iOS 26 beta 4 changes, AppleCare One, and an M5 iPad Pro surprise

Mayo, at this point, I don't even know how much energy I have left to argue with you about liquid glass. But I will just say iOS 26 beta 4 comes a lot closer to falling on. my side of the argument than your side of the argument. It basically reverts to beta 2 with some minor tweaks, I would say, in terms of how it treats the materials. So if you go around iOS 26 beta 4, which came out on Tuesday, you'll see...

A lot of the transparency is back, specifically in the navigation bars. The go-to example for everybody, including me, is the music app. Yep. Just because there's so much. color behind the navigation bar as you scroll through your library, as you scroll through the browse tab. It's a good example of seeing how the liquid nature of that transparent navigation bar reflects and refracts the content behind it.

Yeah, the music app is a good example because it has a relatively big canvas for the liquor glass elements because you have the tab bar and you have the accessory view of the now playing card above it, right? And you have background content, which is a...

mixture of images as in the album art and titles and text in terms of playlists or you know the category headings so you get a very good summary of like how does this actually fare in just site inside of just one application which is the music app which is also

you know one of apple's most important apps so it seems like a good benchmark to look at because it you can't just excuse it as oh you know they'll get to this calculator app in beta 7 like the music app is clearly at the forefront it's in all the marketing images it's a good benchmark for where it's sitting. And I would completely agree with you. Beta 4 is... Whatever diversion they went with Beta 3, they've just forgotten about it again. I don't want to have a big argument about, you know...

We had that in the last time for the beta 2, beta 3 discussion, right, in terms of where it should land. And because they basically reverted to beta 2, you can basically have that same argument again in terms of what's better or where it should be. What's interesting is that...

Why did they do the Beta 3 thing? Right. I mean, I sent you a picture of Beta 2, Beta 3, and Beta 4 all next to each other. Beta 3 looks like such an outlier. It looks like... It was a mistake or something. It's so different than beta 2 and beta 4. And I think if you put beta 2 and beta 4 next to each other...

I couldn't tell you which is which, right? They're so, so, so similar. Yeah, the only thing you can really pick out is like, not the material treatment, but the background gradient that they put at the bottom is...

a smidge darker on Beta 4 compared to Beta 2. So it's not identical. It's not like they've literally just... click revert on the code and they've gone all the way back to beta 2 it is slightly different but it's very very minor whereas beta 3 was dramatically different and what were you kind of landed on in the chat before was you kind of want like a middle ground between beta 3 between beta 2 and beta 3

And this isn't a middle ground at all. It just pretends like Beta 3 never existed. It's like, who did this? Who pushed publish on this particular branch of code, right? It's like, it's so out there in left field and now they've completely... forgotten about it for this release it's very unclear what the intent of doing that was was it like a signal to the user base that look all the people worried about readability

If we have to, we have this option, right? We can make it all pretty opaque in various places and make sure that you can read it all even if it is at the expense of some of the extreme visual flair. but what we want to ship is what we were shipping beta 1 beta 2 and this is what we're going to ship in beta 4 which is closer to the fully transparent glass materials right

And I guess they're going to try and run with that for a few more weeks and see if people can handle it. And if not, they... bring some of the beta 3 DNA back into it maybe that's the only really like approach I can see is why they even bothered showing off the beta 3 stuff because I mean if they hadn't have done

beta 3 at all and this was the you know what was released as beta 4 was beta 3 there'd be a lot less discussion about like does apple even know what it's doing right like because there's been a lot of like quotes about flip-flopping and just oscillating between various different things and whether liquid glass can even sustain itself at all. If you just went beta 1, beta 2, beta 4, pretty natural progression in terms of how it looks.

The Beta 3 is a weird outlier that I don't know if they're going to come back to it or they just threw it out there for fun and try and just signal a message to the outside world of like, we have other ideas, but we really want to do... the essence of the material as close as possible. Now, that may be well and good and maybe Alan Dye really likes this fully translucent stuff, but the design team at large is not stupid. They...

They understand that legibility is an important factor, right? That's the core tenets of design. And you have to imagine that inside Apple, they're still working on ways to improve it. Because right now, I'd say, and this is just a very quick... Back of the head calculation. About a quarter of the time when you're using the music app, depending on where you stop the scrolling, some text is hard to read, right? 75% of the time, it's fine.

But if you get unlucky and you just stop the scrolling a certain place where the subtitle of the artist's name overlaps with the artwork, the kind of like secondary label grey just kind of muddies into the album art and you just can't read it. surely that can't be intended, right? That's not what they want to do. And what they did in Beta 3 was a different approach where you never had that problem, but equally, a lot of people are upset that it didn't look as cool. So what you really need...

Yeah, what you really need is like have the beta 4 treatment as the default and then have the system recognize in this context that the content that's sitting inside the liquid glass platters needs to be more readable and then you infuse. some more opaqueness like what we saw in beta 3 but the the issue of beta 3 was not that those elements look bad like i think they look fine the thing was they were just applied unilaterally without any sort of like conditional treatment it was

It didn't matter what the screen was. It was pretty opaque. Just do the pretty opaqueness when you have to, not all the time. And obviously, it's easier said than done because you've got to come up with algorithms and, you know... the right equations to figure out the color contrast and do that on real time as you're scrolling and figure it out but i don't think it's beyond the scope of possibility is it something they're going to get they're going to nail in time for september

Based on a beta 4, you've got to say no, right? But that's not the end of the road. They'll keep iterating on it throughout iOS 26 and probably beyond. I mean, say what you want about iOS 7. They were in on that for five years, right? It was dramatically different through the beta season, and then it carried on getting changes all the way through. I mean, they rolled out a new system font in iOS 8, right? iOS 7 system font.

in beta one was the really really thin font they showed in all the marking images in beta two it was you know more reasonable um typeface but it was still heretica or across the whole system The next year, iOS 8, they changed to San Francisco font on the whole OS. And beyond that, they started bringing in more...

platter buttons with actual backgrounds, not just link text everywhere. They then did SF symbols, which made all the icons much more rounded, like the share icons. The iOS 7 share icons was just like... a square box and three lines looking like an arrow. Now it's like an actual shape, right? Because that was the evolution. The same thing is going to happen with Liquid Glass and the new design of iOS 26.

