Welcome to In the News for March 20th, 2026. I am Brett Burney from AppsinLaw.com.

And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhoneJD. Hey, Brett.

Jeff, it is Friday, March 20th, and in four, five days, barely five days,

you and I are going to be together in Chicago at the ABA Tech Show Conference.

We have been talking about this for a long time. I mean, I've been talking about this for over a year now

because I've been on the planning board, but I'm just so excited that you and I have been talking

about your sessions. I'm so excited about the people that are going to be there, the speakers.

And I'm so excited to meet the people that I know happens every time, Jeff, when we go to places

like this together, people come up and sell us how much that they enjoy the podcast. And that just

warms our little tiny hearts. There you go. I mean, I can't wait for ABA Tech Show. It's always so,

I learn so much. You get to see so many people, you get to meet so many people or reconnect with

people. I mean, you just said that you're on the planning board. You know, you are a co-chair,

Brett. I know you are incredibly busy putting it together. And so thank you for all of your

efforts in advance. Cannot wait to see it. I will mention that Brett and I, since we're going to be

in person, we're going to try to do some sort of a recording of the podcast next week. So, you know,

check your podcast feed, you know, normal time next week, you should be able to see one.

But I will say this. I know that so many people that listen to this podcast happen to be attorneys

and they happen to be attorneys interested in technology. And so they often go to ABA Tech Show

because I see y'all all the time there.

I am going, I haven't figured out the logistics of this yet,

but if I'm going to try to get some sort of, you know,

listener feedback or something like that

to incorporate into the podcast next week.

So look for me on the tech show floor around,

if you sign up for the dinner

that Brett and I are hosting on Thursday night.

And, you know, I would love to get just, you know,

15, 30 seconds of you talking about something cool

that you see a tech show or a tip that you have

or something like that.

So look for me, don't feel shy.

You know, you can see what I look like.

You know, if you see me walking around, you know, say, hey, Jeff, you know, I'd love to

talk with you and I'll have my iPhone with me.

And I don't know the logistics of all of this, but we're going to figure it out.

But don't be shy.

That is my advice.

Don't be shy.

Come out, talk to me, say hello.

I'd love to hear from you, even if you don't want to actually be on video.

You know, don't be shy.

And I'm looking forward to it.

It's going to be a great conference next week.

Can I just quickly say, I mean, this is happening next Wednesday as the beginning of it.

And I know that if people are listening to this, they may be like, oh, my goodness, you know, that's too soon.

I haven't looked into this.

I would just quickly point out, as much as we would love to have you as a full registration for the conference,

pro tip here, there are complimentary Expo-only hall passes.

So if you just want to come by, I mean, you won't be able to get into the sessions or even some of the keynotes or anything,

but these Expo hall passes are great.

I mean, truly, if you're looking to compare some of the technology that's available in the market today for your firm, for your practice, this is a fantastic place to come and just get some, you know, some information to talk to the different vendors and talk to other people that are going to be in the expo hall.

So anyway, I just want to do a shameless little plug on there just because we tell people, hey, you know, it's not like you have to come for the whole thing.

I mean, it'd be great if you could because there's going to be some wonderful sessions there.

But I predict you'll even find Jeff walking around in the expo hall a little bit as well as most all of us are.

So you're going to go to techshow.com.

Techshow.com is exactly what it sounds like.

And you can find a lot more information there as well as the buttons to register.

Can't wait.

Can't wait to see you there, Jeff.

That's going to be fun.

Now, that's the good news for this past week or for next week.

There was some scary news that happened this past week.

Oh, my goodness.

You and I are very good.

I feel like, well, I'm going to give you the credit for this, Jeff.

You're very good at highlighting what we typically call like very crucial, critical zero day hacks or security threats that happen specifically when it comes to iPhones because there's so many billions and billions of iPhones out there.

And I saw this story pop up in several places this past week, that there is a vulnerability out there that if you go to a website on a phone, now this is an older version of the iOS, but if you're running that older version and you go to a website, there's a potential, scary potential, that some of your information could be compromised.

They're calling this the dark sword iOS exploit.

Apple has already done things to protect about it, but it's still a scary and a scary warning here.

Yeah.

You know, if I have my facts right, I think it was actually some security researchers at Google that figured it out of all places.

Okay.

They have people that are dedicated looking for things like this.

And, you know, I won't get into technical details, but like you say, it basically involved you, you know, if you visit a website, it has, you know, some code on there that uses some exploits in WebKit,

which is what the safari uh engine uses and it able is to get into your phone and the key words

are as you said it's the zero day exploit zero day exploit means it's already something being it

it works right now it's already out in the wild in the wild something theoretical that might happen

in the future uh and what it was you know oftentimes these exploits are so sophisticated

that they are developed thanks to the resources of nation states this one happened to be russia

apparently who had you know hired this espionage group because they were trying to hack some of the

people in Ukraine as a part of that war that's going on. You got to wonder if some things are

going on right now in the Middle East with the war in Iran. And, you know, these things, they may

start as being used by one nation state against others, but they very quickly get found and

discovered and then copycatted. And the next things you know, you know, regular Joe Schmoe hackers are

using them to try to get into your services. Now, the particular vulnerability that was exploited

in WebKit happened to have been fixed with iOS 26. So if you've updated your iPhone as of last fall,

when iOS 26 came out.

For this one, you're okay.

But of course, we all know,

I mean, look around on the street,

how many people are running iPhones

that they have not updated?

You know, they're running, you know, 17, 16, 15,

who knows what they are.

And so every once in a while,

when there's a really serious security flaw,

Apple will go back in time.

They will actually say,

even if you're still running something like iOS 16,

iOS 17, they will release an update for those things,

even though otherwise they're no longer updating

those operating systems just to hash this.

And Apple did do that.

They did that on March 10.

But again, if you're the sort of person that has not by this point, I mean, iOS 26 came out, what, September, a long time ago?

If here we are in March and you still haven't gone up to iOS 26, there's a good chance that you're also not going to update your version of iOS 16 or whatever, 17, whatever you're running.

And so anyone that falls in that category is vulnerable and it's scary.

So, you know, the message of all of it.

Look at this number.

Just real quick, Jeff.

I mean, I saw some other people talking about this.

iOS 18, like, again, I think most people should have been upgraded by now.

But even if it's just a small percentage, they think about 18% of iPhone users have not updated from iOS 18, which the numbers come out to 296 million iPhones that could be affected.

I mean, 18%, that's not that bad.

I mean, it's just a small portion.

But, man, when you put it into context of how many iPhones are out there, that's a lot of iPhones that could be compromised here.

Yeah, definitely.

So, and the message for all of you is simple, you know, just, you know, don't install updates the day they came out necessarily.

I usually do, but you can wait a little bit.

But the point is you want to be reasonably diligent in updating things because of this.

So some other security stories, if I can move on and move on to the next one, is one of the cool things that Apple did in iOS 26, and I think you and I mentioned it just as an aside at the end of last year, but they had this thing called background security improvements.

And what this means is what if Apple has something that they want to fix, but instead of making you download an update.

And again, Apple has updates all the time.

You know, as I also mentioned, we have a new update coming, I think, maybe next week or maybe the week afterwards.

It'll probably come out while we're a tech show.

But they now have the ability, if you're running iOS 26, any of the flavors of it, to push your security update to phones immediately.

And you don't have to do anything on your side.

Now, obviously, Apple's a little, you know, they're not going to abuse this, I'm sure.

And just, you know, they're not going to use it to change the way that your phone looks or something like that.

But like if there's something that they need to patch and it's a zero day, they now can just click a button and it automatically goes to all phones.

Now, it's something you do have the ability to turn this off.

If you don't want Apple to have this ability, you could go into your settings.

