So, Mayo, I have some baseball follow-up for this week, and I'll keep it brief and tie it directly to Apple the best that I can. So first, Friday Night Baseball was back last week, and I watched the game. It was the Orioles. And I posted about this on threads, but there's a new design for the score bug, which is like the box on the screen that shows you the score.
And the Apple TV plus baseball interface has always been really good. I think just because it's very simple. It has like Apple style font. Very just Apple on brand for. what you'd expect from apple it was almost too neutral right it was like it was very very uh straight back to have it was actually like a rounded rectangle with a slight white border and that was it that was the kind of like visual design
And what they've done this year is kind of fixes that problem. So now you have some gradients. So like you have the score bug and then the Orioles logo in the upper left corner of it has like an orange background to it. It's basically, best I can tell, the same sort of style design that they use in the sports app.
where you have the gradients for each team color as you look at a score in the sports app or as you scroll through the upcoming games. And it kind of blends them together. Yeah. When you post that screenshot on threads, it almost looks like a direct... copy of the live activity, you know, on the log screen. Yeah. Because that has that same... And the old...
Live activities before Apple Sports were much closer to the old Friday Night Baseball thing where they were all black. They were like, it was completely black background with the logos and just white text. And then when they did Apple Sports, they put the gradient effects on and the kind of transition from the vibrancy. And now they've brought that to Friday Night Baseball on screen graphics. The one change in the score bug that has been kind of controversial.
is now there's only two dots for outs. So this is kind of something... This I don't understand. This is kind of something that's kind of controversial in baseball. I know it used to have three and now it has two, but I literally have no... understanding of how that relates to the game. Do you know that there's three outs in an inning? I do now. In baseball? Okay, well. Is that like three strikes and you're out? Or is that different? Oh boy. No, it's different.
Three strikes, then you're out. Then you need three outs per half inning. Right, okay. The old Apple TV score bug had three dots, so they'd fill up as you got each out. The third dot is kind of redundant because as soon as the third out happens, like the inning changes. Like there's commercial break, you come back. So you don't really need the third dot. So on the new score bug design, they just have two dots.
So if both dots are full, you know that they're getting their, they just need the third out and then the inning. If both dots are full, the next one is then donezo, right? Yes. Yeah. It's the ultimate. Kind of bizarre that Apple was one of the few score bugs that had three dots to begin with, because you wouldn't expect... Apple's simplistic design to go over top in that regard, but they changed it. Can you remember, does the sports live activity have that indicator on it as well?
That's a good question. I don't know. I feel like it does, and I can't remember whether it has two dots or three dots. It has three dots. They haven't caught up. Not consistent there. I bet that changes then if they don't have two dots on baseball. Other baseball things were quick. The MLB app on Apple Vision Pro doesn't appear to have gotten any better or doesn't have any new feature.
But I was at least pleased to see that they have rolled out bug fix updates to it. So it's not totally abandoned. They are still fixing it. They rolled out a bug this week to address some interface quirks in the video player. And it is just still such a good example of what Apple Vision Pro can be used for, where you have the immersive stadium view. And something they did mid-season last year was they actually added immersive views for all 30.
So at the beginning of last season, you just had one like generic immersive ballpark that you would go into to watch a game. Now you have the exact design of all 30 of them. So if you're watching a home game between the San Francisco Giants and the Cincinnati Reds, you're in the Reds stadium while you watch the game. That's cool. Really cool. Really cool. Again, a great example of...
what you can do on Vision Pro. And it's weird because two of the best examples of that right now are the MLB app and the NBA app. You have two of the biggest sports leagues taking full advantage of it, which is cool. you just kind of wish like the nfl would get in on it and you see some more sports immersive stuff from apple but yeah those two apps the apple contribution is they only just added multi-view right with the yep vision s2
So you can run five streams at the same time in a decent layout. Like the UI is quite good. But otherwise, if you're just watching like one game, the Vision Pro has no... Like there's no MLS, you know, immersive stage you can go to. There's no like additional things that you kind of want is like even just if you've got the video playing to then bring up another window that kind of floats alongside with like the current score and the stats and stuff.
which obviously some of those third-party apps do do, but the Apple TV app does none of that. So they're kind of slacking. Apple TV Plus Friday Night Baseball in the TV app on Apple's Vision Pro. You're getting a worse experience than if you watch a game in the MLB app on Apple Vision Pro. Very bizarre. And obviously Friday Night Baseball cannot be watching anything but the Apple app. Indeed, yeah. That's the thing with all these exclusives to different streamers.
As soon as they don't have a feature that the other one does, it feels 10 times worse. It's like... Because this is my nice watching experience and now I have to go to this other app that doesn't have all these things. It's like when you have it on the streaming TV boxes and people complain about the different ways to fast forward and rewind and autoplay. It's the same thing just on every single device.
Last baseball thing, jumping back to Apple TV+, because I forgot about this one. The quality for Apple TV+, for Friday Night Baseball last week seemed materially worse than it did last season. Because the thing about Friday Night Baseball... The redeeming quality has always been the bitrate is really good. Like it looks really good in comparison to what you'll see on other.
other streamers, other channels where you watch baseball. This time around, it didn't look that good. It looked worse than what I see when I watch the Reds on MLB TV. And I thought it might just be something with like my setup or wherever I was streaming from. But no, there are a lot of complaints I saw on social media about it too. So I'm hoping it was just first week quirks and they're going to fix it. And hopefully not some sort of.
