Welcome to In the News for May 22nd,2026.

I am Brett Burney from appsinlaw.com.

And this is Jeff Richardson from iPhone JD. Hey, Brett.

Jeff, we're just a few weeks away now from the next keynote presentation by Apple,

WWDC,

the Worldwide Developers Conference. We knew that this was happening. I think we've

mentioned this date already uh that we know like it's actually an entire week where a lot of

developers well i guess they still go to cupertino right and they uh attend a lot of virtual now right

a lot of it can attend virtually uh these days but it's an entire week of fantastic classes i know

you and i have gone through and we get to listen to even some of them because some of them they do

open it up to the public but it's typically kicked off by a big keynote presentation right

And sure enough,

on June 8th, I believe,

yeah,

starts at 10 a.m. Pacific time.

So that's 1 p.m.

Eastern time.

You can even add it to the calendar.

How convenient.

Thank you, Apple,

that they make some big announcements.

And this one's even going to be a little bit bigger just for the very fact that it could be the very last presentation that's going to be led by Tim Cook before he hands over the reins to John Ternus.

Yeah.

You know, I forgot to even mention in my post today that Apple did announce the date this week, June 8th.

And that's because in my mind,

it's WWDC is so predictable every year that I had long since put,

you know,

noon central on June 8th was on my calendar as, you know, that's pretty much going to be the keynote.

And sure enough, it was.

I mean, that's fine.

There's nothing wrong with predictability.

It's nice to plan for it.

And we've been talking about WWDC.

You know,

I love WWDC as a non-developer because this is when Apple,

you know,

takes,

pulls back the curtain and shows us what the operating systems are going to be in the fall.

And so we're going to get the next operating systems.

It'll be iOS 27,

iPad iOS 27.

And so that's always interesting because,

you know, there's always some cool new software

features in there.

And the software features are the things that are far less likely to leak than hardware features

because just the nature of making hardware,

there are people actually putting things together

and some of them leak to the press and stuff like that.

So the hardware we tend to know about, but software,

so I think that we know from history,

there will be surprises and that's great.

But then the thing that makes this year

particularly interesting is the AI story.

We've been talking about AI for so long

and AI has been an important part

of Apple's WWDC keynotes for the last couple of years,

most notably a few years ago

where they announced a bunch of features

that they could not deliver on.

But what we knew, though,

because it's been announced is that Apple is working with Google with their Gemini model,

and they're going to be integrating that.

And it is just going to be really interesting.

You know, up through now,

the only thing publicly said about the Apple and Google collaboration has been like a two sentence statement that Google is the one that made it, not Apple,

a couple of months ago.

And every time that Google has repeated it since then,

including just this week when Google had their I.O.

conference and they were sort of alluding to it,

you know, they keep saying the same thing over and over again.

It's almost like they have the lawyers on both sides put together two sentences that they were allowed to say about it until Apple has its full reveal.

So,

you know,

we know something's coming.

They're incredibly tight-lipped about it, except that there's an announcement that there's a relationship.

And so that's going to be really interesting in June.

So it's a lot to look forward to,

you know, coming up.

I mean, just a few weeks.

I mean, that's right around the corner,

right?

So this is exciting.

It's cool stuff.

Most importantly, we always try to decipher what the little visual logo is every year.

I have no idea what this is.

It's a glowing little,

it's like a bird.

Is that Swift?

Maybe that's the Swift operating system,

you know, which makes sense because developers.

but because it's the glowy,

I wonder if it's something to do with Siri

or some AI tool or so.

Sorry, I got to turn all my prices off now.

I just think it's a cool logo.

I mean, I do agree with you.

There have been times in the past

where the logo has, you know,

given you somewhat of a sneak peek.

My guess is that there's not something there this year,

but who knows?

Who knows?

We'll find out soon enough.

Well, among many other things,

Apple celebrates the Apple Design Awards

or they give out the awards,

I think, during WWDC,

but they announced them several weeks.

And then you did link to this this week.

Apple introduced the 2026 Apple Design Award finalists.

Now,

when we say this,

we're really specifically talking about apps, right?

These are really apps.

It's not just not designs for hardware products,

although that would be fun, I guess.

And I guess maybe Apple does that to some extent.

We've talked about these over the years now,

over the five years we've been doing this.

And it's always fun to kind of look at these and say,

oh yeah, I know that app or I know that app.

But I think increasingly more and more over the last two or three years,

Jeff, there's a lot of apps in here that I'm not even aware of.

And I'm like, hey, I got to try those.

Yeah.

And, you know, again,

these are apps that are doing something.

I mean, it's a design award, right?

So it's like the way the app is put together,

whether it's the user interface or sometimes it's more than just the Chrome of it.

Sometimes it's just the way it puts together.

But something jumped out at Apple and they're like, you know, this is worth commenting on.

And again, the thing that interests me every year, and I mentioned this, is that there's so many things I don't know about.

I mean, just to give one example, there's a camera app from a company called Not Boring, which is always such a funny name.

And they have their Not Boring camera app.

And I actually haven't heard about that.

I have heard about that over the years.

I haven't tried it is what I meant to see.

And so now that that's something that was on my radar screen,

but not something I was using,

now that they've had at least a finalist for a design award,

we'll see if they win it.

I'm like,

that is interesting.

And I may look at it.

Another one that falls in the category,

and I know Vision OS interests me particularly because I love my Apple Vision Pro,

but there's an app that they came out with,

I think last year, called D-Day, the camera soldier.

And it's basically just like,

you know, everything about D-Day.

But apparently it was put,

supposedly it was put together incredibly well with like a lot of original source material.

It strikes me as like,

just like,

you know, if you go to like a really well done museum that does a fantastic exhibit on something that you sort of like really feel like you're inside of it and you're it's this and that and it's things are virtual and in the real world sense of it that this app did.

And when the app came out, I was like, oh, I should check that out on my vision pro and I never did.

And so now that I've seen it there again,

I'm like, OK, great.

But then there are just so many apps in here that I have never heard of at all on, you know, everything from, you know, Tide Guide for charting the tides and stuff like that,

that,

you know, good on them because that's, I think, the real what Apple is really trying to do here is give some people some publicity,

you know,

give them a pat on the back for doing a good job and then give them some publicity so that people can pay attention to it.

So what I plan to do at some point is sit down and go through this list and see, you know, what do I want to check out and just download it.

And maybe it'll be something that'll become a big part of my life.

Maybe not,

but it's at least a list of things that have got the big thumbs up from Apple.

This is worth checking out.

Have you not tried Pickle Pro?

Have not tried Pickle Pro yet.

One of the most impressive native gaming experiences for Vision OS.

That means you have to try it.

It also happens to be a very fun pickleball game.

I would like to have your report on Pickle Pro for Vision OS.

I will give you the pickleball report, yes.

The other one, quickly, I laughed at when I saw it.

Where is it?

Oh, Power Wash Simulator.

I laughed at that one, too.

I agree.

I know that this sounds crazy, but I got to tell you, I know on the Xbox,

I came across this game, Power Wash Simulator.

And I don't know, there has to be certain people,

and one of them is in my life, that love to Power Wash.

And that is my wife.

It's very satisfying.

She gets it out, and she loves to, like, sometimes she'll even do designs, but she just loves the idea.

like on the sidewalk,

right?

She just like goes back and forth

and it's just calming for her.

So I got her to play Power Wash Simulator on the Xbox.