And I described in my post today how to turn it off.

But I and if you're really particular about nobody changes my phone unless I'm ready for it, that's fine.

But of course, I'm going to recommend you keep this on because if Apple thinks it's important enough to be sent to you right now, immediately, they can do that.

And Apple has other tools too for this.

Like, for example, for the App Store, you would hope that any app that you download from the App Store is safe.

But if somebody happens to get something posted on the App Store that happens to be unsafe and then Apple discovers it in Africa, they can, of course, pull the app from the App Store.

They also have an ability to push something out to all iPhones that says, don't run this app anymore.

And they've only used it like very, very rarely in history.

But like they have these top level, this is important.

We got to do something about it thing.

So another reason to update to iOS 26, if you haven't done so yet, is not only do you have the fix for this WebKit exploit, but also Apple can do these background security improvements.

So they gave themselves the ability to do this last fall, and they did it for the first time last week, according to this article from Julie Clover at MacRumors.

It happened to be on St. Patrick's Day, March 17.

So you wouldn't even notice it, but in the background, your phone got updated to make it a little bit more safe, assuming that you're running iOS 26.

So I thought that was really interesting.

The flip side, I'll just quickly mention this because I don't know how widespread.

Obviously, this is just my own experience here, is that some apps may not be updated to accommodate some of these background security improvements.

Now, again, this was my own experience, but I found that when I did turn this on, BSI, we can call it for short, right?

A background security improvements.

I saw that it installed that background security improvement.

but then one of my VPNs apparently was somehow clashing with that security improvement.

And so some of the apps that I would open would tell me that I'm not on the network.

Now, again, I'm not saying that I'm attributing that to anything because it was just my own personal thing.

When I turned off that VPN, though, I was able to do everything just fine.

So I don't know.

That was the only thing that really changed from yesterday when I installed this background security improvement.

So I'm just throwing it out there that anytime, you know, this is why people don't upgrade a lot of times, right, Jeff, is because they're nervous that something isn't going to work or it's going to like look different or mess up things.

And yes, that could be true.

There is a chance of that.

But the risks of staying on older versions sometimes to me is just not worth it.

Like you just need to have that comfort level of going ahead and upgrading that.

But once I did that, everything was fine.

Yeah.

As you're talking, Brett, the way that I understood Apple described this is that a background security improvement, a BSI, would automatically be installed in your iPhone.

But I just, while you were talking, so in my iPhone, I just went to settings, privacy and security, background security improvements.

And when I go there, although I do have it turned on.

Oh, you know, I see it.

At the very top, mine says automatically install.

That's turned on.

But at the very bottom, it's telling me that there is a background security improvement available.

And I have a choice that says restart and install.

So even though I have it turned on to install, it actually hasn't installed it yet.

I wonder, in fact, I'm not going to do anything.

I'm just going to let it stay there.

And I'm going to check back again tomorrow.

Maybe like overnight it will install or something like that.

I don't know.

I'm going to be curious.

I wanted to do it in the background.

Because mine says installed on it.

So I hear we're showing each other on the screen.

Yeah, and mine says available.

But mine says installed and yours says available.

Interesting.

Even though you have automatically install triggered on.

Mm-hmm.

Huh.

So we'll see.

Okay.

Maybe it'll take a day to install.

Maybe it'll do it overnight when I'm plugged in.

Who knows?

We'll report back on that.

So we shall see.

The other last thought quickly I had on this, I was just going to say, is this started giving me nightmares of being in law school.

because now it's iOS 26.3.1 paren A.

You know what I'm talking about, right?

It's like the statutes or the regulations.

I'm like, wasn't it enough that we have a 0.1

and a 10th of a point, a hundredth of a point,

and now we have to go to like sub, sub, subsections on this?

I mean, are you kidding me?

It's iOS 26.3.1 and then open paren A, close paren.

I'm like, come on.

We deal with all this all the time, right,

for regulations or statutes or laws and that kind of stuff.

But I mean, I don't think the general public needs to be suffering through this.

However, I don't know how else they would do it, right?

Obviously, they went through several other iterations.

And it just tells you this is that background security improvement.

But just like you said, it's a sub-sub-sub-sub-improvement update install.

It's not a point update.

Anyway, I was looking at that.

Like, really, this is getting now a little bit too confusing on this.

But I wouldn't have it any other way.

So the last security issue to bring up this week, gosh, it's a shame there's so many of them.

So this one was written by Matt Schumer, who is a part of the Internet forever.

He was one of the founding developers behind WordPress, which is what I use to run my website, stuff like that.

So he goes by Matt, M-A dot T-T.

But he had this happen to him that I think now his website post calls this a phishing attack.

I actually think if you want to be technical, it's spear phishing.

As a reminder, phishing is when you get, you know, they're trying to get you to click a link, right?

The bad guys try to get you to click a link.

Spear phishing is when the bad guys try to click you, get you to click a link, but they've actually targeted you.

Like they're going after Mr. Brett Burney, which is nefarious because if they're going after a specific person, they can personalize it and they can make it seem more realistic.

What happened to him is that he gets an alert from Apple, from the actual real Apple saying,

do you want to reset your password?

And he's like, I didn't try to reset my password.

So he just ignored it at first.

But then he actually gets a call from someone that pretends to be from Apple, but is incredibly

realistic.

And like, they are saying all the right things.

They're making all the right suggestions.

They say, we see you got this on the phone.

And he had got on the phone.

They're like, we think that you might be a hacker.

And I can imagine a person thinking, wow, how nice for Apple to reach out to me and help me out.

And ultimately, they did have him go to this website, which he said looked 100% real.

Like it had the Apple logo.

It had things.

Because apparently what the hackers have been doing in the background is they themselves had initiated a password reset with Apple.

But then once Apple went to double check that it was really them, of course, they couldn't, you know, they weren't the real person.

And so they were trying to convince him to type in and approve stuff that would allow

them to get access to the phone.

And we have read tales of this happening in the past.

Once they are able to get into your phone, it can be so impossible for you to prove to

Apple that you are really you because Apple thinks that they are really you.

And you can use access to not just your device.

You can lose access to things that are like, you know, all of your all your photos and your

videos that are on the, you know, locked up in the cloud.

You know, somebody could could could act as personal information. It's a bad situation.

And so this I mean, again, this is a developer of WordPress. This guy is as techie as you can get.

He knows what he's doing. He was going through it until finally he got to the point that he described he was on a page and he realized he I won't spoil the story.

He explains how he figured it out, but it was pretty good. And he actually tells at that point, the guy on the phone.

Wow, this is a really good space. You know, this is really good. This is obviously phishing. So how did you do this?

and the bad guy hangs up on him and clicks but i will tell you as i'm reading this story

you know i would like to think that i would also be you know suspicious yeah but um but you got to

be careful so his his tips which are really really good tips is if you and i've had this happen before

i'm sure you have too out of the blue i get something about upgrading my you know do you

want to reset your password for instagram or something i'm like no i didn't was this you

was this yes or no and it's like if it wasn't you you know then you need to call us but if it was

you, you know, click here, you know, it gives you those, those questions all the time.

I tend to ignore those and you should ignore them if you didn't initiate it, but you should also be

on high alert if it happens, because maybe somebody is trying to hack into you. And then another one

that he says that is really, really good is Apple will never call you first. And I think that this

is true. Apple will never call you first, nor will Facebook, nor will Microsoft, you know,

nor will bill gates or anyone else so if someone calls you and pretends to be trying to help you i

don't care how helpful they are with their voice with all of the ai stuff nowadays they may actually

be using you know someone it may actually sound like your mom i mean who knows who it's going to

be but like you just got to be on alert and you know every day these bad guys get more sophisticated

they get more clever they get smarter um even if english is not you know it used to be that when

you get things that you could tell that the English was wrong. You're like, oh, well,

this is obviously a hacker in Russia or China and English is not their native language. But nowadays

with the AI tools, they can speak the king's English fluently. And so you just have to be

very, very careful. So lots of good security tips to start the week.

