Welcome to In the News for December the 12th, 2025.

I still can't believe it's the middle of December.

I am Brett Burney from AppsinLaw.com.

And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhoneJD.

Yeah, 1212.

I like the number today.

But it's, you know, you talk, I feel like we just had Thanksgiving.

And I mean, I'm at a tie.

I know.

I'm in my Grinch tie.

I don't get to wear my tie with the Grinch on it very often,

but we're having our office holiday party today.

I know that party's coming up soon. Christmas is going to be here and New Year's and it's just

it's gone by so quickly. Just going so quickly. But the news still happens, Jeff. And so I love

the first story that you started off with today. We have both been huge fans of iFixit.com. I mean,

I remember looking at this 12, 15 years ago. I mean, it's been around for a very, very long time.

And I don't think it initially started off as like a focus on Apple devices.

I don't remember it specifically that way.

But I remember even referencing it for some of my old like gateway laptop computers and other things like that that they would do.

But it was always form the breakdown.

I mean, I almost feel like that they embody the idea of a quote breakdown when you're breaking down a device to kind of see all of the pieces and parts.

We have referenced many, many links over the years.

We've been doing our podcast, Jeff.

And today I was thrilled to see that they've now released an app.

It's not apparently not the first app that they have, but it's an app that is based on

AI.

It's like an AI fix.

It's called the they call it the fix bot as in I fix it.

Anyway, you can explain a little bit better.

Yeah.

I mean, let's talk about I fix it a little bit first.

Like you say, it's often in the news vis-a-vis Apple, not only because they talk about taking

apart Apple products, but, you know, iFixit has a deep philosophical belief that people should be

able to fix their own things, which of course at a certain level makes sense, right? The problem is

that Apple and some other companies too, in order to make consumer electronics as small and as sleek

as possible, that's often a tension with making them something that you can easily open and fix

yourself and replace batteries and replace parts. So there's a tension there. iFixit will often rate

products based upon their iFixit score. And, you know, just because it has a low iFixit score,

that doesn't mean it's a bad product. It just means that, you know, that like, you're probably

not gonna be able to fix it. I mean, my AirPods that are in my ears right now, they're so tiny

that there's no, there's nothing user serviceable on that. And, you know, when the battery dies and

after many years, they eventually do, you really can't do anything about it. So I, you know,

that's just sort of the trade-offs of, of the lives, but so that's sort of philosophical,

but they, like you say, they do this great job of taking apart products and we get to see,

I mean, not that I really understand what I'm looking at, but it's like, oh, well, I can see this is this part and this is this part.

And it's just sort of fun to see how things put together.

I even found my gateway laptop still on the website here.

Look at that on the website.

There you go.

But it's always been so good to your point because it shows you like it circles.

These are the screws you need to take out.

This is what you need to slide over here.

Like they've always done such a fantastic job of breaking it down step by step so that even dummies like me can like, oh, OK, I take out that screw.

take out that screw i unplugged this i shoved this over and it's just great i mean but i love the way

that you embodied that like that's what iFixit has always stood for that it's right it's just

it's almost that freedom because the manufacturers don't really appreciate this all the time to your

point that you made earlier that they do this but iFixit is like you know what people still want to

try to fix something and it's like we're going to make sure that they have some of the resources

that they need and they sell some great tools that they make or at least put together for them in fact

my son who's just one of these inherently handy people he has one of their sets of tools i forget

what it is it's like all these different types of parts with these special hexagonal screws and

and i'll you know and this spooge the spudger or the spooge right that's all these different things

that he has um i forget which of the which of the toolkits he has but he loves it and i see it around

the house all the time who knows he's always taken he's he's been taken part since he was like three

years old you know nice give him a toy for christmas and the next thing you know he's taken

it apart to try to figure out how it works, which is very cool and creative. Anyway, so it's a great

service. It's a great company. I'm so glad that they were around. Right. So this new app that they

have, it's, I mean, it's more than just the chat bot. It's got other parts too. It's an interface

to their guides and stuff like that. It's a free app. You can go ahead and download it. But the

thing that got the attention this week is this chat bot feature because people often talk about,

you know, all the time that you can use, you know, one of the things that AIs are pretty good at

is I'm trying to figure out how to fix something.

And so you ask ChatGPT or one of the other apps.

And instead of having to try and find the very right website

or the very correct Reddit subgroup or whatever it is,

the chatbots, the gender of AI does a pretty good job

of going through all that and saying,

here's the steps I think that you need to do.

And it's not always 100% correct,

just like with any AI thing, but it often is.

And so you can do that with the current chatbots.

from other companies.

But what iFixit has done is they are using,

I don't know specifically which engines they're using,

if it's OpenAI or Gemini or one of the others,

but they are mixing with it

its own corpus of information

because they have all of their repair guides

they've been doing for 20 plus years.

They have all of their forums

where all of these incredible tinkerers

are talking about how they fix things

and figuring things out.

And by doing that,

they now have this version of an AI

that you can ask it,

you know, just type in like you would do for any of the other AI agents.

How do I fix this?

And they will give you these step by step.

And I did a couple of certain, you know, sample ones last night.

You know, my doorknob has gotten very, you know, rinkety and stuff like that.

It's not, you know, it needs to be tightened up.

What can I do?

And they have, oh, well, that could be this.

And it's often this.

And one of the most common appears is this.

But it's also got a cool thing that I can totally see myself using in the future.

And again, people do this with the current ones, too, that you just take a picture of something.

So it's some part.

It's like, what is this?

Here's my picture of it.

What is this?

What's going on?

It's making some noise or this part's not working.

And I did some samples last night

and it's like, it looked really, really useful.

So, and so this is something that AI is inherently good at.

Plus you take the information that iFixit

has amassed over the decades.

I mean, I think this is a perfect,

incredibly useful version of AI.

So again, I don't fix things a lot.

Usually if something's broken in my house, like for example, that doorknob, that's actually a real thing that broke in my house.

And my wife and I asked my son if he would fix it.

And of course, he just has some intuitive knowledge.

You have a built-in fix bot right there.

I have a built-in handyman, fortunately.

But if I didn't have him around or when he's not going to be with us, I might be using the chatbot.

So anyone out there, we all need to fix things from time to time.

I would absolutely recommend that you download this app just to have it as a tool.

And if it doesn't help, it doesn't help.

Like the next time you need to fix something is like, how do I fix this thing?

It could be car parts.

It could be appliances.

It could be lawnmowers.

Yeah.

All sorts of things.

Just the sort of things that you might likely, why is this thing not working?

What a great resource.

Now, right now the app is completely free.

You can download it for free.

I don't know if there's any limitations on it.

Ben Lovejoy here at nine to five.

Max says that it is free now.

