Welcome to In the News for July 4th, 2025.

I am Brett Burney from Appsinlaw.com.

And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhoneJD.

Happy July 4th, Brett.

How are you doing today?

Happy July 4th.

What

is going on?

We're

here on Independence

Day.

This

is a little crazy, but I was like, exactly.

It was like, hey, we both have the time.

We might as well make good use of it, Jeff.

I have a red, white, and blue story for you.

Can I start with that?

Oh, good.

Yes, please.

I

was, as

I was getting dressed today, I put on a blue shirt, you know, red, white, and blue.

And I'm like, well,

I have a, there you go.

I said, I have a blue shirt.

I should wear my red watch band because, and we might talk about this in a second.

When Woot had a sale a couple months ago, I purchased, you know how Apple would sometimes have product red, which gives money to like AIDS

relief and stuff like that.

And so I never

had a red watch band, but I'm like, you know what?

They were so cheap.

I will get a red, a product red watch band.

And I

ordered it.

And when I got it, and I think I mentioned this before, you know, I expected red to be

like, this is a water bottle I got.

Oh, that's very

red.

This is red,

right?

This is

what you would want.

That punch you in the face red.

Yeah, exactly.

But the band, and I don't have it with me right now, it's sort of like reddish orange.

You know how when you were a kid and the coolest thing was the Crayola box of 64 colors and

there would be every color in the rainbow?

This is not the red color

crayon.

This is like the one that's next to the red crayon.

That's

getting a little more off, even

though it's called product red.

But I thought this morning, I'm going to put it on and with my blue shirt and that product red watch, it's going to look red, white, and blue.

And my wife looks at me and she's like, your watch is orange.

I'm like, okay.

So I'm not wearing that.

So instead

what I did was I decided I'm

going to get my white watch pants.

And,

you know, this is one of the original Apple watch pants.

But here is the funny part is this is just the very traditional – what do they call this?

It's a sport loop.

It's one of the very first

Apple watch pants.

The very first one.

I'm still wearing mine.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

Well, there you go.

It has been so, because I normally wear other watch bands.

I wear my Milanese loop at work.

I wear my solo loops.

I wear the solo bands.

It's been so

long since I

wore one of these that when I went to put it on this morning,

I couldn't remember how to do the clasp.

Is that ridiculous?

I'm pitiful.

I'm like, I'm fumbling.

I'm like, wait, how do you do

this?

How do you do this?

I'm laughing at myself because I used to put this thing on every single day.

So anyway, so I do not have blue and red.

I have blue and white today.

That is my red, white, and blue story.

Hopefully it wasn't too boring.

Oh, that's good.

Well, now, you know, you can always do the watch face.

I just changed my watch face.

Good idea.

There you go.

I'm going to do that, too.

I don't know.

That almost looks like a diving or something.

But anyway, it's got

the

hint of the red, white, and blue.

I'm going to do that, too.

I just showed on the

video there.

That way, you can incorporate all the colors

to make sure that

your watch is completely, you know, ready for Independence Day.

Obviously, everybody in the United States of America probably knows July 4th today is a national holiday.

But Jeff and I, because we are so committed and the fact that we have so much fun doing this, we wanted to make sure we went ahead and talked today.

And we got several things that we want to cover as well today.

But for those, everyone else, it's, of course, not in the United States.

All of our listeners on the international side, we know it's probably just another normal day for you.

And that is that is OK.

By the way, happy

Canada Day as well.

All of our listeners and all of our listeners in London, no hard feelings.

You know, we're still good friends.

Very good. All right. Hey, how about let's go through a few links that you had today, Jeff, about some things coming up with iOS 26, watchOS 26, visionOS 26, all the 26 is coming up.

But we can we can

go through some of these real quick because some of these links I thought were really fantastic.

Starting with Nick DeCorville from the Mac Observer, my favorite iOS 26 features after three days of daily use.

And I just love the fact that he highlighted some of these really cool features that I'm already getting excited about.

The summer is always a time when there's not a ton of news in the Apple world because Apple has no

announcements over

the summer.

But what we do have is people that are trying out kicking the tires on the beta versions.

And so, you know, of course, there's all the marquee features that Apple talked about at its keynote a couple weeks

ago.

But

now that people have it installed, they're starting to find like little bitty things that, you know, maybe get a little bit of attention or maybe are off the radar screen.

And that's sort of fun because even though I'm not running the betas, I will tell you that I've heard that these betas this summer are pretty stable, which is good.

I've seen the same thing.

But I've also

heard, and this is true every single year, especially on the iPhone, is that if you install the betas, they go through your battery life so much faster.

And, you know,

I have a ton of battery life with my phone, but I'm depending upon my phone to get work done.

I don't want to run out of battery

power at 3 o

'clock in the afternoon.

So even though I also don't want it to crash, and apparently that hasn't been a huge deal for this beta so far.

So anyway, I'm not running the beta.

So I'm just learning about them by reading through what other people are talking about.

And so, for example, the first feature that he has listed here, which I think is a nice one,

is Apple is giving you all these great new tools for those aggravating spam phone calls and spam text messages.

And some of the really cool features are not available in the betas yet.

Like the fact that if somebody calls you and their number is not in your address book, you can have it, that they'll first have to talk to like a sort of a robot.

And the robot will say, who are you and why are you calling?

It will basically screen your calls like a receptionist might do, but built into the phone.

That's pretty cool.

But what they do have available in the current betas is that Apple will automatically create a folder like in your messages app.

And if a junk mail message comes in, it just sticks it into that spam folder.

And it's there.

If

you want to go in the folder and look at it, it's fine.

What I don't know, in fact, I'm just saying this out loud.

What bothers me is sometimes I'll look at my messages app and you know how the little,

the number that tells you how many unread messages you have.

What bothers

me right now is I'll see, oh, I have an unread message and then it's a spam

message.

I'm like, oh, that's aggravating.

What I hope it does is not only does it put it into a little spam subfolder, but it doesn't

even give me a number.

Cause like, if

you send me a text message, I want

to know that I want a badge if my wife

sends me a message, but I don't know if it does that.

But anyway, but at least Apple's starting to, and of course it does the same thing for voicemails too.

So that's a cool feature.

Okay.

And

then the second one he has on the list here, I know this is a cosmetic feature that the time on your

launch screen can get bigger and

smaller.

But I have heard so many people say that, yes, this is a silly little cosmetic thing, but it's really cool.

I was just

listening to the,

in fact, I'm currently listening to the latest episode of John Gruber's podcast called The Talk Show.

And

he has a really

cool interview with David Smith, who does the Widget Smith app.

And but John was talking about like it's like his new little what do you call it?

Like a fidget toy.

He's like, this is my new fidget toy.

It's just making the time bigger and smaller and bigger and smaller.

So it's a tiny little thing.

And it'll probably get old after a year or two.

But it'll be fun.

So those

are two things that

he mentioned that I thought were fun features.

Yeah, those stood out to me, too.

Just the fact, like, I remember seeing this idea of changing the size of the lock screen.

And I also remember thinking, why do I care about that?

Like, there's so many other great things.

But now that I look at it, and obviously I've heard other people talk about this as well, I'm pretty excited about this.

Another article you link to, sort of in the same flavor here, but these are hidden iOS 26 features that are even better than the headline ones.

A couple of these I think we've already talked about.

Like one I think was in here was about it'll tell you if your camera lens has smudges on it or

if it's dirty.

Yeah, isn't that funny?

Which is pretty cool.

But there's a few others in here which I thought were awesome too.

You know what's interesting to me is the custom snooze times for alarms.

Yes.

So I wake up to my iPhone every single morning.

And sometimes I turn the snooze on.

Sometimes I do it unintentionally because I'm not even awake enough and that's good that

it wakes me up.

But

for, I mean, the snooze alarm feature on the iPhone has been around forever.

And

it is by default.

I mean, I say not by default, but you only have one choice.

It is nine minutes.

Why is it nine minutes?

Why is it not 10 minutes?

Why is it not five minutes?

I don't know.

It's always been nine minutes.

And so for the first time, I can definitely see a situation in which you might want to

set your alarm for like 6 a.m., but you know what?

You're going to allow yourself to snooze to 6.30 or something like that because

you're

just getting early.

And so this is nice that you can actually do a custom snooze time alarm.

I don't know what I'll change mine to.

It's been nine minutes for so long.

But

I mean,

that's such a simple thing.

Why hasn't Apple made that customizable in the past?

I don't know.

There was

a funny thing that happened at my house this week.

My son woke up late.

And the reason he woke up late is because he uses his iPhone to wake himself up.

But he was using his iPhone as he fell asleep.

And like it became disconnected from the cord and it died over the night.

And so

because it was dead,

the alarm can't go off in the morning.

And I was like, oh, that's interesting.

You got to make sure you plug in your phone at night if you're using the

alarm thing.

Make sure it is charged.

Very interesting.

I love this one here.

Feel subtle vibrations when calls connect or

end.

This is the first by part of it.

Yeah.

I know.

I think that's going to be really cool.

I mean, just a very subtle thing to be like, okay, yeah, it hung up.