The video at the bottom of this post is a must watch. It is five minutes long. Like if you just

set and listen to Jeff talk about all of this and we're a little confused on exactly how it's going

down or anything watch this little video or just listen to it it's only five minutes but it will at

least you know it it will at least give you the heads up like what to watch for kind of a thing

on there and that is just so so important I mean I feel like the same way Jeff like I read this

And I'm like, oh, well, okay, I would have caught it at that point.

But just to listen to the back and forth, he started recording the phone call.

That's what some of the video is.

So you can actually hear how good and convincing this Alexander, quote, Alexander from Apple support sounds.

That they're just going, he's taking them through and he's walking them through.

Just like you said, they're so sophisticated in what they do and just incredible.

But watch the video because if nothing else, it'll just give you a little bit of a heads up.

Okay, I have one more story quickly, and I'll make it quick, I promise.

And in fact, I just found this news story from Chicago because I was working with somebody yesterday that got a text message, Jeff, and they asked me about it.

It's from Cook County.

They got a text message of a document that said, hey, you have an unpaid traffic violation.

And I don't know if you can see this text message here.

It looks incredibly legit.

Like it looks like it comes from the circuit court of Cook County.

It has all the information. It had the right address.

It was signed that here's the kicker.

One of the first kickers is the person I was working with was an attorney.

They know the Cook County clerk and the name that this text message came from wasn't the name of the clerk of Cook County.

But only an attorney would know that. Right. Second of all, it came from an unnamed phone number.

The last thing, if you can see, and I don't even want to show this because I don't want anybody to accidentally hit.

But at the bottom of this document is a QR code.

There's no other place in here to like call for a phone number.

There's no other place in here to like go and visit a website separately.

They only say, hey, to get rid of this, use this QR code and scan it.

And thankfully, this person I was working with did not do that.

But Jeff, I mean, how quick would that have been for somebody to go and to do that?

This looks legitimate.

This looks scary because, you know, today there's all kinds of like traffic cameras out there.

So you don't know if maybe you were speeding or something happened without actually your knowledge.

It wasn't that they were pulled over. So I just wanted to highlight that one.

As you can see, this story is just from just from yesterday that they're published because now the Cook County Court is is announcing it.

But anyway, just be careful out there, folks. Oh, my goodness.

Just all of these come into a head, which is which is just just just crazy.

Can I share another story from yesterday? Please, please.

This one is not posted in a story online.

My source for this story is my lovely wife because of the dinner table last night, Brett.

She got the exact same scam that you're showing off.

What?

This one was Cook County.

She got one that pretended to be from the state of Louisiana or from New Orleans or something like that.

But it's the same scam.

It told her that she had a traffic violation.

And, you know, she knew that it was fake.

And yet when we're talking about it, I could tell it was like, you know, right, it's fake, right?

And I'm like, yeah, it's fake.

I'm like, they're not going to text you out of the blue.

Believe me, if you get a violation, they're going to send it to you in the U.S. mail.

But of course, the hackers could also use the U.S. mail.

In fact, that would be the next one they do.

You know, pay the postage to send you a snail mail and say, here's a QR code.

Go ahead and scan it.

Or scan this QR code.

Right.

Do it by PayPal.

Because most of us are, we're starting to learn that if you get an email that you don't expect

and it says, click this link, most of us are like, gosh, do I really want to click that link?

But what you don't think about it is scanning a QR code, it's the same thing.

It's clicking a link.

It's going to a website.

And it's even worse with a QR code because with a QR code, you cannot see beforehand what website it's sending it to you.

So it may be hackersr.com.

You don't know.

So, no, this is – and in fact, it's not just my wife here today.

I've actually gotten this one in the past two like a year ago.

This is one of the scams that's been – I'm surprised it hasn't happened to you.

This is a nationwide thing.

text messages out of the blue. They claim that you've got some charge, whether it's a parking

charge or a traffic violation or something else that's court related, that seems official. I guess

it just bothers me more as a, as an officer of the court myself, it's just a Bob, you know,

it's just, this just rubs me wrong that you're preying upon people like this. Well, it makes me,

but you know, people are going to click that Jeff. That's the whole thing. Like you and I

are in this world. And so we kind of have a clue, but for the average person, they would see this

and they're going to start panicking. And it's like, Oh my goodness, I don't have enough to

you know, pay this. I'm going to get, you know, I'm going to find out a little bit more information

and they click into a link. I've had a cybersecurity friend that would tell me never, never uses QR

codes. Never. Now I'm not that drastic about it because if there's some that I trust in at certain

times, it has to be right, but you're right. You know, as opposed to if you get a link in an email,

a lot of people know you can hover over that link in an email and you can see where the destination

is going to be without clicking it. You can hover over it and see. And if it's hackersRS.com to your

example then you don't go but a qr code i know that on the apple iphone it will show up at that

little yellow button at the bottom and it will start giving you some of the the url but i can't

see the whole thing and so i don't trust it then at that point but you're right if i could jump

right into a website then possibly that could be like a dark sword vulnerability right any of those

advantage of the web kit okay i know we get passionate about this but it's just because

we want people to make sure that they are safe out there and what they do. And yeah.

And I see this at my law firm every day. I mean, I'm so concerned about security. And one of our

users, you know, we've got, you know, hundreds, you know, got over 300 attorneys in my law firm

and even more, you know, all the staff people, all it's just a single person clicking a bad link

opens the door to the bad guys getting into our system. And so it's, you just got to be vigilant.

Well, let's turn our eyes to maybe something a little bit more positive on the horizon.

You already mentioned iOS 26.4.

And all I can think of is how many point, point, points in parentheses and sub, sub, subsections after that.

But one thing at a time, 26.4 is not out yet.

We've talked about the fact that it has been in public beta, I believe, already.

And so we know it's imminent.

And maybe, like you said, even next week, that'd be fun for tech show.

But this was a good article from Zach Hall.

I thought 13 enhancements coming to iOS 26.4.

Some of these we've already talked about, I know.

There was a time a long time ago

when I hoped the 26.4 would be Siri improvements,

but that's obviously not coming

because Apple needs more time on that.

But you know, we say this every year around this time,

when Apple gets to the point

that they really wanna make sure

that people update that haven't updated yet,

one of the things that they will do

is they will include the new emoji in it.

And so that's what they're doing for this one.

You know, they are comfortable enough

with iOS 26, 26.1, 26.2, 26.3.

They're like, if you haven't updated yet,

you got to update to this one to get the new emojis.

And so there are, I think there's like six or eight of them.

How many are this time?

It's eight of them this time.

And there are some cute ones that, you know,

I could totally see.

There's a trombone, which I'm sure

I'm going to be putting next to the sad face

to have sad trombone.

There's a treasure chest, which I know would be useful.

There's a very funny fighting one.

The first one on there, which is called distorted face.

That one is sort of cute.

And I am sure there's going to be text messages that my appropriate response is going to be distorted face.

And so when it does come out, which could be as soon as next week because the release candidate is already out right now, you will want to update so that if your friends or family members send you the emoji, you can see what they are and you might want to use them yourself.

So that – I mean if there's no other reason to update to 26.4 when it comes out, it's that one.

But there are some other interesting features.

There's also Harry Creature.

We might know him as Bigfoot.

But hairy creature is the official name for this emoji.

Well, you know, Bigfoot's trademarked.

You know, you wouldn't want to have to get his attorneys involved.

But that's true.

So, you know, him, Sasquatch, or whatever, you want to just use the more generic name.

