Okay, Chance, can you remember what date 18.2 came out? Sometime in December, like December 12th? I don't know. December 11th, I think it was, yeah. Ah, so close. Pretty close, pretty close. So that feature had, you know, a lot of app intelligent stuff, but it also brought the new mail categorization thing, right? So you have the primary and transactions and updates and splits out your inboxes into different categories and groups, which I don't...
reuse but i think it's a pretty good feature and i think some people get value out of it um and if you don't want to use that feature there's the little dot dot dot in the top right and you can basically switch between the two modes you've got the categories you've just got the The traditional list view where it puts everything all in one go. Now, yesterday, I got a phone call from my mum. She was like, I'm at the post office. I'm picking up a package. I can't find the email.
that has the QR code on it for me to be able to actually get the package, right? Because it's one of those things where they drop it off at the post office and you have to pick it up with a proof of receipt thing. Where's it gone? It's deleted my email. All there are are these little dots at the top of the screen, these little circles. I'm like, what is going on? Okay, so basically, at some point yesterday, her phone automatically updated to 18.2. One.
Why did it take two months? Like, it's almost March. I don't know why the update process is so slow. And secondly, although I think the... grouped category things is quite useful it probably needs some sort of um onboarding introduction so people actually know what's happened because mum just thought you know two-thirds of an email had been deleted
she couldn't see it she couldn't see it in the list because i guess it was just on primary and she didn't really you know she didn't get it i was like okay go to these dot dot dot buttons and click all the list and oh it's there i'm like yeah so just a little anecdote really about one all mac updates is slow i mean
She's been on the old mail interface now for two months longer than when the feature officially shipped. And secondly, for what is quite a big change in the layout of the mail app, they didn't really give people... any sort of hand-holding as to what's actually changing, you know? Like, I appreciate they've given people the opt-out so you don't have to be committed to the grouping, but...
If they're going to put the grouping on as the default, it probably should have had a screen or something. Now your email is split up into pieces because she was freaking out that a quite important message was completely lost and she couldn't find it. In Apple's defense, I'm pretty sure there is a very small... like blurb at the top of the email app the first time you open it after updating to 18.2 but I'm guessing your mom just
It was like, oh, what the hell's that? And tapped the X. She probably thought it was an ad or something. It's not like a full screen thing, right? It's a little alert dialogue. So you could almost scroll it away kind of dealio.
Exactly. I think it probably, in hindsight, needs something a bit more significant or maybe a choice screen where it's like, do you want to group your emails? And you click yes or no. And then if you press no, it just defaults you to the list view or something. Yeah, yeah.
and the the fact that it happened like so randomly on like a wednesday it meant she got to the first time she checked her email afterwards or like in the post office where she was like in a queue and she's like the front of the queue and she's you know
The woman's gone, oh, can I have the receipt thing? She can't find it. And she's in like a stressful situation. She was annoyed by it. So I completely understand it. But it was just quite funny that that's how it... transpired because i've been waiting for the the phone call about the email changing you got to be proactive and give her the advice i forgot honestly it's been so long i kind of forgot that she hadn't been updated to it
and i did i think at christmas i mentioned i like showed him my phone i was like this is how it'll look and people don't remember um but i guess i just in my back of my head i was like that she'd already been upgraded to that version because it had just been long enough now Yeah, but no, it happened randomly this week. So there you go. And I bet she's not alone in people being freaked out about some random email just disappearing, quote unquote.
I have grown to really like the sorting stuff. I usually, I keep it on. Then most of the time I'm in the view where you like swipe all the way to the right and you have the all male view, but then you can swipe back and still be on the categories. Cause like. For example, on Monday, I took the day off from work, but I still needed to keep an eye on my email for a couple things. So instead of...
getting bogged down by all the junk mail and the tips and everything, stuff I didn't need to worry about. I just stayed in the primary tab and the couple emails the game threw that I had to deal with immediately, I saw those without seeing all the junk. So it's a really good feature.
I can see where it would be terrifying to think you just lost all of your email if you aren't aware of the change. Yeah, and you're stressed in a queue in a shop or whatever, and the person's at the checkout desk and they're like, we need this, we need this, you can't find it. I get it. But yeah, I too leave it with the groups on, but I spend...
a lot of the time in the all-male view, I guess. But one thing I do like is the change to the badge notification badge where it only counts messages from primary inbox. We get so much email that is like in tips and stuff that that number would get sky high really fast. Whereas now I've just put it on primary. And so, yes, if I don't feel pressured, I don't feel pressured to open the mail app as much because...
you know, it's less important. And so the number mostly only highlights for important messages rather than literally everything that spews into one of my email addresses, you know? That's smart because I keep badges on only for VIPs. So VIPs are primarily like people at 9to5Mac and then Apple PR people that I've added to VIP over the years.
But the primary system could work better if somebody new from Apple PR emails me and I get the badge for that because it'll go into the primary tab, but it won't go into VIP because I've never talked to them before. So that's an interesting strategy too.
Yeah, and that kind of categorization kind of feels like something they should maybe bring to the Apple Watch or something. I don't think there's a setting for... notify me on only for prime you know i mean like it feels a bit undeveloped in terms of the different ways you can like filter the incoming notifications like you can do it for the badges but
Yeah, because with VIP, you get notification. I have notification, full push notifications turned on too. Oh no, actually, I've just gone into notification settings. You can have VIP notifications. Remind me, which is like those. follow-up email things and primary inbox you have as a separate option you can turn on if you don't have it on for everything so i did not know that yeah i didn't know okay that's actually pretty i might turn that on actually
So then you only get, like, basically I just want the Apple Watch to only buzz for important stuff, right? So I have the Apple Watch to buzz for VIPs, but I could turn it on for primary too. Yeah, that's actually, I've literally just found it on the spot, but that's handy to know.
Well, you know, one toggle you will no longer find in the settings app in the European or in the United Kingdom, advanced data protection. And so this goes back to something that I don't think we actually talked about on the show for whatever reason. But the United Kingdom told Apple that they need to add a backdoor basically to access iCloud data from all Apple users in the UK and around the world. Apple.
did not comply with this. And instead, what they're doing is removing advanced data protection from the United Kingdom entirely. So to back up, advanced data protection was introduced in December of 2022. So it's just over two years old. And it's a separate opt-in way for you to protect additional categories of iCloud data. So by default, there are, I think it's 15 different iCloud data categories that are end-to-end encrypted without enabling advanced data protection.
That's things like passwords and keychain, health data, messages in iCloud, maps, Safari, those types of things. Then you could optionally opt in to advanced data protection to enable end-to-end encryption. For things like iCloud backup, iCloud drive, photos, notes, reminders, and a few other things. iCloud backup is the big thing that people wanted end-to-end encryption for. And that's the primary driver for people enabling advanced data protection. Yeah, because...
You would have like your messages in iCloud being entered and encrypted, but the iCloud backup that also contains those messages would not be. So it almost was self-defeating. So if you want that extra security, you wanted to go to the advanced data protection level. So what Apple's doing in the UK is removing the advanced data protection level entirely.
But those other previous categories that I mentioned, like passwords, health data, et cetera, those things are still intent encrypted because those are intent encrypted under Apple's standard data protection. And if you already have advanced data protection enabled and you live in the United Kingdom, Apple's statement basically said that at some point in the future, you'll have to turn off the feature in order to keep using your Apple account.