It's not like September is a do-or-die moment where they can't change it again post-September. It will carry on being iterated on. I do think they probably need a bit more subtlety in the deployment compared to what you've seen back at 4. If you're saying that a quarter of the time there's unreadable content in the tab bars, I don't think that's acceptable. The fact that you have translucent elements to this degree means that sometimes...

You are giving up the fact that sometimes, yes, stuff is going to be harder to read than what it was before. But if that's only like 5% of the time or... 3% of the time or even maybe 10% of the time is probably more reasonable because, oh, you know, you can't read the song name right now because you've been unlucky. Well, you just scroll.

the viewport by five pixels of your finger and then you can read it again right so it's not like these things are so dramatic you can't fix them yourself but a quarter of the time it not being readable is probably too high and so they just need to infuse a bit more opacity depending on what color the labels are and what the content is behind it. I don't know if things are unreadable 25% of the time. I think...

You can obviously find screenshots and find moments where, yes, things are unreadable, but 25% of the time, I'm not quite sure that math adds up, at least in all of my testing and all of my experience. And because of that, I don't think... Sorry, I'm not going to disagree with your assessment, but I meant just 25% of the time when scrolling in the homepage of the music app. Yeah. If you're scrolling in other apps, obviously the percentage is wildly different. In a lot of cases...

That percentage is quite low. But music is like a flagship thing. And just depending on where the scroll port ends with the album art, where it sits, sometimes the text starts to become... unreadable enough it's not completely unreadable but it's unreadable enough you kind of i at least have to kind of stray my eyes to like pick it out um in other apps you know like messages i i have very almost no readability problems in messages there's no issue um

and there's loads of translucent elements it's just the way the app's structured it's a different thing but music is a good case of like there's this big section at the bottom which has liquid glass elements and there's all this album art and white space and depending on when you land I would say you know maybe 20%, 25% of the time, you stop scrolling and then it's like, oh, you can't really read it. In other apps, that percentage isn't as dramatic.

And again, the reason we focus on the music app is because I think it is the hardest spot to solve this problem. If in another world, if they had tried a different design in Safari, I think we'd be saying Safari was the hardest spot to solve this problem. But Safari has a different take on the design.

And they clearly took into consideration how to adapt to the constantly changing content behind the navigation bar. Apple Music is just a different beast altogether. And I don't think it's out of the realm of possibility that they're able to find that middle ground. that they need specifically for apps like music before this is released to everybody in September. Like I don't, as much as I like what's in iOS 26 beta four, and I like the level of transparency there is.

I don't think this is what will ultimately ship come September. They have time to hone it in a little bit more and not go all the way back to the nuclear option we saw with Beta 3, but to find that balance between what we all thought. beta 4 was going to be that balance between beta 2 and beta 3 yeah i don't see this as like a nuclear war you know like yeah you ios 26 beta 4 could ship

I don't think it would be ideal, but it could ship in September and be okay. I've seen some comments go around where it's like, they should ship iOS 18 on the iPhone 17 because it's in such a terrible state. I completely disagree with that assumption, even though I don't like how it isn't available.

particularly right it's not perfect um beta 3 i think they could have shipped unequivocally and even though it wasn't quite as flashy it was you know accessible and readable and legible in all cases so it was it was the more conservative take right While also still looking new. Beta 4 obviously goes for a bit more passion in the look. But it's still shippable.

Is it perfect? Is it great? Can you find plenty of cases where it falls down? Yes, but that doesn't make it unshippable. And again, they will start the beta process for...

26.1 in weeks right and then we can you know then the update will be out in october or whatever like this they could ship i was 26 beta 4 and it'd be okay the world wouldn't break people would like the new phones it's not going to be bad right it's perfectly fine and in most cases it's still better than ios 18 right it looks better it looks more modern it looks fresher it looks nice

The buttons have clear backgrounds behind them. There's nice animations. There's nice transitions. So far, touch wood, beta 4, I haven't had the FPS problem where it like running lags out to 5 FPS for no reason. So it seems like they fixed that bug at least. I think it's pretty stable and design-wise, solid. Is it perfect? No. Would I like some more tweaks? Yes, but I understand that there's a timeline for those things to actually happen and it might be longer than...

September, right? But for September, they could ship iOS 26 as it is basically depicted in this current beta and be okay. I think it's interesting too if you zoom out and kind of read the tea leaves on... The public beta situation, because we all expected based on history that public beta, that the first public beta would be based on beta three and based on history come out a week after beta three was released to developers. That would have been last week.

That didn't happen, and now we have beta 4, which is a drastically different design. Still no public beta, but Apple says coming in July, and we're running out of days in July for that to happen. There's an element to that where you can...

argue that Apple just didn't want people's first experience with iOS 26 to be what was in Beta 3, right? They felt that either the design wasn't good enough, the design... didn't strike the right liquid glass balance, or what I think is a real possibility is they knew that they wanted to tweak it more than what was in Beta 3.

But they knew that if they shipped Beta 3, then shipped the next Beta with a whole different level of transparency, that that would be more jarring to people. And that's why they've decided to hold off for the time being. It's interesting when you think about how much Apple values.

The first impression of non-developer beta testers. And that clearly plays a role in their decision-making process around this design. And that's why I think what's in beta 4 won't be what ships. But what ships will be closer to beta 4 than was... then Beta 3. And I don't think even that this is flip-flopping, which is something you referenced a lot of people have been saying. I really think what this is, is...

The beta testing process working as intended. Apple's responding to feedback. They're fixing bugs. They're trying different things. And I think that's all you can ask them to do, right? You don't want them to dig their heels in and not make any changes. You don't want them to fully give in to the complaints, which is kind of what they did with Beta 3.

You want them to listen to feedback, and if beta 3 was listening to feedback of people who really hate liquid glass, beta 4 is listening to people who were disappointed by what was in beta 3. It's the back and forth and the evolution of the beta cycle. It's not flip-flopping.