And if you go to the site, there is going to be a paid version,

but it's not available yet in fact on the site it says coming soon at least as of today when we are

recording this um i don't know what they're going to be providing in the additional option okay when

i saw ben lovejoy's article he has that screenshot that you just showed that said come soon when i

looked at the ifixit website i actually i can't i can't find i'm sure it's on the website somewhere

i just couldn't find it and it's certainly not in the app right now but one of the things it has a

couple things that looks like one of them is going to be looking at it step-by-step voice guides and

my assumption oh oh there you go you found it okay i didn't yeah it is still right right and it does

say step-by-step voice guides coming soon so my assumption is like i'm sitting there fixing

something and i just want to have my iphone on the side telling me out loud step-by-step first do this

now do this now do this right so that i don't have to be sitting there staring at it i can be working

on making that's my imagination as to what it has um so i think you're right yeah in this little

video there's one little scene here where the guy's like under the car and he's like you know fixing

or changing out the oil filter and of course you know his hands are all dirty it's like he can't

interact with his phone so he's using it so you're right okay so that's probably what they're doing

but right now it is still free you might as well get it and download it and then jeff let me ask

you i think when i downloaded it you have to create an account right on this if you don't

already have an ifix that account but you have to give him an email address and i just gave it

and and that's all it is i gave him like like my yahoo email address that i sort of use for

vendors and stuff because I don't use it for my real mail. And all it did was say, we've sent a

code to your email. What was that code? I gave it to him. I didn't even give him a password. I just

gave him an email address. And so now I have quote unquote an account. So yes, you do need to give

them something, some email address, but it's very easy. I just want to come back and let people know

I did. I was correct. Although this is the spooger or the spudger. And I know if you've never taken

apart an electronic device, you may be thinking that I've lost my mind, but this is an actual

tool. Am I right? I mean, look, it's got 4.9 stars here, but because here's the thing,

if you haven't taken apart some kind of an appliance within the last decade or so,

there's a lot of glue that's involved in this, right? There's a lot of these things,

and I say glue, it's like really heavy adhesives. And so these, I call them spudgers or spudgers,

And they are really meant to get in between whatever has been in hair together and separate that adhesive.

So I just wanted to make sure that people knew I wasn't sort of making something up there on that.

And iFixit is the best place to get them.

Well, let's keep talking about AI.

But this time, let's go from iFixit to Apple.

And I got to tell you, this is a great story.

I like this.

I feel like the general news media has fallen in two camps.

One is Apple has lost the AI race and they're never going to be able to recover.

And the other side, maybe I'm sort of more on the other side here, is, you know, Apple has already been doing AI for so long.

It doesn't look like what ChatGPT does and Gemini and Claude and all these other things that are taking the headlines.

But there's a lot of AI that's already baked into Apple devices.

And I like this article that you linked to today from Barron's here.

Apple may actually be winning the AI race.

And Adam Levine here puts it as Apple is running an AI marathon on this.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, his theory is slow and steady wins the race, right?

It's the traditional tortoise versus hare story that has been around forever.

I he may be right. I mean, this is just my opinion.

You know, I have everybody has a right to an opinion, right?

I he may be right. And I actually think in the end, he probably will be right.

I also think it's true that Apple has obviously had some stumbles.

I mean, we know that they do because they a year ago, they ran a commercial that they've never shipped.

You know, you don't run a commercial for something unless you think that you're gonna be able to do it.

So there's there's no doubt it is objectively true that Apple is not where they expected to be for A.I.

I do at the same time, however, you know, the people that write stories in the news and we report on them every week.

So maybe we're part of the problem, too.

But like they always want to have a race and who's winning and all that sort of stuff.

And the reality is it's not it's not simple as black and white.

You know, things are what they are.

And yes, other people have been.

And this is one of the things he talks about in this article is some other companies have the whiz bang.

We have the new version of A.I.

We have our 5.0.

We have our just, you know, open A.I.

just came out with 5.1, 5.1 like a month ago. And now they have 5.2 already, which they say that

they brought out a little bit sooner than otherwise, because Gemini just came out with

its new version. And so there's just such the race back and forth and back and forth.

But I do think that there's something to be said for sitting back, letting other body fight it out.

And maybe it means that Apple has to license. I mean, one of the rumors right now is that Apple

is licensing Gemini's AI technology to use for Siri in the future. And in fact, they just hired

somebody that used to be the head of Gemini AI, which gives that rumor some credibility.

But maybe they just need to make sure that it's used appropriately.

This iFixit story we just talked about, yes, iFixit has a chatbot, but iFixit did not develop

their own genre of AI.

All they did was they took the technology other people did and they said, here's one

very real good application of it, fixing things.

And so, and Apple, likewise, could be taking what turns out to be the right approach by letting everybody fight it out on today, I've got the best gender of AI.

Now, tomorrow, I've got the best one.

Just, you know, sit in the background, let other people fight that out and focus on how can we can actually make this usable.

Now, they still need to do it.

And, you know, we always say next year is the next big thing.

I mean, a year ago, Brett, when we were talking about what we expected for 2025, we all expected, me, one of them, that Apple was going to come out with some improved version of the HomePod that would have a screen on it and everything else.

And, you know, that product a year later still has not shipped, even though the rumors are that they've been working on it.

So, I mean, who knows? But even though I may be wrong, the prediction is that in 2026, Apple is going to finally, finally take that step forward with AI in sort of a real way of like, here's our, and the big rumors are it's going to be a new version of Siri that will integrate it.

So we'll see. But anyway, so, you know, I,

at the same time that Apple can't be a hundred percent happy with where they

are with AI, maybe in the long run,

they'll end up being in the right place.

That's certainly my hope because I just want my technology to use it

appropriately and to be useful. I just want things that are useful.

That's all I care about. I don't care what the engine is.

Right. Right. I like the way that Adam starts off this article.

Apple has emerged from the AI doghouse because no matter what you think,

which side you're on this AI debate with Apple,

He goes, the stock hit an all-time high this past week after surging 39% since August 1st.

So if they're not doing AI, they're doing something right in here.

And this is where I got this from.

He goes, while most of the big tech is sprinting to an AI future, Apple is running a marathon.

Only time will tell who was right.

I just thought it was a good balance from a lot of the articles, just like to the points we were just making that have been coming out on this.

So while Apple may be running an AI marathon, if you're interested in running a physical marathon, you might want to consider Apple Fitness Plus, something that you and I have talked about.

I go ups and downs.

Like there are some seasons during the year where I'm in Apple Fitness once a day, maybe twice a day sometimes, because there are just so many great options there from the yoga, from the core workouts, from the strength workouts.

I love Apple Fitness Plus.

Now, both you and I get this as part of our Apple One subscription.

And so my whole family actually uses it.

But, you know, we're in the United States, so it's been available to us.

Well, I liked how you leaked today that Apple is announcing they are expanding into Chile,

Hong Kong, India, Japan, the Netherlands, Singapore, Taiwan, and more, which I just think

is fantastic because I want to see this service continue to grow.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

And the way that they're doing isn't interesting.

Just coming to that in a second.

But on Apple TV Plus, you know, on Fitness Plus, I've used different aspects over the years.

And, you know, I'll go through time periods where I use it a lot and I don't.

For a long time, I was using it on the treadmill.

And then I decided, you know what?

I sort of prefer to listen to audio books when I'm on the treadmill because I like the stories.

And so now I've been doing that for the last year or so.

But lately, I've been using them a lot for the strength training like you're talking about.

I have like some, you know, dumbbell type things.

And it's good because you don't want to do the same thing every time.

And so and I know there's other services that do this, too, but but they do a great when they have really good trainers.

And, you know, every workout is a little different.

They're doing different things.

Some of them end up being a little too hard for me, but some of them like I can really do this.

And and they use the Apple Music.

And so it's different themes.

I did one just just two nights ago that was it was the band Oasis.

It's like, you know, we're today's episode.

We're doing all songs from Oasis.

