iPhone 17 case leaks, iOS 26 beta 5 changes, Tim Cook’s AI pep talk

So iOS 26 beta 5 is here and a few interesting things worth pointing out. So the thing that jumped out to me right off the bat is that they finally made.

The select button in the mail app, a dedicated button, and it's not hidden behind like the three dot menu like it was before. Yes. This was particularly annoying to me this week because I've been on vacation, but I've been keeping an eye on my email and like... basically triaging a couple times a day so you triage you want to hit select you want to have the option to select multiple emails at the same time then archive or delete them so as soon as i updated to beta 5 on tuesday

I noticed that dedicated select button right away. Much appreciated, Apple. So I completely agree the button should be there by default. as it is now and was on previous versions of the old print system and in fact on previous betas of 26 if you went to other views that wasn't like the inbox view it would actually have a select button there so like if you went to the unread

You know, you could do those smiting boxes, like the one that just shows you all your unheard messages across all your mailboxes. The select button was always there on previous betas. So I've been kind of assuming in the back of my head that, oh, they're going to actually bring it back to the main view too, because it's a bit odd that they do it on...

the smart inbox view but not the main inbox view and sure enough beta 5 does bring you a dedicated select button what was your workaround before beta 5 or did you not have one the workaround before beta 5 wasn't it You just tap the three dots and hit select. So you did the three dot menu. Okay. Yeah. So I'm going to rock your world with another incredible gesture. Just like the Safari swipe. If you do two fingers.

downwards on the cells. Oh, I knew that. Yeah. Yeah. Because that's what you, you can use that in any app where you need to select multiple at the same time. Most apps. Yeah. Most apps. Yeah. I mean, it's kind of handy because if you just do a little bit, it selects one and it jumps into edit view. Or you can just select the whole screen and just go down. So it's definitely a great gesture for them to have in the system. But of course, you shouldn't be expected to use a two-finger gesture.

that isn't exactly the most intuitive thing in the world to just enter edit mode. So as correctly as it should be, there is now a dedicated select button, always visible in the mail app. One thing that there is a slight... um regression on though is and i don't know if you see this on your pro max because you've got a bigger screen but on my like 14 pro when you scroll down in the mailboxes right you get that new like type they have that new title area at the top

And so for me, it says all inboxes, all mail, and then it says updated, dot, dot, dot. Because now all the horizontal space is taken up by the select button. Whereas in the previous beta, it had enough space to say updated just now, incomplete. So that is a minor regression because they've had to have the dedicated button. But 100% they should have the dedicated button and truncate versus not. So that's a good change in beta 5.

in terms of not so good changes or things that they failed to address. We talked about this last week, but it's the awkward gesture, what do you call it? Gesture navigation in the camera app? Yeah, I mean, they haven't just failed to address, they've doubled down. So we talked about it last time.

they inverted the way you swipe and which way the controls go. So historically, if you swiped left, you moved the setting to the right. In Beta 4, they made it so if you swiped left, you moved the setting to the left. Instead of reverting that change, which everybody has hated, everybody's complained about on social media, we complained about it last week. I assumed it was a bug. Yeah, we assumed it was a bug. Instead, they've added a new mode switching toggle.

So you go into the settings app, you see classic mode switching, toggle that on, and that reverts the behavior to what it's been for years. I think it's safe to say, Mayo, that you are fired up about this. Yeah, incensed is a good word. Right. It was bad enough when Beta 5 came around and it still scrolled in the wrong way. I was like, oh.

this actually might be intended. And then someone told me that there was a setting to change it back. And that really put me over the edge. I was like, not only is now, how is this a setting? The default is for that toggle to be off, i.e. it works wrong, right? It works in the way that goes counter to every other application on the entire phone.