Which I think, again, something extremely useful on there, which is going to be really

cool.

Just to make sure I understand it, it's like a little feedback.

When the other person hangs up

or picks

up, it shakes a tiny bit.

It says in this post that some Android phones from Samsung have had this for a while.

I'd never even heard of this as a feature.

Sounds good.

Charging time now shows on your lock screen.

That's a

nice one, yeah.

Because I always have to go into the lock center or something like that.

I just love

that.

There's some really cool ones in here.

Change podcast playback speeds easily.

Now, I feel like we've always had this because if we use the Overcast app, but now that in fact that it's kind of baked into the Apple podcast app, that'll be cool as well.

Great stuff on there.

On a more specific note, changes coming to the Apple Photos app in iOS 26.

This is from Ryan Christoffel at 9to5Mac.

I think some of these we've kind of already talked about, but the more I start thinking about this, I'm a little bit more excited about specifically what the new Photos app is going to look like.

And I feel like I'm starting to hear more people talk about that as well.

One thing we often see from Apple is when they have a more radical change, it will sort of start by going all the way to one extreme.

And then over time, it

will sort of come

back.

And, you know, we've seen that time and time and time again.

And this is one example of it, because last year, one of the more radical changes they made to the Photos app and the iPhone and the iPad 2, or I guess just the iPhone,

is that for many, many, many years in the Photos app on the iPhone, there would be this bar at the bottom.

And you could tap on the bar to switch between what was it, your library and favorite, I forget what, all the utilities.

Different albums.

Different things.

Different

albums.

And that bar was permanently there.

And then Apple decided last year, let's take that bar away because the idea

was that you could see

more at one time.

And I see where they're coming from.

But it was sort of nice to have that.

And it sometimes was a pain that you had to scroll all the way down to get to those options again.

And so apparently what they're

doing on iOS 26 is they're bringing it back at least partially.

And so this is an example of, I mean, I think that the Apple, I mean, I know just from the stuff I saw on the internet, you can call it complaining.

You can call it constructive

feedback.

Call it whatever you want.

People have definitely say, Apple, we think you went too far.

We would like to have that bar back again.

And so that's something that you

can now

have back again.

Plus, it's going to be better than ever because it uses the liquid glass design.

So it can be sort of see-through

and stuff like that.

So that was the one that jumped out of me of the photo changes that you talked about.

You know, the other one, I guess, is things like the spatializing photos feature.

We talked about that last week when I had my Vision Pro that, you know, not only can you see 3D pictures on a Vision Pro when the whole world is 3D, but even if you just have an iPhone with your 2D screen, you can move your iPhone left and right.

And it will show through AI and through machine learning, it will create as if it's 3D.

And it's a little gimmicky, but I'll tell you, it's pretty cool.

Like it really, especially when you have like an older photo, suddenly it seems like it

has more warmth.

Like it's more

like personal,

especially if it's like a loved one, it's more personal

that you can sort of move it and sort of see it.

So I haven't seen it on the iPhone yet.

I'm very familiar with this from my Vision Pro.

I look forward to

seeing it, but

I'm really glad that Apple is bringing this feature over.

So that'll be cool.

You have inspired me, Jeff, because a couple of times I've been taking pictures and, you know, I'll take a picture.

Sometimes I'll do a portrait and a little bit of a video and then a photo.

And I'm like, you know what?

Maybe I'll take a spatial just in case, you know, just for that time in the future, because I want to see what they look like.

It's not something that I would normally do.

But I remember you keep talking about the fact, like, if you can take some of those spatial pictures now, because if in some point in the future you do get a Vision Pro or I'm excited to look at them on the iPhone, at least in iOS.

26. So thank you for inspiring me because I've started to do that a little bit more now.

I will tell you, though, what you're talking about is a little different. That's a cool feature,

too, that you can use your iPhone to take a spatial photo or video. That's probably the best

way to do it.

But this particular feature, it takes a 2D picture. And just by analyzing the

picture, it

creates sort

of a fake 3D, like puts it in layers and stuff like that. And now I imagine

the quality would be much better if you took it in a spatial version in the first place. But either

way is good. I'll mention one more thing. When you talk about sort of future proofing your

by taking it in a form now

that even if you can't

appreciate it today in the future,

my strong, strong recommendation is

take more panorama photos.

Because

panorama photos,

when you look at a panorama on your iPhone or your iPad,

it looks a little weird

because it's such a long picture.

Everything, like the perspective's a little off

and whatever,

but I wish I could go back in time

and take more of them

because when you're wearing a Vision Pro,

the panorama moves, it shapes around you.

So there's nothing skewed about it.

it looks perfect. And you look around and it's a static image. It's not a video, but you look

around and you can see things. And I've mentioned this before. When I, when I look back at panorama

photos, I took years ago, including things that I would just use my old camera, including my old

SLR. And I would go snap, snap, snap, snap, and then

stitch them all together

in Photoshop or

Photoshop elements at the time. Those pictures are so cool in my vision pro. So in a couple of years,

when Apple is making glasses that have the Vision Pro in it that, you know, costs so much less than

today, everybody is going to have this capability, you know, or so many more people will. And I

guarantee you, you're going to want to go back and look at those Panorama

photos.

In fact, in that

same podcast I was mentioning with John Gruber and David Smith, David Smith, the developer of

Widget Smith mentioned that he is taking a lot more Panorama photos. He said, not only is he using

the Apple Panorama feature of the Photos app.

He's like, because sometimes that sort of skews things.

He's like, I'm also just going old school

and just taking snap, snap, snap, snap, snap,

and then using more sophisticated software

to stitch it together.

Because

sometimes you get a better result

if you do it that way.

I had sort of forgotten about that,

but he's absolutely right.

And I might start doing that too.

I mean, especially if you know,

like you're in some really cool place,

like maybe you're looking at the Grand Canyon

and you

want a cool picture of the whole perspective

or something like that.

So definitely, I encourage people,

take more panorama photos than you think you want

because five, 10 years from now,

you may be really happy that you have those.

You encouraged, you inspired me on that as well

because I remember when you let me test your Vision Pro,

I specifically remember you had panoramic pictures

of like Mardi Gras on your street.

And I had just never experienced that

to be able to like turn my head back and forth

and be able to look down the street and see all the detail.

That was incredible.

So you're right.

Again, you inspire me on that.

Do more panoramas.

I think that's really cool.

Well, let's move to the iPad.

Now, we're not going to talk about all the iOS 26 features,

but you had a specific story today about an app that is very near and dear to your heart, Mr. Jeff.

That is GoodNotes, which is one of the best note-taking apps available for the iPad.

And you just linked to a blog post from GoodNotes.

It's good to see blog posts and coverage from the app developers separately than Apple, right?

When they start getting excited about what they are going to be offering in iOS 26.

And this is the little quick rundown here from GoodNotes.

So I've been using, I've been taking notes on my iPad for an incredibly long time.

I've used different apps over the years to do it.

But for a super long time now, my favorite one has been GoodNotes.

And I use it if I'm just in meetings.

You know, I just have something that looks like a yellow legal pad.

and I take my handwritten notes.

I use

it when

I'm in depositions.

Sometimes I use it in court.

I also use good notes to sort of annotate things.

Like, you know, I'll have like a meeting agenda

that I'll put in Google, like a PDF file.

And

then I'll just sort of write my

notes on the agenda

so that I can go back and remember

what I talked about in the meeting.

Plus, even if I never go back and look at it again,

for me, just the simple app,

the simple act of taking handwritten notes

helps my brain remember

things

so that in the future,

I'm more likely to remember it

as opposed to if I just sat in the meeting like a potted plant and didn't take notes or really anything like that.

So that's my little pitch for taking notes.

And I love doing it on the iPad because it's all digital and they're with you all the time.

So GoodNotes is making some big changes.

Now, they're coming out this fall.

I don't know that they're particularly because of iPad 26, iPad OS 26, or that's

just when they're going to come out with it.

But regardless, so one

of the features they have, and this is one people have been asking for for a long time, is it's the infinite canvas feature.

It's the idea

that it's like a whiteboard so that if you need

more space, you just sort of pinch in and then things get bigger and you have more space to put stuff in the margin so you can get bigger and bigger.

People love these things for like mind maps and stuff where you have like this idea and this idea.

And this reminds me of this.

And so it's a great way to sort of, you know, put down all your thoughts on paper.

You don't even know where you're going to end up when you start.

So that's a cool feature that they're going to add.

And in fact, not only is it an infinite canvas, I didn't mention this in my post today, but

it's going to have these improved features for doing like, I don't know what you call

this, but you know how like you might have like a circle with like a word in it and then

a line and then another, a square and then a line.

And then like, just sort of like these sort of, it's like simple graphics, you know, this

and this and this and this.

It's going to have a lot of that stuff built in so that it's more

easy to create

those

circles and squares.

There have been dedicated apps for the iPad for many years.

Like Omni makes one called Omni, I forget what it's called, but

they do

a really good job

of that.

I thought something like that.

Yes,

exactly.