And now that it's available on her iPad,

I don't know if I'm going to be able

to grab her away from it.

I love this.

True to its title,

this hygienic game is inexplicably satisfying.

Oh man.

Also available for the Vision Pro.

So I'll have to see what the,

you know,

the full armor.

I got a lot of things to do.

Wow.

You got a lot of Vision Pro going on.

Okay, that's hilarious. But anyway,

I love seeing all these announcements coming up right before WWDC. And another one that you did actually link to today,

I feel like that they've done this a few of the years.

Apple unveils new accessibility features and updates powered by Apple Intelligence.

Now,

you know,

most people would say, well, if you're not,

you know, of that group or you need accessibility features,

maybe you don't pay attention to this.

But Jeff, I remember over the last couple of years,

we love seeing this list because it's some really amazing offerings and features and functionality that is being added to the Apple devices.

And even I got one of the pictures here behind me.

They're even coming out with a hardware product this year as well.

Yeah.

So,

I mean, I, of course, agree. We say this often that things that I mean, we want great accessibility tools because they're fabulous for the people that have a dire need for them.

We also want them because it always ends up pushing the platform and things that start up as an accessibility feature then bleed over and are developed further and they become something that all of us end up using.

And so,

you know, a good example of that is one of the things that they let off talking about today was people who have issues with sight can use their iPhone to look around and to get information about the world around them.

And versions of this have been around for a while where you could look at something,

you know, or you put your iPhone up and it would tell you this is the door, the door is closed.

So that if you are either blind or have limited sight,

it could,

you know,

tell you about the world around you.

And they have examples that they're coming up with now that you could like scan a document, like a receipt.

And it says, you know, this is a receipt for such and such a service.

And this is how much you owe and all those sorts of things.

And so that is immediately useful for people that have limited sight.

But this is a perfect example of what we're talking about,

because this exact same technology is what Apple is going to be putting more into,

not just today's Vision Pro,

which is big and bulky,

but the future ones that will be much smaller than part of your glasses.

So that, you know, we will have a world.

I just don't know if it's five years,

10 years, 20 years,

but I am 100% convinced that we will have a world where I will be wearing something that looks like regular glasses.

But when I look over at something and I'm not exactly sure what it is,

somehow Apple will use the same technology of,

and this is using AI,

of course,

too,

of understanding the world around me.

And it will be able to tell me, oh,

you know, what you're looking at is the Mona Lisa,

which is a very famous painting in the louver or whatever it is.

But it will be able to understand the world around me and augment my reality in a way

that is helpful for me.

And so that's why this stuff is cool for everybody.

I also like the fact that, as you alluded to, Brett, it's been a couple of years.

Years ago, Apple would announce their annual accessibility improvements at the WWDC conference.

They would start on Monday with the keynote.

And then throughout the week, they would have subconferences.

One of those subconferences was accessibility.

But there are so many announcements during WWDC every week that I love that for the last couple of years now,

they have pulled those accessibility announcements out of WWDC.

They brought them forward a couple of weeks to this week.

It happens to be Global Accessibility Awareness Day this week.

And so that's, you know, that's their hook for it.

But it allows us to pay a little bit more attention to these things.

You know, another cool one that was on this list is that,

again, if you're wearing a Vision Pro and, of course, in the future,

people that have ALS are,

you know, it's a horrible disease.

What a horrible disease it is that, you know, ultimately limits your ability.

You know, here in New Orleans, we have a former Saints player,

Steve Gleason, who started something called Team Gleason, which is one of the global leaders in ALS technology.

And I noticed that Steve Gleason is just such a first class guy.

But, you know, I think all he can really move nowadays is his eyes.

And he uses his eyes with fancy technology to type out letter by letter things.

And so he can communicate and his brain is incredible,

but his body is just limiting what

he can do.

But he is such a just inspirational person in his organization.

So Team Gleason teamed up with Apple to work on this technology that if you put an Apple

Vision Pro in somebody that's in a wheelchair,

they can use their eyes to look in different

directions and control the wheelchair,

which basically means you are giving somebody who

cannot use their hands or their feet to move the wheelchair.

You are giving them the gift of mobility because they can look around and control the wheelchair.

And I know,

again,

there's a limited number of people who will use this today,

but for

them,

it's going to be incredible.

And then just like I said,

as this type of technology develops,

it is going to expand.

In one way or the other,

I guarantee you that this particular technology,

controlling a wheelchair if all you have is your eyes, is going to branch out into something else that's even more useful for more people.

So I love these announcements.

It's a great press release.

It's got awesome videos in it.

The one that's behind you, by the way, Brett,

which is – what are the name of those things?

So this is something that came out.

Well, they call it a MagSafe accessory here.

It is.

Because what it is, it sticks on the back of your iPhone using MagSafe.

And this is not the first time we see it.

They came up with it last year too.

It's the Hikawa Grip and Stand.

They came up with this, I want to say one year ago,

maybe in two years ago.

And when you look at it, it's sort of big and bulky.

And you're like, well, why would you want to have something so big and bulky in the back of your iPhone?

And the answer is,

is that if you have a hand that has something that limits your use of it, for example, in the picture that you were showing right now, they show hands that people lost a finger,

you know, through an accident or something like you lose a finger.

Or maybe you have limited abilities to move your hand, your motor functions are not working as you would like.

And so you need something that's bigger,

that has a big hole in it that you can put one of your fingers in to give you the ability to securely grip your iPhone.

But you also want to have something that looks sort of cool.

And so somebody,

they designed this thing about a year ago, and it sold out almost instantly, even though it was expensive.

It was like $80 when it came out.

So this is the new version of it that's got new colors,

so it looks interesting.

I think it's even cheaper now.

I think maybe it's like $50 now as opposed to $80.

And so,

I mean, anyone could use it.

You don't have to have some sort of,

you know, issues with your hand.

But, you know,

anyone who wants to use it for people for whom this is going to be like the perfect ideal way for them to securely hold an iPhone.

And because it's MagSafe, it just,

you know,

snaps right onto the back of the iPhone and connects magnetically.

And then if you want to take it off, you can take it off, too, because it's MagSafe.

I, you know, I want to try one because I feel like MagSafe,

I don't know that that could be that secure,

I guess.

Oh, I think it actually is.

I thought when I saw this and oh, here they mentioned pop sockets here.

I mean, you know, I have never been one to put a pop socket on my phone, but I see them everywhere.

You do too.

Everybody has them or it's like a little ring or a hook or something.

But typically I find that those are like attached or even glued or,

you know, some kind,

some kind of adhesive to maybe a case or it's at the back of the iPhone.

But this here is just a MagSafe, which means like,

I mean,

will it hold?

Does it hold enough?

Obviously it does.

They're not going to throw something out there that's not going to work in this way.

But anyway, I got to go to an Apple store and try it.

Yeah, I can lay those fields,

right?

Yeah, they are.

Nowadays,

the magnet and MagSafe is actually very strong.

and I've actually reviewed,

the name of it is Slipping Me.

I have it in my bag.

I use it every once in a while,

but I actually reviewed something maybe a year or two ago

that sticks to the back of it.

It wasn't made by PopSockets.

It was another company, but it was the same idea

that it gives you like a little grip.

And I can tell you from experience,

they do work.

I mean, it is possible.

Of course it's a magnet, so you can pull it off,

but it's more than secure enough

because I used to be worried about that too.