I don't think it indicates in any way, shape or form that Apple doesn't know how to solve these problems or that Apple isn't confident in its design. I think it's the beta testing process happening exactly as it should. Yeah, I mean, I've seen some people say this is like a... An example of lack of leadership or indecision at the executive ranks. I don't think that's the case at all. Even if I don't like it, you know, wholly, I think this is...

the natural course of the beta period, right? What is the point of doing betas if you're not going to respond to feedback? You might as well stop doing the beta program and just ship what you want and then people can be mad about it in September. The whole point of having beta season... is for people to have their opinions, Apple can consider their opinions, and then they choose which opinions are actually worth responding to and changing and acting on.

I don't understand where this recent narrative of like Apple's rudderless and they don't know what they're doing and they're just, you know, throwing stuff out there and seeing what sticks. Like they have pretty solid design vision with this design. And as I argued... you know, a couple of episodes ago, even if Beta 3 is what was shipped, that's still a pretty opinionated design on the whole. Yes, it's not quite as translucent, but overall, it was still a pretty different and radical design.

Even if they ship Beta 3, which I don't think they're going to do, right? But if I imagine they did that, it would still be the biggest design change to the iPhone since iOS 7. Like, full stop. And what it looks like is they're going to be even more dramatic than that, right? based on where they're headed. So I don't understand this idea that Apple is worried about upsetting people or they're just kowtowing to social media. I don't understand that narrative.

one iota when ios 15 had that radical change to safari which is you know almost a precursor to what they do in ios 26 safari right everyone hated it or a lot of people didn't like it in beta 1 What did they do in beta 2 and beta 3? They changed it. People said what they thought about it. Beta 4, beta 5, they changed it a bit more. Beta 6, they added a setting where you could switch between bottom tab and single tab.

You know, my thoughts about settings are, but putting that aside, the fact that even the basic compact layout, the bottom layout, that changed very dramatically compared to what the first version of that was during the iOS 15 betas.

And was that an example of Apple not having a clue what they're doing or having no design leadership? No, it was just them reacting to what customers said they liked and what they didn't like. I don't understand how it's any more complicated than that. There's a design team who've made a lot of choices.

They've shipped it. They've responded to feedback. They're making adjustments. It's not like they're going to revert and just give up. And I do think they actually have that as a last, last, last, last final resort. Like, there has been some commentary that I've been... 17 series has to ship with ios 26 so they're kind of stuck quote unquote stuck with the liquid glass design right regardless that is true it will ship with ios 26 but 26 has accommodations where you can actually if you know what

secret levers to turn. You can make iOS 26 look like iOS 18. And in fact, that's basically the compatibility mode that happens when you run any non-updated application. All of the UI controls and widgets just look like iOS 18 widgets. The keyboard does.

tab bars do everything goes back to how it was so if there really was this like disaster scenario where they'd unveiled the liquid glass design and literally everybody in her didn't like it and they just felt that feedback so immense that they were going to have to give up they could do that but they're not going to because it's nowhere near that dire or that dramatic but that they have actually engineered it with that accommodation in mind uh but

It's nowhere close to being that bad that that's what they need to ship. The idea they need to ship iOS 18 on iPhone 17 is insane. iOS 26, even in its current form, is more than good enough. And in many ways, great in terms of the design.

So other things in iOS 26 beta 4 beyond the liquid glass stuff. Notification summaries for news and entertainment apps are back. So this is something Apple disabled. I think it was in January after the BBC got mad that Apple intelligence summaries had botched multiple headlines. I think the most prominent, the most prolific of which was Apple intelligence said that Luigi Mangione shot himself.

which was not the case. And the BBC published a story calling on Apple to make changes. So Apple's response at the time was just to turn off notification summaries for that category of apps altogether. In iOS 26 Beta 4, That option is back and you'll see it in a setup flow when you update to iOS 26 beta 4. And you'll see some bright red text that says summarization may change the meaning of the original headlines. Verify information.

It seems to me that Apple has made some improvements to the underlying models that power the Apple intelligence notification summaries to hopefully prevent anything like the Luigi situation from happening again.

And obviously at a surface level, what they've done is just made it clear to users that it might just get things wrong. Yeah, because as well as the change to the setup flow, the notifications themselves have more... warning labels attached so specifically for news entertainment apps it has a second subtitle which very clearly says in capital letters summarized by apple intelligence to try and enforce the idea that this these exact words were not said by

BBC News or the Apple News app. It's a summary. And other categories of application don't have that second subtitle applied to them. They just let them do it. Because I guess there's a slightly different bar for like... publications telling the truth reporting on truth right and if apple intelligence messes it up then those people are more mad than if it messes up your summary of your like games apps or something um

It does kind of annoy me that now we have the italicisk indicator, right? So everything's italicized. And now there's a second subtitle that says summarized by unpleasant intelligence. And you still have the little icon too, right? Maybe they could roll back the...

The italics. I don't love the italics. They did that as part of 18.3. That was like an initial compromise they did. It's been six months. It's okay. But if you're going to put a second subtitle that literally says summarize BAPA intelligence on a whole separate line. Maybe take away the italics again. And I don't know if it's anything Apple has changed or what, but I will say I've noticed fewer awkward notification summaries in recent months than I did when the feature first launched.

The go-to example was multiple people are at your front door or those sort of like making it feel like your house was getting graded or something. Like they've honed that in so it now says something along the lines of. There was a person at your door multiple times. They've solved that. We'll see how the new summaries for the news and entertainment apps, how those shake out over time. But I do think they've made some material improvements for all of the models, all of the...

ways that this feature is powered. Yeah, it's definitely got better, but it's still going to make mistakes. I mean, that's just a fact of life. Even the best models make mistakes. And so I guess we'll see what happens when inevitably it does mess up on another BBC headline.

Is the fact that it's now labeled with a big disclaimer enough? What else in beta 4? There's some changes to the camera app. So now... They changed, this is kind of hard to explain or hard for me to grasp, but they've changed the direction of the swipe, right? When you're selecting your camera, it's now basically inverted to what it was before.