And again, MindMap have done this a long time.

You have an idea and then a line and then an idea.

So that's going

to all be built in.

So

that's going to be cool.

So I'm looking forward to using that.

Another feature that they mentioned, and I'll have to think about the security implications of this, but everybody's using artificial intelligence for everything nowadays.

Right.

And so they're going to be using AI.

And there are some AI features right now in GoodNotes, but they're going to allow it that

let's say you go into a meeting and you just like take your handwritten notes, just sort

of scribbling together.

And, you know, they look like what they look like.

GoodNotes already has the feature that it can convert your handwriting into text, which

is nice so

that you can do a full text search.

If you've got like 100 pages of notes, where did I mention the word, you know, settlement?

Or where did I talk about this specific expert witness?

You know, you can search for his name and that's really cool.

But since it already knows what you're writing, now it's going to use – or this fall, it's going to use AI that it can take all of your notes and it can organize them for you.

It can put them into like a bulleted list and headings and subheadings and stuff like that.

We'll have to see how good it

is.

That's nice.

But that's such an interesting idea.

Now, again, I don't know if it's happening on device and the cloud, what's the privacy, all that sort of stuff.

We need to think about all that stuff

before lawyers might

want to use it.

But it's cool that they're using this.

And this is absolutely the future.

This is absolutely the future.

So it's

nice to see that they're getting involved in it too.

And then I'll mention one more feature, which is this, which is text.

So even though most of my notes are in handwriting, sometimes I want something to be in text.

Like maybe I'll have like a couple of pages of notes and then I want to like copy something

from like an email and put it in there or copy

something from somewhere

else that's in it

or from the internet that's in text format.

And GoodNotes has that ability right now.

You put like a little text box, but sometimes it's a little awkward the way it works because

the text box is like the right size.

You got it.

It works.

It's fine.

I've always thought it could be better.

And I guess they think the same thing.

So now they are implementing like a full blown text document feature into GoodNotes so

that

if you wanted to

sit down and just take notes, much like you would use like the Apple Notes

app or something like that, or Microsoft Word, just like, you know, with a keyboard, you're

typing your notes, they're going to be, you know, much more ready for that.

And they're going to say, if you want to take handwritten notes, of course, we're going to still do that.

But if you want your experience to be typing out notes, like through text with a keyboard, that's fine too.

And it'll totally be a native experience for that as well.

I can't wait to see that.

But this

is something that really, it needed, I mean, I didn't even realize how much I wanted this feature until I heard them talk about it.

I'm like, oh, I'm so going to use that feature.

So anyway, very exciting for me.

I mean, this is an app that I use all the time.

So I'm excited to see these are going to be major changes all coming out this fall.

let's quickly to the watch os 26 uh one story you link to again from ryan christoffel at nine to five

mac i am very excited about the hints feature um you know we've talked about i remember what it was

a year ago two years ago when watch os came out with this smart stack feature i like it very much

when i remember that it's

there and

i swipe up and i see it and i'm like wow i should be using this

This is an excellent way.

Well, this is what the hints feature apparently is going to help.

It can solve.

I like how Ryan says it.

Hints in watchOS 26 solve the smart stacks discoverability problem.

Exactly.

I mean, you've just said it.

It's so nice that when you scroll up on your watch, like I'm doing right now, it is showing you things that you might want to see on your watch.

Like I see right now, my very first one is a memory.

That's pretty cool for, you know, prior for

supply.

My next one's talking about my exercise rings.

My next one's talking about, you know, the weather.

And so those are all useful things.

But again, I had to scroll down to see them.

Right.

There's new hints feature.

I guess it's optional.

I don't know.

But just on your watch face, when you're looking at the time, it will have a little icon at

the bottom.

And because it uses liquid glass, it's see-through.

So it doesn't obscure very much of your screen.

And it will give you a hint.

So if there is a weather update,

like maybe

I'm just imagining a weather app is telling

you that it's about to be a big rainstorm.

It might have a little indication.

hey, you might want to tap here and look at your weather app or, you know, something else that it

wants to give you a little tip about. So that I think that's a really cool. So it gives you just

that subtle little indication. And

apparently all you

need to do is tap it and then it will bring

you into whatever, you know, the notification is. So it's like you say, it's smart stack

discoverability. This sounds like a really useful feature.

Very cool. And if you have an Apple Watch

and you want to get one of those red, white, and blue Apple Watch bands,

like Jeff is talking about, how often do they do this?

I remember we've talked about this several times.

We have.

It is now an Amazon company, Woot, Woot.com, which is now owned by Amazon.

But, man, every once in a while, every few months or so,

they come out with this fantastic sale where you can get several Apple Watch bands,

like literal Apple Watch bands, not like third-party knockoff Apple Watch bands.

These are actual Apple watch bands at pretty much a fraction of the price of what Apple actually charges.

Instead of $49 for this solo loop, you can get it for $14.99.

And I know both you and I have taken advantage of this sale several times when it's come around.

Yeah, and the braided loops, which are normally $100, are 70% off at $30.

I

think this is the

third time that I've seen this removed this year.

When they first

did it, to be clear, these are all old models.

And again, why does it matter if it's the new one or the old one?

But if you walk into an Apple store today, you

will see like

their summer 2025 collection of colors for the Apple Watch Band.

But all of the old ones that they no longer sell, I guess they just stick them in a warehouse somewhere.

And we must have bought all of them for like, you know, we'll just take everything in this room

for this much money.

And so they just got them all.

And so now they have all of these, you know, they are quote unquote old and that you can't currently buy them.

But in some ways that's good.

Like I've actually had my an Apple Watch Band break because I tore one of my solo loops.

I was so upset because

I really liked that color and I was able to buy

it on Woot for

a fraction of what I originally penned for it.

I'm like, oh, now I have that color again.

So

if you're looking, you know, and,

and as I pointed out in my post, the, the braided

solo loop, which is really my, that's my, that's my current favorite.

I change from time to time, but my current favorite Apple watch band is the braided loop

because it feels very comfortable.

It's sort of stretchy.

It's sort of like, you know, wearing your, your, your comfy shirt, your comfy pants, you

know,

it's not the fanciest thing for like, you're not going

to wear it to go to a black

tie event but it's just a very comfortable like but at a hundred bucks i'm like gosh that's a lot

of money for just you know but at 30 bucks

for 30 i'm like right yeah that's

pretty good um so

anyway if you're looking to get a couple more colors um these are just the two kinds it's the

braided solo loops and it's the traditional solo loops which are the pot the the sort of stretchy

uh polyelastomer whatever it's called but um

it's fun yeah i was gonna say two things before you go

know the size of your Apple watch, right? There's

usually,

I mean, I know that they have the specific

sizes, 44 millimeters, 45 millimeters. I never really decide or remember the exact measurement.

I just know there's a big size and a small size, right? And just make sure, like typically when you

do the model, you need to make sure you do that big size or you do that small size. And then when

it comes to these loops, we've talked about this a lot before there, you need to Google, like get

apple's measurement it's like a printout that you can do as what i typically have people do jeff

and then you print it out you cut it and then you put it around your wrist and it'll tell you the

exact number of the size you need because you want it it's not like there's a class for anything

right so

these loops basically

are only one size and so you need to know if you need size six seven

eight nine ten whatever it may be but you need to make sure those two things what size or model

number that you need to get and then the size of the actual loop just make sure you know the tip

on that bread

you can of course print those things out and that's a great thing to do because you're

not going to go into an apple store to test it or you actually could go into an apple store and have

them you

could figure out your size figure

out your size and then buy it from

right um

there are a lot

less money another thing that you can do and i've linked to this in the past a long time ago this is

the third time i've mentioned john gruber today john gruber has the website during fireball and

he posted something a long time ago google i'm sure you can find it and um what he did is for the band

that we talked about earlier that I'm wearing right now, that, that traditional, uh, uh,

the sport loop, I think it's the sport loop. Thank you. The sport

loop. What he said is like,

if you figure out which one of the holes that you're using, there is

a correlation.

Like if

you're using the first hole that correlates to this, if you're using the second hole, it

correlates

to this. So that

that's just another way you can sort of, you know, double check it because you do

want to order the right size. I mean, you don't want to get, now I

actually have,

I normally get

the largest of the sizes. But when I, for one of those Woot sales earlier this year,

I got one size smaller because they were so cheap. I'm like, let me just try

it and see.

Just to test it. Yeah.

So I think like

I normally wear the 12, but I bought some 11s and they're really close. I will

tell you the 11 is a little bit more snug, but that's not necessarily bad. It's just a little

bit

tighter. And the

12 is just a little bit more loose. And I have to admit, I go back and forth

between the two of them. I don't actually know which one I prefer, but they both sort of fit.

But my point is that if you're off by one number, it's not the end of the world.

It's just going to be.

Right, right.

But

you certainly don't want to

order

a

12 if you should be a 9.

That would be a huge difference.

Correct.

Yeah.

I like this here.

Even Woot actually knows this.

They first say the bands are not adjustable.

That's the best

way to say it.

They come in 12 different sizes.