So they were all songs from like the 90s and stuff that I knew all the words to.

and like i'm there by myself so i'm singing out loud exactly so it's like it's just something

interesting and fun and um and you get like your little awards with your circles and stuff oh yeah

it just hits so i want apple to continue with fitness plus i i really enjoy what they're doing

they're beautiful by the way incredibly beautifully filmed and stuff like that the video is perfect

looks wonderful on my big screen but anyway so what they're doing now is i think they're like

doubling right because i forget how many countries they had before they've got 28 new ones but they

I think he said there are 49 countries now can access all of the workout types.

And I mean, how many countries are in the world?

That's, that's gotta be a lot of them.

Like 160.

They're getting there.

But one of the interesting things is, you know, they're all filmed in LA by all of their, their, their 20 something instructors speak English.

But what they're doing is they are using, you know, some form of AI, speaking of AI to trans, to, to dub them so that when you're listening, I mean, they have

subtitles. And if you want subtitles, you can use that. I usually have subtitles off. And in fact,

some of the times when I'm working out, I'm not even looking at the screen because you're like,

you're based up another direction. I'm just listening to it. But they are dubbing it in

Spanish, German, and Japanese. And they are using generative AI, presumably, to create a voice that

is based on the actual instructor's real voice. And there's a video, we won't play it while we're

doing, but if you look in the Apple press release, that's the one right there. If you're looking at

on the screen, you can click that and you can hear one of their instructors speaking, presumably in

Spanish, even though he doesn't speak Spanish. And the idea is it sort of sounds like his voice.

And obviously they get permission from their instructors. I mean, they're paying them to do

this. I think it's an appropriate use of, you know, generative AI. It's not like one of these

stories in the news where they take an actor that's long dead and make it seem like they're

staying something else or one of those types of things. So I think that's nice. I mean, if you're

going to have a voice and it's going to be dubbed, you know, it makes sense to have something that

would be similar to the voice of the original person. And although they have a couple of languages

they're doing now, you know, but for the resources in theory, you could have it translated into every

possible language. So I think it's, I think it's a really nice use. And so hopefully it will broaden

the appeal of the product and make more people use it and make Apple want to continue to, to,

to push it forward. We are burying, I think the most important part here,

you can pick your different music genres,

just like kind of like we were talking about.

They've had like Latin grooves, pure dance, the throwback hits.

I do that a lot, but they have added a new genre this time.

K-pop.

You can get your K-pop fix now going into Apple fitness.

These are typically what I see.

This is like, you can do filters.

Like if I do a strength workout,

I like to go in and you can filter it down to a specific coach,

to a specific timeframe, which I always do.

Cause if I got 20 minutes, 30 minutes.

You want upper body, lower body.

Exactly.

and then you could say i want this kind of music so now thank goodness along with the top country

you can have k-pop on there as well i was gonna say that i don't know any k-pop songs but i guess

i mean years ago that that gangnam style was that does that count as k-pop i don't know well okay

if you okay i've had i have a daughter that was in k-pop very much and if i mention

gingham style i i get a very fierce look jeff so i can't in all good conscience say that that

counts as k-pop but that did start sort of the k-pop awareness i'll put it that way i know there's a

show on apple tv that either there's bts right yeah i don't know whatever but hey you know what

having said that i will tell you that with those fitness workouts you know you know how it's always

fun to be exposed to different music types. I don't pick music genres when I use fitness plus.

I don't either. Right. Sometimes I will be listening to, you know, Latin songs, for example,

which are, you know, I, it's not something I would normally listen to. Right. But I'll hear

these songs and I'm like, wow, these are great. Like they're getting me in the mood. And it's

a genre that I would normally never listen to. So I actually like, so, you know, I'm sure that

sometime soon I will be listening to some K-pop songs as I work out. And I may discover that I am

a new bts fan or something like who knows i have no straight kids that's that that was that was her

favorite straight kids yes i actually went to a straight kids concert with my daughter and about

30 000 other rabid straight kid k-pop fans that is quite an experience jeff okay but quickly to your

point there i do the same thing i don't pick a music genre but sometimes so when they switch to

a new song they briefly show the name of the song up in like the top right corner which i like and

I usually will try to look at it and see, but at the end of your workout, they actually have a list

of all of the songs that they play during that workout. And it's a direct link into Apple music.

So I don't know. I don't, I don't do it all that often, but if there's one song that I really enjoy,

I will go through and do that. And I can add it to my library, something like that. And I just,

I like the fact that they had that crossover there. I have a playlist in my Apple music called,

called new and good. It's just sort of a generic name, but whenever I sort of come across a song,

whether I, you know, and I've done it for Apple for a fitness plus before it's like, Oh, that was

a cool song that we had. I'm just, I'm going to use that link. I'm just going to throw it in that

playlist. And then like every couple of months, I'll just listen to the playlist. And it's this

list of, you know, it's just songs I've heard various parts of my life. I use Shazam for this

a lot too, that I'll just throw songs in there. And then it's like, Oh yeah, that was a cool song

that I heard, you know, that they played during the closing credits of the TV show or that I heard

in Fitness Plus, or maybe it's a song that I know a lot that I just haven't listened to, like since

the 80s or 90s. I'm like, oh yeah, that's such a great song. I'm going to put that in there.

So yeah, I love that feature. So quickly, Apple Fitness Plus, I mentioned both you and I, Jeff,

we get it as part of our Apple One subscription, which I think I'm up to paying $38, $39 a month.

Totally worth it because I get all the other things, but I just want to let people know

you can try it for free. It is $10. It's $9.99 a month, or you can pay $80 for the entire year.

But I also always like to point this out. If you get a new Apple Watch or a new iPhone or a new

iPad or a new Apple TV this season, you typically will see a little button in, I see it in my

settings app, Jeff, when I go in, like if I get a new Apple Watch and it says, why don't you

activate your three months of Apple Fitness Plus? Or sometimes I feel like this could be Apple

music like you can get three months free of apple music or apple fitness plus so i'm just throwing

it out there folks if you get a new apple watch this holiday season you probably can get access

to three months for free of apple fitness plus obviously apple's doing this because they want to

hook you as a subscriber but it's a great way to try something out and you know experience the full

experience um as opposed to you know just trying it for maybe seven days or something like that so

i always like to point that out to folks on there let's keep going on music you mentioned sazam

This is an app I've been using for a long time.

I can't remember how long ago that it was such a good app that Apple purchased it.

Do you remember when that was?

I mean, it had to be, I'm going to guess like eight years ago or maybe even something, maybe even a little bit more.

Shazam is this fantastic app.

I mean, before we even talking about AI and Gen AI, this was an app that would basically listen to whatever music is playing when you turned it on and activated it.

and it could potentially tell you what song it was.

And I used to use this all the time watching a television show.

I used to, if I walked into a store or a restaurant

and there was a great music being played,

I'm like, what is that?

I like that song and I feel good about it.

And I use Shazam so often

that I actually have it as a widget on my lock screen, Jeff,

so that I can quickly activate it.

I was so happy to see this story today

You talked about Shazam's, well, there's a new feature on here, but you know what?

Let's start with this auto Shazam because this is something that's been in there for a long time.

And I didn't even know that there was an auto Shazam function in the Shazam app.

I always just turn it on when I need to.

But this is a great post from iDownload blog where they're talking about how to use continuous background music recognition on the iPhone.

I love this.

