NC_2024_06_16
The podcast covers MacStock updates, Tesla vs. CarPlay, Brava cooking device, Apple Keychain, WWDC, HomePod, Control Center, Safari features, Genmoji, AI memory impact, ethical AI considerations.
Automatic Shownotes
Chapters
NC_2024_06_16
Macstock 2024 Discount
Tesla vs. CarPlay … Or the Best of Both Worlds
CSUN 2024: Brava Smart Oven that Cooks with Light
Tiny Tip – Password Sharing with Apple — by Physics Nerd Graeme
Support the Show
14 Compelling Features Coming to Apple’s OSes with Adam Engst
Long Summary
Today on the Technology Geek podcast, we kick off by addressing a minor show numbering error and swiftly transition to sharing exciting updates about the upcoming MacStock conference. We then delve into a detailed comparison between Tesla's navigation system and CarPlay, discussing the advantages and drawbacks of each for tech enthusiasts. The focus shifts to an intriguing interview with Brava, a state-of-the-art cooking device harnessing the power of infrared lights for efficient and innovative cooking techniques. We uncover the unique features of the Brava cooker and explore its potential applications in assistive technology, offering a glimpse into the future of smart kitchen appliances. As we wrap up, we impart a useful tip on leveraging Apple Keychain for seamless password sharing and management, enhancing the overall user experience for Apple aficionados.
Diving deeper into the intricacies of maximizing Apple's Keychain functionality, we guide listeners through transitioning from alternative password management apps to harness the convenience and collaborative capabilities of Apple's solution. Furthermore, we shed light on the latest iOS 17.3 update, emphasizing enhanced security measures for password protection. Delving into the realm of shared password groups within family sharing setups, we illustrate how the Shortcuts app streamlines password accessibility. Shifting gears, we review Apple's recent WWDC event, dissecting advanced features like satellite messaging and exclusive AI offerings tailored to specific devices, speculating on potential monetization models for satellite services. We explore the limitations imposed by device compatibility and RAM constraints on accessing AI features, influencing device recommendations and user experiences alike.
Turning our attention to the significance of Apple Intelligence within the iPad ecosystem, we ponder the necessity of such features for the average user and anticipate their integration into future iPhone iterations. Our conversation navigates through the operational nuances of HomePods, contrasting the management complexities of password systems like 1Password with iCloud Passwords. Unpacking the customization potentials of Control Center on Apple devices, we spotlight potential enhancements aimed at refining user interactions. Reflecting on the need for enhanced clarity in accessing Control Center features on Mac platforms, we underscore the importance of seamless user experiences across Apple products.
The dialogue expands on the intricacies of system settings navigation, alongside the functionalities of Math Notes and Smart Script tools, underscoring the merits of handwriting versus typing. We delve into Safari Highlights and Reader Summaries in Safari, teasing out the benefits of AI-generated document summaries for time-strapped users grappling with extensive materials. Tactfully intertwining humor with insights, we contemplate the practicalities of document summarization tools as aids for efficient information absorption while sharing personal reading habits and perspectives on summarization utilities.
Circling back to diverse tech topics, we explore interactive user manuals for printers, the introduction of Genmoji and TapX features, and the potential implications of AI on memory retention and conversational recordings. Engaging in a candid discourse on the intricacies of emojis, challenges surrounding call recordings, and the ethical considerations of thought externalization through AI, we offer a multifaceted glimpse into the evolving tech landscape. Reflecting on memory accuracy, milestone episode celebrations, and avenues for audience support, we infuse the conversation with dynamic banter and insightful tech musings, inviting listeners into a realm of humorous and enlightening tech-related discussions. This lively exchange underscores the multifaceted interplay between technology and human interactions in shaping contemporary digital experiences.
Diving deeper into the intricacies of maximizing Apple's Keychain functionality, we guide listeners through transitioning from alternative password management apps to harness the convenience and collaborative capabilities of Apple's solution. Furthermore, we shed light on the latest iOS 17.3 update, emphasizing enhanced security measures for password protection. Delving into the realm of shared password groups within family sharing setups, we illustrate how the Shortcuts app streamlines password accessibility. Shifting gears, we review Apple's recent WWDC event, dissecting advanced features like satellite messaging and exclusive AI offerings tailored to specific devices, speculating on potential monetization models for satellite services. We explore the limitations imposed by device compatibility and RAM constraints on accessing AI features, influencing device recommendations and user experiences alike.
Turning our attention to the significance of Apple Intelligence within the iPad ecosystem, we ponder the necessity of such features for the average user and anticipate their integration into future iPhone iterations. Our conversation navigates through the operational nuances of HomePods, contrasting the management complexities of password systems like 1Password with iCloud Passwords. Unpacking the customization potentials of Control Center on Apple devices, we spotlight potential enhancements aimed at refining user interactions. Reflecting on the need for enhanced clarity in accessing Control Center features on Mac platforms, we underscore the importance of seamless user experiences across Apple products.
The dialogue expands on the intricacies of system settings navigation, alongside the functionalities of Math Notes and Smart Script tools, underscoring the merits of handwriting versus typing. We delve into Safari Highlights and Reader Summaries in Safari, teasing out the benefits of AI-generated document summaries for time-strapped users grappling with extensive materials. Tactfully intertwining humor with insights, we contemplate the practicalities of document summarization tools as aids for efficient information absorption while sharing personal reading habits and perspectives on summarization utilities.
Circling back to diverse tech topics, we explore interactive user manuals for printers, the introduction of Genmoji and TapX features, and the potential implications of AI on memory retention and conversational recordings. Engaging in a candid discourse on the intricacies of emojis, challenges surrounding call recordings, and the ethical considerations of thought externalization through AI, we offer a multifaceted glimpse into the evolving tech landscape. Reflecting on memory accuracy, milestone episode celebrations, and avenues for audience support, we infuse the conversation with dynamic banter and insightful tech musings, inviting listeners into a realm of humorous and enlightening tech-related discussions. This lively exchange underscores the multifaceted interplay between technology and human interactions in shaping contemporary digital experiences.
Brief Summary
Today on the Technology Geek podcast, we discuss updates on the MacStock conference and compare Tesla's navigation system with CarPlay. We also interview Brava, a innovative cooking device, explore Apple Keychain for password management, transition to using Apple's Keychain, and touch on the latest iOS update. We delve into shared password groups, discuss Apple's WWDC event, the importance of Apple Intelligence in iPads, operational nuances of HomePods, and the customization potential of Control Center on Apple devices. Furthermore, we explore Safari Highlights, Reader Summaries in Safari, and document summarization tools. We also touch on interactive user manuals for printers, Genmoji, TapX features, AI impacts on memory retention, conversational recordings, emojis, and ethical considerations of thought externalization through AI.
Tags
Technology Geek podcast
MacStock conference
Tesla navigation
CarPlay
Brava cooking device
Apple Keychain
password management
iOS update
shared password groups
Apple WWDC event
Apple Intelligence
HomePods
Control Center customization
Safari Highlights
Reader Summaries
document summarization tools
interactive user manuals
Genmoji
TapX features
AI memory retention
conversational recordings
emojis
ethical considerations
thought externalization
Transcript
[0:00]
NC_2024_06_16
[0:00]Music.
[0:05]Technology Geek podcast with an ever so slight Apple bias. Today is Sunday, June 16th, 2024, and this is show number 997. I would like to register a complaint right now with the live chat room. I know they have a lot of responsibilities like asking for roll call, reminding me to do chapter marks and to save, and reminding me and Steve to count the chapter marks at the end of the show to make sure I don't forget any of them. But they're also supposed to catch me if I say something obviously incorrect. So imagine my dismay when Kiwi Graham, who wasn't even there on Sunday so he wasn't responsible for it that week, had to be the one to tell me on Monday that I introduced the show as number 966, not 996. Now you notice that sounded wrong because it was way farther away from a thousand than he was expecting. Now this was not his job and I expect the live audience to do better, okay? Now your punishment is that there will not be a live show on June 30th. Well, technically there isn't a live show because we're going to be on vacation on June 30th with our kids, but I just thought that'd be a good way to, you know, really put the fear into you. Anyway, we will be here on the 23rd, so a week from now, so you will have a chance to redeem yourselves.
[1:20]
Macstock 2024 Discount
[1:20]Well, the MaxDoc conference is coming up really soon. It's going to be July 12th to 14th in Woodstock, Illinois, just outside of Chicago. It's so much fun. And if you attend, you'll get to see me, Jill from the Northwoods, and Marty Gentius that you've heard on the show. They're all going to be speaking at MacStock. Now, Friday the 12th is workshop day, which is something you can choose to go to or not. And that's where people like me will be giving hands-on instructions on how to do really cool things. Saturday and Sunday, or the 13th and 14th, are the regular show presentations. You can buy a one-day pass, a weekend pass, or all three days, which of course that's what you want to do. I love MacStock, and I hope to have as big or bigger of a show. You have no Silla Castaways at this year's show. We represent there. Let me tell you, we are a significant percentage of the audience, so that's really fun. If you can come, use coupon code PODFEET, all caps, to get $30 off. Now, I get $30 off, too, if you use the coupon, but the main thing is I want you to come. I want you to be there. Come up. Hang out. It's going to be great. Follow the link in the show notes to max.conferenceandexpo to check out all of the the speakers. See you there.
[2:26]Now, we've got a great show today with an article by me, an interview with Brava from CSUN's Assistive Tech Conference that's really, really for everybody. It's not just an assistive device. Got a tiny tip by physics nerds Graham, who you're going to be hearing a lot of from him in the upcoming weeks. Anyway, he's going to be talking about password sharing with Keychain. And then there's a terrific conversation between me and Adam Angst of tidbits about WWDC. Now, we had a strict agenda that we did not follow at all, and I assure you, you're going to hear things you haven't heard on other coverage of WWDC.
[3:00]
Tesla vs. CarPlay … Or the Best of Both Worlds
[3:01]I'm a big fan of the giant screen in Teslas, especially because of how they display navigation. In the Model S and X, the screen is vertical, while in the Model 3 and Y that Steve and I own, the screen is in landscape orientation. On the left side, you get a visualization of the vehicles. You can also see traffic lights. I mean, it actually shows you whether it's green, yellow, or red. You can see pedestrians and even things like trash cans along the side of the road or those orange cones. When I turn on my turn signal, the rear-facing camera on that side shows me the over-the-shoulder view so I don't hit a bicycle on the right or a car on the left. The right two-thirds of the screen is almost all navigation, and it's really good looking with lots and lots of detail. But everyone else on the planet who's experienced CarPlay says that it's amazing. We've rented quite a few cars with CarPlay, and while I didn't favorite it at first, it's kind of growing on me. The audio turn-by-turn directions are great. Some of my favorites include, not at this light, but at the next one, turn left. Or maybe take the right two lanes to exit north on the 405.