It feels worse. It does. It feels awkward. Yes. So it's kind of like, you know, on the Mac, you have the option for natural scrolling or normal scrolling, depending on your trackpad direction. So with your trackpad with natural scrolling, your fingers are going...

bottom up right on the trackpad but you're scrolling the web page downwards because it's if you're pushing the piece of paper upwards i.e scrolling it down and that's how everything on ios works right it's inverted to the direction of your finger because that's natural scrolling it feels like you're moving the object but for some reason on beta 4 the camera selector does not do that it goes the opposite direction in the previous betas it followed the natural direction which would make sense

But I don't really understand why they've changed it here. It's been days and I still just scroll it in the wrong way when I want to go left or right. Because literally every other application, you scroll in the opposite direction to go left and right. But then for this camera control, which is already quite... uh unique right is a system component it now also then scrolls what i would say is the wrong way when you move your finger around

I think so too. It's weird. I'm playing with it right now and I still just can't get it right the first try. And then they did also add a button to the upper right corner. It's like a... It has like six little dots and you tap on it and it brings up the camera settings, the camera settings that were previously only accessible by swiping up from the bottom. That's a fair compromise, I think, to make those settings more discoverable while also retaining the overall.

simplicity of the new camera app design in 26 it gives a fallback right for people that don't want to learn yeah swipe up on the bottom bit to access those options now there's just always a permanent button for it seems okay

Then a few tweaks to icons for, what, camera, maps, and mail. The camera one is the one I noticed right away. It's different, not hugely different, but the lens flare, I guess, is what they've changed. And I still... I think the camera app icon in iOS 26 is one of the best icons we've seen from Apple in a long time. It's so cool. It's so good. Yeah, the beta 4 change makes it a bit more realistic to how the lens of an iPhone actually looks, I think.

Just the way they've kind of like pancaked it out a little bit. And it's also now slightly less close to the edge. So there's a bit more padding of grey, which I think just makes it look aesthetically... better so i'm a big fan of the camera icon change the maps change is pretty subtle but basically what they've done is the ring so you know it has like the um the direction indicator in the blue and then it's like bordered in white

In previous betas, that white border was solid. In this beta, it's translucent. So a bit of the pink and a bit of the green come in to that edge. Gives it a bit more of a glass layering look. That looks nice. Yeah, it looks nice. The one that I'm most happy about is the Mail app. So on previous betas...

So how would you describe an envelope? It's like four flaps, isn't it, right? You've got a top flap, a left flap, a right flap and a bottom flap. Now, how do envelopes close? The top flap goes over all the rest of them. On previous betas...

the top flap and the bottom flap were like bright white colors as if they were like above the left and right flaps in terms of how the shadows work right if you imagine it like that which doesn't really make any sense and just kind of made it look a bit odd it didn't look bad

But if you thought about it for a minute, it didn't really match the physicality of the object. And you just kind of looked at it and it kind of looks like you're wrong. Well, in beta 4, the bottom flap is now shaded like the left and right flaps. which makes it clearly delineated as being underneath the top flap, which is the nice, brighter white colour. So I think it just looks better. I love the male icon on 26, and now I love it even more.

And this is beta four for developers, as we said earlier, still no public beta. I would think either, maybe by the time you're listening to this, maybe today, maybe tomorrow, or maybe early next week, but definitely I'd say. within the next week because apple has to do it within the next week to meet their timeline of july so at some point soon soon but not yet for the public beta happy hour this week is sponsored by caldera lab

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a new multi-device bundle for AppleCare coverage with simplified pricing. So Apple announced this this week. It's $20 a month for AppleCareOne, and it covers up to three products. Then you can add additional products for an additional $6 per month.

The math here varies greatly on how much you're going to save, depending on which devices you're covering with AppleCareOne. Apple's example is that you can protect an iPhone, an iPad, and a Mac for $20 a month, then add an Apple Watch as the fourth product. for $6 a month. So you get coverage for all four of your devices for $26 a month. It's, I don't know, it's, we can get into the exact numbers and how much you'll save, but it is very device dependent.

And whether it's a good value or not will, again, depend on the devices you're covering. But on the surface and with some rough back of the envelope map, for most people, it seems like this is a good option. It does seem... Like a surprisingly good deal. Assuming that you have AppleCare already for three devices. Because even in the worst case you basically come out even except that now you also get theft and loss protection.

on the watch and ipad as well so before that was iphone only and now it's expanded to ipad and watch so even in the worst case where you have like a phone a cheaper ipad and a watch

It probably comes out to about $20 a month, but now you're getting quote unquote free, you know, theft and loss protection on those other two devices as well. If you have more expensive devices, you can easily save money. So if you had like... an iphone pro max with an ipad pro 13 inch and then a watch you'll easily be you know under the old system apple care plus it would be like 30 40 now you're paying 20

And if you add a fourth product on, it's only $5.99 extra. So if you had like a second iPad that would also normally cost you like $8 a month to insure with AppleCare Plus, now you can add it to AppleCare One just for $6. In most cases, you can save money and no downside. Like...

This is US only, but otherwise it just seems like if you can get it, you can get it. And you can register devices that are up to four years old now, which is an improvement over before. It's a monthly plan rather than yearly, but if you do the monthly plans times 12...

In most cases, it works out cheaper than if you insured all those devices separately with AppleCare Plus, which still exists. So if you just want to do AppleCare Plus for one phone and nothing else, then you can still do that. But if you want to do multiple devices, you can do that now through AppleCare One with... No disadvantage though, I could tell.

Yeah, I mean, like you said, it's monthly and then you can also swap in and out devices super easily. So if you are covering your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac, then you say, actually, I don't want to cover my Mac. I'd rather cover my Apple Watch. You can do that. There's no commitment in any way, shape or form.

can just freely add and remove devices and we were playing around with this the configurator on apple.com before we started recording mayo and apparently you can cover an apple vision pro as part of apple care one

But AppleCare Plus for Apple Vision Pro standalone is $25 per month. But if you put it in AppleCare One, it counts as one device in the $20 a month bundle. So if you have Vision Pro... you even if you don't want to bundle anything else you should just enroll in apple care one and save five dollars per month like i that math makes zero sense to me but it works and we'll see if maybe it's a glitch and they take that away at some point but it works

I mean, there's little photos of the Apple Care One branding with a Vision Pro in the scene. So it seems intended. So unless they're going to... I mean, you can always be cynical and say, well, over time, the price of Apple Care One will increase, maybe. so yeah maybe in five years time it's not so much of a value but for right now why not like why you and if you if you're already paying for like apple care plus for your vision pro you switch to apple care one

they will ultimately cancel your AppleCare Plus and they'll give you the prorated refund for the billing period. So it's pretty automatic. And again, it's month to month. So if they do put the price up and you don't want to carry on, you can just go back. Go back to AppleCare Plus if you want to. You can cancel altogether.