And yet they've now got the gall to put a setting to change it back. Now, we talked about in previous episodes about, you know, you can't have settings for everything. This is the most egregious case. You can't have a setting for which way does just the slider in the camera app go, depending on where your finger is. It is absolutely ridiculous. There shouldn't be a setting. It should just work how it always does, which isn't...

natural, correct, and matches every other app on the system. I was so annoyed about this. I actually did a video and there's a very good colliery. If you go into Safari on 26 and you go to the all tabs during Safari, they have a very, very, very similar control at the bottom where you can swap to in your tab groups, right? So it has like all tabs and it's private mode. And it's...

it's even looks the layout is so similar to the camera because you've got the two buttons on the left and right you know the circle buttons and then you've got the slider in the middle and when you slide on the thing in the middle the camera button the circular buttons go go away and then they come back and the middle selector

you know, expands and contracts just like it does in the camera app. But you know what? The Safari one scrolls in the direction you'd expect it would like every other carousel kind of layout in the entire of iPhone OS since the beginning. And in Safari, that's just how it works because that's how it should work. They don't need a setting to be like, do you want it to scroll leftwards or rightwards? It's just absolutely asinine that they seem to think that these...

New mode, this new direction is preferred and what people should be doing because that's the new default. And they're not even so... They haven't even got the courage of their convictions to be like, okay, this is how it works. They've like wimped out and put a setting in so you can change the direction back for this one single application. If there was a setting that was like system-wide...

which changed which way it scrolled. So it would affect camera, safari, TV, fitness, anywhere that's got a carousel. And maybe they now think you shouldn't do this inverted scrolling direction. It should be like one-to-one. I could, you know, at least... take that argument on board and then they've got a setting to go back to the old way, right? But they're trying to push forward with a new direction. But that's not what it is. It's an individual setting just for the camera app.

Absolutely absurd. Like, natural scrolling is a setting on macOS, right? Which basically does this same thing for trackpads and keyboards and trackpads and mice. And natural scrolling is the default because it matches, it mirrors iOS. But...

Since they added it in Lion, there's always been an option for you to turn it off if you want to scroll in the other direction, which I think if you're using a mouse wheel, it does kind of make sense to not have natural scrolling, at least for some people. I just live with natural scrolling on the whole time. But I can kind of get it why it's a setting. But the setting applies system-wide to the whole operating system, right? If they want to do that on the iPhone...

I still wouldn't love it, but I'd be okay with it. But the fact they've now got a dedicated setting just for one app in terms of, and it doesn't change the UI back to the old camera app, right? It's not like the phone thing where they have the different layouts depending on whether you want to try the new unified approach or do the more classic approach.

All it does is change which way the selector slides when you put your finger down. It doesn't show all the options. It doesn't do anything else. All it does is change the direction you're scrolling. That is the most... unreal thing I think they've ever done. Like, how is that setting? And how is that the new default? Like the way that goes contrary to every other application on the phone. Absolutely ridiculous. I agree. And I've been trying to think.

through any sort of reasoning as to why apple made this change in the first place and i've pretty much got nothing i guess the one thing that comes to mind is maybe there's some corollary to how this mirrors what people use on like a physical camera

making the gesture go the same way. But even then, if we aren't making that connection, what are the odds of normal iPhone users making that connection? It just makes no sense. It doesn't look like a UI element that is trying to ape a real world thing, right? Yes, exactly.

It shrinks and expands and goes away. The old UI element actually did look more like a dial on a traditional camera, right? Where they had all of the options in like this kind of rotating thing. You could still swipe between them. And that was clearly basing off the design language of physical cameras with the little dials on them, right? Where you switch between the modes by flicking. And you know how that one worked? The RS-18 version? It worked!

the scroll direction of every other app, right? It didn't go well, but just because in the real world, you flick it this way, we'll just make in the thing go the other way around. No, but this one, which has even less of a relationship to a real world object, they've just changed the scroll direction. I'd love to hear someone...

give me some sort of justification for this because I think it is ridiculous. It's ridiculous that the scroll direction goes the wrong way and it's even doubly ridiculous that there's now a setting.

that can take you back to how it was. Like, I think the camera app on 26 is probably going to be one of the more controversial elements of the whole thing when people update in September. A, because it's quite a big change of the camera app, and B, because the camera app is so popular, right? Everybody uses the camera app. I'm not passing judgment on whether I like the new camera design or not. This is solely about how...

The scroll wheel in it works. It's not like if you turn the setting off, I'm like, oh, the camera app's great. I still think you can criticize the camera app redesigned in 26. It's not the worst thing in the world, but I don't love it wholeheartedly. It's just the fact that now there's another... How many times have we talked about the camera pad in too many settings? Now there's a setting for which way it scrolls. It's the most insane thing they've ever done. And I'll leave it at that.