[4:04]However, the Tesla navigation gives much better situational awareness on the map. It's not just that the screen is giant, it also chooses a zoom level that makes sense for not just seeing the next block or two, but where you're going miles ahead. You always get more information on the Tesla screen than you do on a CarPlay screen. Now CarPlay has so darn aren't much clutter with their cartoony graphics that I'm always frustrated with not being able to see that big picture. Now, I know with fancier cars than the ones I rent, there are touchscreens so you can pinch and zoom, but on rental cars, it's super annoying to use the buttons and knobs to get to zoom in and zoom out mode. Again, the graphics are coarse, so they don't give the detail I get on the Tesla. But on CarPlay, my Apple Watch is in the game, so if a turn is coming up and I'm not watching the map closely, my watch will give me the little gentle taps to tell me to turn. I know that a left turn and right turn are supposed to be a different rhythm of taps, but I have never gotten the hang of knowing which one is which. It's easy enough to glance at the screen when I feel the tap, though, to see which way I'm supposed to go.
[5:07]Listening to podcasts with the Tesla audio system is trivially easy. I set up a playlist on my iPhone, and if Bluetooth hasn't connected to Steve's phone instead of mine that day, I hit play and the audio comes out of the car's speakers. I can use the scroll wheels on the steering wheel to jump forward and back in a show. I can stop altogether and change the volume, all without messing with the touchscreen. Now, I even know how to skip to the next podcast ever since I did that full-on detailed review of everything Overcast can do. I can also see what podcast is playing at the bottom of the left side of the screen.
[5:41]With CarPlay, though, you can directly access your podcatcher of choice, or at least Apple Podcasts or Overcast, without even looking at your phone. You can use the screen to navigate the podcatcher's interface and choose different shows and episodes. But I don't really want to do that kind of thing while I'm driving. When Steve is driving the rental car and I'm the passenger, it is a pretty cool way for me to be able to make the changes while he keeps his eyes safely on the road in front of us. The best part of CarPlay and audio is how it's intelligent about what to do when audio is playing, but audio navigation instructions also need to be heard. If you're playing music, it automatically ducks the music down while the navigation is read and then brings the music back up when it's done. But if you're listening to a podcast, it stops the audio while navigation is being played and then starts back up where it left off. That's genius. It's the best of both worlds. Sadly, in the Tesla, the audio of the podcast or music just keep on playing while navigation is being set out loud. The Tesla system doesn't really know anything, but hey, I'm connected to Bluetooth. Good to go.
[6:46]You can see I'm conflicted on which one I like better. But after owning my car for four years, I realized I can have the best of both worlds. The other day, I was going to meet a friend for lunch, and I was about a half hour away in an unfamiliar location. My iPhone offered to start directions for me because it saw the event in my calendar. I wanted to share my ETA with my friend in case I ran into traffic, so I told Maps, knock itself up, do the navigation for me.
[7:13]Then in the Tesla map interface, I typed in the address using the on-screen keyboard to start my navigation. I started my podcast and as expected, the show started playing through Bluetooth to my car. But what surprised me was that the audio navigation instructions came through from the iPhone over Bluetooth too. Now I had the audio navigation turned off on the Tesla, so it was actually coming from my phone. And you know how I was jealous that CarPlay pauses podcasts when it needs to give driving instructions? Since this was the iPhone itself that's controlling that in CarPlay, not the head unit in the car, the same thing happens in my Tesla. It was awesome. I'm sure someone is yelling into the phone right now that I'm missing out on one big problem, that the two nav systems could choose different routes and things could get confusing. You're you're right, that could happen, and it did on my drive. On my way to lunch, the iPhone told me I could cut three minutes off my drive time if I took Catella. I had no idea when Catella was coming up or what I would do if I didn't take Catella, so I just kept following the Tesla screen. I didn't want to look down at my phone, which is on a charging pad below the big screen, so I simply ignored the confirmation request. Turns out Tesla Nav took Catella anyway, way, so I never had to decide between the routes.
[8:31]I think, in general, if the two are in disagreement, I'm going to do what the Tesla tells me to do just because that's the one I can see, not because it's necessarily better or worse. On my way home from my lunch date, there were several options for where to get off the freeway, but none of them, and none of them are necessarily wrong. The two systems suggested different paths, so I just took the one I normally prefer, and I'm pretty sure it was less efficient because it turned out to be under construction, and it was the one neither of them had suggested I take. But here's the thing. I'm really not in that much of a hurry when I'm driving. I've learned in my 50 years of driving that rushing about doesn't actually get you all there all that much sooner, and it's a lot of stress to worry about making every light and getting ahead of the other cars. I'm a mellower driver than I was when I'm younger, so if it takes me five minutes longer to get somewhere, I don't lose my mind. The bottom line is that I've thought all along that I had to decide between my two available navigation systems, but I now know and realize I have the best of both worlds. I have the best parts of CarPlay plus the best parts of the Tesla navigation.
[9:34]
CSUN 2024: Brava Smart Oven that Cooks with Light
[9:35]I'm with Travis Ria at the Brava booth, and you have an interesting, I'm going to call it an oven, is that a correct description? It's an oven that's not actually an oven. Yeah, it does a lot more than an oven. It can act like an oven, but it does so much more. The Brava was built, it cooks with infrared lights. So these lights were originally designed for the solar industry. They're very powerful. They can melt metal in a matter of seconds. They go from ambient to full power in less than one second. And so Brava is powerful enough to sear steaks, but also gentle and controllable enough to poach eggs. It also gives you three independent cooking zones within the chamber itself. So he's holding what looks like a cookie sheet, and it says one, two, three on it. Yeah, so there's three different zones, and you can cook up to three different ingredients at the same time on the same tray with totally different levels of doneness. I.e., like a steak with potatoes and asparagus, or a steak with broccoli and cauliflower. flour.
[10:29]We've got 8,500 recipe programs underneath the hood, and because we're powered by software and connect to Wi-Fi, it gets better every week. We push new recipes to it every Tuesday, and about once a month we do software updates. So I'm looking at something that's about the size of maybe a color laser printer is where I've described the size, and it's got a handle on the front, and we've got some light-up buttons on top, and a big green circular light might mean go? I'm going to show you the reheat function here. So we have a camera that you can see that turns on right there that you'll be able to monitor everything from the app. So since it's got an opaque front, since it's infrared light, you don't want all that leaking out, I guess. Originally, yes, but we actually launched in August of last year a version with a glass door so that you can see the light show that's going on inside. Okay, that's kind of crazy. So the one we're looking at has a display on the top showing us that it's cooking. That's correct.
[11:22]They all have the camera. even the version that has the door. So you said it doesn't take time to heat up? No, no, no preheat is required.
[11:31]Wait, but that's probably going to save energy, isn't it? A lot of energy. You can cook a whole meal in Brava in less time and with less energy than it takes to preheat your regular oven. Well, I know our oven takes forever to preheat, so that wasn't that high of a bar to step over, but I get your point. Yeah, it stays cool to the touch. And again, we're doing software updates all the time, so what it is today will be very different than what it will be in three months. We're working on some other assistive technology features like voice detects so that the blind and people with low vision will be able to cook really for the first time safely and independently. You mentioned before we started rolling digital bits here that you had some feedback from people working with people with autism? Yeah, yeah so we originally we didn't originally design Brava for the assistive technology community. We launched it in 2018 and it wasn't until the middle of 2023 that we started seeing some orders coming in from a couple of places in Massachusetts that were helping people with intellectual disabilities. And so we got on the phone with them, asked what's going on? How are you doing this? They told us and we trained all of their physical therapists and occupational therapists. And we started seeing orders coming in that we spread the word out in Massachusetts. And now we're here trying to learn from the community so that we can make Brava just more powerful and better for the assistive tech user. Wait a minute. You want to learn from the community instead of assuming that you know better? That's weird. Yeah, yeah. Yes.
[12:55]Caught him off guard there. So if you stop this for a second, can you show us what a recipe looks like, how you get into that? Oh, absolutely. So, again, we've got a display that's across most of the top of the device here. So there's a lot of ways that you can find things. We can go into the cook feature, which gives you all of our basic categories, like chicken, beef, pork, eggs, frozen foods. All right, I want to make a poached egg. Okay, easy enough. So he tapped on eggs. Oh, I got fried. Oh, no, maybe I want a frittata. Oh, we're talking. Okay, poached eggs, fine. So you can tell it anywhere from one to four eggs, and it's going to have the touch screen is going to show you where to place them on the tray. So, they've got a specialized egg tray that's got four big pockets and you just drop the eggs in there and then you tell it which ones, okay. This is your personalization slider, so that if you want it to be a little more or a little less done than the default setting, you can do that and it will save that feature for you. Can I cook the three eggs differently?
[13:54]You could, but it would require some manual messing around. Okay, not using this. Okay. Right here is your screen that's telling you which shelf to put it on because there's two shelves, a lower and an upper. And then last is sort of like your prepare to launch screen. It gives you all of your selections that you've made. What's really cool is that within about three months, all this that I did on the touchscreen, you'll be able to do on our mobile app so that people with low vision and blindness won't have to use the touchscreen at all. Oh, that's fantastic. Now, the other thing you mentioned earlier on is that it can sear steak. How does that work? I thought, does this cook from above and below? How does it work? It does. It cooks from above and below using the lamps that were originally designed for the solar industry. So, like I said, they go from ambient to full power in less than a second. And at full power, they're over 4,000 degrees at the core of the bulb. But what we're really cooking with here is light energy.