I don't, surely it's not like budget cuts or something. I mean, it is cheaper to stream in lower bit rates, but. I doubt that is the case. I think the MLS stuff is 1080p. It's the same kind of bit race as what the front end baseball normally has. Sounds like maybe a one-off quote. If you want me to go conspiratorial, when I was watching the last season of Severance across the season, I did in the back of my mind a little...
I feel like the quality's not, like the visual qualities, like the B-Ray was slightly worse. I remember them watching other Apple TV Plus stuff. I don't know if that's just because the show's so popular they had to like... limit it yeah like launch or whatever and then maybe if you go back and watch it now it's like full quality but the thing you notice i noticed in severance was some of the darker scenes or like
They have a lot of contrast of light and dark and they use the shadows a lot. If someone was standing in the shadow, there'd be a lot of grain around the blacks, you know, like in the shadows. And that's generally a sign that the bit rate's not as high because compression ag rooms prioritize all the bright stuff and they sap the detail out of the dark areas because you notice it less.
But if you look in those dark areas, especially on like a 65-inch over there, like I do, you see a bit more of like grain and banding. And I felt, and I haven't done a scientific comparison, but I felt like it looked slightly worse than other stuff. Like, not even the first season 7, it's just other TV Plus stuff, because generally the general TV Plus streaming is high bitrate too.
Not just the sports stuff. But in this case, I was like, this looks slightly lower tier. There is a... I can't remember exactly how to do it, but if you connect your Apple TV to Xcode on a Mac, you can enable a... A debug view that puts a text label of bit rates over the screen for any app that uses the native video player stuff.
So I might actually, if I ever remember again, I might try and just like connect that up and see what the bit rates are. Because at least at launch TV Plus bit rates were like 25, 30, 40 megabits a second. But to me, it didn't look like a 40 megabit stream. Maybe it's just because Severance is now so popular they had to cap it a little bit to let everybody be able to watch it on time.
I was watching the studio on My Vision Pro the other day, and it looked just as good as ever. Yeah, I've watched both two episodes of the studio. I really liked them. Really good. And yeah, I'd say the quality was about normal on that. The one thing about the studio is it's so good and it's so funny. but it requires you know so much about like hollywood and kind of the business behind it there's a lot of in jokes yeah a lot like
If I watched it with Emily, that scene in the first episode where the Seth Rogen character is driving to work and listening to the town with Matt Bellamy, she would know it's like a podcast and he's listening to it and the podcast is talking about him. But it's an added layer of...
humor when it's when it's you know it's the town with matt belany like it's just those types of things are so good in that show yeah but you have to be in on it i think you'd still like it even if you don't get the appreciate all the in jokes and references um But it definitely elevates it when you're kind of following the Hollywood stuff. Yeah, good show, good show.
The actual news this week, and there's not much of it, but we have some for this week. iOS 18.4 is out. We talked about this a lot throughout the beta testing process. In terms of Apple Intelligence, the biggest new feature is priority notifications. So this is the thing where Apple Intelligence will attempt to detect the most important notifications and show them to you on the lock screen in like this dedicated card interface.
A very good design. Like all Apple intelligence features, the design is really good. I've spent a little bit of time. testing priority notifications and haven't been super impressed with whatever algorithm it's using to determine what it thinks is important.
But I've seen some people say it works really well, so I'm curious if you've tried it. I have tried it. Obviously, my main... carry phone is the iphone 14 probably doesn't do it right yeah but obviously i test it on i have an ipad pro to test it on and i have the iphone 16 plus to test it on And I think the algorithm is, it depends what you're considering is priority, right? Because I think it means priority as in...
something that is time sensitive as in you get a text from your spouse saying turn the oven on, right? It will count that as a priority notification.
But maybe if your spouse texts you something about some meaningful message about a family member that they didn't have like a... a time attached to it or an instant response required then it doesn't count it as priority so i think some people's expectations about what they think a priority notification is is different to what the apple feature thinks the priority is But I was relatively impressed with it in my testing and yeah, the animation is incredible.
I believe it's off by default. Like I had to turn it on explicitly on both my devices. So I'm not sure if people actually find it by themselves, but. Does it prompt? I wonder if it prompts you in the update flow. Yeah, I mean, when you upgrade through the beta cycle, right, you don't always get those same onboarding screens that you get when you update. Probably. I haven't seen any onboarding screens for it. so if someone has seen one please let me know but i haven't actually seen it anywhere
I'd actively go into settings both times on both devices and go and flick it on. And when you do that, then you also have the secondary filter of choosing which apps can be prioritized and which apps don't. So if it does constantly prioritize stuff you don't want like maybe your you know ads from the ebay app or something you can always go in and turn off all prioritization for the ebay app um
it's a good enough feature that i wish it's another it's another um pull on they need to get apple intelligence on the watch right so oh yeah because i would love a filter which is like an apple watch mode which is basically like the uh reduce interruptions focus mode right which is basically what priority notifications is just in a slightly different format um
where you don't have to manually go and toggle off notifications or different things or you just let your ai tell you what's important and important enough to make your wrist buzz and other stuff could just go to the notification center If you have an iPhone attached, it can kind of do some of that, but obviously it's better if it can actually run on the device that you're using.