And look, they actually have a link right here from Woot to the Apple page to where you

can go and get

this little.

Well, I say like what is it?

Yeah.

Here, start your measurements and then

select your size.

this is that printout that they're talking about that anyway so just make sure you do that before

because you don't want to get it and have to go through the hassle of having to you know return

something or things along those lines not only is it our independence day holiday today tis the

season in the summer now to start travel

indeed i loved this

article from ed hardy at cult of mac.com

the best travel gadgets to improve your vacation or business trip and i pretty much agree i think

with every single one of these suggestions that he makes here.

Heavy on the 12 South products, but that is not a bad thing.

I love it.

I love it here.

Yeah, and it has what you would expect.

It's like, you know, portable chargers, you know,

the thing that you take for the hotel room,

the charge all your stuff

overnight, you know,

the power banks that you want to have with you

so that you've got

power when you're on the go.

The Hub is a very nice one.

I talked about my Hub the other, a couple episodes ago,

the one I stick on the side of my iPad.

Oh yeah, he's got it.

Yeah, the Hyperdrive, right?

The Hyperdrive, yeah.

He

has the exact same one on there that's got, you know,

HDMI.

It's got, you know, a traditional headphone.

It's got USB, everything you might need, SD cards.

So it's a nice little list of things.

And I mean, if you like his product, his particular recommendations, that's great.

They look like good ones to me, like certainly that Hyperdrive one.

But even if

you don't like, you know, just the categories that he talks about are really good.

Of course, the AirFly Pro 2, we've talked about that before.

You're

sitting on the plane and you want to use your

Bluetooth AirPods to listen to the in-flight entertainment.

So cool, cool, cool accessories.

Yeah.

Well, and then you are also kind to Link.

I didn't realize this was two years ago we did this, Jeff.

Or three years ago.

I'm sorry, three years ago.

Oh, my goodness.

July 8, 2022, we did a special edition of our podcast,

a treasure trove of travel tips and trinkets.

Man, just like you said in your post today,

so many of these still are very applicable today.

And I completely agree.

Like I was going through like, yep, yep.

Still use that.

Still use that.

Still use that.

all those things so i'll make sure we have that link to our post from three years ago

uh i feel like we could do an updated one but it would just pretty much be uh as like ditto

as like all those things are still very good we could do

some

updates i'm sure but these are still

great the

main update that i have and i mentioned this in my post is that a lot of these like

specific products that we recommended the company that made it you know three years later obviously

they now have the new versions of it

so for example right i recommended

a particular model

of the Wego Jump Starter, which is really nice.

If your car ever dies or your friend's car dies,

you need to jump the battery.

It's just

so nice to have

this.

The version that I have that for both me

and my wife and my kids, everybody in my family,

if you have a car, you have a Wego in your trunk.

That's just a requirement.

I bought the Wego Jump 22

and I see on Amazon that for the same price,

it's now called the Wego 44S.

I don't know what the difference is

between the 22 and the 44,

except that the number is twice as much.

So

I guess it's

twice as good.

I have no idea.

I haven't researched that.

But the

point is,

for many of these things we recommended, there's now updated versions

of them.

But the categories, the categories are still exactly the sort of things that you should

be thinking about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I'm looking here.

I would have absolutely recommended the Flighty app, but

I don't

think it was even around three

years ago.

I wasn't

using it quite as much.

And that, to me, is an absolute must have, you know, if you're doing any kind of a travel

on that.

Very good.

where you at let's do a where you at segment and that'll transition us into something we can talk

about here first and foremost you were very kind to use a link that my my wife that's her this is

her favorite part of any podcast not that she listens to all of it every time but she loves

the idea of the where yet segment because you know she she can she can understand that right

anytime we talk about a story of like yeah we can use you know the the find my apple find my or air

tags or whatever. So she saw this story and I'm like, thank you, honey, for sending this. And I

sent it on to you. Stolen AirPods were used to track a thief. I think this is in Rhode Island,

right? Leading to two arrests. So again, it's just the same thing. They were camping, I think,

in Rhode Island. Somebody broke into their car, took some of their property, but they were able

to track it down. The police were able to track it down because of an air tag that they had in there.

This is a multi-state crime too. You get people from Kentucky that are camping in Rhode Island

and somebody steals their stuff and they find them in Connecticut.

So, I mean, many states involved here.

And I mean, why would you even know that your AirPods were in Connecticut?

But apparently the reason they did is because of the Find My feature.

And I mean, what a stupid thing for the thieves to do.

I mean, little do they know that when they're stealing someone's AirPods,

they're also basically saying, oh, why don't I take a tracking device

so that anyone

can find out where I am with all your stuff.

And so she was able to tell the police, here is the

house that they're at.

And they go in the house and they find,

Like I think they said there were 14 things stolen and there were 11 of them that were still in the house.

Plus they found some other stuff in the house too.

So, I mean, this is a great example of, you know, thank goodness for her that they stole her AirPods because,

you know.

And of course, although it's not in this particular story, I can totally imagine the thieves taking something else.

And if somebody had put an AirTag somewhere in that

object.

That's right.

That's right.

Then,

you know, that would be good too.

So that's a great story.

That's

even better.

I was saying it was an AirTag, but you're right.

It was the AirPods were among the stolen items, and they were able to track them.

Just so cool how Apple has continued to improve some of those capabilities on there.

And in addition, you had another story, injured climber on Snowmass Mountain.

Was this in Colorado, I think?

Yes.

Rescued

by using Apple's satellite texting.

First and foremost, this gentleman apparently was doing something.

What do they call it?

Glissading?

Never heard of that before.

Glissading.

Sliding is a climbing technique that involves controlled sliding down the mountain.

That sounds frightening to

me.

I would take issue in Umbridge with some of those words there, the controlled sliding.

But anyway, apparently it didn't work out so well.

It wasn't as controlled.

And he hurt his wrist so much so that he needed some emergency help.

Well, he was in an area where there was no cellular or Wi-Fi coverage.

But he had his iPhone.

He was able to, I think he used his Apple Watch too, if I'm not mistaken,

to basically contact and

message his family members who then contacted the emergency personnel and they were able to rescue him, which is just amazing.

Again.

Yeah.

And in fact, the emergency folks pointed out that, you know, it's great that you contact your loved ones, but you also could have just called 911 from your device too.

And

that also would have

worked through satellite texting.

But this story was interesting to me, Brett, because it reminded me that not that long ago, you and I tested the satellite

text feature.

And it was fascinating.

There were so many things that I learned from that.

So tell me, where were you and how are we doing this?

Yeah, let me build this up real quick because you're absolutely right.

I've got a few screenshots we can show here.

So

a

few weeks ago, maybe three or four weeks ago, I took my son.

We went down to the Smoky Mountains to a campsite.

Well, I say a campsite.

This was glamping, which, by the way, is very cool.

And I don't know that, you know, I don't really like to say, oh, I'm more of a rugged man.

I'm just going to take my tent and sleep on the leaves.

But glamping, well, I got to tell you, there's some amazing benefits for this.

You know, it's a place, it's almost like a hotel.

You've got like this lobby area.

You have a restaurant there, which was fantastic.

But then they have the whole tent set up for you.

I call it a tent.

It's basically like a hotel room under canvas because we had a king bed.

We had a toilet and a shower and running water.

Inside this camp, we had our own little fireplace, a wood-burning fire stove.

They supplied all the wood and everything.

It was amazing.

I got to tell you, that was a lot of fun.

But we ended up going hiking a couple of times, which was also nice.

However, because this particular location wanted their visitors to experience the great outdoors, they actually did not provide Wi-Fi at this campsite.

And they even warned you about this on the website.

And I told my son, who's 16, I'm like, this may hurt you more than anything else, that you're not going to have Wi-Fi.

And no cellular.

No

cellular.

Well, here's the thing.

I didn't know for sure, right?

So we got

there if we were going to have cellular.

So I forewarned my son and like, listen, you're not going to have Wi-Fi for sure.

But I don't know if we're going to even have cellular connection.

Well, sure enough, about a mile away when we were getting to this little glamp site instead of a campsite, we had no service.

Well, because we're on iOS, well, I guess it's 18 right now.

I keep wanting to say 25, but no,

iOS 18.

On my iPhone 15 Pro, the little tiny satellite icon started showing up in the upper right corner.

So now instead of it just saying, you know, no bars, it has that little SOS and a little satellite icon up there.

So I knew we were not going to have cellular.

So I'm sitting there at the campsite.

Obviously, you can't check email.

You can't surf the web.

You certainly can't watch a YouTube video or check Facebook or anything else along those lines.

However, there were a few things that you can do if you have a phone that has the satellite capability on there.

So here's my first screenshot here, if you can see that.

In fact, let me go to the second screenshot here.

Once it recognized that I could connect to a satellite, this is what appeared on my iPhone screen.

And you can see there's four options down at the bottom there.

It says I can send and receive messages through the satellite.

I can update my shared location.

So if I need to share it,

and then the last two are like the emergency related, right?

Roadside assistance, request help for your vehicle,

and then emergency SOS, contact emergency services,

which again, you and I have talked about before, right?