[14:46]We're using a little bit of conduction when we hit it from the bottom. But when we hit it from the top with the lamp, that energy is going directly into the food rather than spending the energy trying to heat the chamber itself. So that's where we get a lot of the efficiency and the power that you could never get in a regular oven or even on a stovetop. And to sear, you said you just shoot up from the bottom, right? That's correct. But you also have a glass tray, which lets you shoot from the top and the bottom at the same time. That's correct. And the glass tray is really unique because it acts more of like a true heat sink. I think with the metal tray, I get the benefit of conduction across the whole tray. With the glass tray, it really keeps things unique in their zone. So I can do something like a seared salmon with super crispy skin right next to cherry tomatoes that are barely bursting. Oh, wow. And so if you tried to do that same cook on the metal tray here, it wouldn't work. So I started to stick my hand in there just to point at the lights for Steve's video, and it's hot in there. It gets warm.
[15:44]It's warm. Would it have burned my finger if I touched the light bulb? Absolutely. Okay. Don't do that. Okay, so don't ever stick your hand in. Assume it's like an oven and hot inside. It is like an oven. It does get hot. I thought it was magic and it never got hot. No, it does get hot inside because we are cooking. We are generating heat. It's just that radiant heat is not the main method of cooking that we're using. Gotcha, gotcha. So now Brava is actually available today then? Yeah, yeah. We've been around since 2018. What would be the price point on this? It starts at $1,295. Okay, all right. And energy costs, that's about a month and a half of savings. Okay, I'm kidding. Maybe not that bad, but soon. Here's the trick. We tell people, you will end up cooking at home so much more than you were before because we make it faster, easier, and more convenient. And so I think in a matter of months, it honestly pays for itself just by not ordering takeout or going out to eat. Interesting. I like it. And where would people go to find it? Www.brava.com B-R-A-V-A dot com. Thank you very much. Thank you so much. Pleasure meeting you.
[16:49]
Tiny Tip – Password Sharing with Apple — by Physics Nerd Graeme
[16:50]In our Slack community over at podfee.com slash slack, before WWDC, there was a discussion about password management with Apple Keychain, and physics nerd Graham jumped into the discussion. He had a tiny tip on how to share passwords with family members using Keychain. Now keep in mind, again, this discussion occurred right before WWDC when Apple announced that they're coming out with a standalone password app that will make this entire tip a little bit obsolete. delete. However, there's still quite a while with the new OSs until, or until the new OSs ship, I should say, and maybe you're not even going to be interested in jumping in right away. So grandma and I thought this tiny tip would still be interesting.
[17:30]Music.
[17:38]Here's a tiny tip on how to get a little bit more out of your built-in passwords app, even before Apple updates it. A bit of context first. I am the keeper of the keys for our family unit, so I'm in control of making our passwords unique and secure. My wife really appreciates having our banking secure, but finds managing it bothersome. We were on 1Password, which continues to be a superb market-leading app. I moved via some experimentation to ProtonPass, which I still like but its integration is not always there. Ultimately I wanted to use Apple's offering to save money. My requirements were the ability to generate secure passwords easily, the ability to lock passwords and the ability to share them.
[18:32]Apple's keychain is the best for ease of use for me and my wife, and I also know how to share passwords with her, hence this tiny tip. Since iOS 17.3, I've been able to go to Face ID and Passcode in Settings and enable Stolen Device Protection.
[18:51]One of its features is to protect passwords, so that I need to use Face ID to open them, not just my code to unlock the phone. Which means the second requirement they are locked so on to the tip let me make it clear this only works within a family sharing group not arbitrary friends or colleagues if you have family sharing enabled open up passwords in system settings on Mac or settings on iOS at the top there is a plus button clicking Clicking on it brings up two options, new password and new shared group. Click on new shared group to get a window where you can type a name and add people to it if you want to. With new group alive you have two options to populate it. The first is to go into the folder, then click the plus button near the top and this gives two options. to either create a new password in this group or to move passwords to this group. The other option is to open up a password and you'll see a group field that can be changed to any of your groups. Now as a tiny tip bonus, if you want to just have groups for your own organisation, you can follow this process and not invite anyone. I love this and I have about 10 groups but only shared one of them with my wife.
[20:20]Tiny tip bonus extra, the Shortcuts app has an action called Show Passwords. I created a shortcut that has this action in it and assigned a keyboard shortcut to it, Command and Slash. I also placed it on my phone's home screen and this makes it super easy for me to get in and manage my passwords. With any luck, Apple will update and give us a separate app for passwords, but not everyone's going to be able to use that. And even if we can, anyone sensible is going to wait a little bit before we get access to it. Well, thanks so much for that, Graham. That was fantastic. Even if it is going to be Sherlocked soon, it's still a valuable tip and I like it. We're going to be hearing a lot more from Graham in the future. He's got a bunch of other cool stuff he wants to tell us about.
[21:11]
Support the Show
[21:11]You know who is awesome sauce? John Murray, that's who. Every quarter or so, he goes to podfeet.com slash PayPal, and he sends me a very generous donation to show his appreciation for the podcast. He just made a donation, and it really makes a difference. I hope if you find value in the content we create here, you'll consider being awesome sauce like John.
[21:31]
14 Compelling Features Coming to Apple’s OSes with Adam Engst
[21:31]Well, we've had another WWDC, and there's no one I like to talk to more about this kind of stuff than Adam Angst of Tidbits. Welcome back to the show, Adam.
[21:41]Thanks for having me. It's always fun. One of the things I like to do is I look through tidbits and I say, what is Adam interested in talking about right now? Oh, here's an article. And now I know he'll be excited about talking about this subject, right? Oh, yeah. Now let me tell you about all the stuff I didn't get to say or I was like, I was writing too quickly. Exactly, exactly. So I've got a link in the show notes to an article that you wrote about DubDub that was talking about the top 14 compelling features that you saw coming to Apple's operating system. And I want to use this opportunity to say all the stuff I didn't get to say when I hear other people talking about it on shows going, no, no, but what you need to understand, but from my perspective.
[22:21]Yeah, and of course, it's very important to note that it's exactly 14 because that's one of those SEO numbers. No, it's entirely random. I was writing and then at some point I'm like, okay, I got to cut this off. I love it. I love it. One of the things we were talking about before we started recording was how fast this went, right? You were panicking as you were trying to take notes. Oh, just impossible. And actually, one thing I did was I spun up Audio Hijack. I hadn't used it in a long time. I spun up Audio Hijack. It now has a transcribe function. And so, because I wanted a transcript of everything Apple said, because they go so fast. And I swear, this was the fastest one ever, because they need to leave time for the AI stuff at the end. And so, I can now prove this from the transcript. It's like they would literally say a sentence about a feature and then move on completely. You're like, you just know ifs, ands, or buts. You should do some more density metrics on that, right? How fast they spoke. And had to leave time for him flying from a plane or doing parkour and things like that, right? That was fun. on the uh the uh i actually do the sort of the closest i have to density metrics is part of the reason why i wanted to get the transcripts i wanted to feed it to some of the chatbots and see if they could summarize it for me in a useful way and in fact they couldn't because it was so tight already that there really weren't or too many different subjects.
[23:49]Right. And so then what I did, which worked better in at least Claude was the only one that worked really well in, was I said, list out all the features that Apple talked about. Oh, okay. And so it didn't try to summarize so much as extract, and it did better at that. Okay. But it was an interesting, it was just an interesting experiment. Yeah. Mostly what I've done, honestly, is I've searched in the transcript on a word and found exactly what they said. I did almost the same thing. I used Notability to do it. And one of the things I like about Notability is as you're handwriting or you're typing, you can have it be recording the audio and then you can tap in your notes and it goes directly to where in the transcript they said the thing and plays it back for your ears. So you get all three mediums all interconnected with the same timing. And it worked really well. Yeah, I honestly, I should do something along those lines. I actually don't listen to a lot of stuff that I want to take notes on. Apple events are the exception. And so I hadn't thought about this until like that morning. I'm like, huh, I wonder how one does this audio hijack probably does it. And so I went there. But yeah, but that notability would make more sense. Or, as we'll probably get to Apple's own recording and transcription. We'll see how that works. Yeah.
[25:08]You know, I was frustrated by the presentation because I was just so impatient to hear the AI stuff that I was like, oh, blah, blah, blah. You're going to do something in music. You're going to do something in notes. You're going to do something in, you know, pages, whatever they were going to talk about, whatever it was. I was like, yawn, tired of this. Moving on. Come on, let's go. Let's go. and I think mostly I was annoyed because I thought it was going to be an hour and we're at like 45 minutes and we're just starting macOS I think at that point or maybe it was quarter after whatever it was just I was so worried they were just going to go and then you know maybe some other time we'll do AI.
[25:45]Yeah, no, it was, I didn't quite know how to expect in terms of how they were, I was pretty sure they were going to talk about the AI stuff. I've somewhat given up on trying to predict how long Apple will go. Because I forget which one of the last, one of the most recent hardware announcements has been the, I forget what it was, iPad, 20 minutes. It was like it was just like but like they got like oh and then it ended and i'm like uh right okay you're done i mean it was enough stuff but it was like well 20 minutes that's really a press announcement didn't it and it felt like it could have been a little bit more because they do script these things still so tightly yeah and you know and because they're pre-recorded so they're literally writing and reading a script and yeah i mean you guys have to give these people credit it they know their lines yeah i mean well or they are they are actors the best cut.
[26:41]They know their editors do they have to film it i'm gonna tell my god i've been terrible, really really especially with some high level apple executive who can't hit his lines i'm sorry sir but we have to try that again i'm glad you said he because the she's all hit their lines first time hey one thing i wanted to just kind of focus into one pile together is the restrictions on what devices get to have the fun because yeah it's not to depress people but i don't want people learning about a cool feature and they're going then finding out later on they don't get it so starting from the beginning messages on over satellite that's restricted to the iphone 14 and above yes and that is simply because it needs the appropriate radio capabilities to talk to the satellites um you know there's there's there's some magic in there they circulate which happens i still think this feature is total magic um might be electronics but okay no it's magic what's that i saw it's like a freaking satellite.
[27:40]Space uh so yeah so that's a big one that has sos over satellites has that been iphone or the the way you could communicate over satellite during sos that was exactly it's exactly the same exactly the same requirement so it's the first year it was emergency sos via satellite okay second year It was roadside assistance via satellite, and now it's messages via satellite. There's one other thing. I saw it's deep in the iOS 18 page. I think you're going to be able to do it. This was crazy. You're going to be able to do live photos and videos over satellite if the dispatchers enable it. So is the dispatcher the emergency person you're talking to? Yeah. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And so basically, they need to say, you say that your leg is broken off. Let me look at that. Let me see a picture. Oh, it's just a sprain, you big baby.