I'm like, the only way I would really trust it

is if it was glued to the back of my iPhone,

but I don't want something permanently glued

to the back of my iPhone,

right?

And that's why the pop sockets people would often glue it to a case.

The original versions would glue it to a case.

So you can get the case on and off.

But no, I have no doubt that this particular device they're announcing right here is going to be secure enough based upon my experience with other companies that use the magnets and MagSafe to securely hold an iPhone.

And then I want to know, like, what if I have a MagSafe case on my phone?

Would that also work?

I think it should because the MagSafe case is supposed to channel through that magnet.

Channel through and – yeah,

right,

right.

Anyway, just some interesting things there.

So we're excited.

In a couple of weeks, we'll be talking – or I guess three weeks or so,

we'll be talking about what they have been mentioning and announcing at WWDC.

Let's talk about some tips,

which has nothing to do with WWDC other than the fact that we'll probably get a lot more tips.

You have like a deluge.

You have three links today about tips.

This first one here are 10 useful iPhone tips and tricks that you may not know about.

I always love to look at these, as we always say.

We know most of them, but it's good to have a reminder every now and then.

Yeah,

Julie Clover's got 10 tips.

Tim Hardwick had 15 Apple Watch tips.

And then Eric Griffith of PCMag had 109 iPhone tips.

And, you know, anytime they come up with a lot of tips, especially the bigger list,

you know, there's going to be things that you know about in here,

hopefully.

You know, for example, the idea that you could,

you know, hold your finger down on the keyboard and it turns it into like a little virtual trackpad so you can move the cursor around.

It's been around for a long time.

Hopefully everybody knows about it.

But, you know, there's,

you know, whenever I go through these lists, I always see things that either number one I never knew about or number two I forgot about.

And, you know, a good example that I forgot about one is on the Tim Hardwick tip of Apple Watch tips.

I think I've actually made this a tip of the week on our podcast or maybe you have before.

And yet I still forget about it.

And it's when I'm using my Apple watch,

if I want to switch between apps,

if you,

if you,

if you,

you know, the digital crown right here,

if you press in twice on the digital crown,

it brings into like this little,

um,

uh,

slide overview where you can see like all the different apps and like tiles and you can slide back and forth.

It's basically the equivalent of command tab or control tab on your Apple Watch.

And I use it frequently enough that I forget about it.

But then when I saw this tip, I'm like, oh, yeah, that really is useful.

Because although I don't use a ton of apps on my Apple Watch, I do use them sometimes.

And it is a really convenient.

It's a lot more convenient than going to the grid or the big list of apps and scrolling down to the name.

Because the reality is the few apps that I use,

because I use apps relatively infrequently,

there's a good chance they're going to be in like one of the last three or four apps I've used,

if not the last app I used. So it's far more,

I just have to remember, it's far more useful for me

to do that double tap on the digital crown and go back one or two apps than to pull up the list of

apps,

find something,

blah, blah, blah.

I'll tell you, I do this all the time.

When I run,

you know, I start my workout for an outdoor run, right? And so that's the app on the face,

but I like to listen to Spotify and music and Spotify while I run.

And so I want to keep the

workout app still running,

but I'll double press the crown to switch to my Spotify app so that

that's the watch face that's showing so that I can, you know, jump back and forth on music while

the workout app is still going. And then I can jump, I can jump back and forth. So yeah,

I'd use

that all the time. I like that one.

You know, one quickly that I saw from Julie Clover that I don't

think I knew about.

I love using my iPhone to set timers and I've even added the timer button in

the control center.

But if you do that, if you add the timer button in the control center,

one of the things that she says is that you can tap and hold on the timer button in the control

center and it'll give you like a little slider so you can set it for 10 minutes or 15 minutes.

You know, a lot of times I just say, I just ask,

you know,

she who shall not be named to set me a

timer for so many minutes or so,

or sometimes I will go into the control center. But if you

have the timer button added in control center if you tap and hold on that there you can actually

have a little slider so you can say you know slide up and down for 10 minutes or 15 minutes or

whatever i just liked that one i thought that was a yeah that one jumped out at me too i have the

alarm clock in my control center yeah and if i you know i can tap it to instantly go to my alarms

because i usually set an alarm every night because i wake up at a different time every morning

and so that's really useful um but i'm actually noticing right now that if i hold down on the

alarm widget,

whatever you call it.

I see an option right there to start timer,

which is actually a

little quick jumping into there. Yeah.

It's one of the best, best hidden secrets on the iPhone is

it's not just that you can tap an app or a widget or whatever,

but holding down will often give you

a whole bunch of other options.

And you're like, oh, that's really cool. It's like, it's a, it's a

power tip that's, that's been around forever.

And yet I I'm constantly amazed like, oh yeah,

that's really useful. What did they call that when that first came out? The first iteration

um uh 3d touch or something like that there was some weird name that they had something like that

yeah yeah yeah exactly yeah i can't remember now what it is but you're right it is so ingrained

you know one of the ones that i remember you brought up that i didn't know about if you tap

and hold on the app store icon that can get me directly you can select updates from there because

i always like to make sure that my apps are updated i would normally have to go to the app store

tap on my little face go down and find updates and it was like and then and then even then you need

to just hold down yeah to refresh yeah yeah yeah you saved me like four taps just being able to tap

and hold and most of the apps allow you to tap and hold and really it's some neat little shortcuts

in there uh okay those those are good i didn't i didn't have a chance to go through eric all 109

hidden tricks from eric griffith here but there was there was just some good ones as i was you

know flying through but again always fun to kind of just go through and make sure that you're not

missing any of them.

App Store,

you know, friend Dave Sparks has been talking about for a long time,

why isn't there a section in the App Store where we can buy Apple Watch faces?

Now, this may seem

a little silly when I mention it,

because you can get Apple Watch faces.

It's just they are curated

right now from Apple,

right?

If I'm not mistaken,

there's a ton of watch faces in there, but they

all come from Apple.

And I've seen some hacks and you have to,

you know, where people have kind of

gone through and they develop their own watch faces and you can throw those in, but it takes some

hoops to jump through.

And I think David Sparks has been asking this question for a long time.

Why don't we just have an app store for Apple watch faces?

I'd probably spend a little bit of

money there.

Well, I don't know how much money you're going to spend, Brett, but I mean, all you

to do is spend a few thousand dollars on an Hermes band and then you get the Hermes watch face.

So,

you know, they're depending upon what your budget is,

but no,

it's true.

The, I know that Apple is,

you know, doesn't want the chaos that of a bajillion different watch faces,

but, but they don't have

to have it. I mean, they could just have an app store.

I mean, even if they just selected the top

100 that they approve there,

there's no question in my mind that there are developers out there,

very smart developers that would come up with some really good watch faces that would be more

exactly what I want.

I mean, Apple has an okay variety.

I mean,

believe me,

I do change my watch face

from time to time

because I like when Apple

comes up with interesting things.

For a while,

you know,

it was just a week or two ago,

what was it?

We were announcing that they came up

with this year's version

of the Pride one,

which is sort of colorful and fun.

So I had that one on there for a while

because I enjoyed it.

But I completely agree with David.

It's been so,

they could have done this so long ago

that the fact that they haven't done it by now

makes me think they perhaps never will.

But I hope that I'm wrong on that.

I mean, heck, we got a new person coming in.

Maybe Tim Cook didn't like it.