Exactly.

Nice.

But some other things.

One of them that I have heard about this one, but I don't think I've experienced it.

And you're showing it on your screen right now.

Yeah.

I've heard people complain that when you type super fast on your iPhone keyboard, you will actually see the key.

Like on the keyboard, you know how like when you tap down, it sort of pops up, but it won't

actually enter the character.

It hasn't happened to me.

Maybe I don't type fast enough, but I've heard people ask me about this.

And so apparently it was a bug and Apple has figured out how to fix it.

And so that's going to be fixed to 26.4, which is good.

And then there's some other interesting features, some changes to the Apple Music app.

We talked about one of them the other day, the ability to create playlists based upon,

you know, descriptions that you give it.

Playlist Playground is the name of it.

And they also have a feature in Apple Music for concerts that apparently, like if I listen to, you know, a group all the time, like, you know, somebody who went to college in Atlanta in the 1980s and 90s, the Indigo Girls, you know, it knows that I like to listen to the Indigo Girls.

And so if they happen to be touring, it will let me know.

Or whoever your group happens to be, it will say, oh, this is someone who you like.

They happen to be in your hometown.

And you can find concerts in your area.

Spotify has been doing that for a while.

So I'm glad that Apple Music is putting that in.

Okay.

It'll be new for me.

And some other little updates, too, some accessibility improvements, stuff like that.

But I think the emoji will probably be the one that, or the typing thing, if that affects you, will probably be the one that affects most people.

We thought Apple was done releasing new hardware products.

But, Jeff, we were wrong.

This week, Apple introduced AirPods Max 2.

They look exactly the same, I think, from the outside.

I don't know.

Are there even new colors?

I don't even think they have new colors on here.

It's all internal in the guts.

But the only thing I kept thinking of when I read this is,

why can't you have put all of this new stuff in when you went from the lightning port to the USB-C port, right?

Maybe they weren't ready.

I'm not at Apple.

But I just was like, come on, man, really?

Because if you bought those when they upgraded to the USB-C port,

I think you'd be a little upset if all of a sudden you found that there's new, new, new ones out right now.

You know how last week we were talking about the Apple Studio display, which is a monitor that I own and I use.

But I know that it is overpriced for what it is.

But I was willing to pay more because I know it's going to work.

It's from Apple.

The quality is going to be great.

Yes, I could have shopped around and saved money by something from another company, but it wouldn't have been the Apple product.

And I don't have the guarantees.

So I feel the same way about AirPods Max, that if you want over the head headphones, there are other companies, including Beats itself, who Apple's owned for forever now.

Lots of companies will sell you ones that are cheaper.

But I will tell you, the AirPods Max, if you're willing to pay more because they're like $500, they are very nice.

I mean, I've tried them in the Apple store.

I think your daughter owns them here, right?

She does.

She loves it.

So Apple came out with the original version.

And then as you referenced, they updated them just to swap out the Lightning for USB-C and some other tiny, tiny improvements.

But they didn't even change the name when they did that.

They kept the name the same.

So now they have added the number two to the end of it.

But what they've basically done is the features that we have in the current top-of-the-line AirPod Pros, they've taken basically the same chips.

Is it the H2 chip, whatever it is?

H2, that's right.

They've now put those inside of the AirPods Pro Max.

And so now if you purchase these things, you get, you know, so again, you're not getting anything that you didn't already have on AirPods Pro.

But if you just prefer the form factor of over the ear, it would work.

In fact, I was listening to somebody, I forget which podcast it was I was listening to.

And they were joking that one of the cool things that AirPods can do now is this live translation function where, you know, you're talking to someone and they're speaking French and you're speaking English and it can translate as you talk.

And so that feature is now available in their AirPods Pro Max.

But the person was pointing out that like if you're talking to somebody in a foreign country and you have these big honking AirPods over your head, it might look a little obnoxious.

Whereas, you know, these little tiny little AirPods in your ear, you know, may not look as obnoxious.

I guess there's a social issue there, too.

But anyway, so it's nice that they've updated it.

But, you know, I know that I have read some websites and I've heard some podcasters and they say, oh, don't buy these because they're more expensive and everything else.

I don't feel that way.

Yes, you could shop around and buy something from Sony or from Beats or anyone else that's going to be a little bit cheaper.

But the AirPods Max are very nice.

And if you say, you know what, I just want something that's really nice.

It's an Apple product.

I trust it.

It's your money.

You spend it how you want to spend it.

And they are really nice.

They do feel good over your ears.

Many times I'll go into an Apple store to check things out, and I'll see the little display for the AirPods Max.

And I just put them on, and I'm like, you know, this is nice.

They're really good.

I don't know that I have a place for it in my life because for me, I'm often wearing AirPods while I'm walking around and doing stuff.

I don't think I want something bigger in my head, but I understand that for some people, this is what they want.

It's a now, there's a better version.

So am I reading this right that now with the AirPods Max 2, you can have adaptive audio, which is that like the mode between transparency and active noise cancellation?

We've had that. I mean, I think I talked about that last week with my AirPods Pro, which because I am constantly switching between those two modes, depending on what I'm doing.

So are you telling me that the AirPods Max, well, original or one didn't even have that before? And now it does with the AirPods Max 2. That just that blows me away a little bit because I mean, from the premium standpoint, it didn't.

But again, maybe that's because it had the chip, right?

The H2 chip.

So to your point, I know you were talking about the live translation,

but the fact that it now has this parity between the AirPods Pro

and the AirPods Max now with even some of those basic things.

Like I would have been very upset if I had the AirPods Max

and I didn't have this adaptive audio.

Like you, I don't own them.

But I guess my daughter doesn't know any different on some of that.

But I'm glad that they did this.

I just wish it would have happened a lot sooner on something like that.

that. Good stuff on there. Okay, so that was a brand new product. Another product that was

introduced a few weeks ago, we continue to talk about is the MacBook Neo. And I got to tell you,

I continue to see positive reviews of this small MacBook. Even my wife, I think initially,

it was just the colors that she kind of liked. It's like, wait, is that a MacBook? I'm like,

yes, it is the brand new MacBook Neo. But she only uses an iPad, right? She continues to get

In fact, she's using my old 13-inch iPad Pro, and she loves it with the screen and everything.

And so she even kind of perked up and looked at this.

And I've just continued to see people giving some positive reviews of the brand-new MacBook Neo, including Jason Snell writing on Six Colors and also for Macworld.

Yeah, and he wrote a great review of the MacBook Neo earlier.

And now he's sort of talking about, you know, that this is just, you know, this is just the epitome of an Apple product for a number of reasons.

The idea that Apple is not unafraid to change things when they need to.

It's just I continue to see, you know, more good things about the Neo.

And again, I don't own a Mac laptop, but I know that many people do that listen to this.

But if I was going to get one, I have to admit this.

There's just a lot about this because of the price and because of it.

You know, just as interesting was the other article that I linked to today, which was from from Horace Day to you, because he points out something I had not thought about yet.

That, yes, the MacBook Neo costs $599, right?

And you can buy PC laptops that cost $5.99, but we all know that the quality of them is not nearly as good.

But he points out that statistically, people upgrade PC laptops just every couple of years because, again, they don't last very long.

Whereas the typical Mac, people will hold on to for upwards of 10 years.

I mean, my wife got a new MacBook Pro last year, but I think the previous one was about 10 years old.

And so he says, if you think about the average cost of ownership, since you can use a Mac product, a Mac laptop for like twice as long, it means that, you know, essentially the price is even cheaper if you look at it year over year, which is, I thought, an interesting way to do it.

But if you had money and you're trying to decide, maybe not for myself, maybe it's just my kid.

Am I there in school?

Am I going to get them this Wintail laptop?