Because the whole point of advanced data protection is that Apple does not have the ability to remotely turn off that feature, right? So the burden of eventually turning it off will fall to the user, and my guess is Apple will. Put a badge on the settings app, send a few emails telling people that in order to keep using their Apple account, they have to turn ADP off. May I'm sure you have a lot of thoughts on this as a UK citizen, but from an outsider's perspective.
This is really sets a bad precedent. I would be shocked if other governments aren't closely watching this and taking note. We've already seen the United States, for instance, many times over the past. Decade or so calling for Apple to add a backdoor to unlock iPhones to access that additional iCloud data. The famous example is the San Bernardino shooter who the FBI.
tried to compel Apple to add a backdoor so they could access the San Bernardino Shooter's iPhone. Apple didn't do that. Apple strongly resisted it. It was one of the few times we got a full... like letter from Tim on Apple's website explaining why they weren't complying. The United States, as far as I know, hasn't taken any action or expressed any interest in advanced data protection because the San Bernardino case predated.
the existence of advanced data protection. I think what's happening in the UK sets that very bad precedent where other governments are going to be like, huh, this advanced data protection thing seems really bad. We should ban it.
And eventually there's going to be another case like San Bernardino where the FBI is going to want to get into a phone and they can't even get the type of backup because it's encrypted and then they're going to be really mad. So it's going to come up at some point. The clock's kind of ticking on that one.
It does kind of suck, though, being a British citizen, that the first region in the entire world that advanced data protection has been banned in is the UK. I mean, come on. Even China is enabled. You posted on threads, you were like, I'm moving to China where my data is more secure, which I had no idea, no idea that advanced data protection was available in China. Yeah, it's literally worldwide apart from the UK now, which is kind of insane. Now...
People would argue that China has different ways to snoop on your data and maybe it can get the same information at a different part of the chain, right? And obviously in China, the iCloud data is stored on servers that are geo-located within China and there's some...
conspiracy theories or speculation that like the government has its hands in those pies and it can you know it intercepts the information somehow or whatever apple says it still upholds the same encryption standards that does everywhere else but you know that's out there right
But at least superficially, advanced data protection is enabled everywhere but the UK. So that just looks bad, I think. Obviously, what the UK was asking for was backdoors into Apple's... system so that they could and i mean a back door into a end-to-end encrypted system is like an oxymoron right because then it's no longer encrypted if there's a back door in it um but i think what they kind of wanted you know like with
adp now when you set it up apple kind of prompts you to make like a legacy contact or a you know a secondary person that
they will basically be your backstop. So if you forget your password information, you can then go to your friend who has like part of your encrypted key and then you could reconcile it together. I think what the UK was kind of bargaining for was that Apple would just give... them a key for every citizen and so they could then use that without even telling you that they were using it um which is kind of offensive and you know an affront to the whole point and so rather than do that
Apple said, well, we'll just get rid of the feature. So I guess if you wanted them to take a harder stand, they could have gone to court over it, right? And tried to go for some sort of lawsuit about it, like they did in the San Bernardino system. But...
I guess legally they're not allowed to, or the government order doesn't even let them discuss the reason why they're having to do this. So the Apple statement doesn't mention the reason why it's gone, because there's a gag order on it where they're not allowed to, which is kind of insane. But this is the stance they're taking right now. They're removing the N10 encryption capability for UK customers, which then means the government can use the traditional methods to subpoena.
for access to iCloud backups, right? And then that'll keep working. There is a question about those categories you mentioned before that are end-to-end encrypted as standard right now, like the health database, like passwords, like Wi-Fi. Like... That technically still seems to defy what the UK wants, right? Because, you know, your messages in iCloud are entered and encrypted. An iCloud as a service, or I mean...
iMessage and FaceTime as a service are both still encrypted from one person to the other. Yeah, so if you had iCloud backups turned off, you could use iMessage into an encrypted, right? Yeah, exactly. And it wouldn't be stored anywhere else. messages are quite an important part of you know investigations because that's where people share their secrets so i don't know what the plan is with that i mean apple's not saying one way or the other but maybe they're also going to have to
reduce the security of those services going forward and like the health database will have two modes where it's end to encrypt in some countries and not in others but at least right now that hasn't happened uh right now the direct consequence is no longer availability of advanced data protection I do think you're completely right that other countries will now follow suit because why not? If Apple said we're going to do it for you because it's the letter of the law, then...
Other countries are going to demand it too, and here you go. And to be completely transparent, I didn't have advanced data protection turned on. Oh, really? That was going to be my question, because I don't know how many people do. Right, because I...
If someone asked me a date, you know, a general person on the street, I would tell them not to do it because I don't think it's that significant enough. Like if you're a, you know, if you're in a... a politically abrasive country if you are a nation state you know contributor if you're a political activist there's a different level of scrutiny and attention and thing and you maybe want to put that extra security on your account if you're a random person
I personally think the cost of the chance that like your photo library would never be accessible because you forget your password and your backup context. your backup recovery key gets lost or whatever and then all your photos just gone forever that eventuality is way more likely than a nation state being interested in information it would be my stance on the matter now that's a personal choice
But that's what I would recommend to people. I don't think you should turn it on because I just don't think it's worthwhile. But if you're Apple and you're the company that puts privacy on a pedestal and it's one of your main policies and you do ads like what lives on your iPhone stays in your iPhone, you kind of have to have this feature as an option.
And it was kind of ridiculous. It took them until 2022 to do it. So I'm all behind them offering it. And I think it really sucks that now they're basically forced to not offer it in the country in which I live.
And it sucks too that even if you already have it enabled and Apple doesn't have the ability on their end to turn it off on your phone, what they're going to have to do, presumably under the letter of this law, is lock you out of your Apple account if you don't comply and turn it off yourself. Yeah, I presume in a future iOS update, it will start sending you notifications like, you need to turn off ADP. You need to turn off ADP and go through the steps to undo it.
And then at some point in like six months, if you haven't done so, they'll just stop iCloud from contacting your device until you do it. I presume is the only... Because they can't physically turn it off for you. So... They just have to do their best effort attempt to make you do it, I guess. Do you think there's a chance that if the United Kingdom comes back and they say, okay, Apple, you're not doing enough. Thank you for disabling advanced data protection.
But we see in this 9to5Mac article that there's still 15 other categories of data that's encrypted that we can't access. We need that to change too. Do you think there's a chance that Apple just pulls out of the UK entirely? Because in Apple's statement, there's a very specific line at the very end of the statement that says, as we have said many times before, we have never built a backdoor or master key to any of our products or services.
And we never will. That is very much Apple, at least in my interpretation, saying there's a line we will not cross. We've come all the way up to that line by disabling advanced data protection. We will not go further.
regardless of what the UK government tries to compel us to do. Well, offering a different version of the health database where it's not internal encrypted, it's just the standard encryption, you know, encrypted and transient encrypted on the server, but they still have the key. I don't think that's...
equivalent to building a backdoor on master key right it's just yeah more standard level encryption that but you're downgrading everybody you're downgrading what people currently have and expect from their data from apple yeah If I'm cynical and honest with myself, I feel like Apple would do that first rather than pull out of print because I feel like we're a pretty big market. We're not the biggest market in terms of sales, but, you know...