Maybe John Ternus will say, I'm so glad that I'm in charge because this is the one thing I've been wanting to do is be able to have an Apple Watch store for watch faces.

One can always hope and dream.

Let's switch gears a little bit and talk about passwords.

One of the favorite topics for a lot of people.

Although I loved this article from One Password that you linked to.

You and I are big fans of 1Password.

I mean, goodness,

we both have been using it for, I mean, it's got to be almost 15,

16, 17 years now.

It's been out for a very,

very long time.

And through those years,

I've always appreciated the fact that they are very transparent about how they take care of security,

what they do with your information.

They have always been fantastic.

And this article is no different.

This just came out yesterday,

a couple of days ago.

the architectural reason 1Password can't read your vault data.

Because I feel like a lot of people ask,

1Password and many, many other companies are like,

oh, no, no, no, we can't access your information.

But you always kind of question that, right?

Like, really?

Are you sure there's not some kind of a backdoor

or a way that you can get in?

Because I feel like through the years,

we have been kind of hoodwinked a little bit

by some companies that maybe don't have the same integrity

of some of these companies like 1Password.

But man, they lay it out here.

I mean, you can get as deep into the weeds

and cryptography as you want to on here.

But I just really appreciate that 1Password

goes to these links,

you know,

to make sure that they apply resources

to give us the information

to make us feel a little bit more confident

about using it.

Yeah,

I've been using 1Password since 2012.

And for a very long time,

the way that 1Password worked

is you would choose the location for your vault.

I was using Dropbox at the time.

locally and um i i always felt that that was more secure i mean again dropbox is a is a certain is a

you know cloud type thing too but i just felt like it wasn't one central place i mean it's like the

old joke you know why do you rob banks because that's where the money is you know i was always

thought that would be safer to not have all of my past all of every one password's users passwords

in the hands of the company but then a couple years ago when they came out with the current

version of one password and like you know what we're actually going to move it that everything

is on our own server.

I was nervous.

I really was because I'm like,

that's just going to be too much

of a treasure chest for the bad guys.

But I will tell you,

1Password did it right. And they explain

it here because all of your passwords are encrypted on device so that what is stored on the server

is a completely encrypted file.

So there is no plain text. I mean, even if, of course,

1Password's got lots of security, so the bad guys couldn't even get to the data.

But even if somehow,

you know, maybe a rogue employee or something like that,

even if somebody actually got to the data,

they would still just see a bunch of jumbles of ones and zeros without having,

because the two-factor stuff,

without having the keys that are on your own personal device,

they would not be able to decrypt it and see all of your passwords.

And I know that that's hard for people to think about because they're like, oh,

well,

my iPhone and my iPad and my computer,

my PC,

my Mac,

they are all syncing with the 1Password website.

And so, of course, my passwords are just sitting, you know, my great password of fluffy123 is right there on the 1Password website and the bad guys can get it.

But the reality is, no, that's not what's on the 1Password website.

It's completely encrypted.

And in fact,

one of the things I like about 1Password is that unlike some of their competitors,

they have a more sophisticated system that it's not just your own password for you.

It's not just your own master password,

but like your master password is encrypted with a whole bunch of things.

They've talked about that before,

too.

So like it's is I mean,

I guess nothing is, you know,

completely forever safe.

But,

you know,

1Password has been a target of the bad guys for so long and they've never been hacked.

And that's not an accident.

That only happens because they're thinking about it.

And so whether you use 1Password or a different system, we've talked about how Apple's own password system has gotten better.

And hopefully Apple does some of these same things,

too.

But if you do happen to be a 1Password customer or someone considering it, yes,

this is on the 1Password blogs.

You could say, oh, this is marketing flaw.

But no, this is actually them describing in detail how they designed it.

And this is what I want.

The company that I go to to make my food, I want them to be incredibly concerned about making me really good food.

the company that i go to for sure for securing my passwords i want them to be incredibly concerned

i'll be very i want them to be way over my head about why they're doing such a good job for the

passwords and so i thought this article was worth linking to because it does a good enough job of

explaining why you can be calm it you can be you can feel secure yes it's on their way and there's

so many advantages of it being on their website right because you can have it synced between all

your different devices and you even got cool features like if you wanted to leave the country

you could wipe all of your passwords yeah and then as you go through security there's nothing there

at all.

And then once you get to your foreign country and your secure location,

you can re-download

them. And there's,

there's lots of, that's their, I think it's called the travel mode feature.

There's lots of advantages of it all being in that central location.

So anyway,

cool article.

Now, just real quick, we don't spend a lot of time on this, but when they moved to this new

kind of a model, cause you're right. I remember those old days where I had to like,

I had my one

password vault and I had to copy it to different,

different locations,

but now you have to have your

quote secret key so in addition to knowing your one password to unlock the one password

there is a secret key and i feel like um what do they call that it's like the emergency

uh kit or something that they have right where i actually have to download that and i and i have to

store that in a location now that i have access to and that other people don't have access to

now sometimes i get a little nervous about that too because that's that could be another

opportunity maybe where people could, if they had access to that secret key that one password

doesn't have access to that, could they get in there as well?

Well, you know, in theory,

you don't have to, I mean, you say you have to do it. I mean, they encourage you to do so as a

backup,

but remember this is just a backup. I mean,

my secure key that I have, you know,

in a very safe location that I'm not going to say on the podcast right now,

it,

I would,

I've never used it.

I don't need to use it because it's all built into my passwords.

It would require some,

you know,

horrendous event where every single one of my devices was all sold at once.

And I was starting over the brand new things from scratch and I didn't have anything else.

And I couldn't,

you know,

it would require a whole bunch of things to happen for me to need it.

On the other hand,

you know, in theory,

you want to have that backup.

So, I mean,

if having that.

Because one password doesn't have it.

That's what they say in here,

right?

So if you want, if you want, if you just feel uncomfortable with even having that in your possession,

fine, you can go without it.

but it just means that you're not going to have that backup should you ever need it,

which is a little dangerous.

That's helpful.

You know, and in a similar vein, you'll link to another story today about passkeys.

We've talked about passkeys in the past.

I got to tell you,

it's hit and miss with me.

There's a couple of sites that I love using passkeys, and typically I use it through 1Password.

So instead of like putting in a username and password or even having it filled in from 1Password,

because I've got one password already unlocked,

it uses that passkey through there.

And that's great.

But then other sites I try to use it on

and they get stuck or it doesn't work.

And I'm just like, I don't want to bother with it.

Yeah, the reason I linked to this

because passkeys have been out for a little while now,

but of course they're still not mainstream,

is that this was an article by some smart folks

at the New York Times saying that

we actually think that we've turned the corner

and that it's okay to start using passkeys

because they do provide greater security

for reasons we've talked about in the past.

There is no password.

So the bad guys,

you know, the hacker that is in Russia can't steal your password because there is no password.

It's a passkey that's stored on your device.

The bad guy in Russia would have to somehow,

you know, fly over to America,

wherever you're located and steal your device and then have a bunch of your other information to be able to use it.

And so passkeys are inherently more secure,

which is a good thing.

They are still a little foreign to people because it's different.

And you need to use a password manager because you need to have a place to, unlike a password,

which in theory, you could remember your password, but that would be silly to do that because

we forget things.

Everybody should be using a password manager anyway, but you certainly need to use a password

manager if you're going to use pass keys because you need to keep them someplace.