Or am I going to get them this Chromebook?

Or am I going to get this MacBook Neo?

All of the reviews of the MacBook Neo have pointed out that this is not the kiddie version of a Mac.

It's not like the pretend Mac.

It doesn't only run apps from the App Store or something limited.

It's a true blue Mac.

It really is.

And although it's not going to be as fast and powerful as the high-end Macs that cost four times as much,

What would you expect?

But it does everything that you would expect a Mac to do, including even things like Final Cut Pro or sophisticated software.

It can do it, and it's going to be a little bit slower.

And I've heard other people read articles that say, when I was a teenager or even a middle schooler, yeah, I had an old computer, and it was slow.

But I just didn't know it any different.

But I could still do things.

If I wanted to make stuff with GarageBand, I just waited four seconds instead of two seconds, and it was totally fine.

So there's just a lot of interesting perspectives.

And I know it's just another laptop.

And I know that being cheaper in itself is not the most exciting thing in the world.

But just when you put it all together, I really think that Apple has come up with something really, really useful for this.

He breaks it down to the bottom of his article here.

He says the potential for a 10-year-old life for a $500 laptop puts the Neo at $50 per year or 14 cents per day.

And then he said the average selling price of a new Windows PC is between $600 and $900.

So at $700 for a lifespan of five years, the PC costs $140 per year or 38 cents per day.

Like you said, I've never thought about it.

That kind of makes my brain hurt a little bit to thinking about that.

But, hey, you know, if you run into business or something that you have, you got to count every penny.

Well, maybe not pennies anymore these days, but you got to count every nickel or so.

I mean, that could add up on there.

That's important.

It is a bargain.

It is a bargain.

Well, no matter if you have the new AirPods Max 2 or the MacBook Neo, you got to charge these devices.

I like this.

I had seen this article, the Wirecutter, of course, now it's part of the New York Times.

I mean, the Wirecutter has been around for a very long time.

And, you know, I got to tell you, I know a lot of people go here for like the best recommendation.

And I know that because anytime that I go myself and I get a coffee grinder or a piece of luggage or a case for my computer, it turns out I see them in the wild.

And I'm like, okay, you went to the wire cutter, didn't you, when you looked at it?

Well, this is a good overall best fast chargers for every device.

And not only do they just do the chargers here, which is great, and that's the Anker is the single best USB-C phone charger, the single port USB-C phone charger.

But they also give some very good recommendations for lightning to USB-C port.

I mean, again, my daughter still needs a lightning cable because she has the original AirPods Max, right?

So she has to charge it that way.

And the Anker USB-C soft line cable.

I don't have these particular anchor cables, but I do have what I would generally call the braided anchor cables, USB-C cables, right?

Because I find that's what I travel with, and I just find they are way ahead of even the Apple cords that are included now.

Although some of the Apple cords do have a little bit of what I call a braid on it, as opposed to the old plastic ones that you would see that would break off all the time.

In fact, my wife, I just had to replace one for her because it started breaking right at the connection there and opening up.

And you don't want that.

So I've been using some of these anchor cables for a while.

But this was just a great article.

Thanks for linking to it today.

Yeah, the article came out a few weeks ago.

But I get emails from The New York Times because I'm a subscriber.

And it came out yesterday.

And not only did I read it yesterday, but some other people that I work with sent it to me to make sure that I saw it.

Oh, good.

Not all of their recommendations are from Anchor, but many of them are, which doesn't surprise me.

Because when it comes to charging cords and chargers, Anchor's quality is good.

I mean, just a week ago, my son, the cord that he used for CarPlay in his car had sort of, you know, because when they're in the car with the heat and stuff like that, they'll break down over time.

He needed a new one.

It wasn't working as well.

And I'm like, just get one of those good Anchor, you know, braided cables, something like that.

And you'll be in good shape.

In fact, speaking of Anchor charging, stuff like that, you and I talked a week or two ago on the podcast about, you know, that the 3-1 charger, you and I both use the Ugreen one, which is a travel one.

but my wife actually wanted one she decided that she wants one not maybe for travel but also just

to have sort of next to the to the bed and um you know that anchor prime that has the the fan in it

that recently came out the three-in-one yes um i bought one actually for her i bought it quote

unquote for her but i'm playing with it right now so i guess i'll do a review at some point in fact

maybe i'll take it to tech show with me next week it's it's nice it's a tiny bit more expensive than

the ugreen one but um but the quality of it's pretty good so anyway i'll have more to say that

the future. My point is just that it doesn't surprise me that Wirecutter recommends so many

Anchor products when it comes to charging, because I like them too. And again, the Apple quality is

also fantastic, but the Apple ones are usually twice as expensive. And so you can just decide

if it's worth it. I trust Anchor. You know, and it's not just that real quick, I'm going to point

out in this article, they're talking about, quote, fast charging, because I find a lot of people still

use some of the old bricks maybe from their previous phone because apple doesn't even ship

a power brick with their phones anymore right jeff and so they'll use some of the old ones well some

of those older bricks because at the time when they came out they were fine but they don't pass

through as much power and charging capabilities as what you can find with some of the quote faster

chargers today you know you and i've talked about the gan chargers and some of these other capabilities

although that's more for like keeping it cool.

But there are some capabilities

and they've got this really tiny,

small little table right here

where they talk about,

you know, as opposed to a five watt charger,

which was perfectly fine a few years ago.

Some of these now can deliver 20 watts of charger,

which means obviously that your phone

is going to charge a little bit quicker.

It might get warm sometimes on some of,

you know, using some of these technologies,

but that's something to look out for

because it's not just the quality of it,

but it's also making sure that you're getting the right,

the right version that you might want

for the fast charging too.

good advice if you're still using one of those old little square apple white five watt chargers to

charge a modern iphone or ipad don't don't don't i mean that's that's going to take forever

upgrade on that one yeah that's good you and i are both fans of the apple one subscription although

i'm still a little bitter that it can if i feel like it continues to go up in price um i feel like

it started off below 30 and today i think it's 38 maybe that's a little bit too much extreme it was

around 30, 31, $32 when it first started. And I'm like, this is a bargain. It still is a good

bargain. And I am still a happy Apple one subscriber, but I really enjoyed this article

from nine to five, Ryan Christoffel at nine to five Mac, where it's like, oh yeah, there's a few

more things that I am happy to know I'm getting with my Apple one subscription. Yeah. As he points

out, when you pay for Apple one, you get, you know, Apple TV, Apple arcade, Apple news, plus

Apple fitness, plus Apple music. And you know, each one of those services is constantly improved.

And so it just means that the value of the overall subscription improves as well.

And so he picks out some things that he likes from the different services.

And many of them I agree with him on.

I mean, I use Fitness Plus all the time for weights and stuff that I use.

I really like those programs.

Apple News Plus continues to surprise me.

Not only do I love their emoji game, speaking of emoji, but as I was reading Ryan's article,

for example, he pointed out that one of the sources that's available in Apple News is Puck,

P-U-C-K, which is great articles for Hollywood and entertainment news. And I actually didn't know

that. I've tried to go to Puck in the past and it's been behind a paywall. And I'm like, well,

I don't pay for it. I didn't realize that I could read Puck articles like Julie Alexander has great

articles on entertainment and Hollywood. I didn't realize that I could read those in Apple News Plus.