Me too.

um let me start by saying you were talking about how the shazam you know the early days shazam

apparently was founded a long time ago in 1999 it started in the uk in 2002 and the way you would

use it at the time is you would text a number um and you could go from your mobile phone to get

music recognized wow and then they expanded into at&t in 2004 and then of course the bit the shazam

really came to be a big thing when the iphone came out because that's when people started to

use it on the app store it's one of the very first apps and so it was such a big iphone app and then

apple finally purchased it to answer the question you have at the very end of 2019 so it was uh

2019 2017 excuse me oh okay yeah so since since 2018 it has been owned by apple so how many years

is that now seven years that it's been under apple stewardship yeah and i will tell you that the folks

that are uh in charge of shazam have been doing a nice job with it developing it you know making it

better and stuff. This auto feature that you were talking about is one of these things. It's auto

Shazam has been around for a long time, but people don't know about it. I didn't know about it. I

heard about it recently. I didn't either. Where the idea is we all know like you're in a bar or

you're watching a TV show and you hear some song. You're like, what is that song? And so like you

said, you use your widget or whatever, you trigger Shazam and it takes a few seconds and it listens.

But if you know that you're going to be listening, there's going to be songs that you're going to

want to know what they are like maybe i'm watching a tv show that i know always has great great songs

in it you can open up the shazam app and you can turn on auto shazam and it will just listen in

the background i think you can even let the the app can go to the background um and it will just

keep listening to things and it will just create a list of all and i think it sends you notifications

as it as it detects new songs and so you can just have this this running list of songs yeah there's

a good picture of it and so then you're like oh yeah what was the song that they used you know

halfway through the show when the person was driving through the hills. Oh, that's such and

such a song. And then you can, if you like it, add it to your playlist, like my new and good

playlist that I mentioned before. And so it's a cool feature, but it's something that, you know,

somebody mentioned to me recently and I didn't even, maybe I'd heard it was there, but I forgot

it was there. But you need to go through the effort of opening the Shazam app on your iPhone

and turning on auto Shazam to have it running. And then I don't, I forget for how long it runs

in the background so it's a cool feature yeah i like the way in this article you don't even have

to actually open i mean you can't open the app but if you hold yeah there's that little secondary

menu that comes because i love that i love that capability uh on there that it could do it and

then it'll just stay on and then as each song comes up you can see this little screenshot here

it'll just keep sending you notifications as long as you have notifications turned on for shazam

it'll just pop up with like the new song i can't wait until i can find a time to use this i just i

I just think this is so cool.

And, you know, just quickly going back to that,

even though Apple has now owned Shazam for seven, eight years,

I feel like that they haven't blatantly Appleized it too much.

Like they've kind of left it alone a whole lot in there,

which I just appreciate.

I mean, I know they made some slight changes,

but the point that I'm making here is that if you go into the Shazam app

and you go to the library, I use Spotify a little bit more,

quite a bit more probably than Apple Music, right?

So when I I've told Shazam that or somehow I have a setting in here. So when it recognizes a song, it offers to open that song in Spotify for me as opposed to directly into Apple Music.

And I noticed if I go into my library here in the Shazam app, it actually says you can listen to it on Apple Music. That's the first one. But it'll let you jump to Amazon Music, Spotify, YouTube Music or YouTube. Or you can even still buy on iTunes there if you want to.

But I just I really appreciate the fact that Apple has kind of left this alone enough now that I can use the fantasticness of Shazam to do with the apps that I want to use or with the music services that I want to use it with.

And I just wanted to give credit to that because I just think it's really cool that and it is fun to kind of go through and look at all of the songs that I've recognized, you know, over the over over all the time.

And I just I just think it's great.

I can't say enough good things about Shazam.

In fact, you said something else about Shazam here today.

There's a new, actually a new feature.

While the auto Shazam feature is not new, there is a new feature that it looks like you have to go to Shazam.com, like a website, in order to get this, right?

Right.

You go to the Shazam website, and they have, here are the songs that are popular, that people are, you know, what songs are people thinking about?

You know, one way you see that is by, you know, the old days would be the top radio list and stuff like that.

But this is interesting. Like if enough people around the world or in the country, because there's country lists too, are hearing a song and saying to themselves, hey, what's that song? It makes you think that that's a good song, right? Because that's probably nobody's going to do that for a bad song. And so I think it's pretty cool to see their lists of what are their viral charts? What are people looking at? And as you're showing here, they have their global top 200 chart. There's one for the United States, stuff like that.

But what's cool is when you click on any song and you've got one on your screen right now for people watching, not only do they show the song, like this is a song that you happen to show, Turn the Lights Off by an artist named Kato.

I haven't heard of this artist or the song.

But what's interesting is on the right side, there's like this, it's like a bar like that shows the entire length of the song.

And then you'll see that for this particular song, right around the 50 to 55 second part, that's when most people, you can see this huge spike for this one, right?

That's when most people were Shazamming, which is interesting to me because like if you if it's early in the song, then it's like, you know, the song starts and people like, oh, yeah, what's this song?

But for this one, if it's not until about 50 seconds in that people are saying, oh, I wonder what this song is.

It just sort of tells you something about the song, about that portion of the song.

I don't know everything about what it means, but it's an interesting statistic.

And what I love is Shazam has this data.

I love that they're exposing it because it's just interesting.

It's just another little factor to think about.

So I don't know that I've ever visited Shazam.com.

Me either.

And there's a lot of fantastic information here.

Like, I mean, obviously they want you to link into Apple Music because Apple owns Shazam and, you know, that's that's fine.

But you can scroll down here.

First, there's the lyrics on here.

You got concerts coming up, which I can understand.

Right. They're doing a tie in on something like that.

But I just like they have all the song details.

And this looks like some of the features of a song that probably Shazam maybe measures, like the melodicness, the acousticness, the valance, the danceability.

I don't know.

I mean, because I know that there are some functions, you know, or some parameters here that obviously Shazam is, you know, programs in so that they can recognize some of these songs.

Anyway, and then it has the release date.

I just I like this.

I've just never really gone to Shazam.com and I think I'm missing out, including going to the app.

Good stuff on that.

iOS 26 brought a lot of new things, but one of two areas, Jeff, that I feel like I'm still struggling a little bit to get used to.

The changes they made to the way phone calls come in and the changes they made for messages coming in.

More specifically, for unknown callers or unknown texters.

Now, I remember we talked about this a long time ago.

We were excited about it because it's going to cut down on some of the spam text messages.

It has.

And I think you said in your post today that it has for you as well.

I got to tell you, I'm struggling.

I actually went and turned it off for my phone calls because it was like making people say their name before it actually rung to me.

But then I didn't see who it was before I answered the phone.

And I'm like, hi.

And I'm like, who is this?

And like, well, I already told you who this is.

Anyway, this was a message, a post today you did about the new messages feature that there's a setting that may kind of help.

You know, I'm going to try it because I think it's going to make it less confusing for me.

Yeah.

So first of all, it used to really drive me nuts that one of the things that I always get alerts for and they're just they're just tapping my wrist.

It's not noise.

But when I get text messages because I get them, you know, I guess infrequently enough that they're often important and they're often for people that matter to me.

you know, my family members or something like that.

So, and they're short enough

that I can look at them quickly.

So I want to see all my new alerts,

but it's so annoying when I'm trying to get some work done

and I have, I get a tap on my wrist and I look

and it's somebody trying to sell me something

or it's some political thing, you know,

please, I'm a candidate in, you know, Alaska.

Would you please send me some money?

I'm like, seriously, do not bother me.

I don't want to see you.

And so I love that the new feature in iMessages

will filter those.

You still get them.

They're still there, but you don't get notifications

if you have this turned on.