And ideally,

you would want to have a password manager that works on all of your different

platforms,

which is like for me,

I like one password because it works on PC and Mac because

I use both.

If you don't use PCs in your life,

well, then that's fine.

you can keep your pass keys in just the Apple passwords app or something like that,

that just

works on Apple platform.

But, you know,

I start to use them more and more.

I'm still not using

them everywhere I can, you know,

as opposed to, for example,

two-factor authentication.

Two-factor authentication is such a good idea that every service that I use that has it as an option,

I turn it on.

And I don't like the ones that use text messaging as the second factor,

because we know that text messaging,

there's ways that the bad guys can get in around that.

I like the ones that it's a two-factor authentication where it's a secure code that changes every 30 seconds.

That's part of my password manager app.

So, like,

I have turned the corner on two-factor.

I use that everywhere that I can.

I'm glad that I can, and I think it protects me.

I haven't yet personally turned the corner on pass keys,

using them everywhere I can.

But articles like this make me think, okay, maybe we're getting there.

We talked about Apple Watches.

But the faces,

here's an app that I remember we talked about several years ago.

Yeah.

And you mentioned today that you still use it from time to time.

It's called micro browser.

It literally is like having a web browser on your Apple Watch.

I think maybe I can count on one hand the number of times that I've used it just because it's not the most pleasant experience.

So you have the app too?

Yeah.

I do.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Because I remember I was talking about this several years ago.

But it is nice to know that it is on there if I should ever need it.

Like,

I think the times that I've used it, I didn't have access to my phone.

You know, my Apple Watch is cellular enabled.

And so it's like I needed to look something up.

It's painful,

but it can work.

Yeah,

I'm searching right now.

When did I?

I know I thought I reviewed it, but I'm actually not seeing a full review.

Maybe I just mentioned it before and didn't write a full review of it.

But I've had it for a long time.

It only cost a few bucks.

And again,

using a web,

you know, using a web browser on the tiny, tiny screen of an Apple Watch ain't ideal.

But there have been times,

and I normally have my iPhone with me,

but sometimes I just have my Apple Watch.

And my Apple Watch does have cellular,

you know, I can't tell you that I get the full advantage of paying $10 a month to AT&T for it.

But I sort of have it as a security blanket,

you know, for those times that I am just by myself.

I like knowing that I could communicate with the outside world if I needed to do so.

And so,

but in those circumstances,

there have totally been times where,

you know, I need to check something on a website or see something real quick.

And I tell you what, it does work.

It does work.

I mean,

typing in a URL on that tiny little Apple Watch keyboard ain't great.

But once you have typed it in the past, once you do it once, you can save it as a bookmark and then it's easier to get to that website again.

And there have been times that are like, I just want to double check something on this website.

You know, what's the lead article on this website right now?

Or maybe there's something from my law firm that I want to just quickly look at or something like that.

And it does work.

And it is there.

So, again, you're not going to be using this as your day in, day out,

24-7 web browser.

But the idea that it works at all is amazing.

So that's why I appreciated the fact that this article was written by, who was it?

Whoever wrote this article.

Yeah, D. Griffin Jones.

It's just a nice reminder that this is out there.

Well, and just to be clear,

Apple does not offer a native web browser for the Apple Watch.

That's why we talk about this, because there is no way to surf the internet on an Apple Watch.

Obviously, Apple made that decision,

but I remember when this came out, it was just the developers.

They wanted to have the capability to do that when they needed it.

Again, not your main browser where you're going to go every time.

But I mean, for me, it's worth paying the $3 when I did several years ago just to have it on the just-in-case angle there.

So anyway, kind of funny.

Micro browser.

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

Yeah.

In fact, you know when I linked to it before,

it was my pick of the week on December 11th, 2021 in this podcast.

2021.

Okay.

How many years ago that was?

That's right.

I didn't write about it on the website.

I talked about it on this podcast.

Let's do a quick where you –

Episode 30.

Yeah.

I know.

I know.

I love it.

I love it.

Let's do a quick where you at segment.

We haven't done one of these in a while.

iPhone crash detection saved the day after a driver plummeted 330 feet down a mountain drop.

I think this lady was this woman was driving.

She slid 330 feet down a mountainside,

lost control of her vehicle.

This is in the UK is where this happened.

Emergency services arrived at the scene 20 minutes later,

including a mountain rescue team and firefighters.

Both had been alerted to the accident by the woman's iPhone and its automatic crash detection feature.

Apparently, she was able to crawl out of the wreckage.

But the fact that it called and was able to even get people on the scene within a few minutes is amazing.

Every time I slide my car hundreds of feet down a mountain,

I'm always happy that I have crash detection.

I mean, you would hope that this would never happen to you.

But oh my goodness,

if it does,

I mean,

you just to say that you are not in your rights frame of mind when that happens,

thank goodness that she lived and stuff like that.

But, you know, how wonderful that it could immediately call emergency services and get them out there so that she could get the help.

You know, this is like the insurance policy.

You hope you never need these features.

But oh my goodness,

how incredible that they're not just crash,

but the fall detection.

You know, last week I was talking about this story of my mom from a couple of weeks ago who did fall.

Now,

thankfully,

she's OK,

although she's got some bruising.

She broke her nose.

But I was talking to my sister just a couple of days ago that when my mother fell, she actually called my sister first,

right?

So the Apple Watch had already started calling emergency services.

She called and was talking to my sister.

She told my sister I fell,

but then it cut my sister off because that's when the Apple Watch called emergency services.

And so it cut my sister off because it was calling emergency services so that my mom could talk to the emergency services.

Now,

that was fall detection,

which is just as important, I think, as crash detection.

But just,

I mean,

again, it's so important to have an awareness of these tools.

And there was a few comments on the YouTube video last week,

Jeff, where people were talking about it like this is just great that they have the capability.

I think one person,

one commenter said that she had fallen.

She was okay,

but the Apple Watch detected that she fell, but she was able to cancel it because she didn't need any emergency services.

But,

man, again,

just fantastic to actually have that capability.

Like you said, it's kind of a nice insurance on there.

Let's talk about football.

Football is immersive life.

There's a couple of stories you'll link to that I thought were interesting.

I mean,

Apple takes soccer immersive with Real Madrid,

which is a football team.

But now you can watch it on the Vision Pro.

And I think you said that you actually watch this.

You're not a big soccer fan.

But, hey, it's on the Vision Pro.

You got to check it out.

Yeah,

it's really, really good.

I'm not a soccer fan.

But, I mean, you know,

Real Madrid is what that's the premier team in Spain.

I think it doesn't real mean royal in Spanish, I believe.

Yes.

That's their premier team.

And soccer fans are rabid.

I mean, let me just say that.

I would say sports is really cool on the Vision Pro.

I talked a while ago about how there were six Lakers games this year that were on the

Vision Pro.

And it was just so fantastic because,

I mean, that's the sort of thing that you want to

feel like you're there.

You're looking up and down the court.

You've got the fans around you.

It just really,

it's so much more,

I hate to say immersive because it's technically immersive

video, but you just feel so much more immersive at a game,

any sort of a sports game.

So that's why I was sort of curious to check this out when it went to drop to late last night.

And it's there was a particular game that they did.

They have a beautiful stadium there and they have all the players.

But,

you know,

a lot of the focus of the video is on the players and the history of the team and, you know, how everybody expects such greatness from them and the pressure on the players.

And that's cool. It was fun watching because you feel like you're there.

