actually could feel that my AirPods were warm when I put them on my ear.

I'm like, wow, that's sort of weird.

So we all know that heat is involved for MagSafe and for Chi charging.

And what this company has done is they have put a tiny little fan.

The review from Macworld says that it's it's it's really hard to hear.

So it's not like this is a loud, obnoxious fan.

OK, but they put a tiny little stand next to the Chi charger to sort of keep it cooler.

And you're like, well, does that make a difference?

Well, apparently it does.

So he says that in his test from a regular MagSafe charger might take two hours or more to charge his iPhone.

But when this stand, because the Chi is has this fan on it, you can see the vents in the back there.

Right.

It it charges in about an hour.

So it's like almost twice as fast because it's a cooler charger.

And I'm like, that is really interesting.

I mean, as I pointed out, my post for me, I don't I mean, I'm not using MagSafe for fast charging.

If I wanted fast charging, I would plug my iPhone into a cord because that's going to always be much faster.

I'm using MagSafe just for convenience.

I throw my AirPods on there at night.

And by the time I wake up in the morning, they're charged.

And I could care less whether it took them 10 minutes to charge or five hours to charge.

They were there all night.

And likewise, as I'm talking to you right now, I'm looking down at my iPhone, which is showing me the time and the date and the temperature in that standby mode.

I'm going to keep it on my MagSafe charger all day long.

It's way down at the bottom of the post.

There you go.

I'm going to keep it on that charger all day long.

And so I don't really care how long it takes, but maybe you do.

You know, if you really want to use wireless charging for the fastest possible charging, which I can see that some people totally want to do.

This is the first.

And I'm almost surprised that this is the first time we've seen a company do it.

Maybe other companies like Anker and stuff will do this in the future.

It's really it's interesting.

This one is only $70.

I think you mentioned.

Yeah.

Sixty nine.

Ninety nine, which is which is good because that Anker still is one hundred dollars.

I mean, I think you paid a little bit more than that when it first came out.

I paid one fifty.

Yeah.

Yeah.

If you had waited, I think it's down now.

You know, just one other thing quickly, as you were talking about this, I like that there's one.

Let me see.

Do they have a second picture here?

This little Apple watch charger is like a section that can get unplugged and it looks like it's a USB port there that I guess you can put into like your even your MacBook or something.

Something interesting.

I did.

I like that little bit of a versatility there.

That's really there.

That's actually a product that you can buy.

In fact, there was a I saw I didn't link to it today, but I saw somebody on one of the websites had had a list this week of some of the best portable chargers for the Apple watch.

So if you want something tiny that you can just stick in your pocket and you're like, I'm going to be really using my Apple watch today, I'm going to be working out and be running a marathon, whatever.

And so I want to recharge it during the day.

Right.

You could have like a tiny little thing that either has a battery built into it or that plugs into USB.

So you're right.

One of the advantages of this charger is the part that charges your watch is removable and you could take that around with you just as a little portable charger.

That's so it really is.

I mean, for 70 bucks.

I mean, again, I don't know this company from Adam, so who knows?

But but the reviewer at Macworld says that it works.

And in fact, I will say that because MagSafe does heat up, I often am wary of recommending that people use Qi or MagSafe products from a company you've never heard of because you don't want it to to run a muck with the overheating.

But I mean, the whole purpose of this device is to avoid overheating by having a fan.

It might be better.

Yeah.

So again, I can't vouch for the specific product, but I can say that the idea of what they're doing using a fan, it's pretty cool.

Well, if you would instead just want to have old fashioned cable, here's a new one that came out this week.

I saw this from a couple of people covering this.

The company is Nomad, N-O-M-A-D, who have over the years made some really cool iPhone cases and even watch cases.

But they came out with this unique product.

It's a charging cable.

But what's unique about it, even though it's USB-C, number one, it's made out of Kevlar, which I just think is very cool.

But it also has a little puck on there to charge your Apple Watch.

I like I said, I saw this from a couple of places, Jeff, and I was I'm really intrigued.

Like this would be a nice thing to take with you because I have several USB cables that I take with me.

Right.

And I don't always have an Apple Watch charger that's available to your point, unless I have one of these things that's going to be maybe in my pocket.

But maybe I'll carry this Kevlar cable in my pocket from now on.

For me, my need for charging my Apple Watch during the day on the go is pretty much non-existent.

So true.

But I mean, just from it's interesting, you know, the idea that somebody looked at a cable and looked at an Apple Watch charger and said, hey, what if these things got together?

It's just sort of funny for that reason.

So, yeah, I like it.

And of course, and again, to your point, Nomad, very well respected company, right?

I mean, I wouldn't have any hesitation saying, suggesting that this might be something that you want to try if it's something that you want to try out a little bit on the pricey side.