[28:33]You can chew it off, right? Well, so, but regular messages over satellite, is that only in an emergency? I assumed you could be like, hi, honey, I made it to the top of the mountain. Yep, you can. And that's, I was actually, I was surprised because the drum I've been beating for the last two years is this emergency SOS is fine. The roadside assistance is fine. But what I want is I'm out biking in the middle of nowhere, which in Ithaca means I'm 15 miles from my house, 10 miles from my house. There's no connectivity and I get a flat tire. Okay. The way modern bikers deal with flat tires is with cell phones. We don't bring patch kits and any of that nonsense anymore.
[29:21]So basically, I was like, Tanya, could you come get me? That's what I wanted. And I figured, okay, that might be too much, but I wanted to be able to send my location via messages. Because you can do that, right? You can just say, here I am. And it would be very easy to, with a spouse or friend or whatever, say, if you ever get a random location from me with nothing more, come get me. Yeah, that is called SOS. Yeah, so you are today able to mark your location by satellite. Right. Yes, but they have to know to look for you. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. Well, but if Tanya doesn't hear from you for four hours, she's like, let me just go see where he is. Hey, he hasn't moved.
[30:04]Well, actually, you don't even know he hasn't moved. You just know where he was when he dropped that pin. And I think it tells you the time, but it doesn't tell you he dropped it 28 times in the last four hours going, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here. Precisely there was no notification to the other person yeah and that and as before you know i'm like oh i get it this is magic that you can do it at all it's amazing but can we have this one additional thing and i thought that would be sufficient and so apple totally leapfrogged that and it's like oh yeah you have full messages and and oh i know you're gonna be able to do video and photos if you know the emergency people care you know like my head's blowing i didn't need good That was technically possible, but apparently they've got just some incredible compression and stuff to deal with. Maybe it's, you know, imagine they're looking for you. They know you have a broken leg. They're not doubting the broken leg, but they're like, we can't find you. Can you take some pictures of your surroundings? Do you see anything in your view that we can hone in on? That could be, too. Yeah, so there's all sorts of possibilities there. But I think this is, you know, again, this is not one of those features I expect people will be using every day. But boy when you need it you need it oh yeah and and in fact like my my big question is.
[31:22]What about what if you're communicating with someone else who's also out of touch i think that should be possible but here's the trick which i think is that both of you will have to know to be like it won't just come in you'll have to know to be pointing at the satellite, oh right right right right because to do the ss location you have to point at the satellite to get it yeah which i love i just love the concept that you can, well that was at 10 26.
[32:06]Oh and she's back at 10 42 what the it started breaking up and then all of a sudden zoom was just like yeah i'm out oh i'm done here 10 42 yeah um we were enjoying being out in the mountains with some friends and and it'll say hey satellite's coming soon get ready getting ready okay now start pointing around try to find it and so it definitely is you are pointing at the satellite so yeah yeah I have this fabulous memory of back in 1994, we'd gone on a hike with this guy named Corey Lowe, who was, he rewrote the internet starter kit for me for Windows. So he was a Windows guy, a friend in Seattle. And we went for a hike. And at some point, he wanted to get cell service. And he was kind of literally running around, like waving his phone around. And so every time I use, or even test or think about it, SOS for satellite. You think about him doing it. And just this image of my friend Corey, like pointing his phone at the sky, trying to get cellular service. But now you can point at your sky and get satellite service. So it's crazy how far we've come. Yeah. So before we started, we were discussing how long we're going to go. We're on the first bullet.
[33:17]But I'm still going to add one more thing for people who don't realize what an expense saving this can be to have this, not just to have this service, but also a friend of mine has a satellite radio for when he goes off in the middle of nowhere and they have to pay 20 bucks a month to maintain it and when he's gone they pay 40 bucks so he can actually send more messages and it's basically he could just send squirt out a couple of sentences you know every few hours to say he's still alive to his wife so i mean the real question here so apple announced last year that they were extending the free period for um the satellite capabilities through November of 2025.
[34:00]And so the real question is, is do they ever figure out a business model for this? Right, or decide, can they afford to do it? Does it make you buy the new phone, you know? As I said, I just don't know. I mean, and that's, you know, in some ways, we're actually a little closer to an idea now, because if you think about it, maybe this whole messages via satellite thing becomes a paid service. And everyone gets emergency and roadside and whatnot, because it's just so hard to charge for that.
[34:32]And, yeah, do you want me to rescue you? How much is it worth to you? So that's going to be tough. But the message is via satellite, maybe this is the year of, like, teasing the feature. Oh, yeah, actually, I really do find that useful feature. I will pay you an extra five bucks a month for, you know, my iCloud Plus account. If it was any other company, I would bet that might happen. But being Apple, I don't know, it just doesn't smell like it. It smells more like they do these things. They may just have enough money to do it. Well, and to get their 38% margins or whatever on their devices.
[35:04]Yeah. All right, bullet number two. So all these cool Apple intelligence things, the AI that they built into the phone and the special off-site service for their own data center and getting free access to ChatGPT 4.0, who what devices actually get to do this again pretty limited um iphone 15 pro and iphone 15 pro max which i believe have an a16 pro a7 i can never remember a17 i think it is a17 pro yeah um and then an ipad or a mac with an m series any m series so any apple silicon, right and i actually saw something which suggests that it's not so much the processing because really is the a17 pro so much better than the a16 pro for instance um but amount of ram that's what i heard too yeah it needs and people are surmising eight gigabytes of ram is what's required to the the iphone 15 with no pro on the end of it doesn't have eight gigabytes of ram, even though it's got the same essentially the same processor.
[36:15]Yeah. So that, that feels to me like the, you know, what's going on there. And it's absolutely the case that this, you know, these, these language, large language models and, you know, diffusion models really do require a lot of memory.
[36:27]So, you know, so that's, that's a big deal there. I mean, it's sort of funny because in many ways on the Mac side, easy, right? At this point, at this point we can, we can, we can, so we can say everyone's got an Apple Silicon Mac, not true but right but it's certainly it's been out for four years right right you know just about so you've got you've got plenty of time to have had an apple silicon mac and you might have an expectation that you were starting to get left behind right right i mean i'm sitting here looking at my 27 inch imax in 2020 going yep that's just the writing's on the wall boys you got some time here but not much sweetie yeah and um and because that was honestly nothing you know before that i was like yeah i just don't really have any good excuses for buying a new mac right now right and i have an m i have an m1 macbook air my other machine so um ipads though you know we had a couple of years of m series but my experience is that people upgrade their ipads much less frequently sure and and are much less likely to have bought the m series like ipad pros So the two that are left out that they just made a big, you know, they talked about was the 10th gen iPad, nothing for what it's like 369 or something like that. I was I was recommending that to people. But as of last week, I'm not going to recommend it anymore. This week, because it definitely can't do it, right? Right.
[37:54]I'm, I'm, you can't do it. There's no question about that. Um, when I'm trying to visualize, I'm literally writing my, my Apple intelligence article was doing that before we started talking. Um, I'm, what I'm trying to internalize is if you're the 10th gen iPad, you know, core customer, do you care? So like you're, you know, you get it for your 10 year old to play games on and watch videos on and whatnot yeah they don't need apple intelligence probably um the one thing that just stands out maybe it's just the thing i care about the most is being able to edit photos and say take this garbage can out of the background, you think normal people do that most people don't most people most but in fact normal people definitely don't do it now the question is is will they want to do it but i don't think most Most people edit photos in the slightest. Come on. I don't think there's so much as hit. I don't think there's so much as hit. Take Uncle Fred out of the photo? You don't think people have always wanted to do that? Oh, they've wanted to, but the amount of time that they spend doing it is next to nil.
[39:00]And so I don't think they'll start. Because they can't easily do it. Oh i know but i'm saying but i but i don't think i i mean i don't think it comes up so often okay that you're like oh yeah i wanted this is something i need to have i mean maybe i said maybe you're different than like i edit photos very infrequently um you know i just don't do it i take them they look great done move on so then i also don't look at my photos later within 10 miles of no cell service when i walk i go on walks every day long walks i don't know seven or eight miles a day. And I cannot take a photo that doesn't have a power line in it. There, there aren't any, I've just kind of embraced my photography is often with a hashtag urban beauty. So I just like, I'll make sure if there is a garbage can, get it in the photo, you know? Right. Um, no, it's, it's not to say that people won't like it, but I'm, I'm, I do feel like it may be one of those things where you're like, yeah, it's a cheap iPad. You know, you don't get You don't get all the good stuff with a cheap iPad. Yeah. Okay. So the iPad, the iPad nothing is out. The iPad mini is three years old. Not a big shock that that one's out. The iPhone 15 is the one that, that one leaves a mark. You know, it's like, I just bought it. It's not even a year old. You're telling me that's obsolete.
[40:16]That's, that's rough. That's really. And, and, and as we know, the iPhone pros, like, well, it'll be questioned with the 16, right? Right with the 16 it feels like apple's gonna have to make it enough memory in the 16 right they've got it because because if you had to go to the 16 pro i mean the pro iphones are stupid expensive yeah i mean i i i i suffer with the iphone 15 pro and i'm like ah man do i need every year i get the pro and i'm like oh man do i really need the pro and it's always like i want a slightly better camera i think it would be too hard to explain to people.
[40:50]How come I've got the iPhone 15 and she's got the iPhone, what looks like an iPhone 15 to me and she can do all the stuff I can't do? Well, I mean, that could be the answer, basically, that every new Apple product to come out will be Apple intelligence compatible. So the 11th gen iPad, the next iPad mini, the next iPhones. Yeah. Because it would kind of make sense, honestly. Yeah. So you brought up a good question in your article. By the way, we are still on bullet two. too. You brought up a good question in your article of what about the HomePod? And the great joy of the S-Lady not being an idiot is so strong. I mean, that's something everybody cares about, I think. Having the HomePod over there answering the wrong question will, I mean, do we just disable the S-Lady on our HomePods? I've heard nothing about this, but I'm hoping, and you'll be no the home has become useless without the s lady i mean you know that's how because we control our home um you know we turn lights on and off most of the way well i was hoping she would stop telling me someone my one of your devices hasn't responded which one you fool, i want to know which one why would you not tell me which one it is no use to me to know that one of them didn't it's like guess and then i have to go through the home app and try to figure out which one is not responding. Yeah. And reboot it. Yeah. Yeah, I get that. I get that non-trivially often.