But the most incredible parts of it were when they had just I mean, I can't even imagine how many cameras they have.

They had overhead cameras. They had cameras in the crowd.

They had a camera of a person who was watching from their car.

They had cameras.

They had a nine.

Is that what it was?

They had a guy who was like 93 years old who was in Spain and he and his wife, who was probably just as old, were watching it in their home.

But like and so you felt like you were in all these things.

But especially especially when the ones where the cameras were in the stands.

I mean,

I know from watching my Ted Lasso episodes that soccer fans,

football fans in Europe are really big fans.

I mean, I think that American football fans or fans of their team,

uh-uh.

That's nothing compared to soccer.

And so when you have this angle where I feel like I'm in a seat next to all these amazingly amazing fans around me

and the sound and everywhere I can look and it's the lights of the stadium.

And Brett, I got caught up into it.

I mean, I was cheering.

I mean, I was a fan.

You're becoming a fan.

This is awesome.

This is awesome.

And, you know, spoiler alert,

but, you know, you can imagine the outcome of the game that I won, you know,

that I watched last night that, you know, they finally do score and win the game.

It never gets about soccer.

Like the score is like one nothing.

I mean, it's just such the opposite of American football or baseball.

They're such a low scoring game.

But when they do make that score,

everybody goes crazy.

And it's just it was I was cheering.

It was fantastic.

So I love that.

That's great.

It was really good.

It was really, really good.

They did a nice job with it.

And in a similar news, you link to John Gruber talked about the fact that Apple TV is going to broadcast an entire MLS match.

So we're not the Premier League,

right?

But we have Major League Soccer here in the United States.

They're going to broadcast an entire match shot using iPhones.

So not quite the Blackmagic immersive cameras,

but iPhones nonetheless.

That's pretty amazing.

Yeah,

I mean, I love the idea that the same iPhone that I use to take videos of my kids doing silly stuff is the same one that Apple is going to be using for a professional broadcast.

And they've had games in the past where they would use iPhones to supplement the huge expensive cameras.

And it's a little bit of a stunt, but this is the first time ever that Apple thinks that their technology is up to snuff that every single camera that they use to broadcast this game is going to be an iPhone.

I will probably tune in a little bit just to see because you know that Apple is only doing this because they think that they can actually pull it off.

It's going to be really good.

And that's really interesting.

I remember Gruber mentions that last year or maybe earlier this year,

they use iPhone 17 Pros for Friday night baseball games.

I remember we talked about that.

Yeah,

yeah, yeah.

That was pretty awesome.

Yeah. And it's nice because the thing about an iPhone is it's so tiny that you can just set one up and it's not going to be,

you know, and so you can get a cool camera angle,

which is like another angle.

But again,

that's just like one of the one of the ancillary.

That's that's the B-roll footage or whatever.

That's not the main video looking at the game.

Whereas for this soccer game tomorrow,

it's going to be the main cameras looking at the game.

So I'll be interested because,

you know,

they don't have the depth of field and the.

The zoom is actually pretty good in the 17 Pro.

It gets up to,

you know, 4X natively,

8X through some optical stuff.

But an 8X zoom is not the same as what those professional cameras can do.

They can zoom in a lot more.

So it'll be interesting to see.

But I guess if you have enough of them set up,

you can go cut from angle to angle.

I'm fascinated just from a technical standpoint what decisions they're going to make.

Because I really think it's going to look like a different game.

I don't mean look like a different game because of the quality of the camera.

I mean because of the placement of the camera and the angles that they use.

I think it's going to have a different,

the broadcast is going to have a different look to it.

It's just interesting.

I'm interested on the technicalities because it's not like they've got people holding these iPhone 17s.

Maybe some are,

right?

But they got to be connected to some kind of a rig that is being controlled,

you know,

remotely or,

you know, in a truck somewhere or something.

Yeah.

And that was something that Apple came out with.

Was it a year ago?

Was it two years ago?

Maybe it was a Blackmagic product.

But there's this thing that you connect the cameras to and it allows them to have ultra precise control of the cameras.

And so this technology has been out for, like, again,

maybe only a year or so.

We've talked about in the past because it's not something I use in my everyday life, obviously.

It's not something I own.

But, like,

it's – I mean, this is not just a camera on a tripod.

This is going to be a camera hooked up to a very special box that can control the camera so that you can have everything from a central location.

Yeah, it's not going to be,

you know, your aunt Sally out there using her fingers to zoom in and out on the soccer players.

Yeah,

that's fun. That's fun.

Well, a couple of weeks ago,

we celebrated the fact that in 2026,

Apple,

the company,

it's 50 years old.

That's pretty amazing.

And,

you know, maybe that'll surface again at WWDC.

I think that obviously it has to because there's kind of been celebrated all year.

But this year is also the 25th anniversary of the first Apple retail store opening up, the physical Apple retail store.

Not only did you have a story here, but you had this at the bottom of your post today.

You've got this really fun video that you link to where Steve Jobs is going into the video,

into the actual store itself and walking you around,

like giving you like a private tour.

It was so fun.

The first Apple store is from Tyson's Corner,

right?

In Virginia.

In Virginia.

I don't even know how many Apple stores that they have now.

Like the actual physical Apple stores.

It's got to be a couple of hundred or so.

I'm not really sure.

But some of them are just so memorable and incredible.

When I travel now, I like to go and visit any kind of an Apple store if I possibly can.

But seeing where we've come from,

I remember all this little video,

Jeff, I was watching.

it just made me laugh because Steve Jobs goes in and says, well, here's where we have,

you know,

the home type computers, or here's where we have the professional computers.

And every single one

of them is connected to the internet.

He's talking about that. Like, it's like,

wow, you could go in,

you know,

but that still rings true. Cause what he was showing there was the fact that anybody

could walk into this Apple store and get on and start using an Apple computer.

And to this day,

A lot of people would just do that. A lot of people would just jump into an Apple store and check their Gmail or something.

You know,

it's like you can still use them just like you used to, like they had it all there.

And that was a little bit revolutionary than the old days of when we used to go to, you know,

CompUSA or Best Buy and some of these other stores and not be able to use it. And they sort of revolutionized it. It was a big deal when this store opened, I remember.

Yeah, you say it's funny that he boasts about the fact that every computer is on the internet.

What I thought was even funnier was that he boasted about the – Steve Jobs boasted about the fact that if you haven't yet tried a laptop with wireless,

with Wi-Fi,

you can actually see what that's like to have an app – have a laptop that you can pick up and it will continue to use the internet.

It's like, so back in 2001,

that was new technology.

You know, Apple did not invent the wireless stuff,

but they sort of popularized it when they came out with the original Air.

What is it?

The Air.

What was the name of the first wireless router that Apple sold?

The iBook?

No, no, the standalone thing that looked sort of like a spaceship.

It was like a big blob.

But that was a big deal when Apple.

The airport.

Thank you.

the airport when i mean when they originally had airport and they had the uh the keynote

presentation where phil schiller you know jumped holding an eye holding a an apple laptop um he

jumped from above just to show that he continued to use the internet even without no wires so this

video was funny because you know 25 years ago things were so different i still can't believe

the first apple store was 25 years ago in my mind it was far more recently in apple's history when

they started to do it but even though you you laugh as you say but you know features that he

shows off in the store. The technology is old.

They used to have the kids section with the balls

that the kids could sit on and use computers.

Apple stores today are very, very different than

those.