There's promise in it. I don't think it's a... complete failure i'm just not sure how many people actually want to use it you know because yeah generally a lot of people have already sorted out their notifications to which that which notifications come at all which ones go to notifications center which ones come silently so
Because this feature's not there since the beginning of the iPhone, everyone's already kind of already done their filtering of notifications, you know? So you almost look like a brand new user to really get value out of the prioritization stuff. So basically, you need to be a user who gets a...
a cavalcade notifications every single day just flooded and overwhelmed and you need this kind of thing to kind of cut through it um if you've already manually curated your notifications you probably won't get much value out of the feature um
But it kind of happens, triggers infrequently enough that even if you are in that case, it's kind of fun just to leave it on so that when you do get a, you know, turn the oven on, please, it comes through with a nice rainbow effect because that rainbow effect is awesome.
It is one of those things, like a lot of these features where the first time it gets something wrong for most people, they're going to get frustrated and probably turn it off. Like if it shows them too much stuff that they don't think. Warrant priority or it misses something that definitely did warrant a priority notification, then they're just going to get frustrated.
I actually spoke to my brother the weekend, and he has an iPhone 15 Pro, right? And he's on 18.3 or 18.4. He's not on 18.4, but 18.3. And I was asking him, just off the cuff, oh, do you use any of the Apple Intelligent stuff? Because he'd seen the headline about the Siri features being delayed. And he mentioned it to me. And I was like, oh, so do you use any Apple Intelligent stuff? He's like...
Well, none of it's out yet. I was like, what? I was like, have you got it turned on? Because I wondered if he just accidentally switched it off in the settings or whatever. But no, he had it turned on. He just hadn't really clocked it as... Notification summaries, I think, were off. So I think you must have skipped past those. So I was like, oh, you see the notifications get summarized on your lock screen and stuff? And with the italics, he's like, no, I don't get that.
here in a couple of weeks whether he's mad about it or turn it back off again but i described the feature to him and he basically like why would i want that like he didn't really get it um the email is the reaction yeah the email summaries uh which i think are like some of the best parts of apple intelligence right where you get the the better summarization rather than just a truncated version of the email in your mail app were on for him but he just hadn't like
Oh, that's interesting. He just had noticed. I was like, you see that little icon with the arrow and the three lines? That means it summarized it. He was like, well, wouldn't it do that anyway? I was like, no, it's different because it's not just the first three lines verbatim with a truncated off. It's cut off and it's rewritten for you. So I think he kind of, like, got what I was saying, but it wasn't enough for him to, like, realise it, you know, consciously at least.
But when I did explain to him, he was like, oh, that's kind of cool. But he wasn't, you know, it was like take it or leave it kind of thing. The thing that really impressed him the most was the cleanup in photos.
which he didn't know existed and clearly had never used before because when I was like, oh, you know, you can do the cleanup info. He's like, what's that? So I went in photos, I got a random picture and I went edit and I clicked on cleanup and it comes up with downloading cleanup model, you know, because it hasn't done it before.
So we had to wait a minute or whatever for the model to download. And then it actually did a pretty really good... I was impressed by it on this particular example of it took out some people in the background. And you just tap or rub your finger over it and it made him disappear. So that was what left him with a lasting impression of positive Apple intelligence experience out of everything. But he just didn't even know it was there, which I thought was somewhat insightful.
And that's one of the things where our constant commentary that features like cleanup have existed for years and some of those alternatives are better than what Apple offers. That commentary doesn't really matter for most people.
They aren't using dedicated apps to remove people from the background of pictures. Like now that it's integrated in their iPhone, once they know it's there, it's like a whole new world for them. Yeah. And cleanup is pretty good, I think, for an on-device model. For on-device, yeah. I told you about this too privately, but Emily discovered...
Well, so Emily was running, because I asked her a pretty similar question. I was like, have you tried Apple Intelligence? And she was like, no. So I took her phone and I looked at it. She was running iOS 18.0 on her iPhone 16 Pro. So she had not updated at all since she got the phone. So I updated her to 18.3, I think was the public release at the time.
showed her some of the things and the thing that stood out to her most gin moji and she is now obsessed like it's like created a monster she's obsessed with gin moji i showed you some of the things she she's created and it's all just the most weird stuff like she she was obsessed with creating emoji of people giving the middle finger just for whatever reason and she made a dog give a black lab giving the middle finger
Somebody eating bread and crying because one of her hobbies is she makes sourdough bread. So she made a emoji of herself crying while eating bread. Just the most random stuff. Stuff that Apple would obviously never add as default emoji, but she can make them now with Genmoji, so that's pretty cool. Yeah, Genmoji's fun throwaway distraction in a way. Other things in 18.4, the sketch style for image playground is there now. This was what was missing in the first.
Release of Image Playground. So it's sketch, illustration, and animation. Three styles to choose from. You have Apple Intelligence in the European Union. So that... What, that's all of the features, I think? The one thing that's still missing in the European Union is...
iPhone mirroring, but they now have the full set of Apple intelligence features. And the SharePlay thing. Oh, yeah. With the screen sharing, SharePlay screen sharing, which is actually a very useful feature where you can remote control someone, you know, your friends or your family's member's phone over FaceTime. For some reason, that falls under the purview of the DMA as well.