[42:20]The, my hope is. Okay. My hope is that HomePods will use private compute, cloud compute.
[42:27]Okay, so they would go off-site for their information? They'll go off-site. They have to be connected. You're already doing. I mean, we know we don't have that. I mean, that actually could be, and we don't know this, but I mean, let's face it. Apple's going to be rolling this stuff out slowly. They were very clear about how this is over the course of the next year. We're not going to see all this stuff in September, October. We're not going to see it all in January. We're not going to see it. Oh, I want it all now. Yeah, of course you do. Um but yeah it's not my understanding is not out it's entirely not out right now um and even in the data so that's the kind of thing where we've got to wait until we get uh we get to what march april for that last real point feature release they're going to be coming until then is my my belief so um so here's what i'm saying off-site for homepod why can't they go off site for the 15. Well, that's what I'm that's where exactly where I was going with that, which is, I'll bet that as they mean, let's say, private private cloud computers completely new, they have no idea how it's going to have to be scaled, etc, is what the usage is going to be like all that sort of thing. My bet is, is that they open up some of these features to older devices.
[43:47]Through older devices or devices that like the HomePod just makes sense, the Apple TVs, you know, where you really want Siri to be not so stupid, sorry. And I mean, trying not to trigger everything, you want to not be so stupid. And but you're never going to get enough compute there. And so that's where it makes sense to me to go out to private cloud compute for the HomePods, for the Apple TVs, possibly for the Apple Watch.
[44:15]So they didn't have to promise that now. They can have that in their back pocket as a solution. I like it. I mean, keep in mind, this is a 1.0. They had to ship some stuff, and they didn't want to overpromise. And so the last thing they want to do is say, oh, all devices can use it and find out that it truly sucks on an original HomePod. So, you know, bring that in later as a way of keeping people happy after the fact. I'm hoping. Yeah, that's a good theory. I like that. Well, the last restriction thing that I read about in your article was one of the things I'm excited about, and I don't know why anybody but somebody like me is excited, is iPhone mirroring onto your screen where you can interact with your phone from your Mac. I love it because that's going to be a boon to doing video screencasting. That's going to be just fabulous. We use a lot of specialized tools. A tool called Bezel just got Sherlocked on that one.
[45:14]But you said it requires Apple Silicon or Intel with a T2 chip. So that's good. Yeah, and it does. My wife's actually quite interested in this feature, too, because she often doesn't have her phone around her. Yeah, she's one of those people.
[45:33]It doesn't have a constantly connected to her hand you know how she does not have a conflict that's what she has the watch for and so but but as a result yeah there are things where she's like yeah i have no idea where my phone is i mean she's using the watch to find the phone repeatedly yeah and so okay that that i can understand i do that all the time yeah and so but if she could then bring up her phone on her max screen because it'll be in the house somewhere i mean this is This is more that she wants to be able to see, you know, and, and there's, there's a few things like our big one actually is checking the weather. Cause we use carrot. Oh, okay. You know, you want to check, use your weather app, which you just do on the iPhone. That's what you use the iPhone for checking the weather. And yeah, there are weather apps on the Mac, but it's not what we're using for. So, so the, that could be the kind of thing where it's just, you pull, you pull that up and in your window. So I think it'll be interesting to see how many people use this, but, But yes, and the T2 chip makes sense to me because you do not want to be doing iPhone stuff over insecure connections because you'd have to be like putting in passcodes and things like that. And so if you don't have a T2 chip, there's going to be some level of encryption that's not possible. Right. But that extends back a lot of years now. So I was kind of happy. Yeah, you got no excuse. It was mostly interesting. They go back. The Sequoia supports any max before the T2 chip, which it does. You mean up to the T2 chip?
[47:01]Yeah, there's a few that are still supported. Okay. Like the iMac Pro, the 2017 iMac. Okay, I haven't seen the list. Yeah, you scroll down and they have that Mac OS Sequoia preview. It gives you the full list. Okay, that's good. But interestingly, MacBook Pro is back to 2018, but MacBook Air is only to 2020. Yeah, the MacBook Air is just a little shorter.
[47:29]I think that i i think they skipped us some time i don't quite have my i don't quite have the whole lineup in my head in terms of when the different macbook airs came out because i was ignoring them heavily during the butterfly keyboard era sounds like i need to do another one of my world famous diagrams i've been uh i've been doing a lot of them lately like to try to explain how the apple pencil which apple pencils go with which devices i have to keep redoing that graph but this might be a good one to show like where do you where do you get uh the ai stuff and where do you not and And where do you, I got another diagram. This can be fun. Hey, let's jump to talking about the passwords app. And one of the things I want to ask you about in your experience with getting people to use a password manager, is it that people don't want to do it because it sounds too hard or because they don't trust the cloud? Anecdotally. Oh, I think it's mostly it's too hard. Yeah, that's kind of what I thought. Too hard. And I don't know if they quite get there immediately, but then they don't want to pay for it. Yeah. You know, most of the good password managers are not free. Sure. So, I don't get it. I mean, yeah, there are other people who don't, you know, who are perturbed by the cloud. But usually when that happens, I kind of explain, you know, how the encryption works. And, you know, it's... Get them over the hump. I'll use it if you stop telling me about it.
[48:57]Okay so there's a public key and a private key sally and joe um i think about my father-in-law he's really really really security conscious and he's great i mean anything comes up on screen he doesn't understand he's like let's go to the keyboard and he calls us and he always apologizes for bothering us with like no you're nailing this this is this is perfect you know just always call us that's great you see a winner no no that one's okay that one's okay so far nothing bad has come them up. But he says, well, you know, I would never put anything in the cloud. And I said, well, so when you go online and pull down all your stock values from your, you know, from your investment company and you log in, did you know that's the cloud?
[49:37]What yeah you're on the cloud all the time that's that's part of it i i mean i don't have i don't want to quite say sympathy because that's not quite that's overstating the case but, there's a level of okay you just got to get over it at this point you know like the world is online um you know whether you call it the cloud you call it the internet or whatever you do you know standalone machines basically don't exist anymore right right one of the one of the things in thinking about password managers, I have a great love for 1Password. And my first instinct was to say, yeah, but it can't do all the stuff 1Password does. And that's absolutely, I believe, to be true. A couple things I wrote down. Watchtower, with the Have I Been Pwned database, you know whether your site has been compromised. Actually, Passwords has that. Does it? Okay.
[50:33]Credit cards, cards ssh keys bank accounts databases email accounts passports passports actually helped us steve had his backpack stolen in peru and we were able to give a printout of his previous passport to the passport office which helped a little bit i mean probably could have gotten out of the country without it but uh api credentials reward programs medical records you know it's just got a lot of different ways you can store information and i use a fair number of those so there's two things So I wrote a big article about this because Apple, back in July of last year, updated the iCloud Passwords Chrome extension to be Sonoma compatible. Previously, iCloud Passwords had been the Chrome extension and only compatible with Windows.
[51:22]And so the idea was it would solve your problem if you were a Windows user. You had to use your iCloud Passwords under Windows. Windows, but by making it compatible with Chrome on Sonoma, it opens it up to Chrome and Arc and Brave and Edge and all of those. So Chromium. Precisely Opera. Yeah, that works, which is great. So okay, so I actually spent a couple months using this. And the two things that you miss from 1Password when you do this is credit cards and autofill of addresses.
[51:58]Now, the reason why you miss those is because in Safari, you get that. Like Safari does it separately. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's not part of 1Password.
[52:09]Right. Well, it is part of 1Password, but it's not part of the password. The password stuff doesn't have to do it because Safari knows those two things. But I thought Safari knew it because of your MyCard. You know, this is my contact card. Has that been coming from 1Password all this time? No, no, no. is you're you're correct that's why safari knows it yeah but my point is is one password also knows it okay um but remember if you're using chrome you don't have access to my card stuff right right so so what i spent a great deal of time figuring out for this article was how you can turn on because of course all the browsers can remember credit cards can remember addresses internally And so I figured out basically how to use Apple's passwords and the browser's credit card and an address autofill. It's a little bit tricky. It's a matter of trust to do that one. I mean, I mean, come on, credit cards, credit cards get stolen so many so often anyway. I mean, it's just a pain when it happens. And the likelihood that Google's going to get hacked is actually way lower than you're going to get, you know, it's going to get skimmed by a restaurant. I mean, just Google's not losing these things. But you're also trusting Google to trust Google not to play with it, but...
[53:32]Google is not going to mess with that. Google wants to sell you stuff. There's no security problems with Google. Google is the biggest target in the world.
[53:42]They're a much bigger target than Apple. And so Google security is really, really good. No one's breaking into Google. Okay. Okay. Don't get me wrong. People are trying. And the government, I mean, that's just it. It's like China's trying. I actually didn't mean other people breaking into Google. I meant Google using the data. Why would Google use your credit card number? I don't know.
[54:07]Google's not going to use a credit card number to order stereo equipment to their house, you know? That's true. That's true. Larry Page has his own stereo. So back to the passwords app, though. I think it's a really good thing. Anything that gets more people having better hygiene on passwords is a good thing. Absolutely. No, it's a very good thing. And it's free. And it's pretty good. I mean, if you check out that article, it's like, you know, Apple has hit all the bases. Like it's not as good as one password or whatever i mean blah blah there's all these other reasons why it's not quite as good but it's totally fine like you won't go wrong using it no matter who you are and if you desperately want more yes you can always get one password or bitwarden or dashlane or whatever that's fine whatever but the fact is is that it is now you have to be this tall to play and apple has met that has met this that height requirement that's a really good description of it all right let's see what else was um they talked about control center and being able to change uh the control center icons to be tiles and change their size and add controls from other apps and this was one of the points where i wrote yawn in my notes was was this on anybody's bingo card is oh my gosh my biggest problem is that control center is confusing or i need to be able to control it more, I don't think so. I mean, it's, you know, in my article, the heading was something like control center construction kit, because it really feels like, hey, look at all the things you can build.