I don't really see it's hard to criticize like I don't really see what's bad about it the only thing is that you have to be aware of it only covers your personal devices so you couldn't have an AppleCare one plan that covered you and your spouse because it bases it on your individual Apple account so

you couldn't like if you had a family and you couldn't put both the phones into one apple care one thing and have then one extra device you'd have to have individually apple care one for each person so you individually have to have your own you know, phone, Mac, iPad. But if you've got a phone, Mac, and iPad, and previously you were covering them with AppleCare, if you put it under one, you're going to save money and you're going to get theft and loss protection on the iPad now.

And if you do have more devices, it's only $6 flat. So if you're someone who has like five Macs, right? People do. You can now have AppleCare Plus on all of them for... So you get three for 20 plus two. So for $30 a month, you can have coverage on five Macs or five iPads. Yeah. Like I said, me and you, we messed around with this configurator and we never ran into any...

red flags or big pop-up warnings or anything. We just added three of my devices and I'm instantly saving $5 a month now because I had AppleCare on my Vision Pro. Yeah, I mean, it will let you add like AirPods and watches, which... under apple care plus would cost you far less than 5.99 a month so in those cases i'm not sure why you'd want to do that like what is the advantage of adding your headphones which would be a like 1.50 a month subscription cost

in AppleCare Plus, why would you use that up on AppleCare One where it's either going to take up one of your three or it's going to cost you $6 extra? Like, for some devices, it doesn't make sense to put them in the AppleCare One bundle. But for your main... primary devices like Macs, phones, iPads, then you're just going to save money in almost every situation.

Then this week for the App Store, Mayo, you spotted a new framework for developers that will let them offer basically retention deals to their users as they go to cancel a subscription. So if you're in the settings app and you're managing your subscriptions, you choose to cancel something, the developer now has the option to present you with a special offer. So maybe that's three months free, then $5 per month after that, or maybe that's...

The same pricing as before, but they can give you like a reminder saying, hey, you've done like 15 days in a row of something. Are you sure you want to cancel your subscription and lose access to that? I'll be honest, and I didn't realize that this wasn't a thing before because it's so common.

and managing subscriptions in other places throughout the web, like any website you go to and try to cancel your subscription, you'll be met with a retention offer. And speaking from experience, a lot of times those retention offers... are effective they work so it makes perfect sense that apple would add this to the app store and yeah i mean a bit of a cheat code if you're subscribing to stuff that's month to month every now and again just go and go to cancel it

Most services are set up to almost give you an automatic discount for stuff. Anything that you care about enough that would actually matter to your life if it actually did cancel. they won't cancel it on the spot. You get like a calling off period. It takes days to double confirm. Like, for instance, if you're negotiating for, at least in the UK, when your broadband is coming up for renewal, if you call them up and tell them you're leaving...

They'll give you all sorts of retention offers to try and make you stay. And you call them up on the phone, you say you want to cancel, you get through to someone who can give you a deal in almost every situation. So it takes like... half an hour to go on the phone and get through the you know the phone train wait for them and chat to them but then you almost always then save money for the next 18 months when you're in your contract if you have stuff like music subscriptions or

streaming services for video obviously they're they're just like month-to-month things you go on the website and you go to cancel most of them are set up to be like do you actually want to cancel here's another three months for four dollars or something like and then you can just carry on um and i think

Obviously, the main reason why big companies don't want to use that purchase is because they don't want to give Apple a cut. But the secondary reasons include the fact that capabilities like retention offers just weren't really possible. And so you're kind of limited. This is the customer relationship part of it, right? Where if you go through the web, they can kind of show you anything. They can let you cancel. They can let you get a refund.

you know they can show your retention offers you can switch plans very easily because it's just their service offering the payment infrastructure for in-app purchase your list you're limited by whatever apple lets the developer do And today, there hasn't really been a way to do a retention offer like this. If you were inside the application, some apps do this, right, where they run through the purchase subscriptions, but if they notice that you've, like, cancelled the subscription...

the server gets alerted, right? It basically tells the app that they're not going to renew it the next billing period. And so then if you went into the app itself, they could show UI, which is like... we know that you're cancelled. Here's a special offer. Carry on. And then you could press a button and show the purchase sheet and carry on. But that was because you were inside their actual application. They could also send you emails and stuff, right? But now...

Well, at least when this rolls out, they'll actually be able to show you a retention offer in the exact same context when you cancel the subscription. So you go into the settings app. You go into your name. You go into subscriptions. It shows all your subscriptions attached to your Apple account. You click on one. You click cancel. Before, it would basically just say, oh, you sure you want to cancel? Yes or no? Now it will say,

If you cancel the subscription, your service will end. But the developer's offering you this. Do you want to take that instead and carry on? Or do you actually want to cancel? Some people will be offended that Apple is letting... basically additional marketing screens show in between your relationship between intending to cancel and actually cancelling but it is constrained and it's only one screen right so you go to cancel you get a confirm sheet in the previous era

The confirm sheet would have no offer on it. It would just say, you're sure you want to cancel. Now the confirm sheet will still say, are you sure you want to cancel? And it will have a big cancel subscription button. But in the center of the screen, it will then also give the developer an opportunity to give you a message.

right it could just be oh we've noticed you use that for three years and you've done you've made x documents through it are you sure you don't want to lose this out or you know it's a fitness app you've got a streak of 30 days on the trot are you sure you want to cancel and lose your streak or it can be a Here's three months free.