The other bad change in beta 5 comes to the minimization behavior of the scroll bar or the navigation bars in apps. So we'll use the music app as the example here. On beta 4 and earlier.

You would scroll down and the stacked tab bars at the bottom would collapse into each other, become one tab bar floating at the bottom. You scrolled up just like... half an inch or not even half an inch like a few just a very small amount and they would uncollapse and become two separate tab bars again in beta 5 what they've done is now to get that un that separated stacked tab bar view

Again, you have to scroll all the way up to the top of the screen. Or you can tap the button in the bottom left. So you scroll down a little bit and it collapses into itself. Scroll all the way back up to the top and it uncollapses. Or like you said, may I tap in the, what is it, bottom left? Yeah, bottom left, and it unclapsed itself.

My complaint about this navigation bar style the whole time is that it makes controls that are only in the top layer of the navigation harder to access. So in the music app, my example of this has been the skip button, the go forward button. You're listening to something while scrolling through the music app.

Your natural instinct is that there's a button to skip that song while you keep scrolling and doing other things and looking around. Previously, it was bad that the button was hidden, but you could swipe up just a little bit to bring up that second navigation bar, click skip, and go about your day.

Instead of addressing the awkwardness of that interaction, they've made it worse by now requiring you to go all the way back up to the top of the screen to easily access that skip button or any other control in that top layer navigation. Just a bizarre change. Yeah, it is very odd. My big complaint with this auto-minimizing behavior, which we did speak about before, is that it...

just invokes so much motion, right? So you scroll up, you scroll down, you're browsing around, and it's like flicking up, flicking down, flicking away, coming back. And my argument was why don't you keep it expanded the whole time, right? Yeah. Because you've got a screen that's really tall, taller than it is wide, like the aspect ratio of phones.

portrait devices you're not you're not the the vertical space is not at a luxury there's loads of it so why not just keep both roads always visible because it's mostly distracting to the eye to have this thing at the bottom animate and swoosh up and swoosh down constantly. So I guess their response to that is, well, we'll just make it never swoosh back up again. It's like, you know, we'll remove all the movement.

by just forcing it to only be in the minimized state unless you actively try and expand it again. But I don't think that's a good judgment call. I don't know if it's better than it moving around, but it doesn't feel like the best outcome. And it doesn't even feel like a bug because they've actually changed the animation. When you're at the very top and you're starting a little bit, it squeezes in a little before it collapses. So it feels intentional. This is the kind of thing where...

I can see why they'd put it in the library of system components as an optional behavior. So for some apps, it might make sense that are really about scrolling around, that they want the tabs to stay permanently minimized. But for something like music, where you've especially got that like... Now playing platter, I don't think it's important enough that the now playing platter should be minimised and then minimised until you get all the way back to the top of the screen.

So this is like a behavior option that should be available to developers to choose if you're using a tab bar, but it shouldn't be like the one that they use in music. You should also still have the other option of it immediately expanding as soon as you start to scroll upwards.

Then there's another change to the tab bar that you've pointed out in our note here, Mayo, that I don't actually think I've noticed yet. Yeah, this is quite subtle. It's kind of cool. Yeah. So on previous betas... The glass lens, when you long press on the tab bar, it would just kind of zoom up, scale up the tab bar. So you'd see the same items that you see below the tab bar just enlarged through the glass platter, right?

On beta 5, you're not actually seeing what's below. They've actually duplicated all the items. And so now... The items in the glass lens are all colored, right? So if you're in the music app, they're always red when they're in the glass bit. But if you actually look below the glass...

You see the actual tab bar, right? They're still black. So until you let go, it doesn't actually select the actual tab item. But in the glass thing, they've now got this different rendering where everything's highlighted. So if you went to beta 4...

What you'd see through the glass lens is just the item that you're hovering over being the selected one because it would just be the same bar that's below but now they've got like a duplicate copy of all the items that they only show you through the glass bit. So it makes a pretty cool visual effect. Yeah, that's quite nice. Yeah, so it's pretty aesthetic. It was a real bit eye-opener to me where it's like, they're still doing so much fundamental changes to the way these elements work.

Like this stuff is still so much in flux because that's a pretty big change to make where the glass, I'm not sure if any other liquid glass element does this where what it's showing you through the glass lens is completely different to what's actually the content underneath.