Apple News plus food, which is something we talked about a couple weeks ago. This is the thing where Apple News has now. aggregated thousands of recipes from some of the biggest online recipe websites, distills it all into a really Apple-y interface, removes a lot of the cruft, has this really cool... step-by-step interface that's reminiscent of the lyrics interface in Apple Music where you just walk through.
Each step of the recipe, integration with the clock app for creating timers and managing timers, a really well done feature. that I fear a lot of people won't know exists because it's hidden in the news app under the following tab. You've really got to know that it exists in advance. but there's some good ui layout in there and it's very clear and you don't all the recipes that are like extracted you don't have any of the
SEO intro stuff where they talk about their kids and their dog for five paragraphs. You go to the recipe catalogue, which is a submit because you go following food.
Then it has like featured recipes and then you scroll down and it just has like random news stories from across Apple News. But the valuable feature is the recipe catalog, basically, which is another sub-menu in the News Plus Food group. Then you just get... all of the random recipes and you can search and there's categories and filters and then it has like a nice big header photo as description and then it just has ingredients directions
and a bit more information if you want to find out about it and for all the steps if there's a time one so if it says this takes two minutes there's a little hyperlink and you click that and it immediately starts a timer using the system clock app um so really good integration if you know it exists and obviously this is partly destined to be a probably a flagship feature of the home smart home display thing if apple ever gets around to actually releasing it
Some Apple Vision Pro stuff. So on the iPhone side of things, you have the Vision Pro app, which is... As we said a couple weeks ago, not particularly useful. It's a one-page app that is meant to show you experiences and content and tips and tricks for your Vision Pro. Inspired by the Apple Watch app. but a lot less capable than the Apple Watch app, but it's there and presumably it'll get better over time. And it is useful that you can download apps to your Vision Pro from the Vision Pro app.
It's like I've said before, where the time gap between how often you're putting on a Vision Pro, you might see an app recommendation while you're on your iPhone or on your Mac. And you say, oh, I want to check that out next time I put on my Vision Pro. Then you put on your Vision Pro two days later and you've forgotten that app. Now you can just go to the Vision Pro app on your iPhone and download it from there. So that's a nice feature, but otherwise not particularly useful.
Vision OS 2.4 adds the better guest mode. So now if somebody else puts on your Vision Pro... You'll get a pop-up on your iPhone where you can approve their access to Vision Pro, select which apps you want them to be able to use, and then even enable the AirPlay view so you can see what they're doing while they're doing it. The continued march of guest user on Vision Pro getting better and stopping. just ever so short of doing proper multi-user support.
Oh, and it has the Spatial Gallery app now on Vision Pro 2. Oh, Spatial Gallery. Yep. Which is cool. It has gotten updates multiple times throughout the beta process, which is a good sign. And it sends you a push notification when they add new content to Spatial Gallery. That's panoramas, spatial photos, and spatial videos. Some cool stuff in there.
I think a new emoji in iOS 18.4. The face with the bags under the eyes, fingerprint, leafless tree, root vegetable, a harp, a shovel, and a splatter. No dogs giving you the middle finger in the official emoji set. That is called censorship right there. Otherwise, 18.4, not a super exciting update, but some decent stuff. Yeah, I mean, it was meant to have the personal context Siri stuff until I got stripped out and delayed. Small improvement.
Then we're already on to the beta testing process of iOS 18.5, which also doesn't have much in it, at least in beta one, which came out Tuesday or yesterday. I don't know, someday this week. The changes that they do have are in the mail app. So now if you tap the three dot icon in the mail app, the one in the upper right corner, there are new options to disable the contact photos and the digest group by sender feature.
You could disable both of these before, but you had to go all the way into the settings app and do so. But now you can do it right in the mail app. alongside what you've always been able to do, which is switch between the categories and list view. The fact that they've made these toggles easier to access right in the mail app probably says that they know. A lot of people don't like the group by sender and contact photos interface.
I don't know if it's an admission that they don't think the mail app is very good or what, but... You have to think that if every single thing they changed now has a toggle to... Like a toggle in the app to turn it back off again. Something's not right. You know, like enough people don't like it that they've got to have a toggle in the actual app UI. to revert it to how it used to work.
obviously before now all those toggles do exist so they were just in the setting you know buried in settings app and I wrote a how-to in when iOS 18.2 came out about how to revert the mail app because I figured it might be popular and that article has been popular enough that I've even had to recommend it to
people i know because they've been like oh i don't like the con these photos taking up a third of my screen or whatever so i've had to send them that link too if it had shipped as it does in 80.5 originally you wouldn't need a how-to article because you could just say just press the dot dot dot button you know uh whereas before it was like a multi-step process and the thing was i still this really gets on my nerves the settings app where they have the apps sub menu you know all right
Every time, it just annoys me if you go save and then click apps before you click on mail. It's like, just let me put, if not every... app back on the main you know the top of the top level or at least having let me some pin some favorites or put recents there you know like so if you've just been in the mail app and you go in settings it could just have mail settings as a shortcut instead of you to click on the apps list and scroll it every single time
That really gets on my nerves. That's something I hope they really do change for iOS 19 because it's so annoying. um but yeah so now you don't have to dig into all those five five menus deep to change group by sender and show contact photos you can just do it by pressing the dot dot button in the mail app itself It just shows, though, there's a lot of risk in doing any design changes because whatever people are used to...