Here's a reduced discount from switching to monthly to annual. Some kind of retention offer that tries to give you a bit of a price discount too to stop you from pressing cancel. But it's not like the developer gets free reign to do whatever they want on this screen. It's very constrained and restricted to this.

little card that goes in the middle of the screen most the ui is still controlled by apple which means they can't make the cancel button be two pixels high right it's still going to be the exact same size and shape so i think on the scheme on the on the balance of things it's pretty consumer friendly

But it is an example where maybe they wouldn't have bothered making this possible if they weren't seeing pressure from the Epic Games stuff in the US, from the other stuff that's saying about, you know, in-app purchasing Monopoly, and as well as taking these big...

commissions you're not competitive with the market because you don't offer these features this is clearly a feature that every other payment system supports and now apple's kind of catching up so you could argue the kind of like market forces are working here

And Apple has a benefit, too, to having fewer people cancel their subscriptions, right? They want to keep taking their 15% or their 30% from users. So it is mutually beneficial to a degree. But some of the guardrails around the design that you mentioned. I fear will be a reason that most developers don't do this, or at least most of the big companies just don't do this, because this isn't going to push a developer over the edge to start using an app purchase, right?

it's maybe a nice little perk that maybe you're on the brink of thinking like we're getting so big as a company we don't need that purchase anymore we'll just make people go through the website because look at this as well as taking 15 of our money we can't even show them a cancellation offer whereas now when they're in the

boardrooms they can be like look well you can actually show cancellation you can do this and that like so it probably helps some people stay in the in our purchase ecosystem but on balance yeah most people are going to carry on like the commission's still the number one reason right to do it so

It's nice that they're doing this and there's other stuff too they've rolled out in recent years that is clearly market pressure related. But it's not going to change the overall course of flow. And just from a principled standpoint, I'm glad that Apple is still controlling this interface because, again, going back to any subscription you manage on the web, if you get presented with a retention offer, that accept offer button becomes...

50 times bigger than the cancel button, which goes all the way to the bottom. And the colors are like inverted. So you think the accept retention offer, accept offer button is now red. because they want you to think that's the cancel button. It's just a whole mess. So I'm glad that Apple is controlling this interface. There was a fitness app that I won't name, but...

Basically, they have an iOS app and they have a web app. And they're basically designed to look identical between iOS and web. And you can open the web app on the phone and it basically is just like a HTML5 mobile version of the same app. But they let you subscribe to it. through both places and the subscription sheet was identical in design except for the fact

On the web sheet, it was one of those things where they price it as a per month thing, but you're paying annually, right? Oh, yeah. So it's like, oh, it's only $9.99 a month or $4.99 a month and you're saving 30%. But really, you have to pay for a year up front. On the web sheet, it just showed you the monthly price and then it had like confirmed subscription. On the iOS sheet, the confirmed subscription button had the yearly price listed in the button.

And why does it have to do that? Because the app review guidelines force you to. One of the guidelines in the Apple review guidelines say that the actual subscription price that the customer pays has to be in text that's as big as any other pricing that's on the page.

And obviously some slip through the cracks because it's human app view. But in general, they're pretty good at enforcing this. So if there is an app that's showing you a monthly price and you're inside the application... the app review will not let that app go to the store unless the actual price that the customer pays is also written very very clearly in big font on that same screen and this was perfectly shown in this case of this app where if you bought it through the website

None of these protections were there. You bought it through the App Store app. Apple had forced the developer to make sure the annual price was clearly listed. So in-app purchase is not all bad for sure. It's very customer friendly. It's developer unfriendly. That's the problem. Yeah. And I do not to go off on a tangent, but I see a lot of people say that one of the reasons Apple doesn't do a great job at catching spam apps or taking action against against manipulative.

subscriptions because they don't care. They'd rather cash in on that 30% revenue of those apps. And I just don't necessarily think that's true because if you look at the example you just pointed to, if Apple really cared about milking

15% or 30% from every single possible source, they would compromise on those guidelines at some point, right? Because it's mutually beneficial. I mean, they just take the guidelines out. Right, yeah. They would remove those guidelines because they benefit too from manipulative or...

Not manipulative even, but just unclear or slightly deceptive. And they haven't done that yet. So yes, there are problems with the App Store. And yes, there are huge problems with the App Store from a developer relations standpoint. But you do have to... Give Apple some credit for sticking to rules around things like that in particular. Yeah, they have standards for sure. Happy Hour This Week is also sponsored by Shopify. Check them out at shopify.com slash happy hour.

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shopify.com slash happy hour thanks to shopify for sponsoring the show mark german at bloomberg an interesting tidbit in his power on newsletter over the weekend The M5 iPad Pro that we're expecting to launch later this year will add a second front-facing camera, apparently. So this goes back to the M4 iPad Pro where Apple relocated.

the front-facing camera from the portrait side to the landscape side of the iPad. Obviously, recognizing that most people use their iPad in landscape orientation, especially when you have a keyboard attached. Apparently they've heard from enough people who don't like that change that the solution is to add a second camera back to the portrait side of the device. So now you've got both. Do you think there's actually people who are that upset by the relocation of the camera?

The front-facing camera? Oof. It seems unlikely. Upset enough that Apple feels the need to add two cameras to the front of the iPad? I mean, on balance... you have to assume that more people are happy and satisfied when the camera is on the landscape edge than the portrait edge. So the M4 iPad Pro layout is better than the previous layout, right? But it's kind of crazy. There's enough people that have indicated that...

they still use their device in portrait that Apple feels they're going to go out of the way to add a whole second camera lens just for that. But I guess it happens. I mean, I use my iPad 11-inch, iPad Pro 11-inch that Apple PR sent. I use it without a case, without a keyboard case, right? So I actually use it fairly regularly in portrait. I don't really do video calls on it ever. If I'm doing a FaceTime call, I do it on my phone.

You know, obviously I work for my laptop, so if I'm doing like WebEx and Zoom and stuff, I do that from MacBook Pro. So I don't really have a need to do video chat on the iPad, but if you're like a... quote-unquote business professionals going to work and you know commuting and just takes their iPad with them you'd imagine they have it in a keyboard case but apparently there's enough people out there that

They're going to find value in putting a second camera on the thing. The thing that gets me the whole time when I'm using my iPad Pro is the Face ID camera being only on one edge. So really, quite often, I'll be holding the iPad. Pro, if I'm holding it in portrait, my thumb's covering the Face ID sensor. So it doesn't unlock. Because one of the things that Apple specifically...

calls out about the face ID on the iPad Pro is that it's meant to work in either orientation, like it's orientation agnostic, but that obviously doesn't apply if you're covering the camera with your finger. Yeah, obviously it works both way around if your hands aren't on the bezel.