So that's pretty dramatic. But I do think the end result is quite pretty. So it's a nice little change, but it just shows that we're still doing pretty big implementation reworks of all these components. And I think that's something that's going to carry on. way through it's going to like break through the point zero and be way through the 26 cycle like all these complaints or criticisms about the legibility i think that stuff's going to be continued to tweak

for months and maybe even multiple years, right? We could be here next year and they might be doing tweaks to how the materials react with the content behind it. But this was just a very stark example of that.

Other things in Beta 5, there are some new bouncy animations on the passcode screen. So these, when you swipe up to the... passcode screen it kind of bounces in from the bottom then as you type in your passcode there's a bit more bounciness yeah it's cute the dynamic island has a new interactive pop-up that comes up when your battery hits 20 or 10 with the option to

enable low power mode right from that dynamic island notification so again just an animation visual change here to be fair with that one it's now one tap if you want low power mode was before you had to like long press and it all go into settings or control center or something

I've seen some people complain that this dynamic island alert is a bit big because if you have an expanded dynamic island alert, they always have to be quite big to avoid the hardware bar, right? Because they have to be big enough to be below the actual physical camera cutouts. um and the old uh dynamic island low battery alert was an inline one because it just said low battery in the percentage and you know it didn't make it wasn't like double height it was just single width like a single row

But obviously it didn't have the ability to tap on it to immediately turn on the power mode. So I think this is a better change overall, but it is quite a big element that appears. But I think when your battery goes down, you kind of want to know about it. So I can understand why they want to make a big deal about it. For me, being on vacation and out of my normal charging routine, my biggest surprise was how quickly I saw that new Dynamic Island notification.

between 20% and 10%. I was like, damn, I just saw this for 20% and now I'm already at 10%. It felt like it was five minutes, but at least it's easy to enable low power mode. Yeah, I think stability on iOS 26 is getting a lot better.

Beta 5, there's a lot less frame drops and stuff, but I do still think the battery hit might be noticeable. Like it doesn't feel like they've got complete battery optimization done. Then watchOS 26, Beta 5. Mayo, you noticed that Notification Center is now much more glassy than it was before. Yeah, it very much evokes the iOS Notification Center because iOS Notifications are pretty transparent and they show off the refractions quite heavily.

This carries across to the watch. Up to you whether you like how it looks, but it's smooth and it looks cool. So I don't know if the legibility is not a problem, but it's just maybe slightly distracting when you see all of your clock face. basically as you scroll up and down your notifications. But it's fine and it's okay. It's kind of impressive they can even do that animation so smoothly on a watch, right? You don't have to just have it on the phone. The...

The judgment's out on overall whether it's too much. I do think some of these material effects will be toned down in the oncoming years, right? Like, this is a pretty drastic implementation of it everywhere. And they will...

the novelty will wear off and they will tame it back. But I don't think the material is bad, right? It should exist. It's just how much and how transparent and how much it should be used. Should every single element be semi-translucent with highly refractive light effects on it?

I don't think so. But that seems to be where they're going right now. It's like everything gets redesigned with these, you know, with these very clear glass elements. And then they'll tone it back eventually, I'm sure. But it's not like unusable or anything.

And it's visually kind of cool. Then a controversial change in macOS Tahoe 26 Beta 5. So the classic Macintosh HD icon, which depicted an actual... hard disk drive has been updated in beta 5 with a new kind of SSD looking icon. So the iconic classic Macintosh HD icon is dead. Yeah, in fact, all the drive icons in Tahoe have this new style now where they're almost 2D.

but then they've got a suggestion of 3D at the bottom. So the top face of them is like a gradient color with an icon etched into it. And then at the bottom of it... it kind of gives you some 3D perspective. But it's not like a fully 3D thing because if you think about it head on, it's not rendered in a way that would be a normal 3D projection.

So it's clearly gone for a stylized look. And in beta 5, they did that to the Macintosh HD icon as well. So in previous betas, you had time machine change and network attack storage icons change. And now they've done it to like the most iconic one, which is the Macintosh HD icon. I kind of like it though.

I can accept that it doesn't reflect the real world. It doesn't look like a 3D object would. But at the end of the day, it's an icon, right? And it feels quite iconographic. And I think it's kind of nice. So there's been some complaints out in the world about people that don't like it. I kind of like it. Do you ever think that Apple is trolling longtime Mac users when it makes changes like these? Like they changed the Finder icon, just flipped the colors around. Everybody got mad about that.