And yet the spirit,

I think, is still the same.

It's still a place that you can go in and

you can put your hands on technology.

Back then you were looking to see what is an iBook.

Today,

you might look to see what is an Apple Vision Pro,

something I'm not going to buy, but I just

want to play around with it and see what it's all about.

But the idea is still there that you can

you can try it that the the people that work there are not working on commission so there's no hard

sell to buy stuff um and it's um and you know that the products that are there whether they're apple

first-party products or third-party products they've selected are going to be good products

that are going to work well with your apple technology when in this video he was showing off

hd cameras that you could use he was also mentioning the fact that hey if you want to see mp3 players

you can come look at mp3 players in the apple store this was before the ipod this was before

the ipod so he's talking about like third-party companies making mp3 players um but the spirit's

still there so you know brought what a smart decision 25 years ago for apple you know they

brought in ron johnson who led this effort and uh you know i just love having apple stores and i

still enjoy having an apple store right here in my hometown of new orleans because it's a dependable

place you can go to i often go there to pick up my products on day one like when the new iphone

comes out i go pick it up and i know if i ever need like a cord or a part you know that you're

to be able to find something that's dependable there. It's not going to be crap,

you know,

that you would find at some other electronic store. It's going to be good quality stuff.

So I love it. You mentioned this little kid section.

It had to be 10,

11,

12 years ago.

This is where I would take the kids out Saturday morning.

We'd go get breakfast somewhere so that,

you know,

mom could have some mommy time.

And then I'm like, well, we got to stay out.

So we would go to the Apple store,

the local Apple store,

Jeff,

and they still had those little black,

little bouncy balls. They were perfect for the kids because, you know,

they would like jump up

and down on them.

And sure enough,

the kids would sit there for like an hour plus playing whatever

video games are on.

You know, at first it was those the laptops and then it used to be the iPads.

But I mean,

all those bouncy balls, I remember so distinctly, it was so great for the kids and

they all loved it all the time.

Oh, my goodness.

Nice walk down memory lane there.

In the know,

I've got a quick one here,

which I got to be honest, I didn't know too much about this until I started reading about it.

The iPhone now, I think this came out with iOS 26.4 or maybe in just 26.

We always talk about the zoom function on the cameras and how good it really is,

especially if you have one of the pro models.

But even if you have a regular model, the zoom functions on the iPhone cameras are amazing.

Well,

with iOS 26,

or I think it came out new, as it says right here in 26.4,

is something called audio zoom.

So if you use your iPhone camera to capture video and you frequently zoom in while you're filming,

which I do, a lot of times I'll go back and forth.

In fact, I just did this.

My son had a band concert and, you know, we're sitting in the audience and I'll show the entire band and I'll zoom in on him,

right?

Well, there's an audio zoom function in here now that you can turn on that recorded audio is then focused on the subject when the camera is zoomed.

This was just interesting.

You've got to go to the settings app.

You scroll down and you find camera in the settings app.

And then if you go to record sound, there's a little section called record sound.

There's a few other options that are in there, which are kind of cool, actually,

including wind noise reduction.

but you can turn audio zoom off or on.

Now, I can't determine whether by default that it's on or off

because I found this other story here,

which I thought was interesting.

While that sounds cool, the audio zoom,

this person,

Ava Biswas on iGeek's blog,

mentioned that she hated it.

She was using it.

She would zoom in, and when she zoomed in, the audio, she said,

started sounding a little messy.

It started sounding a little distorted because,

you know, the iPhone camera, the iPhone microphone at that point was trying to be focused on whatever you were zooming into,

if that makes sense.

So she recommends turning it off.

So maybe play around with it just a little bit.

If you regularly do something where you're recording video,

you do a zoom on a subject or a person or something,

and it sounds a little off,

the audio sounds off when you're zooming in.

Well,

then go in, you can turn this off.

You go to settings,

go to camera,

tap record sound,

and you'll find a toggle for audio zoom right there.

And you can determine whether or not that it's something that you want to keep,

or you can turn off if it's not sounding the correct for you.

I leave mine on.

I feel like the little bit that I've done this,

I haven't really found that it's been an issue.

And I just kind of like the idea that when I do zoom in on something,

that it's going to try to focus,

try to focus as much as possible.

and recording whatever the subject is that I've zoomed in on.

Otherwise,

you can turn it off on there.

I had never heard of this before.

Thank you.

This is really interesting.

Mine is turned on, which must mean it's turned on by default.

But I can actually,

I can imagine a world in which I would be zooming in on something in the distance.

But what I actually want to pick up is the audio of the people that are around me.

Like maybe we're all talking about something that's far away.

And that would be a circumstance in which I would get better audio if you turn it off.

Of course, I can also imagine the opposite.

I can imagine I'm zooming in on something in the distance because it's like somebody performing on stage and that's what you want to hear as opposed to the people around you.

So I understand why they have that default,

but I had no idea that this setting even existed.

Thank you for telling me about it.

If it's on, she goes, here's what I've noticed.

Background noise can get aggressively suppressed.

So to your point,

if you want the noise around or the crowd around,

she goes, audio can feel compressed or slightly artificial.

We know how that sounds, right?

Sometimes it just gets a little garbled, it sounds like.

And small movements can confuse the mic direction,

causing inconsistency.

So just like if you were really zoomed in on something, you know, if you shake the camera just a little bit, you know, kind of unless,

you know, we have ways to stabilize that.

But maybe not quite the same for the audio.

So anyway, that's something.

Go to settings,

camera,

record audio,

and then you can turn on or off the audio zoom function.

Cool tip.

My tip of the week is I want to talk about AI,

a very specific use of AI.

And the reason I'm sharing this tip today,

this is not really unique.

This is not, of course, unique to the iPhone or iPad,

although I am using it on that.

AI has been such in the news,

I mean, for years now, but especially right now.

We talked about it for WWDC.

This week, Google had their IO,

which is their version of WWDC, their developer conference.

And like every single person that was up on stage was talking about AI.

Google is basically trying to turn themselves into the AI company.

I mean, they even announced, for example,

that, you know, the traditional Google search,

that when you go to Google to run a search for a website,

you know, they're going to be defaulting now to like AI is the first thing, which I'm not necessarily sure I'm a fan of.

I sort of like the idea of seeing a list of websites to go to.

In fact, when I run Google searches.

Right.

At the very top where they try to use AI to answer your question before you even go to a website to get it.

I usually find that annoying and often wrong.

Oh,

really?

Okay.

But that's just me, but whatever.

So anyway, so AI is everywhere.

You know, a bunch of people are graduating from colleges and high schools.

And it's been in the news this week that people like Eric Schmidt from Google were given speeches and people were booing them when they talked about AI in the future.

So AI is getting a bad rap.

And I'm not necessarily saying that's wrong.

You know, there's a lot to not like about AI.

A lot of the ways that Apple currently implements Apple intelligence is lackluster,

to say the least.

We all know that.

But I am here to tell you that AI can also be amazing.

And one that I've been using, now this is going to be very specific for the type of work that I use as a lawyer,

but it won't be hard for you to see how this type of thing could be useful,

whether you're a lawyer or any other type of business or pursuit of life.

And the idea is this.

The idea,

I guess I call this interrogating documents,

interrogating documents.

You know, you have one document or a set of documents,

and you need to find those needles in the haystack.

You need to understand it and stuff like that.