[55:36]But you put it in your top 14, most compelling. Hey, kids, you can build. Yeah, no, it's kind of cool. And part of the reason why I put it in the top 14 is I actually find Control Center a little annoying because, in fact, it's so not customizable. And so, you know, every time I'm using my phone, I can't pull it up. Every time I pull it up, you know, like there's a few things I use regularly and then I have to look at all the others and like try to parse the icons and stuff like that. And so if I have a little bit more, and there's a lot of them I don't use, so like I don't even know why they're there and I can't take them away because they're default ones. So if they make it entirely useful, and like the whole thing with like bringing a media player and the home stuff, you know, we'll see. Well, HomeKit's already in there somehow. I don't know how it's chosen five, six icons to go in there from HomeKit for me, but I don't know how that happened. I don't think I did it. And it's only on my phone not on my mac right yeah you notice they didn't say anything about control center on the mac so i thought that's what they were talking about so that that does explain something i just want them to make something obvious to tell me how i get to control center versus look at every message you or every notification you just missed because i guess wrong 100 of the time i click the wrong icon i get them backwards on the mac oh oh do you just like you just slam your cursor into the corner because that's how you get notification center.
[57:02]Slam it into the corner what do you mean in the upper left or upper right corner you have to click on the clock yes you don't well you set something up sweetie because i'm no i'm doing it right now maybe i did two different screens maybe i did it's probably a hot corner you did yeah it's probably a hot corner darn it you know maybe i should do a hot corner then because i i click on try to get to control center by to click on the clock and i get uh notifications instead dead what are you supposed to put hot corners in this freaking system settings no one knows oh yeah weren't we supposed to get a big redesign of of uh system settings wasn't that one of the big hot rumors that's that's the that's the claim so hot corners go hide home panel i don't even know what that is.
[57:50]What's the home panel no one knows this is good this is good radio i get my notifications and i get widgets we're doing this live we do not come on it's not called that no there's a thing called it is you have to search on it you have to search on it and i found it from accessibility okay yeah well i don't know where oh it's in keyboard why would it be a keyboard yeah hot corners keyboard i'm not i'm getting it oh that's shortcuts no that's desktop and doc, oh wait desktop and doc desktop is where i get it yeah that's how i have notification set can i can make no you can't do control center yeah you can't so how are you doing how are you doing that maybe you did uh you run in one of those no no notification center is what does it, if i slam into the upper corner i get notifications plus less uh widgets okay Okay, but how you got notification center to be in the upper right-hand corner, I don't know.
[58:52]Oh, if you go to, okay, you search in system settings and hot corners. Okay. And then you go to hot corner shortcuts under desktop and dock. Oh, good. And you get the four pop-up menus. Under desktop and dock. Okay, I see hot corners. I mean, I'm in hot corners and I see the four corners, but if I choose the four different options, none of them are control center. What are they? Hide show home panel. no no so that's something else that's accessibility one you need hot corner shortcuts from desktop and doc or just go desktop and system settings this is totally different oh my gosh this is so they don't need to fix this at all okay mission control that's what i want it to be, that's what we're doing oh you do it as notifications no i never want notifications i literally never am trying to get to that i don't i don't i don't use any of this oh my gosh Oh my gosh. Now it brings up spaces. Okay.
[59:49]The only one I use for real is lower right corner for me is desktop. Okay. No, desktop is too easy to hit. It's right out there now, but I click on it and everything goes away. All right. What was the topic? Let's see. Oh, let's talk about math notes. I am so excited about math notes. That is the best thing ever. It's going to be so fun. So So for anybody who doesn't remember, it's where you can write equations and it'll graph it for you and it'll solve them for you. I have to admit, I am enthusiastic for other people. I cannot imagine having any use for this whatsoever. He's got this bless your heart look on his face.
[1:00:31]I can either do it like I'm doing addition in the calculator or I'm using a spreadsheet. There's no in-between for me. Plus, I'm not an Apple Pencil person in the slightest. But that's because you didn't have math notes, you know?
[1:00:46]It's because I don't do math. I'm a word person. I was just working on a ScreenCastsOnline tutorial about notability, and one of the cool things it can do, and I know this is really going to blow your dress up, you can write an equation. And in the tutorial, I write out the quadratic equation, and I invite everyone to sing along as I write, you know, negative b plus minus the square root of b squared minus 4ac all over 2a, all over 2a.
[1:01:11]Anyway, I write it out by hand, and then you can select it, and you can tell it to convert it to a real equation and all of a sudden it's printed as a real like typed equation and if you click on it you go into edit it opens it up in a language called latex which is how it's creating and it's it's just i mean just made my little heart sing it was such a beautiful thing yeah yeah no i as i said i think this is going to be like my son was asking he's a um he's a phd in machine learning um and he was asking if it would do college level math and i'm like i don't know it'll do high school level math from what i could see um so i just assumed it would be able to do i mean i don't know if it'll do fineman equations but uh i would think it would do a you know put it this way and such yeah yeah well as the level of math that tristan does you know exceeded exceeded my high school calculus uh you know somewhere around 10th grade i think and nowadays he's like as we know from linear algebra i'm like linear algebra i have no idea what linear algebra is.
[1:02:19]Sorry, I'm a word person. That reminds me of when my son was in, God, how old? I think he was second, no later than fourth grade, but I think it was second grade. The teacher of his gifted program had found a bunch of books that were being thrown away from a library. So he took them all and he put them in the trunk of his car and he invited the kids to come take books out of the trunk. But he saved one for my son because he was pretty nerdy. And it was a non-Euclidean geometry book. And he was required to read some of it. So every night I would sit down with him in my lap, literally going, and then do you know it? Euclid figured out next. I took a couple of years of calculus in college and enjoyed it quite a bit. No idea what I was reading, but anyway.
[1:03:06]Well, I'm excited about drawing equations and stuff. I think that'll be fun. fun i'm i'm definitely known to uh you know whip open some uh some math when i need to calculate the diagonal dimension of a or take the diagonal dimension of a screen and figure out what the two sides are you know that kind of thing that comes up okay how about okay since you're now you said you're you're a word guy but you're also not a pencil guy so you also don't care about smart script improving handwriting it just seems like i mean like again nice idea if you're a pencil user but I just, it's just so slow. I mean, I can type so much faster than I can handwrite. And, you know, and I mean, the advantage of this would be my handwriting would actually be legible, which it's not now.
[1:03:53]Because I write so little that of course, it does sort of disintegrate over time, because who cares? Well, and your hand cramps up, you can't write more than two or three sentences before you can do it. But let me make an argument for handwriting. And I don't, I'm guessing that you type type faster than I do, because this is what you do for a living. I type pretty fast, but I'm guessing you type faster than I do. But there's a time when you're not constructing sentences as much as you're trying to think. Like when you're trying to think, or when I'm trying to think something out, I do it in programming where I'm just trying to think out what are the different, components of this thing going to be? What are the functions going to be? And what are the The variable's going to be in it. If I have to type that out in code, I have to be right. But I don't even want to be right yet. I just want to be structurally, what am I doing? This is going to go into that, and then this is going to call that thing over there. And so that's when I use notability, when I want to think. I'm trying to plan something out. I draw a little picture of what I'm trying to do. And I find it really useful for that.
[1:04:56]So I'm sure it's good for that sort of thing. And I have discovered that I am weird. And this baby, just because of how old I am, how long I've been doing this. I prefer full text. I literally, I mean, I don't, I don't do outlines. Really? I start at the beginning and I write to the, and I write to the end. And I write as I go. And I mean, obviously we'll go back and polish and stuff like that, but it's very unusual usual for me to like move a section or move something around like i am i am writing final text to start um and so like the speed of typing actually is sort of an interesting one because in fact i'm not all that fast a typist in real world usage because i have to come up with the words to type like i'm speed of typing is like when you're when you're just when you're when you're when you're going from a printed page and you're typing it i mean that's you know how fast you type is is not the question. How fast I can think of what I want to say is the question. Okay. But as soon as I've thought of what can I say, I can slam it out. So basically, the other person who was like you is Nero Wolfe. All of the Nero Wolfe books, those were all first drafts. Every one of his books was a first draft. So it's you and Nero Wolfe. That's it.
[1:06:15]So I definitely, I write like that when I write my articles for the podcast. Podcast, I definitely do move sections around, but all my blog posts are written from the beginning to the end. I often have to go back and go, well, that didn't make any sense how I got there. And I might have to rearrange something. But when I'm trying to learn, or I'm trying to think something out, like when I'm doing the screencasts, online videos, I always do a mind map because I'm poking all the buttons in a tool. I don't know it yet. I don't already know what I want to say. So I'm poking it and I need to know I need to splat ideas down and then rearrange them to where they tell a story. So I had to give a talk a couple of weeks ago at the ACES conference on generative AI uses. And so it was unusual for me because I usually only talk about stuff that I really know well enough that I can just like talk extemporaneously. So did you bring Tristan with you for this one?
[1:07:07]No, he corrected me midway too. So he's like, no, you can't say that. That's not true anymore. I'm like, okay, sorry. art um but uh uh but it was interesting because i sort of started outlining and didn't work you know like i i had a very high level outline and then to go anymore i was like i actually need to write down what i'm going to say and that was how i think about it and this made me really quite worried right because when i'm practicing um beforehand in the hotel room it's not going very well. Because like, I'm not exactly remembering what I had written or whatever. And what I what happened as soon as I got up there was, I remembered that I'm actually a very good extemporaneous speaker. And so I regurgitate what you'd written down. So I didn't I didn't need to that as soon as I was up there, and I was talking to people and could engage their reactions and figure out, it all just flowed naturally. And you know, the jokes happened and all that. Whereas Whereas when I was trying to write it out, like I needed to do that as a way my thinking, my thinking works, but I didn't actually have to say those words.
[1:08:18]Interesting. That I could perform, I could perform the part, but my thinking needs to, I need to think in full text. I don't, I just can't think in outline. You know, I think I know what you're talking about there. when I first started doing the podcast and I started and I was writing these blog posts with everything I was going to say people said well you know you're wasting a lot of time you should just do an outline and and do that and what I found was I would write full text and then erase it to make it a bullet point well wait a minute I could keep it as full text and then people who didn't want to listen to me and just wanted to read what I had to say would be able to read it, And that's one of my favorite jokes is people used to tell me, why do you give it to them in a blog post? Then they're not going to listen. I said, wow, that'd be terrible if they got the content the way they wanted it, wouldn't it? You're right. You should stop doing that. Just awful, right?