As soon as they change something now, there's a load of pushback and blowback. Because the show contact photos thing is the most innocuous change in the world. It seems so harmless. Yeah, it's so harmless. It just adds a little icon.
uh next to every email and if you if they're in your contacts it shows their picture and if they're not it just has the little category for the kind of email that it represents so if it's a payment one it has a little dollar sign you know if it's shopping it has a little shop and etc etc it's so harmless but People are used to what they're used to. You know, users have had the iPhone mail app for 10 years unchanged.
And it's never had the little inset logo and so they've always been to see you know another line of text or their recipient's name will never get truncated and now it does just because it's been you know pushed in the screen a little bit and maybe they're on a smaller screened iphone then on the iphone 16 pro mac you know they're on an older one that's got a smaller width
And it just upsets them enough they want to immediately turn it off. Some... I don't know, harbingers or cause concern whenever, when there's now a rumor of iOS 19, you know, redesigning everything. There's always a lot of risk when you change anything. Even something as undramatic as just putting an icon on each cell in the mail app.
And that's kind of the thing is I'm all for Apple adding these options to let people customize the interface to their heart's content. But things like the contact photos. I feel like you have to make some changes that people just have to get used to. Otherwise you're going to end up with so many toggles and so many settings that people get overwhelmed.
I don't know if that makes any sense, but... Oh, it's totally true. Design is about making choices, right? It's not really about making options. You don't want to have... settings for every single setting or for every single possible change that an app can do, it becomes...
You know, the combinatorial explosion of different combinations is insane. And at some point, you need the confidence in yourself, the Apple design team, to be like, no, this is how it's going to look. This is how it's going to work. have it and be done with it and if it's really so bad that there's enough pushback you just got to get rid of the thing for everyone you can't just have a little toggle for every single minor UI change that they roll out like I understood why they had a
toggle for categories and list view because it's such a fundamental difference in how people use email and you can very easily argue that some people will benefit from having automatic categorization and other people benefit from just having the old list default mode you can see how there's almost like segments of the user base that would prefer one or the other. Hence, you have a setting.
I don't think you can really make that argument for show contact photos. That's just a visual thing with an icon. If it's really that bad, they shouldn't have done it at all. It doesn't feel like the thing to me that should be a preference. This week's episode is sponsored by Dream Technology.
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And this is apparently currently set to debut next spring in iOS 19.4. He describes this as a health coach or an AI agent that will, the word he uses is a bit bold or suspicious, I think, which is replicate your real doctor. He says that the AI agent will be trained on data from the health app and then be able to give you insight and more information about what all of the data means.
So if you have your heart data, your weight, your exercise information, your sleep, the AI agent will be able to take all of that and give you like a breakdown of. what those numbers mean and how they impact your life. Because one of the things we've talked about a lot with the health app is it gives you all this information, but then stops short of telling you what any of that information means. It's so hesitant.
to give you advice or tips. It makes sense that it stops short of diagnosing you with something, but there's a better balance to be struck there. It doesn't even really do a good job of... summarising relevant information or changing trends, right? Like, let alone diagnosis, it's still much closer to just a big... uncurated repository of all different statistics about you versus having any sort of recommendations or suggestions or featured like the home app the health app has trends
in a big but it's not like here's the trends that are most important it's just here's everything that's changed in in your health app database by a significant amount we'll make a little graph for it and include it in there so there's just loads of trends like overwhelming amounts of trends and then you can pin specific health stats to the top of your summary screen but it won't like suggest things to pin or do it for you so you've got to manually sort out so
I don't know how many people I've like walked through pinning their step count, you know, to the first screen of the health app to actually, because that's what people want to see. They want to see the health app. They want to see maybe their sleep stats and maybe their heart rate.
And right now it's such a big manual process to get that how you want. I think there's a lot of potential for... an ai something an ai agent to like collate and present that information in a better more useful way i also kind of balked at mark's phrasing that is going to like replace your doctor kind of kind of framing yeah because They just released that new app in WatchOS 11 with the Vitals app on the watch, right? Yeah.
That does exactly the same thing where it curates some few specific things about your health, but it doesn't give you recommendations or suggestions or tell you what to go and do based on it. It just presents them to you and shows you abnormal fluctuations.
I don't really think Apple's like Apple's obsession with AI does not override their conservatism when it comes to health matters of health because also there's a big potential of you know recommending things that are ultimately damaging to an individual and getting sued over it so as well as like the personal morals there's also the you know financial penalties and stuff associated with it too and legal frameworks where you have to get approval to be able to suggest this kind of stuff
So there's a lot of barriers to having an AI agent give you a diagnosis or giving you recommendations to go and buy a drug or take antibiotics or anything. But I think take a few steps back from that. put some ai in the health app to actually make it easier to understand the information that's in and maybe give you some better insight about trends i think is probably a good thing
I think I'm skeptical somewhat of any time you pair AI with health data, just because the ability for AI to hallucinate and go off the rails, it's always a risk. I saw Elon Musk at one point. Quote tweeted somebody who said Grok on X, like X's. chatbot or LLM thing, whatever you want to call it. diagnose them with something before their actual doctor did.