I mean, this is really what it was built for

was the idea that if you need it,

just like this young man

that we were talking about in Colorado,

that he could have just contacted SOS

and contacted emergency personnel directly

because the satellite connectivity.

And we've talked about other people.

I remember there was a lady that was caught in some kind of a cavern and she couldn't get out.

And she was able to use this because she was able to look up and see the satellite with her phone.

That's the most interesting thing.

Apple has done such a great job with this interface, Jeff, that you can see on the screen right here.

And I'll show this other screenshot.

The phone is literally looking for the satellite.

And you can see where I was.

I was in Tennessee at the Smoky Mountains.

And it's telling me where to turn the phone to actually connect to the satellite.

The interface was superb, I have to tell you.

And it's like you just kind of hold the phone up, and I'm just kind of turning it around until it locks on.

And once it finds it, this is what you can see now in this screenshot.

I've got a green bar, and it's

got almost like a

green homing signal there that it shows me it's connected to that satellite.

And what was interesting was I was sitting there at the little outdoor restaurant place doing this that I would stay stationary with my phone, but I would see on my screen the satellite would start moving, you know, ever so slowly, of course.

And you have to continue to move your phone in order to stay connected to that satellite.

Now, it's not that egregious.

I mean, it kind of stays for a while, but I'm just saying that it will continue to track you as it's going.

And

it's line of sight, right?

Because like if you were pretty much in that, that's exactly right.

So it actually, that's right.

That's right.

Okay.

Yeah, indeed.

And in fact, you know, if I walked out or I tried to do this underneath inside my tent or the outside room that they had, then it would not work.

Like I

had to be

completely outside.

There had to be no obstructions between me and the sky above in the satellite.

But it was, it was cool.

And I got to tell you, this works so quick, Jeff.

Like I was amazed at how quick I thought it would take several minutes, but it just kind of goes through this boot process and it finds it.

And, you know, if you turn, of course, it'll it'll break that connection there.

Now, it's not like immediate.

And again, it's not, you know, all that.

But again, I remember this lady we talked about in a story in a cavern.

She only had a few minutes, I think, you know, of the day when the satellite would come around.

Like she could see it because she was

looking up

in this cavern and she only had sort of a sliver to be able to see that.

So it just, I just have to say, Apple did such a fine, fine job of making sure that it gives you almost like a very dumbed down approach to do this.

And it worked out great.

So, of course, once I could connect to a satellite, I had to text my good friend, Jeff Richardson, mainly because, you know, no one else would really care that this was such a cool thing.

But I know that you would, Jeff.

So

I did.

So I connected to the satellite, and here you took a couple of screenshots from your end now that I actually sent you this little message.

Satellite connectivity is awesome.

And you were able to see it.

It actually told you this is iMessage, and it said the word satellite right there.

And you were able to reply to me.

We literally had a text message conversation that looked exactly the same as it normally would, except also down here it said,

Brett can check for messages via satellite.

I just thought that this worked out so very well.

So it was really cool for me that I was being told,

because it was in the messages app.

It wasn't like a different app,

but it was just part of our normal conversation,

just like at the very top of the screen

was a message that you had sent me for whatever reason.

It was just like a regular message.

And so then you're in the satellite area

and we're talking it and I'm responding to you.

The thing at the bottom that says

Brett can check for messages via satellite,

correct me if I'm wrong,

but I think that this is telling me

that when I send you a text message,

you're obviously not going to get it automatically.

Like you're going to, you have to fetch messages.

It's like the old

20

years ago, 30 years ago, email

that you would have to actually fetch new messages.

And so if I send you a message, it's just sitting out there.

And then when you decide to point your phone at the satellite,

then you download any

new messages and that you get it.

So it's nice

that the iPhone gave me that notification

that, you know, you might not be getting it right away.

I also noticed that, you know, how for traditional messages,

it would actually tell you things like,

actually that's, well, no, that's not true

because it does have the word delivered.

So I guess I did get a notification

that it had been delivered to you.

So that's actually interesting.

And then the other thing I noticed,

if you go to the next picture that I sent you,

so this screenshot

that I sent you

just a few furthers down,

I was starting to type a message to you.

And one of the things that I noticed

is in very small gray numbers,

it

has, in

this screenshot,

It says 36 slash 500, which was telling me that so far as I'm in the act of typing you

to something, I have typed 36 out of the 500 characters, which is the limit apparently

for every message.

So that's what this reminds me of is the old days of traditional SMS text messages where

you could only have was like 320 characters, whatever it was, like every

message had to

be

small.

Now, now Apple no longer has that limitation with the messages, iMessages protocol.

You can have it as long as you want.

But, you know, we're sort of going old school here.

When you're using a satellite, each individual message apparently can only be 500 characters.

And it's super nice that it's very subtle.

It's just like very gray and very tiny, tiny text.

But it's just giving me that little bit of an indication.

Just

keep in mind, Jeff,

that you've only got 500 characters for this particular text

message.

And so that was

actually good to know.

So I love how Apple has sort of the things that would matter.

It's like these subtle changes throughout the messages app to let you know about it.

But I mean, the bottom line was you were in the middle of nowhere, but we wanted to just sort of, you know, be silly and text each other.

Amazing.

And we were able to do it using satellites.

I mean, I feel like we're living in the future.

This is just so incredible.

And it's just using your iPhone.

This is not using some dedicated Garmin device that's got

some major antenna on it.

This is just your regular old iPhone that doesn't have anything sticking out of it or anything like that.

And we're communicating via satellite.

I

have not been silent about how I believe this is where we are definitely going.

I mean, this works so well in my mind that there will be a day when we're not going to have to look for a signal.

We're not going to have to decide whether we're on Wi-Fi or AT&T.

It's just it's all going to be going through the satellite.

And the fact that this worked as well as it did and it looked as good as it did, that just continues to encourage me.

Like that's where we're going because it doesn't make sense.

I mean, or it only makes sense to me that I would love to have a world where we have less towers, cell towers and places around and all the signals there.

And it's like, why not just be able to go through the satellite?

And to me, this is just ultimately where it's going.

And again, I would put money today on the fact that within five years, 10 years, Apple is already right now working on some kind of a satellite network.

Not that they're going to own the satellites necessarily.

Maybe they will.

I don't know.

It's just to me, this is sort of where the future is going.

Now, obviously, there were a couple of limitations.

I think I even told you here.

I cannot send a picture.

Like there are some limitations on this aspect.

And to me, that just seems reasonable.

Of course, I can't.

You know, I'm not going to let me send a photo.

Again, I'm not going to stream anything here.

This is only for some limited things.

And I feel like from the consumer side, the messages and the find my is great because I can share my location.

I did try sharing my location with you.

I don't know if I just didn't take the time to understand it or so.

I didn't know if I could do that through the Find My app or not.

But I think it could share my location if I typically do that.

I think my wife would say, but because I'm just always sharing my location with her.

And then the two like emergency aspects, the roadside assistance and the emergency SOS, you know, goodness knows.

I hope that I never have to use that.

But just the fact that this works so well of me just connecting with a friend just encourages me that if I do and when I do need it from the emergency or the SOS aspect, that it will work so well on there.

It's just pretty amazing how well it was.

So anyway, thanks, everyone, for letting us talk through that.

But we've been wanting to talk about that just a little bit because it did work out so well.

Let's do an in-the-know.

In-the-know.

This might take a little bit time as well.

We will take all the time, but I will tell you, finally, finally, Jeff, I have entered the smart home era.

We've talked about this.

I know.

Well, I had some credits that I needed to use before the end of June, and I decided, okay, this is going to be it.

I would like to start investing in some security cameras.

We have a very old, probably original doorbell that's like from 1978.

Don't we've never had a camera or anything like that.

So I made the investment probably based mostly on some of your recommendations that have been around for so long.

But I did some quick research.

I didn't have a lot of time to do as much as I normally would do.

But I ended up going with Eufy, E-U-F-Y.

We've talked about Eufy many times on this.

I know you're a big proponent.

I've got many questions for you.

I ended up getting the Eufy E340 video doorbell, which I'm already excited about.

I don't have it mounted.

I'll explain why in just a moment.

But I also got the Eufy Cam S3 Pro 2-pack, which I know you already have as well.

This also has two cameras and a home base.

And a home base is something we can talk about in just a moment.

That comes with it.

So this is my smart home gift to myself.

We got the video doorbell, and we got the two-pack of Eufy Cam S3 Pro with a Eufy home base,

which has to be connected to my wireless router.

I'm hoping to do that today.

I've opened the video doorbell.

We've gone out and I've held it up against the wall where I think I want it to be located.

And just even that alone, using the Eufy app on my iPhone, I am already so impressed.

I mean, this is pretty incredible.

I know I'm late to the game on some of this.

You've already been there.

In fact, I think you have some of these same products already, but I'm so excited.

This is probably my weekend project that I'm going to be putting up some Eufy security cams over the weekend, Jeff.

I have so many things to say about all this stuff.

Let me talk about

why don't

we start with the doorbell.