And there's this little indicator at the top right

that you're circling on your screen

that every once in a blue moon, I'm like,

oh yeah, there's three things in there.

Let me tap and see what they are.

And they're all things I don't care about.

And I'll delete them and sometimes tell it,

block this and stuff.

But they didn't bother me when they came in,

which is fantastic.

So this is a cool new feature.

What I did not know is that you can adjust how it works.

And so if you go to the settings app

on your iPhone or your iPad, whatever,

and then you go to the apps

and then you select messages,

you'll see all these features, all these things you could turn on and off that I did not even

really pay attention to them before. The one that's recommended in this post is, you know,

first of all, there is the feature to filter spam, which I really like. You want to, I think that

you should turn that on. And then there is another feature that is called, let's see, I just saw it.

It's allowed notifications. So, you know, do you want to turn on or off unknown senders? I have

that turned on and then what do you want to allow notifications for even if it's an unknown center

and um if you tap there's actually that's not the one that's the sensor what's what's the one that's

called uh they just had it described in this post it is called allow notifications here you go allow

notifications right i see it here you can toggle these four different types of what do you want to

be notified of and one of them you can allow is time sensitive and that works for me because

sometimes I will be logging into like a website, like a bank website. And like that bank is not

somebody that I consider a friend. I don't have them in my contacts or anything like that. But

when they say, here's the six digit code, I want to see that immediately. Right. And so I do want

that to come through. And the reason it comes through, even though normally it would be filtered

out as potentially spam or somebody that's not in my contacts is because I have time sensitive

turned on and that is turned on by default. Now, having said that, if you don't want to turn it on,

you can turn it off. But the other features that you can turn on and off are personal,

transaction, and promotions. I don't really want promotions. That's the very definition of what I

don't want to come through. Transactions, like an update on your order or something like that,

you can decide whether you want that or not. But the personal one is interesting because,

and this is what the author of this article is recommending that you turn on, even though it's

turned off by default. If Messages thinks that a text message is not from a company trying to sell

something, not from a political candidate. You know, if it seems to be from a person,

it's just not a person that you would seem to know. They're not in your contacts. Do you want

that to come through? No. And to be fair, I will sometimes get spam messages from people pretending

like they know me. Oh, hey, Jeff, you know, we're wouldn't use often use my name. It would just say,

you know, hey, you know, we have a meeting coming up or because they're just trying to get your

attention and they're trying to trick you into responding and stuff like that. So but it could

also be someone, you know, my, my, my cell phone number is sort of out there in a number of places.

And so it could be like a client trying to text me urgently because they want me to see something

right away or something else. And I would not want that. I mean, it just, it happened to me literally

just yesterday, Brett, somebody who was trying to do, we, we got new homeowners insurance and

somebody was contacting me about doing inspection from my house. I didn't know this woman from Adam.

And so it got filtered into my whatever, and I didn't see it. But then, then I was like, oh,

actually that is a real person. I just don't know her at all. And so I do want her to come,

you know, schedule a time for the inspection for my home, for my insurance. And so that's something,

you know, now that I have turned this personal on as the post recognized, something like that

would come through. So I'm going to try it and decide if I like it or not. But my, the real tip

for today, this could be one of our tips is take a look at this and know that you have these options

and decide what you want to have turned on or off based upon what notifications you do or don't want.

I do prefer this new world where I get less aggravating notifications.

I do too.

But you don't want it to go too far to the other extreme.

So you need to find the balance that's appropriate for you.

That's the key.

I mean, you know, I was complaining at the top of the segment here, but it's like I just I haven't had the time to find that proper balance there.

And I'm thrilled that you said this today because I'm going to try this.

I went.

So you go to settings, you go to apps and you go to messages.

And then it's the allow notifications menu.

This is what Jeff has been talking about.

and you'll find those four options there.

I turned on time-sensitive, personal, and transactions.

But like you said, I'm going to leave promotions turned off on there.

And I'm going to play with that and see how it goes.

And again, it's not like any of this automatically gets deleted.

I think it's important for us to point that out, Jeff.

You can go into the Messages app,

and there's a little filter icon in the top right corner of the Messages app.

And you can tap onto that,

and you can see if there's unknown senders or other things.

Like all the messages are going to be there.

It's just a matter of whether you want it to be notifying you, which I think is important.

One more thing.

The reason I started when I was talking to you is this allow notifications feature.

I'm just now noticing that when I was talking to you, I was looking at it on my iPad.

And of course, my iPad doesn't have a cell phone chicken.

It doesn't directly get the text messages.

It just sort of carries them over from my iPhone.

Yeah, right.

Allow notification screen is different on an iPad than on an iPhone.

The one that we were just talking about is on the iPhone.

That's the one that has, you know, the time sensitive, the personal, all those things.

I got that.

Right.

It's different on the iPad, which of course makes sense because the iPad is just showing

me the ones that I was able to get from my iPhone.

Although you still have some choices there like time sensitive.

So anyway, keep just the clarity.

The one that we've been talking about for these last five minutes is the one on the iPhone,

which makes sense because that's the place that you are directly getting your text messages.

We like Anker Batteries, A-N-K-E-R.

And this has been a company that we followed for a long time.

In fact, I remember seeing you maybe eight months ago or so at the ABA Tech Show.

You had the Anker Laptop Power Bank, and you have liked this.

I've seen a couple of others in the wild.

In fact, it powered not just, I think it powered my laptop, your iPhone, and somebody else's iPhone that was with us at the time.

Yeah.

A quick one on this.

One of my brothers had a birthday recently and I said, I think I'm going to get you this for your birthday because it's so useful.

This anchor laptop power back.

He's like, oh, OK, it is useful.

I actually already own two of them.

So I'm like, OK, well, I'm going to get you something for your birthday.

So, yeah, that's great.

And I like this.

I haven't pulled the trigger on that.

So maybe you can you can give that one to me if you've already got it for your brother.

But I do like this.

It is still a little bulky.

I mean, it's heavy now for good reason.

I'm not that's not a complaint.

It's just, you know, I got to think about like, what am I carrying?

But, you know, all of us have some of those little tiny batteries.

But, hey, you know, is that going to charge your iPhone for, you know, 40% or whatever the case may be?

I like this thing.

I know it's been going on sale.

But, boy, if you wanted to raise the stakes a little bit, here's the review you leaked to today.

The Anker Solix C1000 Gen 2.

I pretty much call this a generator, although I guess it's a rechargeable generator.

But I love this from Julie Clover today at Mac Rumors.

I mean, this thing, this is a beast.

I mean, I don't know if I could carry this when I travel on the plane, but man, it would

be great to have.

You're not going to stick this in your pocket.

That's for sure.

It's a ton of power.

Now, I did not mention this in my review, but I've actually seen one of these in the

wild because my brother-in-law bought me this recently and I saw it.

And let me back up.

I was recently listening to our friend, David Sparks, and he was mentioning that he tells

people that you want to have batteries because batteries are always useful in your life.

Of course.

But he says, you pretty much goes, his recommendation is only buy them from Apple or Anchor because you can't trust it for everybody else.

And that's a little restrictive.

There are other companies that make reputable ones too.

But he was saying it because Amazon, you know, Amazon has their, what is it called?

Amazon Basics line.

And they recently had to recall some of the batteries.

And he's like, this just shows you, you want to go.

John Gruber reported on something like this too, right?

There you go.

And we're believers.

You got to stay with those name brands.

Yeah.