We're responsible for millions of units of devices every year, right? And if I was Tim Cook, I'd be like, look, maybe we have to disable iCloud syncing. Maybe we have to disable this or this. We're not going to build a backdoor, but we're not going to... pull out the country would be my expectation i think with you that they they threatened you know pulling out of europe about the gdpr stuff or the you know the dma stuff and they they didn't you know like yeah yeah
the money talks and there's quite a lot of money uh you know britain's quite a well-off economy and we buy a lot of phones so i i think that's the the overriding factor that the the line is building a back door which they've already shown they're not going to do because they just removed at adp entirely rather than offering it but then secretly having a back door in the system right yeah so that's kind of the stance that i that i assumed they would go down and the strict reading of the rules
those 15 categories of things do seem like they're under threat and so it wouldn't surprise me at all that within a year or so they're like oh yeah you know these categories here well in certain regions they're not as secure as they are elsewhere and you just kind of have to deal with that which again
sucks for the united kingdom and for the broader world too because to do what americans do and make this about us my thought is that the current administration in the united states i don't think would have any shame in following the uk's footsteps in this I saw a tweet from Elon Musk right when Apple announced that they were removing advanced data protection from the UK where he quote tweeted it and he said, thanks to President Trump, this will never happen in the United States.
The background and the context that he's missing is that during the San Bernardino case and during a couple of similar things since then, Trump has been. on the front lines saying Apple should help the government. Apple should build the back door and let us get into the phones of these terrorists. He called for a full-on boycott of Apple for that reason in 2016. I don't think...
The U.S. is going to be far behind in trying to do something similar, maybe not as expansive or as aggressive. But I do think Apple will be a target of something like this in the United States and definitely in other countries, too. Yeah, I mean.
removing advanced data protection availability is not that high a bar because as you said not many people turned it on right because it's opt-in um i think maybe like if they were taking the next step to those categories that everybody's data is already encrypted on the health database on messages nine cloud then that might fit might hit harder to home and people might resist it more but saying you can no longer turn on a feature that you probably don't have on already
it's not that hard to get political weight behind to make Apple do it, as they've already done in the UK. And the UK doing it just opens the door to plenty of other regions doing it too. So, yeah. Unfortunately, I was kind of surprised when they introduced Advanced Data Protection.
that they just dropped it worldwide and it was available in every single country without contest. And it's taken a couple of years, but we're finally starting to see the pushback. And from a public sentiment standpoint too, turning off or removing advanced data protection. Again, because most people don't have it enabled. Most people will just be like, okay, that's a bummer, but it doesn't affect me. Yeah, it's not like stuff stops working.
But saying your messages in iCloud, your iMessages and your FaceTime communications are no longer int and encrypted, that will cause more public pushback than anything. So if I'm the UK government, there's an argument to be made where you take...
the removal of advanced data protection as a big victory. You say you're successful and you don't push any further. I mean, it might be a case of you wait until there's a catalyst. So yeah, you wait until you get a situation where there's a criminal or suspected criminal.
They can't access the secondary data because it's end-to-end encrypted despite ADP being disabled. And then you go back and use that as leverage to force more changes. Situation kind of sucks. And it doesn't really seem to be any... particular force pushing in the other direction like what is the likelihood of this being reverted seems pretty low at the moment so iphone 16e reviews so they came out at a very weird time they came out at i think it was eight
p.m or 9 p.m eastern time so last night in contrast to most apple embargoes which drop at 8 a.m or 9 a.m eastern time i saw some people say that this was apple trying to bury the reviews and because they knew they weren't going to be super positive The prevailing theory that I also saw, though, is that they're trying to align it in time zones and markets that are more interested in these lower priced iPhone options. So somebody pointed out that.
9 p.m. Eastern time is equivalent to 9 a.m. in India or something right around there. So they were trying to target that market. Right. Okay. I don't think it was a conspiracy theory, though. They were trying to bury the reviews because ultimately reviews of a new iPhone come out.
People are going to read them. People are going to watch the videos. If Apple doesn't want to participate in a review cycle, they just wouldn't give the phones out. Exactly. Yes. The reviews themselves, I don't think there's anything surprising from a who is this iPhone 4 perspective.
A lot of reviews focused on the limitations of the phone, which is to be expected. But a lot of the reviews focused on things that the phone didn't have that we all knew and don't expect a $600 iPhone to have, like ProMotion. Which the $800 phone doesn't have. Exactly, yeah. It's tricky. I think the consensus seemed to me that it's a good phone, but most people should just spend the extra money to get the iPhone 16 or even the 16 Pro.
I didn't see any super compelling reviews saying that this is the iPhone everyone should buy or this is the iPhone most people should buy. It doesn't feel like the perfect balance of value proposition, right? In terms of how much you pay for what you get. But if you do have to buy that phone because that's the amount of...
budget you've got you'll probably be all right you know like that's kind of the motif that you come away from is it's not the best value for money and maybe carriers will just offer you know an iphone 15 pro for the same price so you should just get that instead but if you look at like the the apple top line pricing uh it feels a bit punitive when they have features like magsafe not available um but and it's 599 so
it's not like the best value offering and maybe if you spend a little bit more you can get something that's more fair in terms of pricing but especially if you don't care about that second camera a lot of the core iPhone features that you get in the iPhone 16 are in the 16e
And it's $200 less. So... you know it's a personal choice and only comes down how much money do you want to spend per month right when you go when you go to the shop and buy it and there's plenty of people in the world who just did not want to buy an iphone 16 before because it was too expensive so here's a lower priced option and maybe that's enough for them
So I get why it's an option in the lineup. It's not as great as what we were hoping it would be in the run-up just because the price is $599 rather than like $500 or $550.
So it's not, you know, they've taken the floor out of the iPhone SE and not replaced it, right? It's just everything starts on the first floor now rather than there being a ground floor pricing. But it doesn't mean the phone's a failure or... you know pointless it just means it's more of a niche market which is quite literally how much money do you have to spend okay you've only got this much money here's now an iphone that looks modern
Is it ultimately what it comes away from? Because the iPhone SE was a lot cheaper, but it looked old, right? It had the Touch ID, it had big bezels. This at least looks modern and it has an OLED screen. Does it... defy the competition from cheaper android phones that are you know 499 450 and they have like high refresh rate screens and all you know and all that jazz and multiple cameras well no but apple commands a price premium because of the brand right and
The iPhone is a popular brand and people like the iPhone and people love iOS. And so Apple doesn't really have much pressure, seemingly, because otherwise they would have done something different to offer a cheaper model. And so this is what they think is their place where they can convince some people to spend a bit more and get the higher model. But if you don't spend a bit more, you're going to buy this one anyway and be relatively satisfied. On the removal of MagSafe, last week we...
regurgitated some speculation that it could be because of the C1 modem and potential interference between the MagSafe magnets and the performance of that C1 modem. That's not the case. Apple said as much in a background statement to Macworld that the C1 modem has no... relation to the removal of MagSafe, and that the vast majority of iPhone users charge wired or just via standard Qi charging, which makes it sound like it was purely nothing more than a cost-cutting measure.