They reverted their decision. They've changed this icon. A lot of the longtime Mac users are upset about this change. It's just interesting what particular crowds of people notice that Apple changes. versus other people who won't even notice that the Macintosh HD icon has changed when they update to Tahoe. They're not trolling, they're just moving forward. And these are just icons, right, at the end of the day, and...

people have different preferences about icons. I have preferences about icons, right? The iOS 7 icon set, I didn't really like, quite famously. We talked about icons quite a bit last week. We talked about icons quite a bit last week, and we got a bit of follow-up coming up shortly about icons. So obviously... it is very subjective the finder icon was changed to match the rest of the icon set like the logic of the mac os 26 icon set was reflected in the finder icon changing um

in that first beta and then they've just kind of flipped the colors back and the second beta onwards. But I didn't find the first beta finder icon offensive either. Like some people said this shows that Apple doesn't care about the history of the Macintosh anymore. I didn't really get that from it.

These are the ultimate icons, and they've got a new icon set, a dramatically different icon set with the 26 releases. Some people are not going to like the icons. Some people are going to like the icons. On the whole, I like all the new icons, including these hard drive icons.

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So we just mentioned it, but we talked about the new icons in iOS 26 quite a bit last week, and we got some feedback from Tom and a few others who said, that to their eyes, some of the new icons in iOS 26 look blurry. So that's like the Photos app, the News app, and the Reminders app, where the edges of the colored shapes look just blurry to them. Mayo, you have an explanation for this.

But my interpretation of it is maybe a bit naive, and was that in our story or your story, comparing these icons, we simply blew up the icons. They were bigger. And when you make the icons bigger, there's going to be some more blur effect on the edges. But what matters is how the icons look at smaller sizes on your iPhone's home screen. But you think there's a bit more to it than that? Yeah, so it is correct that the icons in our story do look a bit blurry.

That is partly because of the source resolution of the icons and partly due to the way that we extracted them because it is really hard to extract icons these days because they're like... not just a single png they're composited of layers and you know blur shadows and all these effects and stuff so you have to do a bit of jiggery pokery to get them out the system and so the process by which we did that including the story does make them look

a bit blurry compared to what they should be right they're not as they're not as perfectly defined as the source artwork is they're close enough right But there is also a separate phenomenon which I have seen a lot of people, you know, a decent chunk of people complain about or at least raise that to their eyes, the new icon sets do look blurry and less sharp than the previous icon sets.

And this isn't just like an artifact of how we export it on the website. This is looking at them on your phone. I think on Mac, the dock has a bug at the moment in the Tahoe Betas where it does just make the icons blurrier than they should be. So that's one issue. There's multiple issues here. On the Mac, I think there's just a bug where if you look in the dock, sometimes it's blurry and it shouldn't be like that. Hopefully they'll fix that bug. On the iPhone...

I think the icons are rendered as sharp as they should be, but there's like an optical illusion on some of them where the light effects on the borders of the shapes kind of fudges it for your eyes. So when you look at them further away, you can interpret them.

you can interpret that as being like a blurry line rather than a solid line. And obviously you're coming from iOS 18 where all of the artwork was very flat with very sharp solid edges. So the contrast of that does make the 26 icons look blurry in some cases.

I especially see this, it's most notable to me, with the adaptation that Apple does automatically for third-party apps. So I don't know if you use Facebook Messenger, but we use it in our friend group. So that icon is obviously not updated for iOS 26 yet. But the system applies automatic lighting effects to icons like Facebook Messenger, which are like a central glyph on a background. The Slack icon does this too. So if you're looking close on Slack icon or Facebook Messenger icon,

they have the light effects running across them, even though the developers haven't made any custom artwork at all. It's just adapting the flat PNG from iOS 18. But on those icons, you can kind of see that it doesn't look as... the edges of the face measure icon don't look as sharp as they used to because now there's like a secondary layer of light.

refractions running around it and if you're not looking at it super close it just just kind of looks like a bit like anti-aliasing and a bit like blur so that is definitely a phenomenon that other people have spoken to me about even before we talked about in the podcast last week and then we got a few different people saying it including