Stay with the name brands.

But the Anchor ones are good.

So when I saw that my brother-in-law purchased this the other day, I'm like, first of all, this thing is a beast, but it is so useful.

It's got like real plugs.

Plus you can plug in USB-C.

It's got the nice display on it.

And you could use this like during a power outage of your house.

Not only could you keep all of your iPhones charged, but like you could plug in a refrigerator.

I mean, it's that powerful.

It can handle big appliances.

And the cost of it, in fact, it's on sale on Amazon.

What is it right now?

$370 something.

I think it's normally more expensive.

So, I mean, this is an expensive thing, but, you know, whether it's for camping or for, you know, power outages or whatever it is, I don't own one.

But when I saw that my brother-in-law bought it, I'm like, I feel like I want one.

You know, I don't know exactly what I would do with it, but like just to have that much power.

So, so anyway, it's always, it's all about the justification.

You are in New Orleans.

You are prone to hurricanes.

Like, have you not learned your lesson?

You must get one of these things.

And so must I.

I mean, we have a lot of snow here today.

You never know what's going to happen with the power.

We never know.

I could be a master at justifying this.

In the show, we haven't talked about some of the shows coming up,

but we haven't been talking about it, but somebody else has.

The American Film Institute.

Oh, my goodness.

I saw this post from somebody else.

Apparently, every year they announce the outstanding motion pictures of the year,

which I would assume coming from the American Film Institute.

But they also have outstanding television programs.

And as you mentioned, Apple did pretty good in this list.

Yeah.

I mean, how many places are there TV shows?

There's network TVs, there's Netflix, there's Amazon, there's all these different services.

We all know that Apple TV is a smaller service, both in terms of the number of subscribers and the number of shows.

And yet I have a bias because I like a lot of Apple things, but I also have a bias because the Apple TV shows tend to be really good quality.

We always say it's what HBO used to be back in the day and every once in a while still is, but it's their good shows.

And so for three out of 10 shows, for 30 percent of this list to be Apple TV shows, you know, I think that that's that's something for Apple to be proud of because AFI is.

And, you know, frankly, there are shows not on this list that I might want to include, like Slow Horses and stuff like that.

But the ones that they do have Severance.

I mean, we don't have to you know what we say about Severance is, you know, such a fantastic show.

The studio is particularly loved by insiders, but I thought was incredibly fun, incredibly well crafted.

And Pluribus, I know you haven't started yet, Brett, but I just, you know, Pluribus comes out on Friday, but it technically comes out late on Thursday.

And last night was one of those nights that I'm like, you know what?

It's about 11 o'clock before I go to bed.

I'm going to stay up that one last hour.

So I have now watched today's episode, episode seven, which I don't know spoilers, but it's just beautifully shot.

And it's just such a wonderful.

I love I got a service.

And what's interesting is I can't part of me likes the fact that I'm watching it week to week because it means that I think about the episode.

I listen to podcasts about the episode.

There's a really good official podcast.

And there's some I wish I listened to the decoding TV unofficial podcast about the episode.

And and there are others YouTube clips about it.

But then some of these shows like the episode ends and I really want to watch the next episode.

Right. Like a good show does that.

And so whenever you do get to it, the advantage that you'll have is if you decide you want to watch two back to back or even binge even more, you will have that option.

And I will tell you after last night's episode, the way it ended, I'm like, I really want to know.

I got to wait another week to find out what happens next.

So anyway, kudos to Apple for that.

So this is the AFI list of good shows.

Let me just also mention that some of the other shows in that list, not Apple, but like, you know, The Diplomat on Netflix.

It's such a good show starring Perry Russell.

Oh, it is so good.

There's a couple of seasons.

my wife and it's one of my all-time favorites i love carol so i love that show i love the co-star

is the guy i forget his name he was on that amazon show years ago called the man from high castle he

started it oh it's such a good show so that's a good one uh i also mentioned my post today and

or and disney i mean i'm a star wars fan and and or is perhaps the best um star wars show you know

really oh wow time recently it's so good i loved and or in fact the the lead the lead actor in that

recently got a um was like a golden globe nomination and they said it's the first time

a star wars actor has gotten a golden globe nomination since alec wow like that goes back

a long time and i'll finally say the pit on hbo oh such a great show i haven't seen that

it's like my daughter's in nursing school she loves that oh well then you would love it if you liked

er back in the days when er was like the early days of er when it was really good you know with

the young george cloney and and of course and everybody else the pit is so good so good so this

is a great and then there's shows on this list that i haven't watched like uh death by lightning

i've heard about but i haven't seen it low down um i haven't watched some of these shows but now

i'm intrigued to take a look at them i have heard of adolescence i haven't seen that so okay anyway

that was that list you're going to go on to uh you mentioned golden globes yeah the golden globe

apple tv keeps knocking them down even here and this one does have slow horses along with

zero bliss apparently sometimes people uh laugh at the golden globes because you know that they're

sometimes there's rumors that you know it's the foreign press they they pick shows because they

want to have a good awards show regardless of what you know more fan favorite than critical

favorite but it is what it is it's an award that's out there and you know it's always nice to be

nominated and and the interesting thing here was they have six dramas nominated right and half of

them half of them whoa tv shows severance slow horses that we just mentioned and pluribus so

again it's nice for apple to be getting recognition i mean they've come so so far from the early days

of apple tv where they had just a few shows looks like the pit is a contender here as well and they

also mentioned the dip and the dip yeah kind of similar and the white lotus you know yeah i think

that this last season of the white lotus was not as good as prior moments prior seasons although it

did have some memorable you know moments in it uh thanks to some of the great actors but anyway

it's you know good shows little ending video here i i liked this one um we just can't get away from

vapor cooled devices we talked about this with the the um uh what do they call it the the vapor

what is that called inside the vapor chamber yeah vapor chamber thank you well uh at least it's not

built out of concrete because maybe this guy could bust through it here this is a fun little video

here and uh you know if you watch the video you'll understand why i've got a piano behind me i just

i thought this was so cool you know you you linked to this other video uh i don't know a few months

ago from aldo of no art which was fantastic because that just did a really good job of explaining sort

of the the technology and the science behind the vapor cooling component of the iphone 17 and i

got to tell you, I think probably one of the best compliments I can give to that design is that I've

never thought once that, oh, my iPhone's pretty hot. And that's because that's what great technology

does. I think, right. If I could almost like, you know, channel Steve Jobs spirit here, it's like,

you don't even think about it. It's just, it's there. And it's never once I thought it'd be hot.

So while that video from Aldo of no art is great from a scientific standpoint,

If you want a marketing spin on it, here's a great little video from Apple today, Peak Performance.

It's fun. It's silly. This one came out about two weeks ago and I finally linked to it.

It's silliness, but it's fun. It's worth watching.

But as you say, it's actually based on something real because, I mean, I know that when I use my iPhone,

one of the things that often causes it to heat up the most is when I have extended periods that I'm taking HDR, 4K, top possible video.

I often record my daughter's basketball games.

And I know that with my prior iPhone, that puppy got hot.

It really got hot.

And nowadays it will get a little warm, but it is noticeably different.

And heat is an issue, not only just because it's uncomfortable in your hand, but more importantly,

when chips get too hot, they need to throttle back to performance.

That's right.

And so this vapor chamber, it really works.

And it means that my chip can go, I can get the full speed out of that A19 Pro chip because of the vapor chamber.

So, so smart that Apple, I mean, Apple didn't invent them.