There was some testing from a case manufacturer too, showing just how important MagSafe is to achieve even efficient and even to a certain degree usable wireless charging speeds. One of the results was that without MagSafe, the iPhone 16e charged at an average of like 5 watts, which is vastly lower than the maximum Qi charging speed of 7.5 watts. But then that case manufacturer put the iPhone 16e.
in a case that had MagSafe built in and attached it to a MagSafe charger. And it got 7.5 watts in all of those charging tests. That's a big... Big drop in efficiency for wireless charging without MagSafe. And the faster MagSafe gets 15 watts, right? Yes, exactly. You're losing a lot of energy when you wirelessly charge without that magnetic connection to securely attach the iPhone.
Yeah, the alignment matters. I still can't quite grok my head around the fact that they got rid of, what, eight magnets because it cost them too much money. I don't know. I mean, I guess that's the only option left. I mean, Apple PR will tell you that they didn't remove MagSafe because of the C1, but they won't tell you why they removed MagSafe, right? Right. I guess it's...
Testing does confirm that they're not lying about the C1 thing. There is testing where they put a MagSafe case on the iPhone 16e, test the download speeds of the C1 modem, and they're unchanged. They are being truthful in that. But yeah, they won't go as far as to tell you exactly. why they were moved out. I guess they just have data that a lot of people still charge by a wire so they can save a couple of dollars here and move on. Most people might charge by wires or...
Normal Qi charging, but from a utility perspective, how many people are using a magnetic wallet attached to the back of their iPhone? They may not charge with MagSafe, but they take advantage of MagSafe for a car mount or a wallet or something like that.
And that's, for me, that's where it's a real bummer. Yeah. It is a stupid thing, which we can't really justify. But at least it's not related to the C1. And in general... yeah the c1 review the c1 was a core center a lot of these reviews and you know that's the main new thing with this cheaper model right everything else is what we've seen before uh the c1 is their new initiative it's their new modem that will eventually go into the flagship phones as well
And so far, there's no drama. Like, no news is good news. Seems to be performing about as well as the modem in the iPhone 16. Even better in some tests that I saw? Better in some tests, slightly worse in others, but overall seems to be about the same. And for that basically equivalent performance, also more power efficient. Apple says it's up 25% power efficient. Geeker One did some measurements today and they measured the relative power draw about 17 to 23% better.
It's about in line with Apple promised on that, which is good because you could very easily have a modem crisis and have a lot of issues. Obviously, that's why the C1 debuted in this lower stakes iPhone 16e first rather than being in the flagship of phones out of the gate. um but later this year it will arrive in the iphone 17 air slim whatever you want to call it yep and then next year 2026 they'll have the c2 generation which is brought like millimeter wave and be a bit faster
And that would be in all the phones. But yeah, so far so good on the C1. And this has no real relation to it. But if Apple has its own modem now, feels like getting... cellular in like max might be closer than ever before you know like even though they could have done it with a quaker modem for the last 10 years if you've got your own one now kind of feels more inevitable right
If you've got your own one that you can put in a Mac and charge people $200 extra to get that modem, which definitely doesn't cost you $200 to make, Apple loves the profit margin, and there's never been a better time to do it than now with the C1. Because hotspotting works fine, but there's nothing more frustrating to me than when I'm trying to connect to my iPhone hotspot. And you know how the little personal hotspot icon in your Mac mini bar just pulses as it tries to connect to your iPhone?
Nothing drives me more insane than that animation on a Mac just because it's so frustrating waiting for that hotspot to connect and seeing if it's actually going to connect or if you're going to have to go into settings on your iPhone, turn off personal hotspot and turn it back on. reboot your iPhone, or just get like a USB-C cable out and try to fix it that way. So I'm all for a C1 and a Mac. I think it's coming. I think it has to. Not this year, but soon.
Soon but not yet. Happy Hour This Week is sponsored by Incogni. Get an exclusive 60% discount at incogni.com slash mac happy hour. You might not know that there are hundreds of commercial databases and people search sites that hold your personal information. They agree with stuff like your name, your social security number, your home address, online activity and more.
And all of this is then made available for purchase by businesses and it could fall into the hands of criminals. In a nutshell, your personal information has been sold or published online without you even knowing about it.
Now, you have technically the legal right to protect your privacy and request that data brokers delete the information they held about you. But the bad news is that it would take... ages to actually do that manually and that's only once you have to keep repeating the process every few months as new data brokers continue collecting data and creating new records about you
incogni is the solution they do all the work on your behalf you sign up you tell them what your personal data you want removing and you let them handle it they contact data brokers on your behalf to request your data is removed they deal with any objections and they keep protecting your data privacy
for as long as you use the service i did it i have a bajillion email addresses that i use for various things incognito lets you add all of them as part of your profile and then i just sit back as they go and contact all the data brokers and get them to take down information about me
And they have a really user-friendly dashboard that keeps me updated on their progress. So check them out right now. And as well as 60% off, you can also have a 30-day money-back guarantee when you use our special URL. go to incogni.com slash mac happy hour. Take back your personal data with Incogni. Use promo code mac happy hour at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan. incogni.com slash mac happy hour.
Thanks to Incogni for sponsoring the show. Happy Hour This Week is also sponsored by Shopify. Check them out at shopify.com slash happy hour. Nobody does selling better than Shopify. It's the home of the number one checkout system in the world. Now Chance, let's talk about the time when you used Shopify. We sold wallpapers through 9to5Mac, right?
Indeed, we use Shopify at 9.5 Mac to sell custom wallpapers to readers. And it really did make it incredibly easy to set things up and get going because we wanted to focus on the content and what we're offering to our readers.
And using Shopify allowed us to put that first. When we were ready to launch, we were able to do so with Shopify very easily from our end. And for our readers, Shopify made that checkout process incredibly seamless. So in just a few clicks, people could complete the checkout. and have immediate access to that content, providing the best experience possible to us as the creators and to our readers. And that's always our goal. And I've sold stuff as an indie dev before online.
Done it all by hand. And even though I had the know-how, it was so much work and hassle that... on reflection really wasn't worthwhile. Whereas what I love about Shopify is that it's so simple and it's everything you need in one place. So if you hit the jackpot and get big, you aren't stranded waiting for a dev team to better all the functionality. Shopify just has it there, ready for you.
So upgrade your business and get the same checkout we used with Shopify. Sign up for your $1 per month trial period at shopify.com slash happy hour or lowercase. Go to shopify.com slash happy hour now to upgrade your selling today. That's shopify.com slash happy hour. Thanks to Shopify for sponsoring the show.
And it doesn't include any of the new flagship Apple intelligence features that we're expecting. So there's no upgraded Siri with personal context or in-app actions. But surprisingly, there is. A pretty big collection of other changes and features, I think bigger than we expected based on some of the rumors. So one of those changes is something called Apple News Plus Food.
On the surface, that sounds really weird and really random. I had a briefing with Apple about this, and at first I was like, what is this? Why of all things are they adding this to Apple News Plus?