[1:09:09]Cannibalizing my product. Exactly, exactly. So, yeah. So, in any event, no, again, I do feel as though the Apple Pencil and the iPad, they are not tools for me. And I think there are a bunch of people who are having trouble figuring out what they want to do with the iPad. You know, right now I'm seeing a lot of complaints, like, particularly like the iPad Pro hardware. Oh, my gosh, this is amazing. amazing, but iPadOS is still bumming me out. Yeah. I don't want to go down that road. I'm so tired of everybody whinging on that topic. I love my iPad. I use it for all kinds of things. It's great. Leave me alone. Let me be happy. I don't want to hear that. All I said is just, but that's just it, is that once you find those things, then it's great. And that's what I think the Math Notes and Smart Script will really help with that. It would be be nice if they did a little bit more of the you know other stuff people want but nonetheless you know those are for the for like the students again those are student features yeah those like if you're a student holy cats that's great well yeah or people who do math in real life.
[1:10:17]Who would that be? No, I mean, the thing with math notes that I think is really interesting about it is that it feels like it's in between what I do, which is, you know, simple calculator stuff and spreadsheets. Like anything I'm going to do that, like it's very unusual for me to do something that doesn't, either isn't just over and done because it's a calculation I need to do once, or it's something where I need to put in different bits of data and play with the data or, you know, it's a fair amount of data and things like that. And then it's a spreadsheet. So this is a nice in-between chunk.
[1:10:54]Yeah, I think so. Hey, I wanted to ask you, one of your 14 compelling items was entitled Safari Highlights and Reader Summaries. I did not understand what this one even was it tell me what what was that yeah this feels a little funny to me so okay so safari highlights are you're going to a hotel um you're on a trip and you need to go to you know you're trying to figure out where the hotel is so you need to figure out what the address of the hotel is so you can get directions there once you've landed in the airport um so you go to the hotel's page and you're like where do they where have they put what the damn address it's always at the bottom right it's at the bottom but like in the bottom of this page do i have to go to do i have to find a contact page do they have an actual directions page the idea behind highlights is there's a certain number of things that people apparently do when directions is a big one where it will just um the apple intelligence feature will just go and find this you know it'll sort through all the content on the page oh there's a second dress there so.
[1:11:57]I'm gonna make i'm gonna give him give him a button where he can click to get directions because he's in the airport now so that's one of them the others were funny things like i don't and they didn't give a demo of this i can't quite visualize it is like you could look up like what movies an actor had been in so if there's an act i i don't quite i don't quite get this like is it how is it no that you're doing this unless it's a page about the actor or something but that was that was kind of where they were going with that so it feels a little bit to like like beefed up updated detectors.
[1:12:29]Okay. You know, we've, we've, we've detected some kind of data on this and we're going to tell you more about it. If you click here. Okay. But it wouldn't do anything if it went to tidbits.com or podfeed.com because we don't have addresses? And presumably we're not famous enough to be an IMDB. So, yeah.
[1:12:50]Okay. I think you could have made 13 compelling things, not 14. So, what I think is actually, I mean, somewhat more interesting about this actually is the Safari reader stuff. Okay. And so that's where basically you send something to Reader. And let's face it, you're only going to send something to Reader if it's big, right? Or if the ads are too annoying on the page. Well, that's true. That's what I use it for. I let their ad runs and if they annoy me too much, I hit the Reader button. That's their penalty.
[1:13:22]Yeah, penalty box. Damn, you're out. um and so so with long stuff that you send um to reader you know this is it's what's sort of funny about this is this feels more like a businessy feature right you know like oh i need to you know go over this long document kind of thing that i found on the web um and so that's where you'll be able to use the art of the apple intelligence stuff to summarize it pull out key points, give me a table of contents so that I can click to different parts of this huge document, things like that. So that felt more interesting to me. Yeah, it does. It does. My friend, Dr. Marianne Gary is always sending me these like 35 page, you know, research papers that she wants me to discuss with her. And I'm like, you know, I'm, I'm, I can read a little longer than a tweet, you know, before I get bored and I move on. I mean, I read your stuff, but if it's more than like three paragraphs, I might have to do it in five settings. So to be able to have a summary like that, that's just right there, that would be terrific. Right. And so, I mean, this is, again, one of those generative AI features which.
[1:14:32]On the one hand, yeah, it feels like Cliff's Notes. It feels like you're cheating. But on the other hand, it depends whether you actually need to read this. The reason why Cliff's Notes was cheating was because you were missing the entire point of it being this classic work of fiction, say. Right. As opposed to, when I wrote about this in my generative AI article, I was like, I actually got a federal government document that I was supposed to look at and it was, I don't know, 74 pages of federal government document speak. And it was very much the kill me now, you know, like, I cannot do this. And so, in that case, I was using a service called Chat PDF, which allows you to converse with the document. You can ask questions of the document. And it answers, you know, it gives you the answer, and then it gives you a link to the page, which shows it. So, I'm hoping some of the summarization and whatnot features that Apple's providing will work a little along those lines where you can just say, this is just way too dense, and I don't care enough. Like I care enough to like, tell me the summary or, you know, bounce me around in the document a little bit, but I do not care enough to read this document. I just downloaded the user manual for my new color laser printer from brother. And it I'm not joking. It's 378 pages long.
[1:15:50]And that's only one language. It's not like French is in there, too. It was one language. It's a printer. It's a printer. Yeah, well, they do have an interactive user manual online, so you can just poke into the piece you want. But this thing is big. I think I'm going to try it with this chatpdf.com. I'm going to throw it in there and say, you know, what is that second printer tray for, the second paper tray? I haven't figured out what that thing's for. What is that? Yeah, yeah, totally. Totally. The funniest manual I've seen recently is I bought a Bluetooth barcode scanner for scanning QR codes on race bib numbers at races. And the way you configure this thing entirely, when you get its manual, its manual is like 100 pages of QR codes.
[1:16:35]Oh, really? Because everything you do in this is all scanning a QR code with the device and the special QR codes can actually change settings in the device. I thought that was just really fun. That's kind of clever. Kind of meta. meta yeah i'm like well okay i guess that makes sense but wow weird well probably the most fun thing is the uh tap backs being expanded to any emoji and genmoji and i got confused on where genmoji ends up in the plot and where tap backs are are they intermingled right so well so uh A little bit of a good question. So, TapX, to begin with, right now, there are these little monochrome, you know, there's five of them, plus, you know, thumb up, thumb down, heart, ha ha, exclamation points and question mark.
[1:17:24]And so, there'll be color and nicer looking, for one. And then you'll be able to use any emoji you want of the existing, you know, thousand emoji, which is, that's, I mean, I think that's cool and useful. And then Apple said you'd be able to use Genmoji. And I can't quite visualize how that's going to work. I mean, you know, when you create a Genmoji, how does it keep it around for you? Well, they said you can make a sticker. Right. Oh, yeah, stickers is the other ones, but Genmody are different than stickers. So I think Genmody can be a sticker is what I thought. I don't really understand stickers, honestly. Let me check my notes in Notability and listen to what they said. I'm too old for stickers. No, stickers are... I'm not 12 anymore, seven anymore. Stickers are stupid because you can send a sticker, but the other person can't take the sticker and then use it for anything.
[1:18:13]It's one way. It is literally like it's stuck down with really good glue on your message, so it doesn't do anything. So i like i like the idea of the genmoji actually quite a lot um and i actually repeat again what genmoji are is okay so genmoji are uh generative emoji where you say i want emoji an emoji of a penguin riding a surfboard okay there is not an emoji of a penguin riding a surfboard there might be a penguin there might be a surfboard but there clearly needs to be a penguin riding a surfboard right um and uh all my emoji genmoji are going to have penguins in them just saying um so so you can just create that with a text prompt and and this is what i you know like apple didn't show enough to know exactly what the interface is going to look like but then you've got this genmoji of a penguin riding a surfboard that you can use in tap backs or in normal normal text or anything else and i think there's going to be some real devils in the details with these things because for instance emoji each platform has its own imagery for emoji so what the you know what you see when you put a you know a christmas tree um or uh you know a hamburger i remember there was the order of the cheese and the tomato was a big kerfuffle you know.
[1:19:37]Android has a different graphic for that. I mean, it'll still look like a hamburger or a Christmas tree or whatever, but it's not going to look the same.
[1:19:47]But what they're doing is the emojis are ending up with Unicode characters. And so that's why they can be agreed upon. I have no idea. Genmoji are going to probably just be graphics as far as I can imagine. So I don't quite know how that will work across platforms or what happens if you put them in a web page. Oh, yeah. yeah just just don't know i mean i mean is it good is it just going to be an image or but if it's just an image how is it emoji it shouldn't get the moji part.
[1:20:16]Precisely um and then actually i have other i mean you know the emojis just like are they maybe maybe they're moji because they're just small i mean i don't really do the memoji or the animoji either so um the genmoji i'm the most interested in of all the emojis I think it's probably been three years since I did an emoji, not against it or anything, but I don't actually do it. I have no, I have no, yeah. So, but I do think actually, so bear with me a little bit because I haven't actually thought all this through, but I'm somewhat perturbed by emoji because they have meaning, but they do not have shared meaning a lot of the time. So at this point we all know what an eggplant emoji means i don't make me say that okay i've heard that i'm supposed to know but i'm old you're supposed to yeah i'm old i know so, any event the point being don't just be sprinkling the eggplant emojis around okay good to know.
[1:21:17]Good to know. But, but, but, but all the, I mean, most emojis, like, what does it mean if it's the, you know, emoji with one eye winking and the tongue out? Does that mean something different than if it's just winking and it doesn't have a tongue out? You know, like, I don't know. um and so and and i believe that you know some of these things you know do again in certain communities have very specific meanings but that meaning is is is not easily transmitted.
[1:21:44]And so what i kind of like about the genmoji is it eliminates that belief that oh you should know what this means oh okay okay right um so like if it's a penguin riding a surfboard it's just a penguin you know sometimes a cigar is just a cigar though um i do like and and so we may be in a situation where like we can stop taking the emoji having these emoji laden with meaning by some people a little less seriously maybe maybe the uh the emoji super council or whatever they're called has just been sherlocked that we don't need them like when we're trying to get the penguin on on the surfboard approved. Now we can just make our own. Maybe we don't need all those approved ones. We don't. And I'm tremendously offended by the whole, by the fact that, you know, they come up with like, I don't know, 30 a year or something. Like, I don't know. Why did you think you'd eat that one and not a penguin on a surfboard? You know, like I would use a penguin on a surfboard regularly. I couldn't care less about a pineapple, you know, or whatever. I mean, it's just so freaking arbitrary. I was actually thinking the penguin should be holding a pineapple. I was about to say it earlier and I didn't say it. I would have mine be that way. A penguin on a surfboard holding a pineapple. Exactly. I mean, you can do that. Yeah. I'd like to have a microphone on their discussions of arguing about whether or not the penguin on the surfboard is considered a viable candidate or not.