Maybe all that Kevlar in there is something that people are a little nervous about, but worth checking out there.

Well we just talked about the birthday of your Apple Vision Pro.

Maybe in a year or two from now, we'll talk about the birthday of the elegant, elegant, eleg, eleg, nt, lamp.

This was a fascinating video that you linked to today at the very bottom and really unique in the sense that it actually came from like Apple Labs, or I would just like to think of that.

I don't know if they really have something they call Apple Labs, but I would like to think of it.

Maybe the Apple skunk works on there.

But I just, the moment I started watching this and I'm sure you had the same thought, I thought about the Pixar lamp.

This is like a very human aspect or expressive lamp, which at first I was watching this.

I'm like, okay, I don't know if this is something that would be interesting, but the more I watch this video that you linked to today, Jeff, I'm like, okay, I see what, I see what they're doing there.

Especially when they had that expressive video versus I think they call it the functional video, right?

Of what typically robots would do.

Really just fascinating on several levels here.

There were two things I loved about this video.

Number one, it is so rare to get a sneak peek of what Apple is working on behind the curtains.

We've talked in the past about because Apple is now doing Apple intelligence and a lot of these researchers want to contribute to the science of AI, they will often publish their results in like an industry journal.

So you'll get a sneak peek at what Apple is working on just because of a published scholarly article.

That's what's going on here is that this was part of, Apple has a developer page, it was part of discussing just sort of the general idea of robotics.

This video was a part of that.

It's just so rare for Apple to show us something they're working on.

Second of all, this video was amazing because as you said of what it shows and the purpose of this experiment or study or whatever you want to call it was if you're going to make an object that moves around, do you want it to just be functional?

This is a light and so if I'm working over here, have the light automatically move to the left.

If I'm working over here, have the light automatically move to the right.

You can do that.

It is useful, but it's not very interesting.

Whereas they also have an alternative version where, and you've got to watch this video, at least a tiny bit of it, where it moves around as if it is a live object.

Again, it's the same way that you think of like something from a Pixar movie, like it's WALL-E or something like that, or the Pixar lamp.

And it is, I mean, it's just cute.

It's like a pet.

It's like something you want to interact with.

And when you see the side by side, you're like, this is just so amazing.

You hear that Apple is working on things like this upcoming device in the home that's going to have maybe a screen, be your home hub.

As Apple moves more and more into things for your home, obviously they're doing this research because they plan to do something with it.

Maybe this is all years away before we see something, but oh my goodness, I want a cute little virtual pet that moves around, talks to me, has the expression.

This oh my goodness.

When I looked at this video, it could not be cuter.

So definitely, I mean, I can't describe it with words.

You got to watch it. - You have to watch it, right. - You have to watch it, yeah. - But I even came out from like almost like a psychological aspect, especially this little picture here that I'm showing on the screen.

Like if you say, move from looking at the desk to the wall, well, in a typical kind of a robot fashion, it would just go voot and just do that.

But in this case, what I was thinking from like a human psychology standpoint, it's like, well, wait a minute, if I was a human saying, look at the desk to the wall, I'm probably going to have more movements than just a straight line aspect of that, if some of that makes sense.

And I was like, oh yeah, now I can see that even though this is a robotic lamp, but if you just have some very subtle additional movements that it might put in, that just immediately gives the human psychology, as humans, we immediately think of like, oh, that's a little bit more like lifelike, right?

That's a little more human.

Anyway, just like you said, you got to watch the video, but I just thought that was so interesting.

And thanks Apple for giving us a little glimpse into the skunk works and keep them coming.

We love looking at this kind of stuff on there.

Well let's talk about something that everybody has to deal with and that is typically an email inbox, Jeff.

If your inbox is driving you insane, then please go and check out our sponsor today, sane box.

In other words, if it's driving you insane, sane box can help you get out of that insane hole.

This is great.

We're thrilled to have sane box back with us again.

Thank you for sponsoring the podcast.

Jeff, why don't we just talk about a little bit about what sane box can do and why it would be worthwhile to go to sane box.com/in the news.

You can get a free trial and even $25 credit toward a sane box subscription.

That's a, that's a heck of a deal right there.

Yeah.

I mean, same box is great because you know, you go to an inbox and you open it up and you're going to see, you know, 20 messages, a hundred messages, whatever it is.

And some of them are things that you want to see, but a lot of them are things that you don't want to see right away.

Maybe it's a newsletter that you'll get to later.

Maybe it's like a marketer that you probably don't really care about at all.

It's borderline spam, or maybe it's not technically spam.

Maybe it's something you signed up for, but you're like, this is not important stuff.

And then you have the emails from like somebody else saying, you know, let's get together for a party because I don't have the Apple invites app.

So I'm going to send you an email.