But once I went through the demo and saw all of the different aspects of Apple News Plus Food, it's actually really clever and really well done. So what they've done is they've taken thousands of – online recipes from various different sources, all the big names that you'd recognize like Bon Appetit and allrecipes.com, those types of services, imported them into Apple News, then...
stripped out a lot of this stuff that a lot of the clutter that kind of ruins the experience of finding recipes online all of the ads all of the personal stories about how this person's grandma made this food for them 30 years ago, and it's a family staple, all that type of stuff, and just gives you the raw information about what you need to follow that recipe. So you see ingredients, cook time, category.
You can filter all the recipes by things like what dish you're making, whether you're making breakfast, lunch, or dinner, whether you're making something quick or a more time-intensive recipe. And then when you're actually ready to... start cooking, you can launch this interface. That reminds me a lot of the Lierks interface in Apple Music or the Transcripts interface in Apple Podcasts, where you can just scroll through the entire recipe step by step.
clear instructions on how much of an ingredient you need to use at each step. There's a couple of cool integrations with the rest of the iPhone experience. So if you see a time in the recipe instructions, you just tap on that time and it'll automatically start a timer. That's a really clever integration. And I think the writing on the wall here is that this is clearly made for the future, quote unquote, HomePad, the smart home command center thing that's supposed to be.
the seven inch square touchscreen that you can place in your kitchen or on the wall because if you're in your kitchen having this really clean interface to follow a recipe is going to be it's going to be great right you see the big text you can scroll through the recipe
All of that integration right there just screams a beautiful design for that HomePad. Yeah, because they have the kind of more standard article view, but then they also have this kind of cooking view, which puts the ingredients and the directions in this. full screen experience similar to like apple music lyrics so you know big text big font and you can just see how that's something that you could like page through on a seven inch screen in your kitchen uh kind of design so the the home
HomePod with a screen device is definitely a key area for this edition. It also has more general use. You don't have to have a screen in your kitchen to do it. You can just have your iPhone and your iPad. on a stand and do it too. So it's a pretty cool expansion of their kind of content services. I don't know if I think the news app is necessarily the best place for it. It always makes me laugh when...
They have existing apps that they add features for, or then they make the choice to do a completely brand new app that's wholly new. You know, like Invites was a wholly new app when a fair amount of functionality could maybe cross over into the calendar, right? They could just make it a...
part of calendar but no they're going to make a completely separate app or you have apple music classical which is a lot of overlap with the normal music app it just focuses on one particular genre and there's you know some different layouts and some different you know bits of content you can get there but
A lot of it's a clone of the music app, but that gets a completely separate app. But then you have food, which is like recipes and ingredients and new stuff and like... articles and blog posts and that that just gets a tab in the news app it doesn't get a standalone application no no no it doesn't get a tab even it's on the it's on the main page in the news app or you have to go to the following page and scroll down and tap food there
Yeah. Because as we've talked about before, you can't customize the tab bar in the news app. So right now, by default, the only tab bar you can have is today, news plus, sports, audio, and following. And I don't get audio. Then you go to following and that's where you have food. That's where you have puzzles. And you still have the sports tab, even though there's a dedicated sports app too. So you have sports in the news app and sports is a separate app.
And you can't rearrange those tabs at all. The more stuff they add to the news app, the more it really needs that ability to customize the tab bar. Yeah, so you fit five tabs down there with audio by default, right? I only have four tabs.
So it's even more egregious that food can't slot in there. I mean, I'd like audio and puzzles to be available in my country, but that's a separate conversation. Yeah. In the original days of the iPhone, a lot of Apple apps had a customizable tab bar on the iPhone.
You could go into the more menu, you click edit and you could like drag stuff in there. The music app definitely used to do it and a few other apps did too. And then that stuff slowly got stripped away and taken out. And with iPadOS 18, they added a customizable.
tab bar to the iPad right with that new design tab bar and you can rearrange the items and it can go to a sidebar it can be the floating tab bar at the top um so they've added some customization on the iPad but none of that arrived on the iPhone
So I'm kind of hoping that's maybe something where they did it for the iPad last year and then they'll bring it to the iPhone this year so you can move your tabs around. Because especially with some of these apps like News, there's so many different facets to it that...
If you just want one particular element, you don't have to keep going to the following tab and then scrolling down every single time. You just want a quick button right on the bottom. Or if you can't put it in the tab bar, they need like pinned favorites at the top of the home tab or something, you know? Just some kind of...
pin section or bookmarks or something where these kind of core areas can be accessed um even so even if you could put food in the tab bar already kind of feels like something that might be a standalone app like yeah So much of the UI just feels different enough that...
I guess it's shoehorned into the news app because it comes under the News Plus subscription, but if they'd have introduced this as a completely standalone app and it just required a News Plus subscription, I don't think people would have blinked their eyelids and gone, oh, that's quite natural. Like they do with Apple Music Classical, you know?
And they do say that the vast majority of content is exclusive to Apple News Plus subscribers, but select stories and recipes will be available to anyone. So you can play with it if you are undecided about subscribing to News Plus. The two things that I would like to see come to Apple News Plus Food, Siri integration, so you can ask Siri for recipe advice or recipes you can make based on your needs and time when you're cooking.
And integration with Reminders. So you can imagine you're looking at a recipe in Apple News Plus and you say, okay, I'm going to make this tonight. Import all the ingredients that this recipe requires into my shopping list in the Reminders app. Those two things feel like they should be next on the list for upgrading Apple News Plus or Apple News Plus food, especially, again, if this food feature is going to play a big role in the HomePad whenever it launches.
Yeah, the ingredients list does let you check things off in the News Plus Food page, but obviously it makes sense to be able to exploit it to a reminders list too. because I just don't you can check like four or five things off and then completely leave the recipe and go like all the way home and then you come back to it later and it remembers which items were checked off so you do get a little kind of shopping list like in the app but
People want it in their main shopping list, which they're doing reminders or whatever else. But for a first go, there's quite a lot of functionality to this food interface. There's a lot of screens. They've got that completely separate cooking mode. If they'd only done a category...
And it was just like the articles, you know, the same UI they have in the rest of the news app. There will be less evidence that this is part of a bigger plan. But especially with that recipe screen where you can go along in the direction step by step, that just feels primed for, you know. a six foot away interface in a kitchen. Other things, iOS 18.4 enables priority notifications, a new Apple intelligence feature. This is the one you've been, I think, excited for a lot, Mayo, because it's...
I don't know if I'm excited for it, but you've been questioning why it hasn't come out for a while. Yeah, because it's basically the reduce interruptions algorithm just applied to the lock screen with pretty animations. Because what it's meant to do is... triage your incoming notifications and show you the important ones so you don't have to see all of them at any given time you see the important ones and then you swipe up and go to notification center to see all of them
Yeah, so they have the priority section in the mail app, right? This is that, but applied to the lock screen notification instead. And the priority grouping in the mail app is not bad, although it kind of quite often, it doesn't understand like... spam and phishing attempts so it'll put like phishing attempts in the priority section yep notifications don't really have that problem because there isn't really you don't really get like phishing notifications from any app you know it doesn't
people can anyone can send you an email but only apps can send out notifications you don't really get like phishing attacks through notifications so that problem is kind of sidestepped and it just puts a nice little section so if you send an urgent message that especially if you put like a
a thing that says i need an answer today it will like see that as a priority and put it in the priority section and that's what it shows at a glance and if you want to swipe up you can see the rest of notifications and it has some really pretty rainbow animations so
the animations are really cool on it and it has like these separate sections and there's little like globules is the banner split like some really good work on the on the design side for that whether the feature is more annoying than useful i don't know but it's kind of kind of cool
The only other Apple intelligence change is the sketch style and image playgrounds. So this was missing when image playground launched with iOS 18.2 at launch. You had illustration and animation, but the sketch style. Wasn't there until now. It's fine, I think. You generated one based on your Twitter profile picture, and...