[1:23:13]The whole thing, it just doesn't make any sense to me, you know, like why one would be chosen over another, you know, again, how could they possibly decide? Oh, well, people, you know, like people have, you know, like in Slack, I do the colon and then you start typing out the name of the thing and I'm constantly disappointed there isn't an emoji for such and such because like, I don't know, I mean, I have no clue what emoji might, there might be.
[1:23:38]I'm amazed by the people who can just pull them out and they're it's like well i have to sit there and you know hit the globe and then search for the thing i want and hope i get the right word i'm looking at this giant grid i'm scrolling through and all i wanted was a thumbs up you know, well see you're gonna love the genmoji then because you're you're gonna make the uh you know allison's thumbs up which is going to be different in some way and uh and you know and that one will just be saved for you. Exactly.
[1:24:07]I'm not big on animated GIFs, but I had a little live photo of my granddaughter. She was jumping up and down as I took the picture, and I realized that'd be a really funny loop video. And so I made it one, and then I realized it works as a GIF, so I used it once. And if I use it often enough, it's always at the top of my list. So instead of writing yay, I keep sending that little video. So yeah, I'll be doing my own thumbs up, that's for for sure. Well, I wanted to do one more on the list, and that was about call recording and transcription. And I entirely missed this. If this was in the keynote, I didn't see it, didn't hear it. One sentence. Really? One sentence. I'm telling you. Super, super fast. Okay. So, is this part of the Apple intelligence stuff? Yes. Okay. So this comes, it was talked about when they were talking about notes, being able to record audio and transcribe it live. And then there's just, there's one sentence basically that says, and you'll be able to do this for phone calls. And we'll be alerting both participants when it's turned on. So everyone knows what's happening, something along those lines. That's all they said.
[1:25:21]So you won't be able to surreptitiously record, So it's not quite clear how they'll be alerting, but, you know, we'll see. Presumably it would have to be audio because you can't be sure that you're talking to someone on a cell phone with a screen, you know, so, and how would you, how would you pop up a notification on a different platform anyway? So presumably some audio thing will, will go, you know, Alison is recording.
[1:25:46]Right, right. So two things on this. I read an article in Neiman Lab, neimanlab.org, and I'll put a link to the show notes in the show notes to this, is, evidently this is going to be the bomb for reporters, where they call somebody on the phone and what they do right now is they can record, but then they use something like otter.ai to transcribe it, or they use a service called Tape-a-Call, apparently. And Otter.ai just reduced the number of calls you can record, or transcribe, I should say, to 10, and that's for $120 a year. And then Tape-a-Call just increased the rates from $10 a month to $70 a month. Like, just now. So, this article has all these screenshots of reporters basically saying, Pound Sand, Tape-a-Call. You know, I'm out, I'm out, I'm out. And so that was really interesting that reporters need this. I'm going to use it every time I'm on a support call. You know how it always starts with this call may be recorded for customer quality assurance. And I'm going to hit my button right when I hear that. And I'm going to do it on AppleCare in particular, because some of the absurd things they've said before, I'm going to say, well, you record me, I can record you.
[1:27:03]Yep. Yep. Yeah. No, I mean, the thing that, you know, not so much phone calls, but you know, that I've wanted to record a lot of times are doctor's visits. Because they are not happy about that. I've heard. I've specifically asked and they've said, No, you are not allowed to record me. It's like, well, you talk a mile a minute, and I can't take notes fast enough. Right, precisely. And I have to pay attention to you. And yeah, so that's what I want to record. Because yeah, there's always a lot of details. And you're like, was it twice a day or once a day that I'm supposed to do this? Or it's three sets of 15? Or was it three sets of 10? I don't remember. Yeah, I've got an eye doctor who talks to a person in the room who takes notes, and he just spits out all this jargon that I don't know what any of the words are. But I've got a friend who's an ophthalmologist, and I would love to have all of those words and take it to her and say, what did he say? And then he'll turn around to me and go, oh, everything's fine.
[1:28:08]You just said the three turned to a two. Was that good or bad? head yeah right so yeah so i mean it's it's an interesting problem um and this is one of the things that um i'm starting to play with in my head a little bit which is ai in general, is allowing us to instantiate what's in our heads for better and worse.
[1:28:36]What do you mean by this is where you're getting in that case well so this is i mean what do you you think most people are generating images of um eggplants clearly you're a dirty boy that never occurred to me it literally never goodness really seriously okay no no i've been out there i've been trying to get a get a get uh steve and i've both been trying to get one of the um generative uh drawing modules to take uh grogu and and put a helmet on him like so his ears are inside the helmet and we can't get oh and he needs to be riding a horse when he's doing it that's what we've been trying to who's gross who's gross uh baby yoda to offend everybody yeah yeah so any event the point being i mean like because there's there's actually a bunch of bad a bunch of seriously bad stuff going on with ai generated child uh sexual abuse materials um yeah it's it's an ugly ugly scenario and and so but the point being that you know like one of the things that people are using AI for is to get what's in their head out.
[1:29:43]And in some ways, recording what goes on around you so that you can revisit it is another way of doing that. It's instantiating something that was previously ephemeral.
[1:29:56]Yeah and so so the and and it's interesting that doctors don't want to do it presumably because they are afraid they could be sued for malpractice and this would be held against them but but but again in some sense this is these are your thoughts once they've been once they've been told to you it's in your head right you remember this stuff so shouldn't you be able to to spit this out well of course you can you can write down everything you say but everything you remember but somehow it's not okay for you to record them so you don't have to it doesn't have to go through your head first right yeah just saying there's there's some interesting stuff going on here and that changes once you can do this and this is not i mean the whole microsoft recall is is you know another aspect of this where people are like oh privacy privacy privacy but part of that's because you don't want other people to see what you're instantiating in your your head right you didn't want you know and so they're worried about the fact that this could be hacked or whatever there was a terrific black mirror episode about this where uh people had the ability to record everything going on around them at all times and where it came into play was a husband and wife having arguments and it was it was just horrible it was like it's exactly what i want and it is exactly what i should never have you know it was just i said and i quote yeah yeah.
[1:31:20]Yeah, eventually she figures out that he's having an affair with somebody because of the way he said something had a recording of something else and was able to pull all the dots together, but only because this record of every single thing ever said between them was there. And yeah, so it's a bad thing. Yeah. And so, but again, it's in your head. You just don't know if you remembered it exactly. So again, you know, I don't know. Yeah, we don't remember anything correctly, so.
[1:31:51]Well, it is clear that people have, you know, some people obviously are often people photographing them. You know, people just have very widely varying abilities to remember stuff. So I've mentioned Dr. Mary Ann Gary earlier in the conversation. She's been on Chicheta Cross the Pond. Yeah, name dropping her regularly. Oh, yeah. Well, she's probably, I think she's been on Chicheta Cross the Pond more than anybody but Bart. And she studies memory out of the University of Waikato in New Zealand. And basically what she has taught us is everything you think you remember, you're wrong. And she can induce memories in people. She can take a class of like 30 grad students. She experiments on grad students all the time. She can get more than half of them inside of a couple of weeks to tell a story about their childhood that simply never occurred. So, everything you think you know about your memory, you're wrong. If you have siblings and you're always arguing about how something happened in your childhood, not only are you wrong, they're wrong. Everybody's wrong. Nobody's remembering it correctly.
[1:32:47]I i'm listening to this fabulous podcast called a history of rock music and 500 songs which i i recommend super highly but but he's he often will get into the point where like there's been books written by all the members of a band and they all disagree about some key point, because they yeah they don't they might have agendas etc etc but they also just don't remember what happened, you know, four years ago when they were all 20 and stoned out of their minds and in a recording session. Exactly. I was going to say, yeah, the drugs really helped with that plot line, right?
[1:33:25]Oh, well, I think we have given this all a flavor that possibly nobody else has given to WWDC and the importance of each of these attributes in our clear and linear thinking method strictly following our agenda, right, Adam? Oh, absolutely. I only write linearly. I don't think linearly. That's why I have to write it that way. All right. Well, if for the two people who don't know who Adam Angst is in Tidbits, you want to tell them how they can find you? Indeed. Tidbits weekly newsletter, though we put stuff up on the web throughout the week and then collect it into email at the end of the way or beginning of the week at tidbits.com covers all things Apple that I find interesting. Very good. Thanks a lot for coming on. And stuff that I don't find interesting just gets left out. I don't know. You put math notes in your notes there. I find it interesting for other people. I can put myself in other people's shoes sometimes.
[1:34:27]All right. Well, thanks for coming back on the show, Adam. I'm glad to be here.
[1:34:32]Can you tell that I just love talking to Adam? I could talk to him all day. I mean, I had to cut us off on that, but we had such a great time. I always say, I got to get him back on more often, and I really need to do that. But that's going to wind us up for this week. Hey, don't forget to send in your 1,000th episode recordings to Steve by June 23rd. You don't have much more time here, and you can do that by emailing them to him at steve at podfeed.com. He's got quite a few submissions so far, and it's going really well. He's having all kinds of fun, and not playing them for me. But definitely send those in by June 23rd to steve at podfeet.com.
[1:35:09]Speaking of emailing people, did you know you can email me at allison at podfeet.com anytime you like? If you have a question or a suggestion, just send it on over. We've got some big vacations coming up so we can use some reviews. So if you just start thinking about it now, it's not urgent yet, but we're going to be needing some reviews this summer for pretty much most of August. All right, remember, everything good starts with podfeet.com. You can follow me on Mastodon, podfeet.com slash Mastodon. Want to listen to the podcast on YouTube? Just go to podfeet.com slash YouTube. If you want to join the conversation, you can join our Slack community at podfeet.com slash Slack, where you can talk to me and all of the other lovely, you know, silly castaways like physics nerd Graham was in there. You can support the show at podfeet.com slash Patreon, or with a one-time donation, podfeet.com slash PayPal, like John Murray does, except he just does it over and over and over again. And if you want to join in the fun of the live show, head on over to podfeet.com sass live on Sunday nights at 5pm Pacific.
[1:36:04]Music.