OK,

so the

doorbell that you have is really cool.

This video doorbell.

I have an older version of it.

The one that I have, the 220, has a single camera.

So it just looks straight ahead.

OK, a wide

shot.

The one that you have is better because the current

version of the

Eufy, the one that I have, I don't think they sell anymore.

The new version, not only does it have the camera that looks straight out, but it has another camera that's at an angle at the bottom.

And it's really faces

down.

And what's cool about that is that if you have that like at your front door and if somebody leaves a package, like, you know, an Amazon package is delivered at your house.

That's exactly what it's for.

You might not see it from the camera that looks straight out because, you know, it's really close to your door.

But the camera that looks straight down, you could see the package.

And so in the Eufy app, you actually will

have two

images.

You'll have the image that's straight ahead and the image that's down, which

is really cool.

That's right.

So that works really well.

And that's a nice feature.

Otherwise, the one that I have is basically the same as the one that you have.

I actually have mine mounted.

Most people, I mean, what you're traditionally going to do is you're going to put this right next to your door, right?

At my house, I actually don't have it mounted that way because I have a gate in the front of my house.

It was there when we bought the

house.

And

so like you open the front gate and then you walk up my little steps, my three steps, and then you get to my house.

And because the gate is sometimes locked, if somebody has to ring my doorbell, I want that to be at the gate, not at the front house, which is the

reason why when I first

looked for a doorbell, I knew that I needed to have something that was wireless because I'm not going to like break up the concrete in the front of my house and run wires to my gate, to my house, stuff like that.

And so the video doorbell can, I think it works either way.

You can use it

wirelessly.

Yes, exactly.

Or you

can use it if you already have a regular doorbell that you're replacing that's connected to your house, you can connect it via wires.

And it's better to do the wired connection if you can because it means it has power all the time.

That's right.

So one of the things for

my doorbell is it will detect motion.

And you can have it record when it detects motion.

But I actually have that feature turned off on mine.

The only time that mine makes a recording is if somebody presses the doorbell and then it looks to see who

they are.

And that's nice because

then like on my watch or on my phone, not only can I see that I can hear the doorbell ring, but I can also see who it is at the doorbell.

And I could even talk to them if I want to.

I don't use that feature very often.

But I have it turned off to record every time motion goes by because if it recorded motion every time somebody walks down the sidewalk

in my house, I would

have to be taking – and it's very easy to do.

you use like a little thing, you press the thing in the bottom of it and it pops off and then you

just plug it in and it charges and then you bring it back. But I didn't want to have to do that like

every, every couple of weeks. And so I only have to charge my doorbell once every, I don't even know,

six months or something like that.

Now

I do, however, want to know if somebody is at my house,

but I use my cams for that. We'll talk about that in a second, but for the doorbell, those are the,

those are the features, you know, that that's what, that's how it works. It's, it's, it's really

nice. I mean, I love the fact that, um, plus you have things like, because if somebody rings my

doorbell and I'm not home, I will get an alert. I, if I have this turned on, I can have the Eufy

app ring no matter where

I am. So I

could be like around the world. I could be on vacation in France

or something like that. And, um, I can have it. If I have my notifications turned on, somebody set

my doorbell and I could even talk to them and say, you know, who are you? Or just, you know,

leave it right there or something like

that. And so, and again, ring doorbells have done this for

long time, but the UV one does it as well. So I think you're going to really enjoy the doorbell.

And in fact, you're going to enjoy it more than me because you're going to be using it

for its intended purpose, which is right next to your front door. Um, and, um, and you know,

and that'd be nice. And, and, and you have a very nice image of who is the person that's right there.

Um, so it all, that

works really well. The image now, the image on this is only 2k. So,

you know, everybody knows about 4k 2k is plenty for what you're doing on this. We're going to talk

about the other cameras in just a moment that are 4k for other various reasons but the the image

quality it just pretty amazing you know just from the fact of remembering you know security camera

footage from years ago this is amazing that this is a consumer product it can do that good but

quickly i just wanted to say these are things that i don't feel like people talk about as much

but it is great that this can be either battery powered in fact this is the battery that goes into

it you just

slips into

the back there like you said and this is what you would charge or

you can connect it just from the two wires that's probably already connected into your doorbell.

And in fact, it even says here that wired mode does require the battery to be installed,

but the power source basically just keeps that battery charged up.

So if you do lose power, this will still work.

It will still be able to send some of those information,

as long as your Wi-Fi is still up and running on that as well.

But I like the fact that it does have those two options

because you may choose to not replace your current doorbell if you have one of those in there.

And you could mount this basically anywhere around your door, like you were talking about, even at your gate, of course.

And you have that battery power on there.

I just like the fact that you have those two options on there.

Before we move on to the doorbell.

No, this may be what

you're asking because I want to know, like right now, I'm trying to think about, like if I plug this in,

there is a doorbell sound when you push this doorbell on there.

But I think that there's like some additional chime sounds or something that you can use.

I'm assuming you've already gone through some of those things.

I hear it is.

Pair with a chime to hear alerts throughout your home.

Have you already done that now already with the chime alerts?

Yeah.

So this will be my tip of the week is that if you do have a system is that I have a chime for it.

And here's the reason I bought it.

So when somebody rings your doorbell, you can have notifications turned on on your phone.

And so then you get the notification no matter where you are.

Additionally,

these Eufy devices, they pair to a home device, the name of which is in my mind right now.

It's the what's the what's the base?

It's the home base or something like that.

It is home base.

That's what they call it.

OK.

And so wherever your home base is located, it will ring.

So when I first set this up at

my house a number

of years ago, I

had a home base downstairs.

Okay.

It's, you've been to my house before.

When you first walk in my house,

the room, I have my

piano in, I had it right there.

Okay.

And so that's great if I'm downstairs, because it's pretty loud, you know, ding dong, you

can hear it.

But if I was upstairs all the way in our bedroom in the back of the house, that was far enough

away that you might not hear the ding dong.

And so

what I did is for 30,

40 bucks, I purchased the video doorbell add on chime, which is

which is just like, all

it is, is like the back of it is just like two prongs. So you just plug it

into an outlet. And so just find some outlet that you're not using in your house, plug this thing in.

And every time the home base rings, the chime rings as well.

So I had a chime upstairs. I had

the home base downstairs

and that way I could hear it ringing no matter where I was in the house,

even if I didn't have my iPhone on me or my Apple watch or anything else. So that was nice.

More recently, and this moves into our second discussion, I had a prior version of the camera, the 2-something, and it was lesser quality images.

I think it was HD, but not 1080p,

but not

4K, or whatever it was.

And for a number of reasons, I wanted to get some of the features of the new version.

And so a few months ago, I upgraded to the cameras that you have.

And in the process of doing that, one of the differences was that the home base, it's now a requirement of Eufy that the home base be plugged in directly to your internet.

So you have to have

like

an ethernet cable

going into the back of the home base.

The old home base that I used from Eufy was optional.

You could either have it plugged in or not plugged in.

So I just had it plugged into a wall outlet and it used Wi-Fi to communicate, which did mean that sometimes the Wi-Fi wouldn't be as perfect.

It wouldn't work as well.

So the new home base that I have, it's directly connected to the internet, which actually improves.

It's much better as a result.

I'm really glad

that I have it directly plugged in.

But what that meant is that I couldn't put it downstairs.

It had to be upstairs where my computer is, which is fine.

I just have it like sitting next to my computer upstairs.

But now I had the opposite problem.

Now when it rings upstairs, if I'm downstairs, like in the back of my house downstairs, you don't hear the doorbell.

So what I did is I took that chime.

I just unplugged it, moved it from upstairs to downstairs.

And now I just have this.

And now I have

ding

-dongs no matter where I am in my house.

So that's everything about it.

The last thing I'll say is the Chime that I have,

even though it claims that it only worked with the

old home

base,

this is the one that I've had.

It actually works with my current system too.

I don't know why they say it only works with the old home base,

but regardless, don't buy the old

one.

Okay, good.

There's a brand new Chime that I gave you a link to that you have $40

on Amazon.

I think this is it.

That works

with the E340, which is what you have and all the other things.

So that's the Chime to get.

It's a nice little add-on.

I like having, you know, the doorbell ring throughout the house.

So that's that's that tip.

So one.

Yeah.

One last thing I was going to say with this, because I don't know if you just didn't plan for people that have vinyl siding on their house or if if they just left it up to you.

So when you get this doorbell, they give you a flat mount so you can mount it on, you know, the side of your house.

They actually have a little wedge so that when you mount it, it actually will turn the camera just a little bit.

So, you know, if you can imagine you've got it next to your door, you can have it to where it'll just turn ever so slightly.

So you're it's actually looking at the person that's standing in front of your door because you can't look straight on, which is great.

I like having that wedge.

But the last problem that I had, Jeff, is we have vinyl sliding on our house, which means that I can't mount the Eufy doorbell flat on.

So, of course, I did what any good true-blooded American would do.

I went to the web, and I started looking around for it.

And I found one gentleman apparently at a site called doorbellmounts.com.