And Elon Musk was like, yeah, don't hesitate to ask Grok about your health problems. It's like, I don't know if I'd go that far, especially with an AI platform that has no knowledge of any of your health data. At least Apple will have some data.
on you or a decent amount of data honestly on you and the health app that it can that it can build from but again is it going to be a wholly on-device model because yeah yeah what we've seen is that for as good as Apple's on-device models are, they pale in comparison to
chat gpt and the like that have a massive server cloud to fall back on it's the thing with image playgrounds like image playgrounds run on device for an on device model it's not bad image generation but it's just strictly far worse than anything you can do you know, using Lama or Dali or even the latest ChatGPT with Image stuff that runs on the web.
But does a customer, if you're making an image, if you want to do an AI image generation, do you really care that it's on device or not? No, you just go to the thing which gives you the best quality output. with health maybe you can make an argument that on device has the privacy implications and so you can make the argument about this is why it needs to be on device like i think image generation is a bit more of a stretch on that like do people really care that
ChatGPT know what you've asked to generate in terms of what photo you want to make or funny picture you want to produce. For health... there's maybe more of a debate where it's like okay we don't want to suck up all your health information into an unencrypted form on some back end because of x y and z it's going to be on device only but if you make it on device only then you fall into the traps of
maybe it can't give you the most relevant or you know it can't have a very deep llm model to run locally it just can't give you relevant enough suggestions for you to care about it so maybe they're going to try and do a middle ground thing where they use private cloud compute and maybe it can like upload
selective amounts of information to service your requests and stuff so there are like possibility and pathways um some of which apple is like apple made a big talk about private cloud compute when they announced apple intelligence but As far as I can tell, they don't really use it for almost anything at the moment. Yeah, it's not. If you have a really, really long pages document and you ask it to summarize it, sometimes then it will take it off to the cloud instead.
But otherwise, you can generate your private cloud compute report and it's almost always empty. And image generation doesn't use it ever or at all. It's kind of a weird thing. I kind of get this sense that the private cloud compute infrastructure just isn't fully running yet. And so they're being very restrained in what they actually use it for because they just don't have the capacity.
And it's, you know, running out over time and they're upgrading the servers from the M2 ones to the M5 ones or whatever else. And so maybe by the time the health service comes out next year, that stuff's in a better place to actually be able to be more useful. Mark says that Apple is training the AI agent with data from physicians that it has on staff, and it's looking to bring in outside doctors to create videos.
So these videos would serve as explainers to users about certain conditions and how to make lifestyle improvements. When you put it like that, it sounds a lot less ambitious. Like if it sees...
Your sleep is trending down. Is the quote unquote AI agent just going to show you a. a canned video from a doctor saying why you need sleep that sounds less ambitious than quote-unquote replicate your doctor yeah then it making paragraphs of text to yeah like just finding a relevant video on the subject is a lot safer He says Apple is opening up a facility near Oakland in California that will let physicians shoot their video content for the app.
And Apple is looking to find a major doctor personality to serve as a host for the new service. So I guess like a famous TV doctor or something, somebody with some name recognition, like Oprah was temporarily the face of Apple TV+. I guess they did it more concretely with Fitness+, right? Where... Most of the hosts of Fitness Plus had followings on Instagram before, you know, tens of thousands of followers. So people kind of came along with them.
And in fact, this government report also says that they're also eyeing integration with Fitness Plus in the future, like, quote, Apple is working on features that would tap into the cameras. The idea is to let the AI agent study users' workouts and give them pointers for improving their technique. That's cool. That's cool if they can do it, you know.
So far, Apple hasn't shown a proficiency enough, I think, to have a feature that could do that very well. But they're always working and they're always improving. Like, I hate people who are like, well, because Apple Intelligence 1.0 couldn't do this or that, they're never going to be able to do anything like this.
I think you can see image recognition models and LLMs at the state of the art could definitely do something like that and give you pretty good suggestions. So if Apple keeps building out its actual technology and services, they could probably offer something like that too. Then he also says that food tracking will be a particularly big part of the new health app. Food tracking is an area that Apple has mostly avoided so far.
Instead, in the health app, you can enter data for certain things like carbohydrates and caffeine. And it also integrates with third-party food tracking apps like Food Noms and MyFitnessPal. This would suggest that Apple is bringing some of that or all of that in-house, which seems like an obvious progression of the food app.
even though it's a bigger undertaking than you might think if they're going to integrate a database of nutrition information for every food in the world. They must exist, though, those databases.
It must be possible to partner with someone and get that in there because the Health Act does let you enter carbohydrates, but you don't want to manually enter numbers. You want to enter either this and it's roughly this number of carbohydrates, right? So that is a missing link in the Health Act right now that they could fill. You don't always want to have to go to a third-party app to do food tracking. Just some basic tracking of carbohydrates or whatever based on your meal.
Just use the Apple app. I can see a vision for that and then presenting that quite well and being quite compelling. And if they wanted to get super fancy, they could do the humane thing where use visual intelligence, take a picture of your meal and it could work out how many calories are in it. Food Noms, which is a great indie food tracking app, does have an AI take a picture and estimates the nutrition feature. I haven't tried it, but it seems to work well for a lot of people.