And so I went in Apple News Plus and you know how you can subscribe to particular channels.

when I read this article I subscribed to puck because now if I'm just looking to read something

I can take a quick look there and then of course we all know the trick that like if you bring up a

webpage in safari on your phone or your ipad um if you then use the share button to share it to

news plus to news plus if you are a subscriber it will then often open the article so for example

the wall street journal I don't pay for a wall street journal subscription I used to years ago

um but whenever I encounter a wall street journal article that I want to read I just open it in news

plus and I can always read it there. So I just shared that because I learned that from you,

that tip. And I just shared that with my wife the other day because she was like,

I've got this article from Wall Street Journal. I'm like, but you know, it's a paywall. You're

like, just open it in Apple news plus because we subscribe. And she's like, I did not know you

could do that. And when I was looking that up, just to, just to confirm there is, if you go to

apple.com slash apple dash news slash publications, look at the number of newspapers that are

available through this apple news plus jeff this is this is crazy now some of these are magazines

and other things too but these are all the publications that are available you can see at

the very top they got the featured ones here even the washington post the new yorker is available

here now to be fair not all of the publications from like the wall street journal are available

in news plus but it's mostly a lot of the big stories you're going to want to read anyways

all the big ones and you know vanity fair i don't subscribe to vanity fair but sometimes they have

an interesting article about like a tv show or a movie and i love that i can read it there and

Wired Magazine, which back in the day, I used to, gosh, in the 90s, I remember I used to love to get

the Wired in the mail, all the pictures on it. But sometimes there'll be a Wired article and it's

there. So anyway, that's Apple News Plus. And then the other services too. We talk about Apple Music

and Apple Arcade and stuff like that. So I actually, I'm very happy that I do have Apple

One. And yes, Apple charges more for it, but I feel like I get a lot for it. And it's shared with

my entire family too. So I feel like it's a bargain. I really like it. We should point out

that you can get each of these services on their own, right?

You could just subscribe to Apple News Plus.

You could just subscribe to Apple Arcade if you wanted to.

But I guess I would start to say,

if you've got two going on to three of these services

that you really want to, Apple Music, Apple Fitness,

I mean, go to the Apple One subscription at that point.

Because plus, he doesn't even talk about it very here,

but you get access to a lot more storage

in iCloud Drive as well.

And there's a few other things.

He doesn't go into all the detail.

That's not what he's doing here, but he is pointing out some of the additional little

features, which I just thought was really neat.

Now, I've mentioned this in the past.

The one issue that I have with the storage and iCloud drive is that it gives you two

terabytes, which is a lot, but I actually ran into the limit because I have a lot of things

that I put in there.

My son does, less so for my wife and my daughter, and I was over two terabyte.

And so I needed to bump up to the next level.

And when you do that, number one, it's expensive.

And number two, you don't get a credit for the fact that I already have two terabytes

free.

So I pay the same.

I have the six terabyte plan and I forget how much I pay for it, but I play, I pay the same

price for that plan that I would pay.

Even if I didn't already have two terabytes through Apple one, which to me seems unfair

yet.

An additional $30 a month, which is too much money.

I wish I didn't have to pay it, but for me, I was just running into limits and, and, you

know, it's a lot of money, but now that I have more space.

You have six terabytes total or you have six terabytes through that and then two terabytes through the right.

It's total. So if they had said it would be on top of my two.

And so now I have eight, even though I'm not going to use our terabytes, it would feel like I'm getting something.

But no, if you subscribe to the six terabyte service, your Apple doesn't give you any credit for the fact that I was already paying for two terabytes through my Apple one subscription.

So that makes me a little aggravated.

I would be miffed on that.

Thank you for linking to this story today, though.

I was not aware of the personal voice.

I hadn't heard about this before, I should say, but I never really like paid attention

to think of it as something that I should do, probably because I think I saw this Marques

Brownlee video two years ago or when he first came out because it's been around for a while.

But now it's even better in iOS 26.

Maybe you can explain what personal voice is.

Yeah, I always think of this as the Roger Ebert feature, you know, of the old Siskel and Ebert movie reviews.

Roger Ebert near the end of his life lost his voice.

And so he was working with some really high tech people to synthesize his voice based upon all of the recordings of all the TV shows and stuff that he had done.

And so when he would when he could no longer speak with his own voice, he could use a computer and have a synthesized voice that sounded like him.

And so the iPhones now have a similar feature in it that it can create a synthesized voice.

And this has been around for a little while.

The old version of it, when you trained it, you would have to talk for like 15 minutes.

But the new version of it in iOS 26, it actually, you basically have to read like 10 different sentences.

It's actually very, very.

So first of all, you can train it a lot faster.

And second of all, the quality of the voice is much better.

In fact, I did one of them last night and it's not great.

Let's see if I hold this up to my speaker, I'm just going to click preview.

This is just personal voice too.

So I don't know if you could hear that, but that was a synthetic version.

And does it sound exactly like my voice?

No, it's a little robotic still.

It is a little robotic.

On the other hand, it sounds a lot more like my voice than the built-in voices on my iPhone,

like the British guy or whatever.

So the point is, if I was in a situation where I needed to speak and I wanted it to sort of

sound like me, but not 100% like me. And again, because I haven't lost my voice, this is not an

issue for me, but if I lost it tomorrow, I guess I could use it if I wanted to. And in the future,

there may be some other things. And there's all sorts of security stuff, the way that Apple does

it. So bad guys are not going to steal your voice and stuff. If the bad guys wanted to steal my voice,

they've got hundreds of episodes of the podcast that they can use. And to be fair, there's other

technology out there that's even better. I think 11 Labs has these- That's right.

Okay. This is weird. I'm on the 46th floor, Brett, and there's some window washers out there,

But whenever I look out my window and I see a person coming by, it's just freaks me out a little bit because it's like, yeah, because they're not supposed to be 46.

Yeah.

Why is there a face out there?

But hello.

You know, thank you.

Thank you for cleaning the windows.

Anyway, so that's it.

So the personal voiceover feature, it has gotten better.

So if you would like to use it and record a new voice of yourself, it takes like two minutes to do.

And then should you ever need it, it's there.

There's actually a feature in personal voiceover that you can turn on that says I just had it closed.

It says something like, allow apps to request to use.

Do I want to allow third-party apps to ask me if they want to use my personal voice?

I decided to turn it on only because I've never seen an app try to use it.

Like, I don't know who's going to ask to use my voice.

I have no idea.

And if they ask, I might well say no, but I'm just curious.

Maybe carrot weather.

Yeah, maybe carrot weather talk to me in my own voice.

I don't know.

So we'll see.

But anyway, that's the improvements to the personal voiceover feature.

Yeah, I don't know. This makes me a little uncomfortable. I'm not really exactly sure why. Probably after watching that video that we were talking about earlier from Matt, because that video shows a little bit of the 11 Labs tool, right? Okay, you knew what I was talking about there.

and yeah it just i mean i want to try it just because i think it is cool and i mean apparently

you can use the voice then to read back like you know text messages or or you know an article from

a website or something like that and that would be i guess kind of fun a party trick of some kind but

we'll we'll see i'm glad that it's better i mean to me that it should be better at this point

how about a quick in the show you had a great little post here of the walk down

of Apple TV shows.

They're going to kick off five weeks straight of big premieres.

There was a lot of stuff that you covered in here.

And some of these I'm pretty excited about too.

Yeah, this first show, Imperfect Women, it's available now.

I mean, just from who it starts, it's got Elizabeth Moss.

I love everything she's in.

Kerry Washington, Kate Mara, you know, all these other people, Leslie Odom.

I mean, just from the cast alone, this is something I want to check out.

And I think it's based upon a book that's got some acclaim.

But anyway, it's a psychological thriller.

It's gotten some good buzz.

My wife was interested in it.

So that's one to watch.

So like that's this week.

Next week, while you and I are at Tech Show, the new season of For All Mankind, which is

one of my all time favorite shows.

This is going to be the tough thing.

I'm going to have so much to do in Chicago.

I'm not going to have time to watch this.

Maybe on the way home, maybe on the plane on the way home.

On the plane.

OK, although I may wait because my son and I often watch this together.