But if your finger's covering the bezel, they have a message like, camera covered. It's like, oh yeah, let me move my thumb out of the way and then I can unlock it. If you're in landscape, it never is a problem, right? But...

If I'm sitting on the sofa, quite often I browse the iPad 11 in portrait because it's kind of like a big book in that way. So I kind of use in portrait quite a lot if I'm just got like Twitter app or something or scrolling a website. I kind of prefer the portrait orientation.

And in those cases, the first ID is in the wrong position. Would I argue just for me that it should be on the other edge? No, it should be on the landscape edge in general because most people use their iPad in landscape, right? But...

If you ask me, should they add another camera or should they add another face ID array? I would tell them to put a face ID array on the other side of the thing. Because then that would mean that it wouldn't matter whether I picked up in landscape or portrait. It would still be hard to unlock. I think in reality...

it probably costs them a lot more money to add a whole second true depth camera system than it would to just add a camera lens. So that's a much bigger bar they'd have to reach to make it worthwhile in terms of the building materials cost versus the actual... gain to the user the amount of money it probably cost them to add a second camera lens is so small that even if only 10 of people have been like i want to do video calls in portrait for the ipad pro you know the thing that's like 800 and up

if they're looking for a little feature to add to the next generation of ipad pro this probably can make the cut quite easily and you just use the accelerometer right depending on whether it's held landscape or portrait you can just switch between the cameras and then you're done um and i guess

The segment of the market that has clearly been loud enough that Apple's heard them will then be satisfied going forward. I don't expect them to add second cameras to the base iPad or the iPad Air. You know what I mean? It's niche enough that it's like... going to fit in the ipad pro price margin bracket um but if you're spending 1200 on ipad pro and one of the things that clearly is quite popular on ipad pros is video calls these days

I guess that's the justification by putting a camera on both edges. With the original iPad...

Apple very nearly put a dot connector on both the landscape and the portrait edge. Oh, right. Yeah. So there are plenty of prototypes of the original iPad where it has holes on the landscape and the portrait side, the short edge and the long edge for... the 30 pin dot connector because the idea was the ipad is um supports you know their line was what it works whatever way you hold it right it doesn't it doesn't have to you don't have to adapt to it it adapts to you

And because obviously that was part of the fact that you could hold it in portrait or landscape and the X long which would rotate. But they were trying to push that in prototypes as well. Even when you dock it, you don't need to care whether you're using a landscape portrait because there's a thing on both edges. So it actually had two ports.

Only one of them would ever work at a time, so it wasn't like you could plug two accessories in. The point was you could only plug in... one way but you remember like the original ipad had that like keyboard um keyboard accessory it was literally like a magic keyboard with a dot connector poking out the end of it the original plan was you could have that in landscape as well as portrait but close to shipping

supposedly there was a jobs was like why does this thing have two ports this is unnecessary just choose one and then the ipad ship portrait only but even from the original ipad there's been enough interest in this thing's kind of ambidextrous in terms of orientation um so let's see if we can duplicate some some components and what are we 20 years on they might actually do it because if you're looking at things like you said

even mention about this new iPad Pro, you don't have much, right? Because it's just supposed to be the M5 chip. And now you can also talk about the second camera. So another thing to show on the Bento box when you announce it.

Then finally this week, Apple has reportedly submitted a bid to get the rights to MLB Sunday Night Baseball. So this came from comments from MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred, who said in an interview that they've had... bids from Apple, NBC, and ESPN. So the ESPN involvement here is weird because ESPN currently has the rights to MLB Sunday Night Baseball, but they're opting not to renew their current deal.

at an average of $550 million a year for the last three years of that deal. So $550 million. Initially, when ESPN said it was not going to renew the deal, Rob Manford made some... Comments that he probably regrets in hindsight, he said, we do not think it's beneficial for us to accept a smaller deal to remain on a shrinking platform. In reference, DSPN. But despite that messy...

kind of breakup. ESPN is apparently still involved. So Apple, NBC, and ESPN. What it's going to come down to here is the pricing for the Sunday Night Baseball rights because $550 million a year is insane. And I don't think... Anyone would blame ESPN for backing out of that deal, because if you look at what Apple pays for Friday Night Baseball, I think it's about $85 million a year. That's for two games every Friday.

If you look at what Roku pays for their Sunday morning baseball, it's about $10 million a year for one game a week. So as iconic as the Sunday night baseball brand is, half a billion dollars a year. That math does not make sense. When you look at what Apple and Roku are paying. So for the sports uneducated, how many games does Sunday Night Baseball, like, does that have? So Sunday Night Baseball historically has been one game a week on ESPN.

So it's one game. The relationship between ESPN and Major League Baseball over the years has been iconic. It's been one of the best partnerships for Major League Baseball. It's been 35 years, and at the peak, ESPN was showing six MLB games a week. And they had an ESPN highlight show called Baseball Tonight that aired every night during the week. But ESPN dropped to three games a week about 20 years ago. And then in 2022, it went down to just one game a week.

And that Baseball Tonight highlight show was also canceled. So as of today, ESPN shows 30 regular season MLB games all year. 25 of those are Sunday night baseball. Then there's also a couple of wildcard playoff games and the All-Star Home Run Derby. For half a billion a year. For half a billion a year. You can kind of feel like why ESPN didn't want to pay that much anymore because it feels like they're getting a bit shortchanged. Yeah, I mean...

The Apple partnership is interesting because it's two games every Friday for $85 million a year. Roku is $10 million for one game, but it's at a really awkward time slot every Sunday, right? So $10 million for one game. Sunday mornings. Like Roku's trying to start maybe like a Sunday morning baseball brand or whatever with that deal, but you can kind of exclude that one. The Sunday night baseball brand is huge. It's iconic, but it does not justify that price, right? So no wonder ESPN.

A brand that is struggling with a shrinking audience and shrinking relevancy can't afford or just doesn't want to pay half a billion dollars. Yeah, at least defend it to pay that much when Apple's getting primetime games on a Friday for... yep a fifth the price and they're getting two of them every week um so yeah if you were the negotiator at espn you probably wouldn't be too happy about renewing a contract for that much no um which is i guess why they're still in the in the

bid right because they're just bidding not 500 million they're just bidding a smaller number and they know they've still got a lot of sway because broadcast TV gets a lot of eyeballs and what do sports leagues want they want money and they want eyeballs and obviously ESPN

can give you eyeballs and they can still probably pay a decent chunk of money. It's just not going to be half a billion. Whereas you've got Apple, who's probably going to offer you a smaller audience, but they're going to probably be bidding more. And just like the F1 deal that's supposedly ongoing...