I don't think it did a great job turning you into a sketch. I don't think it was terrible, but it's about the same quality as the other styles, right? Just with the different flair. I guess it should be expected if it's a sketch, but it kind of removes a lot of the finer details. It just makes you kind of look like a... normal, normal guy. None of your distinguishing charm. Oh, just a normal guy.
Yeah, but I mean, that's what a sketch is, right? Yeah, right. It's not picture perfect. It's fine. It was just weird that they promised it and then it didn't ship and then it was only available in the Notes app with... image wand right yeah you could do it through there but not through image playgrounds now it's there in image playgrounds too do people use image playgrounds probably not will this change the usage patterns probably not but it rounds out the suite and
There's maybe a rare case where you're just having a fun lazy chat with someone and you want to make a stupid little image and you can do it through that instead. Oh, that does remind me of another change in 18.4 where they've made the... Genmoji button a lot bigger in the keyboard. And that makes me think that Apple is disappointed by the adoption of Genmoji so far because it is a really good feature and probably the best example of Apple intelligence so far, or at least the most.
widely applicable, like everybody sends emoji. Everybody likes emoji. Letting people generate their own custom emoji should be a super popular feature. By making that button significantly bigger, it signals to me that Apple. wants more people to check that out yeah there's some growth hacking going on there yeah make the button bigger because like you say it really is an obvious thing where
Everyone's been in that situation where they want to send an emoji, but they just can't find one in the library that matches what they want to represent. And so here's a feature where you can make your own. And to pretty good results, you can type in something and it can...
Generate something that still looks like the style emoji, but follows along with the... prompt that you gave it so i think it's a pretty good feature and you share it with your friends and add some sort of like social element too right where they can be like oh i want to get that emoji too how do i get it well you need to upgrade your phone you know the cycle continues so i think it's a pretty good feature um
Adoption-wise, it's hard to tell how well it's done so far just because it's only on the 15 Pro and the 16s. You've got to give it a bit more time, I think, for... to be able to make a judgment whether normal people are using it or not because most of my friends you know don't have the brand new phones at the moment so they couldn't do it if they wanted to um
And they have made the button bigger in 19.4, but it's not like egregiously large. I feel like it's decently proportioned. So I was fine with that. I think you are still the only person to have ever sent me a Genmoji. Other thing, this one's weird. Ambient music toggles in Control Center. So by default, there are four different toggles for what Apple calls ambient music that can be added to Control Center.
and to your action button and to the lock screen where the flashlight and the camera buttons are. Those are chill, productivity, sleep, and well-being. By default, these are assigned to four different... Apple Music playlist based on the vibe of each of them. So like a chill playlist, a sleep playlist. But you can also go into the settings app and customize to which playlist those are linked. So you can set it to your own. Like if you have a sleep playlist that you've made.
you can set it to your own custom sleep playlist. And when you access like the now playing interface for this ambient music feature, it's a very stripped back version of the music app, right? It shows you the cover art. Big play pause button, volume controls, nothing else. You can't like tap on the title of a song, go to the album, tap on the artist to see more from that artist. You're seeing what's now playing and nothing more.
A really weird feature, a really random thing to add. I kind of like it, though. It's different. It's fun. It's kind of like the background sounds thing that Apple has gradually implemented in iOS over the years. I don't know if I'll use this, but...
interesting that it's something they felt the need to add maybe it's home pad related too like that is also possible yeah some ambient music on while you're getting you know work done or you're cooking or something but i feel like if i'm cooking i want like proper playlists on i don't want yeah yeah
chill stuff but i guess if you have the home pad by your bedside you could run like the sleep thing on it maybe like ambient sleep noises which is kind of like background sounds like you say but it's just a slightly more productized version of that because background sounds is still
buried in accessibility whereas if they want to make it like a global feature they generally migrate stuff out of accessibility into its standalone thing. CarPlay has gotten an update. It's one that I've seen a lot of people being very happy about. And I think the happiness stems from people just having a very low bar about what they expect from new CarPlay features. So now on Certain Cars, you'll see a third row of app icons on the homepage.
So previously, regardless of how big your CarPlay screen was, you'd only see two rows, including like in my Mustang Mach-E has a big, tall implementation of CarPlay. I'd only see two rows of app icons with a bunch of wasted space in between them. Now I see three. Cool enough, I guess. I still want Apple to do more with CarPlay, like we talked about in Happy Hour Plus a few weeks ago. Some new apps, the home app, some more customization options to the dashboard.
I suppose at this point in the current CarPlay life cycle, I'll settle for an extra row of apps. This is like a sign of life. Look, we're still here, guys. We gave you an extra line of icons. I'll take it. I'll take what I can get. Some new dynamic island behavior for the privacy dots. So now, for example, the microphone, the orange icon, when the microphone is active, when an app is using the microphone, now appears next to the dynamic island with like a black background.
Makes it more visible and it's also brighter than the display surrounding it. Makes it more visible visually. Looks more appealing. Looks like it fits in better. Another small change. Yeah, because the privacy indicator would be...
In the middle of the island, if there was no other content running in the island, so if you didn't have a live activity going, it would be in that kind of spot, emulating the... led for the mac right next to the next to the webcam but if if the dynamic island was in use so you had music playing you had some of the light activity running uh the dot would be like way off on the right hand side like almost
It looked cut off, basically. Yeah, it looked wrong, right? It was like the far extreme of the display on the right-hand side, like almost in the cutout section where it starts to curve the bezel into a rounded corner. And it always looked like an afterthought or just under... underdone right oh we've we've used the diamond car and where can this other indicator go i guess it could just go over here whereas now
in 18.4 it actually has a quality of life improvement where it fits in better it has a nice animation where it moves from the center of the dynamic island to the right hand side of it with the outline and it like bubbles out of it you know the nice little effect around it um
So they've just tidied it up, which is nice to see. Because that has always bugged me before. I'm like, I knew why it was over on the right side. It's like, it goes on the right side when there's something in the island. But it just never looked visually very appealing. And now it looks better. Robot vacuum support in the home app is finally here.
There's, I think, Mayo, in your story, you said there's one compatible robot vacuum on the market with proper matter integration, and that's from SwitchBot. Yeah, the SwitchBot S10. Do you have one of those? I don't have one. I'm trying to get one to try it out, but I don't have one right now. Other brands like Roborock, previously sponsored this show and stuff, have all promised software updates with Matter in it, but they just haven't shipped them yet.