But I love that show.

The next week, it's the new season of Your Friends and Neighbors, starring Jon Hamm.

Have you watched this one?

Have you watched the first season?

No, I haven't, but I like Jon Hammond.

It's really, really good.

He's really good.

The other stars in it are great.

It's a great, you know, all these have great shows in it.

So then the following week, we have this movie that I had not heard about called Outcome,

and it's got Keanu Reeves, it's Jonah Hill, Cameron Diaz.

The week after that, now we're into mid-April, April 15th, Margo's Got Money Troubles.

So this one was previewed at South by Southwest, and it's gotten really good.

Like this is supposed to be a really good, funny show.

And it's got, you know, people.

Nick Offerman is in there.

Elle Fanning, Nick Offerman.

We all love Michelle Pfeiffer's in it.

Greg Kinnear, lots of people that we know.

And I thought there was maybe one more too, but I mean, there's just, there's just so many

amazing things coming up.

It's oh, and then I'm sorry.

The other one I was thinking of, that's the next five weeks in a row.

And then this is going to probably be a year away, but I just saw this report this week

that Martin Scorsese, Leonardo DiCaprio,

Jennifer Lawrence, Patricia Clarkson,

who's a great actress from right here in New Orleans.

They are in, I mean, again,

I don't have to know any more about the movie.

The fact that it happens to be a thriller, great.

But with these people involved,

of course I'm going to want to watch this.

And they just started production on it.

So we're still probably a year away from it.

But Apple TV continues to fire on all telers.

It's time to subscribe.

But, you know, I always like to remind people of this.

If you bought a new Apple device within the last, you know, they give you like three months free.

I think you can get into your iCloud account when you log into your new device.

So anyway, if you haven't gotten Apple TV, you could binge watch some things if you just bought a new Apple device and you can get on some of that free trials on there.

In the last little video, I thought this was great.

We spent a long time last week talking about Apple turning 50 this year.

And this was a fantastic little video.

I've only got the chance to watch a few minutes of it.

You apparently watched the whole thing.

The Computer History Museum is in Mountain View, California.

So obviously lots of history there from all of Silicon Valley.

But David Pogue, who wrote a book, which I hope you I don't know if you started or not.

I know we talked about that last week as well.

He did an interview of all kinds of people.

I got a chance to watch a few minutes of senior Apple employee, Chris Espinoza, who is the

only person that has worked at Apple for its entire 50 years.

That is mind-blowing to me.

He started working at Apple when he was 14 years old.

That is just insane.

Yeah, and it's a great, great interview.

I mean, not only does he have on stage Chris Espinoza, who has so many stories, John Scully,

who, you know, John Scully was the CEO in Apple.

And what many people say about John Scully is,

oh, well, you know, he fired Steve Jobs

and so he must be bad.

But the reality is that, first of all,

he didn't directly fire Steve Jobs.

It was a board decision.

But second of all, every, you know,

now that we're 50 years later

and people are looking at history,

I think that in retrospect, Steve Jobs had to go

because Steve Jobs, as important as he was

for the beginning of Apple,

he was not a good leader

when he was originally an Apple

from all of the accounts.

It was really important for his personal development that he left Apple, started his own company next, learned how to actually be a good CEO.

And then, you know, so fortuitous that he came back to Apple in the 90s and saved the company.

I mean, don't get me wrong.

But and but John Scully himself, he did a lot of great things.

I mean, it was under John Scully that we came that the whole MacBook line.

I mean, Mac laptops were because of John Scully and all these other incredible things.

And so and he, you know, whatever age he is, he's still very articulate.

Great story.

So, I mean, it was fun hearing from him.

There's a little John Rubenstein comes on as a little Zoom video thing.

Avi, I pronounce Avi's last name, Avi Tevanian, who is a very senior leader at Apple that came with Next.

Oh, yeah.

He's now retired from the company.

But not only the people on stage, not to spoil it for you, Brett, but because this is right there in Silicon Valley, the audience is packed with so many people.

Yeah, he kept referencing other people out in the audience.

And Chris Espinosa was talking.

He's like, sorry, Walden.

Or he wouldn't be referencing people out there.

And there are times that David Pogue jumps off stage

and like someone is sitting in the front row.

It's like, how did Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak meet?

Let's talk to the guy who introduced them in middle school.

And he walks into the audience and does it.

It's just so funny.

So it's, and David Pogue is so enthusiastic.

He is so happy to be there.

Yeah.

I was, I linked to this when I wrote today's post

and I had not yet finished it.

And then I went downstairs

and I put on my Vision Pro to make it really big

and the YouTube app.

And next thing I know, I'd watch the entire thing.

And I went to bed too late last night as a result,

but it's so good.

If you're interested in Apple,

if you're interested in history,

this is just the best.

It's so worth watching.

I cannot recommend it enough.

In the know.

In the know.

All right, my friend, I have a beef to pick with you.

Okay.

As much as I enjoy my iPad Pro

sitting in the Magic Keyboard.

One of these times we talked about the fact

that you love your Magic Keyboard now,

but you still keep your Apple Folio cover

and you put them both in together.

And I remember looking at you

when you mentioned that a few weeks ago

and I was like, well, that's ridiculous.

Why are you carrying both your Apple Keyboard

and the Apple Slim cover?

Because I think that was from your old iPad, right?

That was your old slim cover from your old iPad and you just kept it.

Or did you get a new one?

Or maybe I purchased it when I got the iPad Pro.

It's been so long since I first purchased the iPad Pro version 4.

But I'm playing it for a while.

But anyway, I may have paid $100 for this.

But you're keeping both.

And I was like, that seems a little silly that you would have both.

I love the Magic Keyboard and that's where my iPad stays.

Except three or four times this past week, I kept thinking,

boy, I would just like to use my iPad as if it was just sitting on my lap without having to like

open the keyboard and pop the, you know, the iPad off. And then it was naked. It was my biggest thing.

It's like, I don't want to set it down on the table in case it gets scratched or on top of this.

It'd be nice if I could just have a little folio case to use with my iPad. So I did a little bit

of research. I was going to go just with the Apple, but Jeff, I mean, that's $99, right? I mean,

That smart folio is $100.

So I'm like, there's got to be some others I know.

And I was looking at Logitech and others.

I landed on Pitaka.

Pitaka?

Never heard of it.

P-I-T-A-K-A.

Never heard of it either.

Great reviews.

$60 was what this was.

But here's the cool thing.

And I'll show this to you next week.

Because one of the reasons I wanted this, honestly, is because I plan to carry my iPad around with me all week next week.

a tech show to be able to reference the grid and different information and you know things and i

just didn't want to have it too bulky well this does exactly what you would i could just you know

open it up here i'm kind of crowding in the camera right now but just like what you're talking about

i just wanted to flip it around so that it could it could the cover could be on the back right

it's protected it's magnetized so that it actually has a magnet in the in the base of the

of the cover so my iPad just glues right on and in fact I can even hold it up and you can see that

it is in the case it doesn't come out really easily but the other cool thing about this and

I'll show the pictures on screen here in just a little bit is that once it's flipped around

I can quickly do this origami thing with it and it will stand up in portrait mode

allow me to do it in landscape mode as well here I'll show some of these pictures as they as they

have it on here and i gotta tell you i've had it for like three days now and i love it the other

little thing that it has is a little flap on here i don't know if it's gonna let me see if i can show

you so a little flap so that you can put your apple pencil on the side and then when you uh uh

want to take off with it here you can see a little bit in this picture here that flap will just wrap

around the apple pencil so that it keeps it on top of the ipad and that magnetized area so obviously

it charges it as well anyway it's there there you know there's dozens and dozens of these uh little

folio cases that are available out there i had just never looked at them because for so long

as long as you never didn't use an ipad magic keyboard i never used a folio case i'm just like

i don't need that but i gotta tell you you you had the right idea jeff and you made me spend more

money because i love having the ability like i'm gonna carry now i've got both the keyboard

and this folio, this photocatal folio.