So I did want to raise that and I did kind of forget to include that in a little chit chat last week. I don't think... there's anything fundamentally wrong with the icon set maybe your eyes just have to kind of get used to it a little bit where the edges are going to be a little bit softer

If it became a real problem, Apple could turn off the lighting effects on the icons and then they'd be just as sharp to your eye as iOS 18 would be. The third-party icons where they get the automatic adaptations, I do think just do look worse.

but that'll be fixed in September when Facebook Messenger, Slack, and everybody else release updated icons because they're not going to necessarily update all their apps for Liquid Glass, but they'll definitely update their icons with the new icon composer thing. wait for September for the third party icons. If you really don't like how the first party icons look, I don't know what to tell you. Because that was another piece of feedback I saw a few people have was already criticizing, I think...

YouTube was an example and Facebook was an example about why Google and Meta haven't updated their app icons yet. But yeah, they literally aren't able to until September when they can start submitting. iOS 26 specific app updates to the App Store. Yeah, and if they really want to, they can submit an icon that includes no glass layers. So it will have no glass effects. So if you take the Facebook Messenger icon, if they really don't want to embrace it...

they can just basically submit the same rendered artwork again. But because it's in the iOS 26 icon format, the system won't automatically change it in any way. So we'll see what they do. I think people adapt the home screen icons because it's an easy way to like say...

We're participating. It's way easier to change the icon than it is to revamp the whole app UI, especially when they're all backed by Electron or whatever else these days. So I expect the icons will change, but we'll wait. I mean, we're only a little over a month away now probably from...

26 being public. That's crazy. We're also only a little bit of a month away from the iPhone 17 and a new leak this week. claims that Apple has some new silicone cases for the iPhone 17 coming with a couple of interesting changes. So the first rumor is that the iPhone 17 silicone cases will have built-in

holes at the bottom on either side to attach a lanyard. Similar to the AirPods Pro lanyard case. Which I said nobody cares about. And a lot of people do care about. We got a lot of feedback on that. Similar to a lot of third-party, really good iPhone cases that have built-in lanyard holders. Zach covered this on the site for us, and he made the good point that it's very similar to a lot of digital cameras that also have built-in lanyards on them.

I don't hate this change at all. I mean, if they did it, it would be cool. I don't know if I would attach a lanyard to my iPhone, even though I love the lanyard on AirPods Pro. But given the size of... The market for third-party cases that have lanyard holders, I totally see why Apple is doing this. And I think I pointed out to you, Mayo, either on the show or privately, at WWDC...

One of the most common trends I noticed, particularly among the younger YouTuber TikTok crowd of people who were there, they were all using iPhones with lanyard cases attached. So it's clearly a very in. Fashion trend right now. That's interesting. Yeah, I wouldn't use the lanyard, but I'm totally fine with Apple doing cases with lanyard holes. The thing that I saw when I read this article was that this explains...

the weird rumor about the camera control on the top edge of the phone. Oh, yeah. Yep. It's not a camera control. It's not a hole for an antenna. It's just a hole in the case if you want to slip a lanyard in. The phone itself is not going to have a camera control on the top edge, but you can see how if you...

If you were filming the phone inside one of these cases, you might get that impression, right? Because it's a cutout and what a lot of the cutouts on the side of the phone fall there for buttons. But this is not a cutout for a button. It's just a cutout where you can loop through a lanyard string.

The only other part of this rumor that was kind of interesting is that apparently one of the colors for these silicone cases is going to be called like liquid glass. So it would be like refractive and iridescent and have a multicolor look to it. Again, I don't know if I choose that color itself. It might be a bit flamboyant, a bit lavish, but I can totally see them doing it. Just like how last year they did the Fifth Avenue Cube in the Apple Intelligence colors, right?

I can totally see them doing silicon cases with a kind of glassy look to them to match iOS 26. They should have done iPhone cases with like a border that was similar to the Apple Intelligence animation colors. That kind of would have been cool.

Or like a bumper like the iPhone 4, but the bumper was just multicolored and made up of those Apple Intelligence colors. That would have been cool. Then Mayo, you also, you've been busy this week. You spotted a new... entitlement option for enterprise apps on Apple Vision Pro for something called a window follow mode. So I'll read from Apple's description here.