But right now, Switchbot is the only one actually shipping a Matter-compatible vacuum. And in our story, we have some screenshots from... a smart home website who did some testing and you can basically toggle it on or off in the home app you can change modes you can turn on the vacuum or the mop
and you can send it back to its home base or whatever. It doesn't have the more advanced features that people use with robot vacuums where you can choose which room to go in or whatever. You still have to use your dedicated app for that. But for the bare basics...
it can get pretty decent integration in the home app, which also gives you voice controls, right? Because then it means you can just natively ask Siri on your HomePod or your phone to go off and start a cleaning session or come back home. and people kind of hacked it before using Siri shortcuts right and little phrases but it's always better when it's built in because you get you know a wider vocabulary of things you can say to make it actually understand what you mean
And this is obviously promised for iOS 18.0, and then it got delayed and delayed again, but it's finally coming out in 18.4. Proximity-based setup with the Mac OS 15.4 beta too, so... If you're setting up a new Mac and you have your iPhone nearby, you can now do the thing where you can start and kind of complete the setup process of that new Mac from your iPhone. It's similar to if you're setting up an iPad or a new iPhone where you can scan the little.
bubbly animation thing and automatically sign into your Apple ID and move some basic information over. Kind of surprised this one took so long to make its way to the Mac, but a really clever way to do it. Then... The new Mail app is now on Mac and iPad. That's the thing we talked about at the beginning of the show with the categorizations. Again, should have been there from the start.
of whatever 15.2 and ipad os 18.2 but now that bifurcation of the mail app across platforms has been fixed at least the reconciliation didn't take until like iPadOS 19, you know. Which I fully expected. They did it in the same year. Some other small things in 18.4, but those are the big ones. Beta 1 is available right now for developers and public beta testers.
Could get beta too as soon as today or tomorrow, but probably next week. Then I'll release to everybody in, what, April probably? I mean, unusually, Apple even promises April. That's right, yeah. In the News Plus Food press release, it says, coming in April. That's part of 18.4. So they've pinned it down in April and that's when you're getting it. Finally this week, Happy Hour is brought to you by Charge ASAP.
ChargeASAP is where innovation meets convenience for all your charging needs. ChargeASAP invites you to experience the world's first 275-watt power bank with an OLED screen integrated. It's called the Flash Pro Ultra. This can charge up to six devices simultaneously, including your MacBook, your phone, your AirPods, your watch, and more. With its massive 25,000 mAh capacity, it can recharge your MacBook Air.
one and a half times or your iPhone 16 Pro Max four times over on a single charge. It also has three USB-C power delivery ports, a MagSafe compatible magnetic charger and a dedicated Apple Watch charging pad. On the OLED display, you can watch the current volts, amps, battery percentage and time remaining. And the charger is TSA approved for hassle-free air travel.
Right now, ChargeASAP is offering the Flash Pro Ultra starting at $169. So if you're ready to level up your charging game, pre-order the Flash Pro Ultra today. The campaign runs until April 12th, so don't miss your chance to get in early and take advantage of the limited... pre-order prices shipping begins in august thanks again to charge asap for sponsoring the show so we also have vision os 2.4 and some of these features are in the beta but apple says most of them
aren't in the beta but will be available by the time vision os 2.4 comes out in april the first and foremost one is apple intelligence support so apple intelligence coming to apple vision pro You get things like image playground, Genmoji, priority notifications, writing tools, chat GPT integration with writing tools for like the describe your change and generate text features.
There's Smart Reply, Memory Movies in the Photos app, Natural Search in the Photos app. All of the basics, but some things are still missing. The Siri experience on Apple Vision Pro is completely unchanged with VisionOS 2.4. There's no integration with ChatGPT. There's no new fancy animation. It's just the standard Siri globe, which does look quite...
cool on Apple Vision Pro. It's like 3D floats in front of you. It's weird though that they're not changing the animation. They learned from changing the animation too early on the iPhone without any new feature. That's the charitable take.
Because obviously that Siri orb is going out of fashion, right? Because if you have an Apple intelligence phone, you literally never see the orb anymore. Maybe they just couldn't figure out a better animation to do yet for the Vision Pro and they'll get to it eventually. The Serial Orb on the Vision Pro does look cool as hell, but it's just not... It looks old, right, compared to the rainbow animations they're now adopting for the rest of the devices.
This is where I need to admit that I was fully wrong in my... Oh, yeah. You told me. You told the podcast. The M2 chip in the Vision Pro is just overstrained. It can't possibly bear to handle any additional functionality. And here we are. To be fair, it's not doing – the question is going to be when the super –
LLM-intensive-based features like the personal contact series where it's learning everything about you on your device, whether those things come to Apple Vision Pro. But I was wrong that Apple Intelligence, in at least some form, is coming to Apple Vision Pro.
The subset of the subset of the people will love doing some writing tools in pages in an immersive environment on their headset. There are... instances with things like writing tools and smart reply that make more sense or make a lot of sense on Apple Vision Pro just because entering text without a keyboard attached with Apple Vision Pro is such a pain.
So you can see where things like writing tools will be really useful. A new spatial gallery app. So this app aggregates spatial photos, spatial videos, and panoramas into a central app on Vision Pro. All the content is curated by Apple and is free, and the company says it'll be updated regularly with new content. There'll be different categories like sports, travel, and entertainment. This feature is not in the Vision OS 2.4 beta.
I have a lot of questions about how much content will be in this app, what kind of content. We'll see. Apple does have like a teaser video showing off what the app looks like in some of the content. So you can see a bunch of spatial.
What look like just spatial photos from the set of Shrinking, the Apple TV Plus show. There's some dinosaur pictures because Apple loves dinosaurs on Apple Vision Pro. The devil's in the details on this one. It depends on how much content is there and where the content is sourced from.
Because if it's just a bunch of spatial photos from Apple TV Plus shows, that's cool, but it's not super, like, there's only so many pictures you can look at, right? Yeah, there's no longevity to it, right? Yeah. You want content from. Anywhere and everywhere, all kinds of spatial photos and videos and panoramas, whether they're from Apple, from third-party photographers and videographers. You just want as much content as possible.
in that app and we'll see and the press release even for the tv plus stuff the press release mentions like behind the scenes of shrinking and severance and others and i was like oh they're going to do like you know a video from the director's chair and you can like see all the set making you know go backstage
And then in the preview video, it's just like one photo that's, you know, got some depth to it. So I hope it's more than just individual pictures, you know, and like panoramas. And does this, is this intended to like... replace the immersive video category in the tv app or that kind of no to run alongside each other they'll coexist because the tv app is just supposed to be immersive video which is different than spatial photos and videos and
panoramas so i think they'll coexist all the immersive video itself will still be in the tv app right but they should probably find a way to like link out to it from the spatial app surely you know like i mean previously there was like no way i don't know how you would view
any of the spatial gallery content without the spatial gallery app. Like where would Apple post a spatial photo or video from shrinking, for example? Like there was nowhere to showcase this stuff. So it makes sense that this exists, but yeah.
There is some. There's a lack of uniformity for sure. Yeah, a bit of bifurcation in terms of where you have to go and find the stuff. But more is always better than less. Yeah, indeed. Everyone always says, you know, the best feature of Vision Pro is like...
Watching spatial content and watching movies and stuff. And here's now a new outlet where they can shove some stuff in there. And hopefully they just keep that pipeline going. A new Apple Vision Pro app for iPhone. So this is basically the Apple Watch app for iPhone, but... For Apple Vision Pro, you can see content and tips and tricks and new apps and app updates. And you can view things like your Vision Pro serial number, details on your Zeiss optical inserts.