You know, they were out there before.

Oh, yeah.

But they used it.

It seems to work really well.

And it's one of the reasons that the iPhone 17 Pro, I mean, I think you only get this in the Pro.

I don't think there's a vapor chamber in the regular 17 and certainly not the Air.

But like one of the reasons that you can get pro level performance for the iPhone 17 Pro is because of this vapor chamber.

It makes a real difference.

So I don't think that this is just marketing spin.

I mean, the commercial is silly because it is commercial silly.

But I think that Apple is tooting their horn on something that's deserved.

That really is deserved.

Yeah, just don't run through concrete walls.

That's not suggested.

In the know.

In the know.

We talked about an app earlier.

So I thought of an app maybe that I haven't mentioned.

You know, it's funny because I remember when we started this podcast, we would have almost

apps weekly that we would recommend.

And I just feel like over the years, even with the iPhone, I've just been less and less

like app happy, if that makes any sense.

Right.

It's just like, I agree with you.

You know, but the ones that I do use, I use every single day.

Right.

It's not like I'm not using apps.

It's just, there's not kind of as new, the newness as it were.

Anyway, maybe we'll talk about that another time.

But here's one very specific app from a company called Wit Software.

So this is an independent developer, which you and I both always like to make sure that

we support those that are just putting these apps out.

I actually came to know this app called PDF Squeezer from the Mac side.

In fact, I was subscribing to Set App, you know, that little service that you can subscribe

to several apps and it was using it for my app for my Mac.

And I found PDF Squeezer.

Now, this is a very specific use for this.

And typically for folks like you and I, Jeff, that we're working with documents every single

day, right?

And typically PDF files.

And sometimes PDF files can get pretty big.

So maybe if you're like in the construction industry or somewhere else where you have

very large PDF files.

Well, I like to email those files a lot or I want to upload them somewhere so that somebody

else can download them.

Well, typically when I create a PDF, either from a Word document or an Excel spreadsheet,

maybe, or even like a website or something like that, those PDFs are, I call them raw

in the sense that, you know, they are very large, typically.

I usually don't like to send or email a PDF if it's larger than five megabytes today,

right?

Like I like to make it, squeeze it down.

Well, now you can see why I like this app, PDF Squeezer.

So this is available for the iPhone and the iPad.

I don't use it every day.

In fact, I maybe use it once a month, if even that.

But it's a fantastic app that you can take a PDF that might be 26 megabytes or 30 megabytes, right?

And you can go pull it up in the app.

And you have a choice here.

You can say, I want strong compression or basic compression.

Let me see what they call it.

It's three different settings.

Moderate and light compression.

And what's great about it is that when you pull a PDF in, you can see how much it will

compress it.

So this PDF was very small.

It's 463 kilobytes.

But if I did moderate compression, it puts it down to 200 kilobytes.

If I do strong compression, it puts it down to 51 kilobytes.

So again, that's something I probably wouldn't mess with that PDF because it was already

small to begin with.

But for those that are 30 meg, for 16 meg, I can get those down to maybe four megs or

two megs, right?

And that is much easier to upload to Dropbox or to send to somebody via email.

The app is completely free to download and you can compress as many PDFs as you want.

You just can't download the compressed PDF unless you pay for it.

Well, yeah, you can use it, but you've got to pay $10.

It's $9.99.

It's a one-time fee.

It's not a subscription or anything.

And you can just pay for it.

And then, of course, you can then download those compressed PDFs as much as you want and send them.

So, again, very simple.

And by the way, he says at the bottom here, this is a separate purchase.

The iOS, you know, the iPhone, iPad app is a separate purchase than the Mac app.

I think the Mac app is $20 if you want to purchase it one time or you can get it as part of that set app subscription that I mentioned.

But it's just a great app if this sounds like something that you do quite a bit.

Typically today, there's a couple of other apps, software apps that I use, like even Adobe Acrobat will do this now.

If you know where to find it, if you subscribe to Adobe Acrobat or I use PDF Expert.

And if you subscribe to PDF Expert, Jeff, as you might know, you can actually do it calls like reduce PDF size or reduce PDF file size.

But I like this app just because it does something very basic, but it does it great and it looks fantastic.

And I like it.

This is from Witt Software, W-I-T-T, wit-software.com.

And I'll make sure we have a link in the show notes.

PDF Squeezer.

I know you have the three different settings for how much compression you have.

Obviously, if you have a ton of compression, the quality of the image is going to be affected.

So the document won't look as good.

From your experience, Brett, if you use like the moderate or the light setting, I mean,

I really like the idea of compressing PDF files because they're much easier to deal with.

Right.

Have you found that the quality of the document still looks pretty good after it's compressed?

Yes.

Overall, in general, yes.

Now, if it's just text on a document, Jeff, first of all, if it's just text, the PDF, the original PDF probably is going to be that big.

We're talking about scans, yeah.

But the text always looks fine, even if it's strong compression.

But yes, if it's an image in it or a table or something like that, if I use strong compression, and since I know what I'm looking for, I can tell that it just looks a little fuzzier than probably it's not as sharp, anywhere near as sharp as what it should be.

But if I do light or moderate compression, I really can't tell much of a difference.

In other words, if it's something that, you know, it's not going to print, right?

It's not something that I want out there as print quality, quote unquote.

It's just a document that I'm sending back and forth to work colleagues.

It's not that big of a deal.

It doesn't it doesn't make that much. And frankly, I just like it because if it's a smaller PDF, it still has all the information in it.

It's just compressed it a little bit more so that you can see those images are a little bit fuzzier if you compare it to the original, but not enough that I care too much about it.

Yeah, I often have not often. I every once in a while have the need to do this on my iPhone.

And you're right. If I'm in front of my computer, I've got lots of tools to do it, but I don't have as many on my iPhone.

PDF expert does have it.

I haven't played around with it too much.

I've got the compressed feature.

But I know that in the past,

and this is not a criticism of PDF experts,

it's a criticism of the iPhone and the iPad.

There have been times that I have used tools

to compress PDF and I've been unsatisfied

with the quality.

And I'm like, I'm just not going to send

that version of it.

So while you were talking,

you may have heard the little beep.

I downloaded this app,

so I haven't paid for it yet.

But I like the idea that it's a one-time payment

of 10 bucks.

So the next time that I need to do something and the quality matters, you know, I might

try PDF Expert because I already own that, but I'm going to try this too.

And I do like the fact that as I can preview it for free, so I can just say, that's right.

What is this going to look like if I use your app?

And if the result looks good, I'm like, okay, I'm going to go ahead and buy it.

And then I'll just have it for forever.

So this is now, yeah, there's a little, yeah, there's an eyeball down at the bottom to your

point that you can tap on it to like preview it.

So you can zoom in and you can see how fuzzy it is.

Because I can see now I've zoomed in and on the strong compression, you know, when I zoom in, I can see that there's some, you know, pixelation and stuff like that.

That, again, it may be fine if that if I'm just sending it to myself or saving it, you know, as an archive and I don't really care as much.

But anyway, it's just something that you can look at it and you can see before you determine.

And then you can flip flop back and forth between light, modern and strong.

So you can compare all the different versions on there, too, which is good.

Can I say one more thing?

Am I correct that I saw from the title page of this that the compression is all done on device?

Right.

And the reason I say this is there are many ways and many apps in the app store that will tell you that they can do this.

But what they actually do is they upload your document to the cloud.