And that's why I'm going to kind of, you know, run with my iPad

because there's times when I just don't need the keyboard.

Although I have found sometimes that I'm using it with this folio case

and it's like I want to type in a quick URL or something.

Before, I would just use the keyboard and type it.

Now I've got to go on screen and, you know,

sometimes I just miss that keyboard.

But for the most part, I've been very, very pleased with this.

And there's several others that are, of course, that are out there.

But I like this little origami thing.

it's well made it's like this faux leather kind of a thing so it doesn't you know it doesn't scratch

anything the magnets are really well done really high quality so that would be my recommendation

the pataka they just call it the ipad pro case but i sort of call it i think of it as like the

folio case probably because that's what apple usually calls it but that's my pick for the day

that's cool thank you for sharing this because there's like you know it's similar to what i have

the Apple product, but it looks like you've got three features that I don't have. You know,

first of all, mine can fold up in the origami shape to support my iPad in portrait, in landscape

mode. But what mine cannot do and yours can do is if you want to put your iPad tall in portrait

mode, it can actually fold that way too. So that's a cool feature. The second thing that it has the

little protective thing to cover the Apple pencil that I can actually understand the value of that

Because sometimes I'm walking around my office and I've got my iPad in my folio and my Apple

pencil is just magnetically attached at the top and the magnet's pretty strong.

But as you know, if you hit it on something by mistake, my pencil will fly off, right?

But now you have protection.

So that's the second advantage you have.

And then the third advantage you have is you have an extra 40 bucks in your pocket that

you would not have had if you had spent a hundred bucks on the Apple product.

So those are three good reasons.

I know I will see you in person next week and you will obviously be carrying this.

So I'll have a chance to check it out myself.

so i look i gotta tell you it was hard i was you know similar to like what you talked about with

the apple studio i was ready just to go i'm just gonna go out but just get the apple product and

i'm like well just wait a minute actually i think it went to chat gpt and i put it in it's like what

are some of the other cases out there and there was a few others that i had mentioned because i

typically don't like to go off brand very much if i don't have to but so far i've been extremely

happy with with this one and i just i wanted to make sure that i had this little flap there to

make sure that the Apple Pencil stayed on. And also it's hard to see, but there's a little

indentation in that so that when you don't need to flap, it can hide itself away very, very easily.

So it doesn't even, you know, it's not like flapping in the wind or anything. You can just

hide it and tuck it away. So you don't even have to get access to it. But the Pitaka iPad Pro.

I mean, I always love clever design, so I'm very excited. I'm glad that you found that and that

you shared it. That's very, very cool. I also like it when people have suggestions that are even

better than our tips of the week. Last week, your tip of the week had to do with switching

listening modes on your AirPods Pro. And you were showing that not only, of course, you can squeeze

the tip, but that only switches between the modes that you set up because you can only have like

two modes or three modes. And then you were showing a tip last week that you can actually

go to control panel and do it. So we have someone who listens to the show and he said it was okay to

share his name. So it is an attorney in Akron, Ohio, which is not that far from where you live,

right? Yeah. Mike Walsh. And good old Mike. Mike Walsh is the court administrator and magistrate

for the Ninth District Court of Appeals in Ohio, which is close to my heart because I'm an appellate

attorney. So I always love people involved with appellate courts because that's where I love to

practice. And he said that there's actually another great way to switch listening modes

that I cannot imagine it did not occur to me. Use our friend Siri. If you just say,

hey blank okay you can just say switch to noise cancellation mode switch to transparency

switch to adaptive okay say that out loud it will switch modes and this is so useful for me

because sometimes i don't think i've tried that i might be like you know i'm doing dishes or

something like that and so my hands are wet and i don't want to be squeezing my thing and i'm not

going to pick up my iphone and go to the control panel but i want to switch modes because i had

been in noise cancellation mode and now I want to listen to that people outside because they might

talk to me um you can just speak out loud and it will change modes and once I saw this tip from

Mike I tried it and it worked um one thing that's different about it is you know how when you squeeze

the tips of the airpods or if you go to the control panel when you switch modes you know how

it makes a distinctive tone as you switch modes and I know what those and they're different tones

for different modes.

That's correct.

When you just use your friend Siri,

got to be careful when I say that word.

And of course I just set off my iPad when I did it.

It doesn't make the tone.

At least it hasn't for me.

Maybe I'm doing something wrong.

And so of course I know it does it

because like if I switch from noise cancellation

to transparency or to adaptive,

you can tell the difference

because suddenly you can hear the outside world.

It's a little bit more subtle

when I switch between transparency and adaptive

because those are pretty similar, right?

You know, transparency is everything comes through.

Adaptive is everything comes through,

but the really loud stuff will sort of put the sounds down.

So I'm walking around outside,

the hustle and bustle of the street

is gonna be a little bit down.

But if someone talks to me,

it'll be just like I'm in transparency mode.

So that's the adaptive mode.

And so that I might not be able to hear the distinction,

but again, it works and it happens.

And you get an alert, by the way, on your phone.

So in case you're curious, if you did it,

If you can see your iPhone screen, when you say, hey, you know who, and you switch the mode, you'll see something at the top of your screen that actually says switch to such and such mode.

So you'll get that visual indication.

But like this makes so much because this is what I wanted.

I wanted a way to switch modes.

Sometimes it's not convenient.

Something's in my hand.

I don't want my phone.

And I cannot believe I did not think about this.

Thank you so much, Mike Walsh, for sharing this tip.

And I'm glad to share it with others.

What a great idea.

Thanks, Mike.

I mean, certainly because I'm thinking, and I got to test this, because if you press and hold the stem of your AirPods, then it's only going to go through the cycle that you've predetermined, right?

It'll go transparency to adaptive to noise cancellation.

But apparently here, if you ask our friend Sally to change it, you can specify exactly what you want it to go to, right?

If you want to go to transparency.

So you don't have to go through that cycle all the time.

Correct.

Oh, I have to try that.

This is cool.

Although I normally do this a lot in the airplane.

So I don't know if.

Sure.

You have to be in an environment that you can speak out loud.

Yeah.

So I will admit if you're around other people, if you're around other people, you might not

want to do this.

But if you're by yourself and you're listening to something, because for me, that that's absolutely

the case, you know, I'm doing something around the house or I'm doing whatever.

And it's OK for me to speak because I don't have a lot of people around me, but I want

to switch modes.

So anyway, I thought this is a great tip.

Oh, man.

Thanks, Mike.

We need to have like a crowdsource tips, Jeff.

I mean, you're going to do some of that a little bit next week as we talked about since

we're going to see each other in tech show.

But thanks, Mike, for sending that in.

And feel free to do that or email Jeff on the blog,

or you can reach out to me as well.

We always enjoy seeing folks provide some tips.

And again, if you're going to be in Chicago

at the ABA Tech Show next week,

you'll see both of us there.

I'll probably be a little bit busier than Jeff,

although Jeff's going to be pretty busy.

He's doing two sessions and really just going around.

Both of us are going to be doing the dinner next Thursday

for a select group of attendees.

If you get there and you can sign up for the Taste of Tech Show dinners, I'm always excited about that.

I have good memories from doing this many, many years with you, Jeff, and I'm looking forward to it.

So as always, thanks for being here.

And we definitely will talk next week, just in a little bit of a different capacity.

There you go.

Thanks, Brad.

I will see you in person next week and hopefully see some of folks listening too.

Otherwise, take care.

Bye-bye, everybody.