I mean, you know, why would you not go to doorbellmounts.com?

But I love this, and I actually found him through a YouTube video.

So he uses a 3D printer to create these little mounts on here that will basically fit into the vinyl siding of your house so that it is flush up against it.

Like I know you could probably cut into your vinyl sliding.

I don't want to do that.

I could use the flat mount right now that came with the doorbell, but then there's going to be space in between, you know, for water and bugs and all kinds of stuff like that.

And the doorbell, I don't think, would be affected by that.

But I just don't I don't like that.

I don't like having, you know, that little spacer there.

So this gentleman for $20 will sell a mount that he 3D prints.

And, you know, it's like you can check if you have the four inch standard vinyl or if you have four and a half standard vinyl.

Apparently, I didn't even know this.

There is a Dutch lap style siding.

Dutch lap siding.

I have no idea.

This won't fit Dutch lap style siding.

But, you know, it's so funny because it's just things like that that I never really think about.

But the idea that you could have this flush like this with this sign, you know, the siding that kind of butts out and juts out.

I mean, just bravo.

I mean, I just think that that's really great that somebody could think about that.

And I'm going to give this guy my business here.

I haven't ordered this yet because it is a holiday, but I will be doing this very soon to make sure that I have that adjusted.

Again, just things like that that I just had never thought about.

And if you do have siding on your house where, you know, the doorbell is very small, right?

So it fits in between one of those vinyl slats.

But this needs to go above and beyond a little bit.

So just wanted to make sure people point out.

And thanks to doorbellmounts.com, I'll be sending you my business here in just a moment.

You're not alone, by the way, Brett.

I had to do something custom for me at well because, as I mentioned, my doorbell is mounted on my gate.

It's a wrought iron

gate.

Yeah, your gate.

So I can't just

like screw into a wrought iron gate, right?

I actually hired a handyman to sort of put a little mount thing that it attaches to.

oh okay okay good that

much but much like you i had to find a way to mount it because the the

built-in stuff wouldn't do it but now that it's done it's it's done i never have to think about it

so

the last thing quickly we don't have to spend as much time on this because the doorbell to me

right now is exciting but we can talk about this maybe in another one is the eufy cam s3 pro now

i recall you've record you've reviewed maybe not this model but the previous model that you've had

before but now today you also have i think the eufy cam s3 pros and you seem to be very happy

with them yeah

so these are just you know regular security cameras they're wireless which is very

key because it means that you can put them up on the outside of your house and you don't have to

worry about running a cord to them or anything like that

um solar they're solar solar so let me

talk about the solar

part so they have solar panels on the top of them

the version the

version that

you got brett did it also come with an external solar panel did that come

it does okay it's like

square that you can plug in. Okay, good. And I haven't

used that yet. The one thing about the

solar panels is it depends upon where you mount them. Because at my house, you bought the kit

that has two cameras. I bought the kit that has four

cameras and

three of my four cameras are

mounted someplace that there's something over them. So like one of them is right above

my front door,

which is on a porch.

And so it gets like a tiny bit of sun, like just as the sun is coming up a day,

It will, like, for like maybe 45 minutes, it just gets a little bit of indirect sunlight.

It's

not enough, however, to keep it

powered all the time.

And

so it does mean that every couple of months, I do need to take it down,

plug it into USB-C for a few hours, charge it, and then put it back up again.

I will say that this new

version, the S3 Pro, it is much, much easier.

You just basically unscrew it.

It was unscrewed and screwed it again.

The older version was a little bit more complicated to take it off and on.

Now it's super, super, super easy.

It's right at the bottom.

Yeah, exactly.

It's just a simple little

screw like you would use for a tripod mount or something like that.

Very, very simple.

So one of my cameras, the one that I have pointing at where I park my cars on the side of my house, it's actually on the side of my house.

So it gets tons of sunlight.

I will never need to take

that one down.

It's more than enough to keep it charged 24-7.

In my backyard, I have them sort of on like a column that's in my back that's sort of on my porch.

And it's very close.

I mean, it's not completely – I mean, it's just got a little bit of an overhang from my EVE.

And as a

result,

it doesn't quite – it gets enough sunlight to sort of give it a boost, but it's not enough to give it all the power every needs.

And so every month ago, because I've had it for about four months now, maybe four or five, I still need to – I think I've charged them twice now.

So I had hoped – I had hoped that I would never need to take them down again, that the solar panels would be enough, but it's not.

Now, as

I pointed out, it comes with an

external solar panel, which is like a square.

And so what you could do is I

could mount that on my, you know, somewhere like a foot out.

It's not terribly ugly.

I mean, it's not the easiest thing in the world.

And I could have that point at the time.

And there's just a cord that runs from that to your camera.

And but it's only one cord, even though I have two cameras that are right next to each other,

one pointing one way and one pointing the other way on the two sides of a column.

I would technically have to have like two different solar panels, one for each.

So I haven't gone through the trouble of mounting them because at the end of the day, it's really not that big of a deal to get on a ladder, take it down, charge it, and put it back up again.

One day I may change my mind and decide to use the external solar panel.

So there were two reasons that I upgraded.

One reason was to have the solar panel, and it's nice, but it doesn't do everything that I hoped it would do.

The second reason I upgraded is the quality of the images.

My old version was 1080.

Well, I forget what the quality of it was, but one of the problems I had is because I

was using

it with HomeKit.

I specifically bought the Eufy Cam because it supports Apple's HomeKit standard.

Because I was thinking,

I use HomeKit all the time for my smart home stuff.

Wouldn't it be nice to be able to see my camera images from within the Apple Home app?

And it

was nice.

But what I learned over a couple of years is that that feature doesn't really matter.

Because Eufy has its own app.

And the Eufy app works

totally well.

It really does.

I can see my cameras.

I can see everything else.

The only advantage that I had of having my UFY cams as a part of the home app is that if it sensed motion, first of all, it would make a recording if it sensed motion.

But I could also use that as a home kit trigger.

So, for example, in my backyard, if my camera, if my old camera sensed motion, not only would I take a video, which it can totally do in the dark.

It's got like night sensors and stuff like that.

But what I could actually do is I could turn on the lights on my porch and the back.

And so, first of all, that's a little bit of a deterrent.

If a bad guy was back there and the lights come on, they're like, oh, what's going on?

Maybe I shouldn't be

breaking into his house.

Second of all, you can take, I mean, even though it takes very good night pictures, it

takes even better pictures if there's light.

And so I took better video.

So that was my old system.

On the new

cameras,

although they also support HomeKit, I made the decision not to use it

with HomeKit, which means

that I no longer have a

motion sensor.

And to solve that, I just bought an independent motion sensor for like 30 bucks.

And I just have that sitting back there.

So that was a simple solution.

But what I also get is Apple limits the quality of video in HomeKit.

I

see that right here.

I think it's 1080p.

1080p, whereas these are actually 4K cameras.

And the quality, I mean, 1080p is fine.

It's fine.

As you pointed out, the video doorbell has 2K,

whatever.

But I will tell you that 4K is noticeably better.

Like when I look at the

before and after videos, you can see a lot

more detail.

And again, you know, you hope that you never need it for security.

But even if I'm just seeing that my kids are in the backyard or God forbid, there's a burglar

at the house, I want to have the best quality video that I have.

So that's really, really cool.

Another advantage of the new system is that Eufy uses something called, it has an AI.

It's very rudimentary AI.

But what it will do, for example,

is you

tell it, you give it a picture, like, here's what

I look like.

Here's what my wife looks like.

Here's what my kids look like.

And then when it gives you a notification, motion detected in your side yard or motion

detected in the front yard, if it knows who the person is, it will actually say, and I

this is Jeff. And I think this is your wife or whatever. And that's actually nice because then

I could say, Oh, whatever. That's not a big deal. On the other hand,

if it's like somebody

in my

backyard that doesn't recognize, I'm like, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Nelly, who is this? And I want to

double check it. And I might want to like

take a look at the camera and see

who it is. So it's a

cool feature. I will tell you, it's not perfect. There's lots of false positive. It makes

mistakes.

It's his first, they just started this feature. It's all brand new. That's, that's whatever.

Another AI feature that's sort of cool is if you have multiple cameras, like I do,

like I have one camera pointed at one part of my backyard

and I have another camera pointed at a different part

of my porch or my backyard,

it can use AI to, after the recording has been made,

on the home base, it will stitch things together.

So imagine, for example, if there was a burglar

that started in the front of my house,

let's see, he jumps over my front fence

and gets in the front of my house,

he's gonna be picked up by the camera

in the front of my house.

And

then he walks

around to where my cars are parked

on the side of my house,

that's gonna be a different camera angle.

And then he walks around to the, my back of my house,

that's a third angle.

And I could look at each of those videos separately,

but the AI is smart enough that it has a feature

that it will actually stitch

together

different

videos.

And I gave

you an example,

if you want to just sort of share it.

This is an example.

I tried to bring it up,

but I don't think I'm going to be able to.

But we can talk through it.

Yeah.

It was just an example of, it was just me,

but like I was in one part of my backyard

and you see me sort of walking.