You know, those are the things you really want to see when you connect sane box to your account, you can control how you want it to manage your inbox.

And then it does it.

And so I have it set up, like for example, on my iPhone JD inbox, you know, Jeff@iphonejd.com, you know, I will have individual people send me emails.

Like, this is something I really cool.

I saw you might want to put it in your Friday post that I want to see.

And then you have like random companies that are like, you know, dear, dear, Mr. iPhone JD.com as if that's the person, you know, please, you know, it's the stupid marketing emails and you know, everyone's in a blue moon.

There's something legitimate, but sane box will automatically move those into a separate folder of my inbox called like saying whatever.

And then I will eventually look at them.

But the thing is, when I go to look at my email during the day, I'm just going to see the good ones in my inbox.

And then like later on that day, or maybe every couple of days, then I'll say, okay, now I'm going to look at the folder called sane news and it's got all the newsletters.

And now I'm going to look at something called sane later, which are the ones that same box, like, you know what, you could probably look at this later.

And you know what?

It does a good job.

Now, if it makes a mistake, if something from a real person ends up insane later, all I do is drag the email into my inbox and that teaches that teaches sane box in the future.

Keep this in my inbox.

So it works really well.

It even has something called the black hole that like, if it's something just total junk and my spam filter missed it, I just, I just throw it in the black hole.

I feel good about it and it teaches it.

I will never again, ever, ever, ever have to see an email from this person, this, this, this company or whatever.

So it really does make you a lot more productive.

It means that you go to your email, you just see the good stuff and then you can look at the rest of the stuff later.

It's really been a huge deal for me.

So I use it on my iPhone JD email.

I use it on Gmail.

I've been paying for a while.

I really like it.

So I encourage you to check it out.

If you haven't tried sane box yet, it's really, really cool.

You know, quickly, I'm just going to stay on that black hole.

That's one of my favorite things because I would imagine several people listening and are like, well, you can go set up a rule in your email, you know, that any emails from this particular sender or something can go in.

That's true.

I've done that before.

It takes a little bit of time.

Like I just, like I've got to go copy the email address and I've got to figure it out.

And it's like, is it always going to, is it always going to work?

And then just, does my server reject it or is it come?

It's just so confused.

It's so easy just to drag that into the same black hole folder, Jeff, and it's done.

And it's like, I don't want to worry about it then.

And if I ever suspect that maybe I might need to go back and check on something, I can jump into that folder.

And this works because depending on where you get your email, your server, sometimes you have your junk email folders on your computer versus on your server.

People get confused about that and how it works.

And I just like that, that black hole folder for, for that reason, not to mention the same news, just like you were saying that to me is worth the price right there of having the same news.

Cause I get a ton of newsletters.

I don't want to reject them.

I don't want to put them in the black hole, but I don't need to see them right now.

I need to focus on the thing, the emails that are just really important, just like you were saying there.

And that's just, that's just really great.

Thank you.

Same box for sponsoring the, in the news podcast, you can go and find out a little bit more about saying box, sign up for a free trial.

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Thank you.

Same box in the know, in the, uh, we were talking all about tips and here is one that I stumbled upon that wasn't in that list of the Apple watch tips.

And I know we, I remember that we talked about this a while back when it came on, but recently I just found this extremely useful.

This is mirroring your Apple watch to your iPhone.

And some people are like, that's ridiculous.

Why would you need to do that?

Well, again, like we have talked about many, many times, this is a feature that Apple allows as an accessibility feature.

So this isn't something that would happen all the time.

You have to go and actually actively turn it on.

But I will tell you where I was able to find this so useful.

I regularly need to go into my list of apps, you know, on the iPhone, some people put it in that, what I call the honeycomb view of all your apps together and you can swirl around and find the app that you need.

I put it into a list.

I like having a list, but typically when I go into that list on my Apple watch, Jeff, it obviously starts at the top of the list in alphabetical order, but I need to go to the settings app or I need to go to something that starts with W or S and I got to scroll all the way down.

Well, I was trying to weed out some of those apps on my Apple watch that I didn't need anymore.

So I can go into that list.

I can tap and hold on that list and it'll go into like the jiggly mode so that I can remove that out.

But I got to tell you, I don't know if I'm trying to, if I'm fat fingering it a little bit, it just wasn't as useful.

So I was able to pick up my iPhone and you have to, your watch has to be unlocked for this to work.

You go to the settings app and your iPhone, you go to accessibility and then there is a list there.

It's probably maybe towards the middle.

It's called Apple watch mirroring and you tap on that and there's just one toggle in that setting.

Apple watch mirroring allows sharing and control of your Apple watch screen from a paired iPhone.

So obviously your phone has to be paired with your Apple watch, but when you toggle that on, it literally comes up with the bottom part of the screen and you can see I've got my unity watch face on as well.