Why would Apple not pay a few hundred million to get premium baseball? They've already done Friday Night Baseball for four years now. If the price is right, why would they not add Sunday as well? It seems like a no-brainer. I kind of have mixed feelings about this in general, just because being a baseball fan and growing up with the Sunday night baseball being like a staple of the week and baseball tonight being a staple of the baseball season.

It is discouraging to see the relationship between MLB and ESPN deteriorate. One of the biggest reasons being that if ESPN loses the rights to its MLB package, it loses the rights to Sunday Night Baseball. ESPN as a network is just not going to cover MLB as much as they do now, and definitely not as much as they used to 10, 20 years ago. That's overall bad for the MLB brand, right? People who watch ESPN, people who watch SportsCenter.

They're just not going to see as much baseball content. So that's a downside. But in terms of finding a partner that I think would be a good steward of the Sunday night baseball brand, you have to think it's Apple, right? They've done great with Friday Night Baseball. Say what you will about the announcer teams, but that's just part of the deal when you have nationally televised games, right? You have a national.

broadcast team that is not going to be the same or as good or know as much about your team as the announcers you watch for every other game of the week. But Friday Night Baseball is very good. And from a technical perspective, like we've talked about before. they knock it out of the park, right? They stream at the higher bit rate. It looks incredible. The graphics are great. So if I'm going to pick a company other than ESPN to have Sunday Night Baseball,

I think it's Apple, right? I think they would do the best job at maintaining that iconic brand. Viewership permitting, right? That's always the question mark. Are they going to fall into irrelevancy if they go to...

a payroll service because i mean right now friday night baseball was just included with apple tv plus but if they got if they were spending like let's say they they they bid 300 million for sunday baseball right Seems like an opportunity for them to then slice out MLB as a separate subscription, like what they do with MLS, right? Like, I kind of feel like if they got the Sunday night rights, then they'd sell you a...

$100 a subscription so you could get the Friday night games and the Sunday night game through Apple. I don't know if they could justify $100 a season, but yes, they should, or they will almost certainly break it out into a separate package.

i kind of think and i don't know if they have any appetite to do this they should have one apple sports pass which puts mlb mls and then let's say f1 in the same price so yeah because mls on its own i feel like it's quite i mean i don't obviously don't care about unless

But that's $99 a season, right? But that's every single MLS match. Yeah, you get every single game. I guess that's the differentiator. Whereas MLB, I guess, has, what, hundreds of games a year, and so this would still only be three a week, right, in total. But you can't imagine that they want to, like, if they've done, how much do they spend on MLS? They spend about 250 million a year on that deal. They'll be spending as much if they got the Sunday night rights for MLB, right?

So they're going to want to charge something for it, surely. They're not going to charge you $99 for MLS, which costs them a quarter of a billion a year. And then if you combine Friday Night Baseball and Sunday Night Baseball together, that's going to be in the same kind of ballpark, if not more expensive. They're not going to include that as a TV Plus perk. I'd be shocked if they did that. So what if they did...

F1, MLS, and the MLB games is one thing, and you spend $99 a year. They convert MLS season pass into just Apple TV sports pass, and you get Friday. You get games on Friday, basically across the weekend because it covers Friday, Saturday and Sunday if you cover those through sports. That'd be a pretty compelling option. I guess we'll just have to see because one thing we've learned about Apple throughout all of their various...

sports negotiations that they are not going to overpay. Yep. I think they very much just like to be in the room where it's happening. They bid a lot. They bid on a lot of things, but they don't... They don't double the money just because they're there, right? They give what they think is a very competitive offer and then they hope that the Sport League chooses them. But they bid on all sorts of stuff. They were close to landing.

sunday ticket until they bailed right it wasn't the sunday ticket didn't want them they and apple in that case was happy to pay the money I think the only deal they made with Google is actually slightly less than the rumoured price that Apple was paying. But just the terms of what they got for it were not what they wanted. Apple has never shown panic in being like, we have to get sports rights. We'll take anything at any cost.

They've been a lot more measured. And here's another example. We don't know what the makeup is of the Apple bid. I'm sure it's competitive. Perhaps it's not even as much money as some of the others. I don't know if other streamers are bidding. It didn't sound like it, right? From what Manfred said.

Apple, ESPN and who else? NBC. NBC, yeah. Yeah, so there's no other streamers bidding. So probably in that case, Apple's going to be giving you the most money just because they're able to. But it doesn't mean they're necessarily going to pay you $550 million. They'll give you a competitive offer that they can...

make something out of and manfred said that he would be open to splitting it between two different bidders so apple and espn maybe where espn has broadcast rights and apple has streaming rights But as we've talked about before, Apple generally wants exclusivity with everything. With the exception of some MLS games are on broadcast, right?

That could be the direction. Maybe not every week, every Sunday Night Baseball game is available on broadcast as well as streaming on Apple, but they could make a deal where ESPN gets a quarter of them or something. You know what I mean? So it gives them some broadcast exposure without going exclusively behind a streaming paywall. Because Apple has shown they're open to doing broadcast deals in places.

I mean, they've streamed MLS games on TikTok. They're not so limited in their view that they're like, oh, just because we got this deal, we're only going to let you watch it through Apple. Obviously, that's where they want you to do it. But every week, they have free games.

that are part of tv plus right not everything's behind the season pass paywall and then they also have a couple of games that show on broadcast channels every week as well for mls so i think they've shown they're at least got an app and now you can subscribe through comcast right and stuff so like they're pretty open on the sports side too

arrangements but obviously it has to be ultimately in their favor because otherwise why would they bother paying for it we'll see Manfred said he hopes to pick a partner or two partners within the next month so

And this would all start with the 2026 MLB season. So into March, April next year is when maybe we'll see the first Sunday night baseball games on Apple. 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. You can 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 and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? At BZM. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.