What was it? The humane pin, the demo where they like.
use the ai pen to take a picture of like a handful of peanuts or something and ask how many calories were in the in that amount of peanuts in that was not accurate in the slightest so but the problem is when you have a handful of peanuts you have no clue how many peanuts are covered up right because yeah you could see six but then there's 20 more underneath your hat under you know covered under the second the first layer like if you have a plate of food all laid out
you can get, I think, a better estimate using AI recognition. And it doesn't need to be scientifically down to the carbohydrate and calorie, right? If you've got bands, you know, I kind of think it's similar to the... The thing they added to the watch, the fitness app, the training load thing where it's like mild, easy, extreme. Like you can kind of see where like you put a plate of food, it takes a picture and it can...
rank it into you know zero calorie or lots of calories you know like there's a there's a big bucket so it could probably clock them into and then you could like look back on your month and see how well you've eaten over the course of the month and stuff like there's ways to do it where you don't need to get the exact number of calories exactly right Because the fact is most people aren't tracking that data to begin with. Most people don't use a calorie tracking app.
So just giving people to track broad trends is better than nothing. Yeah, because it's so annoying. Like food tracking apps are a real pain because it takes a long time. Like if you can make something super convenient where you just take a snap of a picture of your phone every meal or...
Yes, you won't get exactly as precise results out of it, but you can maybe extrapolate a broad trend. So with all the caveats of AI and question marks around that... I think the center of this article is pretty compelling and I'm kind of looking forward to it because the health app could always be better in many different ways.
And Mark's report seems to suggest that this will be a service of some sort with Apple Health Plus or something that you'll have to pay for and or will be integrated into Apple One. Makes sense. It strikes me as another service that most people will use if they get it through Apple One, and then otherwise adoption will be kind of low. But it depends on what you get for free versus what you get if you pay. Because if you get a lot of just the...
improved tracking stuff, the additional metrics and some of the suggestions and what you have to pay for is like the videos and maybe a little bit more personalization stuff. I don't know if that's a super compelling package. But if they can strike that right balance of making the health app as a standalone app better, then pairing it with some...
enticing services stuff, then yeah, I would probably pay for it. Yeah, they should never be afraid to throw some more little add-ons into Apple One just because it doesn't make for a standalone service on its own. Put them in the bundle stuff and let people who have the bundle enjoy them. Finally this week, a topic that we haven't touched on recently, the future of Apple Card. So as we've talked about before.
The future of Apple Card is quite unclear because Goldman Sachs, who has been Apple's partner since Apple Card launched in 2019, they are looking for a way out of the deal because they have lost. I think the last number was $6 billion on the Apple Card partnership. And Goldman is looking to exit the consumer banking. segment entirely. They want out of Apple Card. They want out of everything.
So while Apple is looking for a new partner bank for Apple Card, they're also looking for a new payment network. So that's either Visa, MasterCard, Discover, or American Express. Apple's expected, according to a new report this week from the Wall Street Journal, they're expected to pick the network, then pick a bank. The report says that both Visa and American Express are trying to unseat MasterCard as the payment network that powers the Apple Card. MasterCard is Apple's current partner.
Visa has apparently made an aggressive pitch with a $100 million upfront payment to Apple that's normally reserved for the biggest credit card programs. American Express wants to become both the issuer and the network of Apple Card and would replace both Goldman Sachs and MasterCard. Discover is not rumored to be in the mix at all. So you have Apple searching for this new payment network between either Visa, MasterCard, or American Express, and then also needing a bank.
This just shows to me how many moving parts there are to this process because you need a network, you need a bank, and you need a bank that can do. everything that the Apple Card can do, which is the credit card, the integration with the wallet app, the Apple Card savings account. You need a bank that's willing to accept at least most of the terms of the current Apple Card, which is going to be tricky considering as Apple Card is. A very user-friendly credit card. No fees.
No foreign transaction fees, no late fees. It shows you right up front how much interest you're going to pay if you don't pay your balance off entirely. All things that most credit card companies actively avoid doing.
apple card does yeah because those things help me reduce the credit card's profitability because yep if you're more aware of what your costs are going to be you're more likely to pay it off early whereas if you kind of hide it then people forget and then obviously the interest payments come in And I posted on threads that I was pulling for American Express to win this deal. So that'd be the payment network and the issuer of Apple Card.
I got a lot of responses from people who are arguing that it should be Visa instead of American Express or MasterCard. Visa's more universal, isn't it, than American Express? In the United States, Visa and MasterCard, I think, are about the same. And American Express is the third place. I think it's like 99% for Visa and MasterCard and 95% for American Express in terms of acceptance rates.
And the thing a lot of people said how they use the Apple Card today is that they use it as a complement to an Amex card. So in places where they can't use Amex, they use Apple Card. So if Apple Card was to switch to American Express, they would need another card in their setup. And I think most of those people arguing on threads actually ended up winning me over. The question is, if you choose Visa as a network,
You have to find a bank, again, that's willing to do everything. One of the reported banks that operates on the Visa network and has been rumored to be in talks with Apple is Chase. Chase doesn't offer a high-yield savings account, and I don't think they're going to change that. None of the big, the quote-unquote big banks in the United States offer a high-yield savings account because it's not. They would rather you keep your money in your checking account and not get paid any interest.