Not much else there. It'll be pre-installed on your iPhone once you update to iOS 18.4 and if you have a Vision Pro on 2.4. Or you can go to the App Store and manually download it if you just want to check it out and see some of those. tips and tricks and content previews and stuff. Maybe you're considering buying a Vision Pro. You can get a preview of everything in this new app. If they've got an Apple Watch app and they've got a Vision Pro app.
Surely they've got to do an AirPods app, right? You would think so. The AirPods app has so many settings already that are just buried in the Bluetooth menu, you know? They could have that. They could have a proper tab for the hearing aid stuff, as well as it being in the health app. They could have it in the AirPods app. They could have demos of the different spatial experiences you can do. Yeah.
I feel like it's like, I'm kind of amazed they did the Vision Pro one first, but there's less stuff they can put in the Vision Pro app because you almost need a Vision Pro to be able to see all that stuff, you know? So yeah, I feel like an AirPods app is just kind of inevitable.
You can see in the screenshot of the Apple Vision Pro app where it's kind of just looks like there's no tabs or anything. There's a single pane where you can scroll through and view some stuff or tap My Vision Pro. It's very barefoot. It's like an RSS feed almost. Yeah, basically. Not much to put in there at the moment. Then some updates to guest user. So when Vision Pro launched with Vision OS 1.0,
Guest mode required the Vision Pro owner to put on the headset and select which apps they wanted to share with the guest user. Then the guest user would put on Vision Pro themselves and go through the hand and eye tracking calibration process. With Vision OS 2 last fall, Apple updated that to let the guest user save their hand and eye data for 30 days so they wouldn't have to go through that calibration process each time.
With Vision OS 2.4, the Vision Pro owner doesn't have to put on the Vision Pro headset at all before sharing it with a guest. So now the guest can put the headset on, then request access from the owner. And the owner of the Vision Pro will see a pop-up on their iPhone where they can see that request and approve it and select which apps to share with the guest. And right in that flow, even enable AirPlay.
So you can watch what that guest is doing and give them tips and tricks and tutorials as they navigate around Vision OS. This is a nice update. It seems just about as far as Apple can go, short of adding proper...
multi-user support on Apple Vision Pro, but at least they seem committed to the guest user system. Yeah, this is like the best version of guest mode that they could do. People obviously want to be able to make the product... more value for money as in being able to use my more than one person at a time with like a proper multi-user setup but they're not going to do that in a point release you know that's the kind of change that requires a full os jump and
Vision OS is kind of like derived from iPadOS and iPadOS doesn't have proper multi-user support still. So it doesn't feel like it's coming to Vision OS anytime soon as much as people want it. So at least they've given people the best kind of guest user experience they can imagine. I'm glad to see all of these updates. I think we've crossed the point of where there's very little Apple can do to spur new people to buy Apple Vision Pro. Without new hardware. Yeah, sort of new hardware.
Their commitment to continually rolling out pretty good software updates at a pretty good pace is admirable. I mean, what, we've gotten the significantly improved spatial personas. We've gotten... The big upgrades to Mac virtual display. Now we're getting Apple intelligence. Spatial gallery app. A whole bunch of stuff that's coming in software updates to existing Apple Vision Pro users. Even if nobody's going to say.
I was waiting on Apple Intelligence before I bought my Apple Vision Pro. Now it's time. Yeah, like you just have to keep making it better. Assuming it's a platform you're going to commit to and you're not going to stop selling and give up on.
You have to just keep the software rolling, right? Like, you know, the same thing with the Apple TV box. What of the features they've added to the Apple TV and software have really changed the calculus on whether a new person would buy an Apple TV box or not?
Nothing really, right? Yeah, no. But that doesn't mean you just leave it there abandoned and just floating in the air. You give it new screensavers. You give it, you know, the smart subtitle thing when you go back 10 seconds. You just make the experience better on an ongoing basis. And then eventually people come.
And then part of the contract of buying an Apple device is you get free software updates with new features every now and again. And that's how the product stays lively and stays connected. And it's not all about like...
you know we're sitting here waiting for them to add just this one thing that then suddenly makes the vision pro a compelling product it's just not how it works right it's just a casual build-up of feature after feature after feature eventually there'll be second-gen hardware and then all of those software features that they've added in the intervening time start paying dividends. And before that happens, they make all their people that spent three and a half grand on them happier. Yep.
Also one piece of immersive video content news this week. Apple TV has announced a Bono documentary. Bono Stories of Surrender. I think it's based on his recent. book or something, his memoir or something. But it's the first feature-length Apple immersive film for Apple Vision Pro. Of course, it's U2 related. But I mean, I like U2. I like Bono. I think they...
have made some good albums. I think they've done a lot of good charitable work over the years. I'll watch this. I just think of all of the people they could have done, the first feature-length Apple immersive film for, they picked Bono and U2, they could have done...
anyone else they could have done taylor swift or anyone else but we get bono i mean at least his feature length that's what we've been asking for right yep all the vision all the what is the longest piece of immersive content i've done it's like 12 minutes yeah
this is feature length which they don't say exact duration but you've got to assume it's at least over an hour right so that's like a proper session of content and they say it's the first which implies they've got more in the pipeline which is reassuring And I had heard that the Apple started filming this Bono documentary in spring of 2023, and they were filming it in immersive video at the time. There's obviously a lot of variables and a lot of production things.
But that does give at least some insight into the turnaround time of something like this, which we've always talked about as being a problem with some of the immersive video content where you get the four minutes inside the Super Bowl. eight months after the Super Bowl or the MLS season recap thing six months after that I mean to be fair a lot of feature length documentaries do take a couple of years to finish that's true yeah
The Super Bowl stuff is more egregious because it's literally like, you blink and it's over. So it's like, did that really take eight months to edit together? That's a problem. If you're doing proper feature-length films...
They do take a year, two years, three years to get together. And this has a non-immersive video version that's coming out at the exact same time. So like... you know general documentaries i'm sure you know tv plus has like the billy ice documentary they were working on that for several years before it came out you know so like i don't i think a two year you know two to three year turnaround time for like a proper documentary is
okay like that's acceptable it's when they're just doing the short vignette stuff that that can't take that long to to produce um so in this case i was it's good it's feature length as long as it's like 90 minutes ish then great you can actually give somebody content they can actually sit down and enjoy for a whole session on one one full charge of their vision pro battery i guess part of my point my thinking too is that it's taken a full by the time this comes out it'll have been
15 months since apple vision pro was released and the fact that it took 15 months to get the first feature length immersive video is a bit disappointing but at least it's coming it's coming on may 30th and like you said there'll be a 2D version of the music for Apple TV Plus subscribers than an immersive video version for Apple Vision Pro. And if you do an imaginary plot of the amount of immersive content available...
The gradient of the line is definitely going upwards. They're getting better at it. It's becoming more frequent. All right. I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple Podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review. Find an ad-free version of the show with bonus content each and every week at 9to5mac.com slash join for $5 a month or $50 a year. Send us feedback happyhour at 9to5mac.com.
I am on threads, Twitter and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? At Be The De Mayo. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.