And, you know, as a lawyer, if it's something confidential or even quasi confidential, like it's got to be on device.

Yeah, it says right there.

No Internet connection required.

So like that is a no brainer for me.

I need it.

I'm glad this has it.

Yeah.

In fact, I would just think a small PDF is a service that to your point, like I remember coming to small PDF a long time ago, but it's an online service.

So you have to upload that PDF, which if it's an original PDF, it's huge.

So it's going to take a long time to upload.

And then I've used small PDF before, but I just, to your point, I like it because it does it on the device here.

Yeah. The other PDF tasks I often find myself wanting to do, and like, I don't feel like I found

the best solution for it is, um, is doing OCR. Like I have some apps on my iPad that I've used

for, for forever that will OCR a PDF because sometimes I want to do that. Right. And, um,

they're just of mixed quality. I mean, the one that I often use is I will often scan, like,

this is a real world use that I have. I will have a actual physical document that I come across

and I want to scan it and I want to be able to copy the text from the words.

And I use, it's another read-all product called a scanner pro.

Yes.

PDF expert.

That's right.

And it does this.

It will scan so that you have the image and then it will automatically do an OCR so that

you have the text.

Yeah.

And that does work.

And it works pretty well, but like, I still feel like I'm looking for that, that perfect

OCR app.

um a long time ago readle announced that they were going to add this or at least it was on their

roadmap was to have the ocr function within pdf expert and it's still not currently there i don't

know why not in the ios right oh yeah i'm talking about on the ipad right that's right because on the

mac version of pdf expert in fact i just did this i upgraded to the professional and i did just do

this yesterday i actually did an ocr but you're right on the i'm talking about on the ipad on

iPhone. Yeah. And there's another one. It used to be, um, smile, smile on my Mac, right? Remember

way back in the day, they offered the feature a text OCR or something like that. Anyway,

that's been long gone. So you're right. There's that's a dearth right there.

And I have an app that, gosh, I've had this for so long. I'm looking at the title. The title is

called OCR scanner. The app has a big picture of a T on it. I'm not saying it's the best. I'm just

telling you it's been around for like forever. And sometimes it has been my go-to, but like,

I still feel like one of these days I'm going to find what's the perfect app for that.

So anyway, so thank you for this tip.

I now have it.

I'm glad that I have that ability to use it when I need it.

Your tip for today of the week is far more useful than mine.

Mine is a repeat.

But just given the season, I wanted to mention it, which is simply using HomeKit or if you

want to use the new standards matter, one of these smart devices to turn on and off

holiday lights.

One of the things that I love about the holidays is it gives me an excuse to have Christmas lights.

We don't have a Christmas tree at my house this year for various reasons, but we're going to still have some like twinkly lights up.

I mean, they're silly.

I know.

It just I'm like a little kid.

It makes me happy.

But I like having twinkly lights.

Sometimes in years, we've actually had like a little Christmas village in our house.

We just got little things going around and lights in the houses.

But it is so, so, so useful to have those things.

We're often just a simple plug.

It is so useful to plug them in to one of these devices that gives your ability to remotely through your iPhone or you can say, hey, you know who to turn it on and off.

I love that feature. And so this is just my annual recommendation that, you know, if you've got any sort of holiday lights at your house, whether it's a Christmas tree or something else, get yourself something.

So like the one that I personally use because I use Lutron's products and I use a lot of

Lutron products that are like built into my wall, like dimmer switches.

But Lutron also has these little bitty things that just, they just plug into an outlet and

it's got two things on the side of it that you can plug onto the left and the right.

You control them both at the same time.

That's it right there.

Okay.

Okay.

And it works simple.

You know, if you actually reach down and touch it, you can turn things on and off, but the

reality, I never touch them.

I just, they're, they're hidden away.

They're behind a piece of furniture, but I've got lamps and things plugged into it.

my twinkly lights. And that way I can just say, Hey, you know who turn on this lights and they

come on and it just, it's, you know, the twinkly lights themselves are just sort of impractical,

but delightful and being able to turn them on and off remotely. And, you know, I'm, I'm in bed

upstairs. Like, Oh, did I remember to turn the lights off? I can just double check my iPhone.

So, so whether you use this $50 lights, the thing that I actually like about the Luchon plugin

is not only does it work well and it works with the Luchon system. Luchon is so much more reliable

than the other ones that I love it for that reason.

You do have to have a hub,

but once you get one hub,

you can have as many almost unlimited devices.

The plug-in dimmer has another feature,

which is that it acts as an extender.

And so I actually have,

there was a part of the very back of my backyard

that I wasn't extending the Lutron signal to,

but when I plugged in one of these things

near the back of my house,

and I use it for other reasons,

so don't get me wrong,

it's useful just as a plugger.

It also extended my Lutron network even further back.

so um it does you know that it does double duty um i like it so anyway whether you use the lutron

product or one of the other ones that is my recommendation for this time of year you can you

can in fact speaking of amazon you can get like there's some really cheap like cheap ones i've

seen them for like 20 bucks or something like that i mean you can get these this is the most simple

of the smart home devices it's something that just plugs into an outlet and you can control it using

your smartphone and there are tons of brands out there there are okay but but here's what i'm gonna

ask because now i'm gonna do this for my my uh christmas tree that we have because i have to

like bend down like hit the switch nobody wants to roll exactly okay so if i get one of these plugs

do i still have to also get a hub or does this have a built-in the ability or maybe is maybe

lutron sells one that has the built-in i guess it would have to be a built-in hub so so that it can

connect to the wifi in the house already. Some smart home don't require a hub. Some do. Lutron

brand is one that does. And you're like, well, that's a pain because you got to buy the hub or,

you know, as you're showing, if you buy this, there's one version that comes with the hub built

in and there's one version that's just separate. And so I agree that is a little bit of a, and I

forget what the hub costs separately, but once you buy the hub and there's a good reason for the hub

because it's the hub that gives the Lutron devices their magic,

that they work so darn well because they have a proprietary standard.

They don't use the standard that a lot of other people use.

And Lutron, the company has been around for so long

that they developed the standard years and years ago

and they got FCC approval in the US and everything else.

And that's why they're so reliable

is because they have this special proprietary band that they use.

So you want the hub.

That's a real selling point.

Call it a smart bridge.

For your very first, yeah, smart bridge.

for your very first Lutron device, you have to get it.

And so in fact, I'm seeing, yeah,

the one that you're looking at right now,

this is, it's $114 if you buy the version with SmartBridge.

I think it's 50 bucks if you buy the version with that.

So that shows you that that hub is costing you

about 60, 70 bucks.

But again, once you buy it once, you can have,

I can't even think of how many Lutron devices

do I have in my house?

15, maybe tons of them.

Some are built into the wall,

some of the things you plugged in.

I have so many of them and they work so well.

And you've talked about them many, many times.

I haven't.

I just like this morning, I went and turned on the Christmas tree lights and the way it's

there's a power strip under the skirt of the base of the tree.

And it's like, I got to get, you know, move the dog out of the way and get down.

And it's like, no, no, no.

If I could just put this in.

Okay.

I might have to have something I can review for next week, which is, which would be good.

And we'll talk next week because it's always fun talking with you, Jeff.

Thanks as always.

And yes, we will talk with you next week.

We're going to do a little bit earlier.

Anyway, not everybody has to be concerned about that,

but we'll still have an episode next week.

And so thanks for joining as always, everyone.

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

Thanks, Brett.

Bye-bye, everybody.