So I don't know what Apple's going to do here. I think... Goldman Sachs wanted out of the partnership by Q1 of 2025. which has now come and gone. But aren't they under contract to like 2029? Yes. As much as Goldman Sachs wants out, they're kind of forced, hoisted by their own batard of agreeing a five-year extension like the year prior.
Apple's not in a rush. It's not like the service is going to shut down overnight because they've got the guarantee through the contract. Apple has no reason to be in a rush and they have no reason to... rush and make a bad deal or make compromises just because, like you said, they have Goldman Sachs locked in till 2029.
I will say about the viability of different options, and some of them don't already offer high-yield savings accounts, A, I think there's going to be some compromise. The Apple Card deal, as is, is so good and so customer-favorable.
I'm not saying the core tenets of the thing will go away, but there might be some... shifts and the apple will agree to get a different provider on board i think a good example of that is the thing about that right now apple card um invoices all come out on the first day of the month right yeah yeah you get statements dead on the first day of the month whereas most
credit card providers will spread out when they give statements to customers over the course of the month because that reduces the load on support because you don't have everybody needing
with their statements at the exact same time. Apple said, let's make it really easy, that they're always going to come out on the first of the month. Goldman Sachs really struggled with that because they had to hire loads of extra support to handle the... peak in demand on the first month and then they had to pay people that
you know they're all on salaries but for the rest of the month the demand was a lot lower because they all came out at the same time so something like that is something i could see apple relenting and being like okay we'll let you take over we won't have that requirement even though it was great we we do understand some of these things like They're not in, although they're in a great position.
They're going to have to make some sort of compromises somewhere. So on the high yield savings account side, I would be shocked if they just dumped it on the floor and got rid of it. But maybe it's a case of like... all of the credit card stuff goes through. But we have this partnership with smaller bank Y for the savings account. So it doesn't all come from the same provider. Maybe that's a route forward for that.
Because I know in Britain, for instance, you have the big banks which don't offer high yield accounts, and then you have these smaller upstart companies which do. And so maybe it's just like, it's always great into the UI, but you have to agree a terms and service with two different companies, right? Which is similar to how Apple Cash works because Apple Cash is backed by Green Dot, right? Green Dot, yeah.
So I could see that kind of thing happen with the high-yield savings account, where it's not quite as beautifully integrated because it requires you to agree to the terms of service of another third-party company or whatever if you sign up for it. But otherwise, it would be mostly transparent.
My biggest reasons for wanting American Express to get the deal was primarily American Express customer service is so good. They've been in this game for so long and they are known for their customer service. They're known for being a... on the more premium side of credit cards and they offer an experience to match that brand recognition. And Goldman Sachs customer service, like you said, has been routinely terrible. We've seen people
like file disputes on a charge and literally not hear anything for over a year on the status of that dispute. So going with American Express would be great in that regard. I was also thinking that if they went with American Express, one compromise they could make would be you could choose between either getting the daily cash rewards or getting American Express points.
I'm guessing from American Express's perspective, getting points would work out better on their side financially. So that would be a way for Apple to maybe win. American Express over and say, hey, you can put these people into your membership rewards ecosystem. get them to take options with their points that actually are less valuable than if they just took the cash. Yeah, the daily cash concept does feel a bit too core to the Apple Card proposition.
It was really clever that, like, no points. We just give you dollars in the next day, you know? And anything that happened in that regard would have to be... I would hope, complementary to the daily cash system. You could choose if you wanted to get points, but by default...
you would still just get cash. Yeah, or maybe it's like we don't give you a 3% cash back anymore. You only get 2%, but also you get these other points stuff. So like daily cash still exists, but some of the extra bonuses come through a different means or something. I do think there's going to be some compromise somewhere.
Because the original Goldman Sachs got into a mess with everything that they agreed to Apple to do. So whoever's coming on board, as much as they want Apple's custom, you'd think they're not going to be as... naive or stupid you know yeah there's gonna be some sort of retrenchment on some things i think the
The move in the invoice statements from the first of the month to the spread across the month is like such an obvious one because you can see immediately how it reduces the load on the support teams and the infrastructure. And it's the kind of thing where like...
If they never did that for the first Apple Card, nobody would blink an eye, right? Yeah. It's like a small detail that has actually a big implication on how the operations go and make it really annoying for the people that are actually running the card. So if they just dropped that out, few people would notice and any new customer wouldn't even think twice about it. They'd just be like, oh yeah, we just get our statement on the 17th now instead of the first, right? Or whatever.
And a lot of credit cards, like American Express does this, allows you to go in and pick what day your payment is due. So, for example, if you get paid on the 1st and the 14th of every month, you might want your statement to be due. like on the 17th, after that second paycheck. So there's an argument to be made that if Apple...
just rolled out that feature, people would be willing to change their statement date just to have that added flexibility of timing when their payment's due with their paycheck each month. Yeah, they would voluntarily smooth out the statement production. So I don't know. We'll see. This is just one of the stories that I'm so fascinated with because it. Clearly, Goldman Sachs is suffering. so bad and losing so much money with this. And Apple is just like, yeah, well, you signed a contract.
Well, slowly but surely, you know, we'll help you get out of it. But we have final say and we don't like this company. We don't like that company. We don't want to work with them. We'll get you a deal by 2030, which. Yeah, they know in a rush. That's for sure. 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 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 BZA Mayo. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.