And then as I move out of that camera's view area

into the second

camera's view area,

it just automatically switches to the other camera.

And again, you could totally do this yourself.

You could take two videos.

You could use iMovie on your phone to stitch them together.

But I mean, why go through the trouble

if you can do that automatically?

So it's really nice.

Yeah, so it looks great.

Yeah,

not to mention the fact, quickly,

I just mentioned like the sound was picking up

as you were walking through.

And just the idea that even when you open the door,

you could hear the little squeak of your door

when you were opening.

But just that little video clip that you sent,

it really did good just tracking it i mean it almost it almost looked like it was uh like a

movie like somebody took a movie and stitched it together but that was the uv cams doing that for

you which was pretty amazing yeah

the other features though just what you would expect from

a video camera like if someone's out there you can turn notifications on or off um you can adjust the

sensitivity of notifications you know do you want it to pick up animals you know because sometimes

it's sort of fun to see like a bird that's out there or a cat that's walking through the

neighborhood, but you might not want to have that. You can turn that off and it will automatically

detect pets. It's not perfect, but it will try. And you know, if

I'm at the house and

like,

there's somebody at the front of my house, I can totally see who it is for the camera.

I especially like it if I'm away from home, you know, you're on vacation, your summer vacation,

and there's motion detected at your house. You could totally see, you know, who's there and

with the video. I mean, all the things that you would expect from a video camera system.

And I've been very happy with it.

It's not 100% perfect all the time.

Sometimes it will miss something.

I don't know why it misses the motion.

Maybe the Wi-Fi wasn't working perfectly.

One last thing that I will say, Brett, is when I first bought this four-camera set,

I actually had a problem because my base station was near the front of my house,

upstairs where my study is, as I described

before.

And so the two cameras that were in the front of my house, they had a perfect connection.

Tons of Wi-Fi, tons of bandwidth.

It was all perfect.

The two cameras in the back of my house, it just wasn't getting a really good connection

to the base

station.

And so I

actually went to Eufy and I bought a second base station and they shipped it to

me.

I forget how much I paid for that.

After they shipped it to me, before I opened the box, which then did arrive at my house,

I then realized, wait a minute, I don't have to have that second base station.

And the reason for that is there's a feature.

And as I'm sitting here in front of you, I apologize.

I didn't do my homework.

There's something that you can enable in the base that basically allows the camera.

Instead, you can tell the camera, do I want the camera to directly communicate with the base station?

And that was what

I was having a problem with.

Or do I want the camera to communicate with my Wi-Fi network and use Wi

-Fi to communicate with the camera?

Because I totally have Wi-Fi at the back

of my house.

That's not a problem because I've got these Eero units all over the place, right?

And so once I found that feature and I told the cameras, don't

try to talk directly to the base

station.

It's far away.

Talk to my Wi-Fi.

Then it totally solved my problems.

So I got that Eufy base station.

I sent it back to Eufy.

I wrote them a little note saying, I apologize.

I ordered this.

I don't need it.

And they said, no problem.

We'll give you a full refund.

And they did because I ordered that directly from Eufy instead of from Amazon.

And so I didn't need that second base station.

So if you find that one of your cameras is too far away from your base station, look for that feature to

turn on Wi-Fi and you can use

it.

And so you have two cameras right now, Brett, and that's a great place

to start.

That's where I started, too.

For many years,

I just had two cameras.

And then over time, you can

add on additional cameras because

you might decide, you know what, there's this one blind spot.

And I sort of want to know if there's somebody over there.

And that's really nice that you can add on additional cameras over time.

Yeah, yeah.

You know, the other thing quickly on this, because everybody talks about Ring and some of these others.

One of the things I got to say, I'm becoming a big fan of Yuffie, which, by the way, I think is owned by Anchor, which we're big fans of as well.

The fact that you don't have to have a subscription for this, right?

Everybody is always subscription

fatigued now.

But that base station, I know it's a little bit more pricier probably.

I mean, right now for these two cameras, I think it's like $550, something like that.

And that

came with the base station.

Exactly.

And I have the base station.

But then the fact that you don't have to have a monthly subscription.

Now, I will say Yuffie has other things you can subscribe to and some other security protection things that may or may not be beneficial.

So it's not like you don't have to have necessarily.

But I just like the idea that Eufy still has this go-to-market strategy in the sense that you can have this home base.

And then quickly, because I know we're spending a lot of time on this, but if I have that home base, one of the things that that home base does allow me to do is, and I think you've done this because you sent me a link to a hard drive.

You can put extra memory or storage space in that home base, right?

And so if you wanted to keep some recordings longer than just what I think it has 16 gigs of on-device storage, it says, but then you can expand that up to 16 terabytes by putting in extra hard drives in there.

That allows you to store additional movies, right, and recordings if you wanted to do it that way.

Yeah.

You mentioned not having to pay a subscription price, and that is one advantage of the Eufy.

But another advantage of with these other products, it uploads your videos to their web servers,

which is nice because it means you can

watch the video wherever you are.

But I'm like,

do I necessarily want

videos of my home on somebody else's web server?

I don't know.

I mean, that just makes me feel a little creepy.

Whereas for the Eufy, I directly connect wherever I am on the Internet to that home base in my house.

So there's no web service involved.

And so

it's just nice from a security standpoint.

When I used

to use the Apple HomeKit support, Apple actually has a very nice feature that they will store your videos and they promise privacy and everything else.

And I trusted Apple.

So if you use HomeKit, you can turn that on.

But again, I don't think you need to have it.

I don't think you need the HomeKit secure video option.

I don't think that you need to have something in the cloud.

Eufy will sell you that service if you want it, by the way.

They will let you pay a fee for something

in the cloud.

But

you totally don't need it because you can directly connect.

As you said,

the built

-in home base will store videos for a certain number of days or weeks.

I

purchased a,

it was an SSD.

It wasn't a hard drive.

It was an SSD drive.

I just found one on Amazon that was like 80 bucks or something like that.

And I just stuck it.

You just open up the home base.

You stick it right in there.

It's a no

brainer.

It's plug

and play.

And now my Eufy can store videos for many, from four different cameras for many, many,

many years.

Will I ever need that

feature?

Who knows?

But who knows?

I mean, maybe I'll say, hey, four months ago, what happened?

I like the fact that I can go back to that old video and

look at it again and

it's all

there and I can just stream it and, you know, watch it and stuff like

that.

Yeah, that's good.

So it's good.

You know, I will end by saying that all of these cameras, because these are wireless,

they're not going to be as good as a wired security system.

If you pay thousands of dollars or hundreds of dollars, whatever it

is to like a company,

they will install cameras.

They'll have cords connected to it.

They'll run those cords along your house.

That's going to be a more foolproof system.

And, you know, there are times that I know that somebody was outside my house, including myself, and the camera doesn't pick it up.

But I would say, I don't know percentage-wise, 90% of the time it does exactly what I want.

It

records people.

It gives me a sense of who's there.

It's nice for security.

It's nice for peace of mind.

It's nice even if there's just somebody outside my house.

And I'm like, who is that?

And so, and, you know, it used to be when I

used to

use the HomeKit stuff, I could actually use my Apple TV.

And I could actually see it on my Apple TV in the home app.

Because

I'm now using Eufy, I can

no longer use my Apple TV.

I would be great if Eufy just – Eufy, please make – if Eufy, if you're listening, and I'm sure you're not, please make an Apple TV app that shows the cameras.

That would be really nice.

But, again, it's not a big deal.

I can just look at it on my iPhone and my iPad.

So I've had

really good success with

it, and I'm really happy with it, and I'm glad that I have it.

And I'm especially glad that I have the new models of it.

And I'm glad

that you have them

too.

Last quick question here.

So you are able to share that with your family members, right?

Can they log on to a Eufy app as well, and they can –

You decide –

Do you just add them to your home group or something like that?

You decide who you give access to.

So like I immediately gave my wife access from day one.

And then more recently, my son, he asked if he could also have access to the cameras.

And I'm

like, sure.

And so I just went in

the UV app.

I gave him permission, gave it his email address.

You know, he has it

too.

Oh, perfect.

And so he has it.

But you can decide who has access to your recordings.

Yeah.

And

not just recordings,

but the live stuff too.

If anybody could open up the app and just get a live view of what's going on in my backyard,

what's going on in the front of my house.

Right,

right.

Well, Yuffie, if you are listening, I think you should become a sponsor after all of this.

I mean, we're just talking about it.

Anyway, this is a lot of fun.

Thanks for letting me ask a lot of questions on that too, Jeff, because it's been a long time.

But man, I am excited.

Like I said, I'm hoping that this will be my weekend project to get everything set up.

And it will become a Yuffie household then at this time.

Okay, lots of stuff.

Thanks as always, Jeff.

Thanks for coming in today.

Happy Fourth

of July.

Happy Fourth to everyone else listening.

Have a great weekend.

Please be safe.

And we'll talk with you next week, Jeff.

Thanks, Brad.

Happy Fourth of July weekend, everybody.

Bye-bye.