So the bottom part of your iPhone screen is your watch and you can interact with it the same way you would interact with your watch on your wrist.

You can swipe up and down.

You simply tap the side so that you can get into the digital crown.

You just tap it on your Apple watch and it'll do the digital crown as if I was pushing that button.

You can also tap the button down below, but you can scroll back and through.

I found this to be a much easier way to go through my list of apps and then I could tap and hold on this list of apps on my iPhone screen and then I can tap it again if I wanted to delete it or so.

I found that to be a fascinating way.

Some people will find that maybe it's a little bit easier because it is a bigger picture of your Apple watch, whereas you may have a limited kind of a screen size on your watch itself, but if you go into this accessibility feature on your iPhone, well, you've got a bigger screen real estate to play with.

And that just makes it a little bit easier to maybe do some of the tasks.

Like if I wanted to change around my smart stack or if I wanted to, you know, edit my control center, those kinds of things.

Sometimes I'll do that on my iPhone as opposed to trying to fat finger it on my Apple watch itself.

So that's my tip today, how to mirror your Apple watch to your iPhone.

And it works really great.

It's very responsive.

I found very cool.

I don't see a practical need for that.

I have to admit I was trying it out as you just described it.

And it looked very, I mean, it was fascinating to see my Apple watch mirrored on my Apple, my iPhone.

That was something really interesting.

So just from a cool standpoint, it was worth doing for a few seconds, even though I don't know the whole tip for today.

Anyway.

So I have an Apple watch tip too.

We're going to be talking.

We just, we just celebrated, you know, one year of the Apple vision pro in about a couple of months, Brett, we're going to be celebrating 10 years to the Apple watch.

It was April 2015.

It came out.

So that's, that's the celebration coming for the last almost 10 years now, an invite ever since there, I was on your invitation to the party.

Every, every since I've had my first Apple watch, I would always keep it just about 99% of the time in mute mode.

And my idea was saying, I don't want my Apple watch interfering with me during the day.

I want, I don't want it beeping and booping and interrupting me if I'm in court or I'm in a meeting or with a client, or even if I'm just doing my own thing.

And so I always have it super quiet.

I love the idea that the Apple watch can tap me to get my attention, but nobody around me hears about it.

Having said that last, was it just last week we were talking about the unity band and we were talking about how it has like a special sound associated with it on the hour and the half hour.

And, and I, in fact, I even tried to hold up my watch to my mic, my microphone to pick it up.

It didn't really work last week on the podcast, but anyway, I, I turned on sound so I could listen to that.

And it was, you know, it was an interesting little chime.

And ever since then, so it's been, it's been literally one week now I have had my sound turned on just to try something new, you know, sometimes in life, right?

You just got to try something new and I will tell you, I like it.

I really do.

I, you know, I have my Apple watch pared down substantially from a notification standpoint.

There are a lot, there are not a lot of things that will try to get my attention, but those few things that do, you'll get like that little ding.

It's a very light little ding.

So this is a week, Brad, I haven't been in court this week and I haven't had any in-person meetings.

So like, but I will tell you using the sound on my Apple watch for the last week, it's not very loud.

It doesn't make sound very often.

And when it does make a noise, um, it, they're, they're very pleasant chimes and it just sort of gets my attention even more than just a tapping wood.

And I have to tell you, I've sort of liked it.

I really have.

And so am I going to keep my Apple watch unmuted forever?

No, maybe not, but my tip of this week is if you're like me and you've had your, your watch Apple watch muted forever, and I'm with you, just go ahead and turn it on for a, for a couple of days and see what you think.

Because it's actually, it's, it's, it's, it's nice.

It's like a new way for the watch to interact with you.

The sounds are all very pleasant.

And um, I, I, I think it's been sort of fun.

So I haven't decided how much longer I'm going to keep it on.

I'm sure at some point I'm going to turn it back on to the unmute mode, but, um, it just reminds me, you know, maybe on weekends.

I'll, I'll turn the sound on or something like that.

It's uh, the sounds are not very loud.

They're not very obnoxious.

And um, it's just a fun thing that you can do with the device that you already own if you have an Apple watch.

So that's my tip.

Now I noticed that I have mine, the audio, I don't have it muted, but if, if I don't have it muted, I need to go into the sounds and haptics right on the, on the watch app.

And then I got to make sure I, okay, I got to turn that on and adjust the volume and stuff like that.

Yeah.

That's a really good option, especially now that you've got that, that unity watch face on there.

That will be cool.

All right.

All right.

I might, I might, I might try that now.

You think you've convinced me Jeff.

That's really cool.

All right.

A couple of Apple watch tips to end our show.

Thank you again to SaneBox for sponsoring us today.

You can visit sanebox.com/inthenews.

Jeff we'll talk with you next week.