In the old days,

you would just read it, take really good notes,

highlight it,

put sticky notes on it, put flags in it so you can get back and find things in the future.

But it's hard to find stuff.

And a big part of my life as a lawyer is I'm an appellate lawyer,

as you know, Brad.

And so I will often,

I literally am working on a brief right now.

I'm about to give it to the client later on this afternoon where it's a case that I was not involved in the trial.

It was a week-long jury trial.

I was brought in afterwards for the appeal,

which means that I had to read the entire record.

You know, this record has 23 volumes in it and each volume is 250 pages.

So what's what's 23 times 250?

That's a lot of pages there.

Right.

And I have read it.

I have read it and I did take notes and I annotated it as I read it.

But of course,

the first time you read things,

you know, I picked out the stuff that I thought

was going to be interesting.

But it's only later when I'm working on my arguments for my appellant brief that I'm

like, oh, you know, this is going to be an interesting issue.

And I wasn't even thinking about that issue,

or at least I wasn't really focused on it when I read it the first time.

So like in the old, in the old, old days where everything was on paper and it was all bound together,

that would be, I mean, I would just sit there in a room with all the flipping pages and trying to find the needle in the haystack and it would take hours.

But you need it because I want to be able to cite something to the appellate court.

And in fact, if it wasn't raised at the trial court level, it's waived.

So like it was critical.

More recently with electronic records,

I could do searches.

I could put all the records on my iPad and I can do the command F or control F find feature.

But that is limited because just working, it's so literal.

If I search for the word dog,

it's not going to show me the word poodle,

right?

Even though that's what matters for the appeal.

It doesn't matter if they use dog or poodle or canine or whatever.

And plus,

there's things more sophisticated.

Somebody might not use any of those words,

but they're talking about the idea of pets,

and that is relevant to my appeal that I'm making up right now that has something to do with dogs.

You want something with comments.

What I've been doing recently is using an AI tool.

The one that we happen to use at our firm right now is called Harvey,

but there's many other companies out there that do similar types of things.

I give it the entire record,

the whole darn thing, not just the trial record,

but the pretrial record and everything else.

And then I can ask the AI questions in the chatbot interface of,

you know, this is an issue that I'm working on.

You know, what testimony was a trial?

What exhibits were talking about this issue?

And it will find things for me.

And it's so good that even though I have my notes from when I read the record the first time,

and I do double check those as well, of course, but I'm finding that the AI in mere seconds, I mean, we're talking like 15, 20, 30 seconds at most,

can find all of the relevant testimony.

And it's not just the literal matches.

It's even the more fuzzy stuff that's just related to the concept or something that the

other side might cite.

And of course,

with any AI,

trust but verify,

right?

So like it gives me an answer,

but for every answer that it has,

there's a footnote,

sometimes

multiple footnotes for every sentence.

And when I click on that footnote,

it brings up the actual written trial transcript where

I am then looking at it and I can decide for myself,

does this really say what I want to

say?

But my point is that I am finding things so much faster.

It's completely different.

It is allowing me to be more creative as an appellate attorney because I can just come up with ideas and like, was there anything on this issue?

No, not really.

Was there anything on this issue?

Oh,

wow.

Look at this.

It literally happened yesterday.

An attorney,

one of my partners and I were brainstorming in my office,

and we both came up with something.

And next thing you know, within seconds,

we had found this in the record.

So again,

what I'm talking about right now is very focused on my life as an appellate

attorney.

But just to step back,

it's the idea that you can interrogate a document,

whatever one,

whether

it's one document or a set of documents.

You know, there's an app I have on my iPad that we talk about all the time called PDF

Expert,

which I use to review PDF files and annotate them and stuff.

But it has a built-in AI feature in it.

I think you can use some of it for free and you may have to pay to get more advanced of

it.

But it will allow you, especially if you have a really long document,

you can just ask

questions.

and it will understand the document.

It does it in seconds and give you these answers.

And what I love about it is I've always been jealous

of the people in my life that have photographic memories.

My wife is one of them,

frankly.

They just remember everything,

sometimes to my detriment.

You know, I did not take out the garbage four years ago.

But I've always been jealous of that

because like being able to remember that

means that you can act upon that information.

I am not someone that has a perfect memory.

But now with the AIs, it can sort of be my second brain.

It can be the one that finds it.

And I can just be the one that's creative in coming up with why this matters for my business

or for my personal pursuit or whatever.

And so I just wanted to speak out in front of it.

So whatever your AI agent, you may not be a lawyer, you may not be at a law firm that

uses something that's very high end like Harvey.

But whatever it is,

the AIs that you use in your life and think about privacy and be concerned

about hallucinations and all the caveats.

I know, I know, I know, I know.

But if you use it as a tool to be able to interrogate a document or set of documents and then trust but verify,

then look at the actual source to double check that it found something for you that's accurate,

it just changes the way that you work with information.

It is truly transformative.

It's really, really cool.

So that's my tip.

I think even more powerful is the fact you keep saying interrogate the document,

but you get to do that in what we generally call like natural language.

You don't have to know Boolean operators.

I mean, as legal professionals,

we've we've been inundated with this idea because we've done legal research for so long.

And it's like you have to kind of know what are the proximity operators and,

you know, all these different kind of almost like a quasi different language to make sure that you're finding mostly what you need.

wild cards and all kinds of stuff. But no, now because it's trained on a large language model

and it understands,

you know,

the patterns that we use as, as asking questions and even further,

it understands how to answer those questions.

We can use generally what we call natural language

queries to ask these questions and interact with this large language model to be able to find some

of that and uncover that. I mean, they, they call that rag, you know,

retrieval augmented generation.

I mean, there's a lot of technical terms that go into this,

but the reason that the,

you know,

what I like so much about it, it's like,

I'm just going to sit down and ask a question as if I'm talking to another,

like you said, you're talking to your partner.

What if you had an associate that had read all of those volumes?

Exactly.

Exactly.

Had photographic memory of exactly what you were asking and they could regurgitate whatever you needed.

Plus they had this idea of being able to,

you know, share it with you in the way that it would make sense.

that to me is where the power is coming into all of that yeah and you're i mean you work in the

world of e-discovery brett i mean this is obviously incredibly important because e-discovery i mean i

think i have a lot of documents i have 23 volumes of a record but in e-discovery i mean brett i'm

sure that you have worked on lawsuits that have had thousands of thousands of thousands of documents

yes and and being able to find that needle on the haystack you know the smoking gun powerful

it's just it's it makes all the difference yeah it's cool great stuff all right well you can't

sleep on AI. I mean,

you and I are just inundated to this,

just in that world that we live in. But

I think every, every world is getting,

you know, profession today.

And frankly,

even workplace

is getting inundated with learning about AI.

And I just try to encourage folks. Yes,

it's

overwhelming. The news is overwhelming,

but just start small,

start simple,

start understanding some

of the basic ideas about it, because it ain't going anywhere.

I predict that this is, it's just,

you know,

whatever we have today is the worst that AI is going to be right now, because it's

continuing to get better good point all of that yeah yeah well a good note to end on but we're

looking forward to wwdc who knows what ai will surface there we'll see you while that happens

we've talked about that many times uh but yeah good good uh talking about ai and google has been

talking about this i know several other companies have been touting their ai components and every

and features and functions as well so wow what an exciting time and uh we'll talk more about it

next week then, Jeff.

Thanks as always.

Thanks, Brett. Bye-bye, everybody.