When a person installs an app that has the follow mode for Windows entitlement configured, all standard with Windows on Vision Pro across all apps, locks themselves in a place relative to the person's body. When the person then moves to a new location, the window will follow along with them and then quote-unquote land itself in the same place relative to their body, again using that follow mode entitlement for that window.

Why is this restricted to enterprise apps only? The reason I found out about this window follow mode thing, which has apparently been part of WWDC, it's not like a new announcement, it's been there since the beginning of the 26 cycle. Apple uploaded a two-hour presentation to their YouTube channel for Apple Developer, right? And this is like a little talk they did.

um at the developer center stage right so not the not not one in apple park but not the c jobs theater in the developer center they have that little presentation area They obviously had some invites and developers in to be there in person, but they also just filmed it and showed it online. They basically did a recap of big things that they announced at WWC26.

And they had a few different people guide you through it. So they had a section on liquid glass, a section on iPad windowing, and they had a section on vision OS. And in that section, the presenter described this window follow mode feature under the enterprise apps.

part of the presentation and the feature sounds pretty good like you have an app you know that you're going to be moving around your home or something or even just rotating in your seat like you don't have to physically walk around you can just like rotate your body right um If you have an app with the entitlement, you can then make it follow you and stay locked in place. But I don't really get the justification for it being an enterprise only. The camera thing...

you know, privacy is at least an argument. But for having the window follow you around, I don't understand why that's limited to Enterprise thing. Hopefully this is something where like it gets incubated in the Enterprise land and they bring it to like VisionOS 4 or something.

Because it's just a weird thing where you could have a Vision Pro yourself. None of the apps have a follow mode button, but then you install one app that has the entitlement. And then suddenly inside that app, the window controls will have a new option. But then...

that option won't be available in other apps in the system, like to a layperson. That's pretty hard to describe why it's available here and not elsewhere. And it just feels like something the system should offer. It shouldn't be an app by app thing. So this is a cool thing, but I don't understand why it's locked to... Enterprise apps only. The access to the cameras in 26 on Vision OS 2 and 1, Enterprise apps could get access to the left camera feed.

On 26, they can get access to the left and the right camera feed so they can transmit stereo in 3D. That comes under the enterprise app entitlements. I don't believe there's any accommodation for the mass of the app store.

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So Apple reported its fiscal Q3 2025 earnings last week, and we aren't going to talk about the actual numbers themselves, but a few interesting tidbits from the call and then the next day that are worth noting. On the call itself, Tim Cook was asked a lot about Apple's artificial intelligence plans about Apple intelligence. And he seemed to hone in on one particular comment that he said multiple times. And he said that Apple is open.

to mergers and acquisitions that accelerate its roadmap in AI. This comment, it comes as Apple is rumored to be in talks with perplexity about an acquisition and beyond just mergers and acquisitions. in talks with companies like OpenAI and Anthropic to power Siri. I think the interesting part about what Tim said there is just him publicly showing Apple's willingness to not just make everything in-house, but to rely both on an M&A or on.

a partnership with a third party beyond what they already have with Siri and ChatGPT. Yeah, and an open commitment that they're going to invest more. Because the reason this was an investor call sentient comment was because he was basically telling investors,

our capital expenditure numbers are going to go up which investors at the moment kind of love because they're like great they're going to buy loads of gpus loads of servers you know they're going to do the ai thing that everybody's hyping up so much at the moment um and Tim Cook kind of doubled down on this the day after in this kind of company-wide meeting where he said things like, AI is ours to grab. It's as big or as bigger than the internet. Apple must do this. Apple will do this.

we will make the investment to do it. So from the executive level down, then at least trying to portray that they're actually now serious about doing this in a bigger way. I mean, you talked to them last year, they were almost... proud of the opposite they were like we don't need to do a lot of M&A or a lot of um

capital expenditure because we're going to rely on partners like chat gpt to hand it off and we're going to have our private co-compute stuff but for world knowledge we can just rely on chat gpt and other partners and whereas now they're kind of singing a different tune which is probably more closer to the reality they actually need where they're still going to rely on partners but they also need to bring more stuff in-house and do it themselves

and power it themselves. And yeah, they might also then have to spend a lot of money to make Siri good in the short term with a partner, but they also need to work on it internally and actually have competitive models things running in their infrastructure i still don't know right now how much private private cloud compute actually does right like you know you can go on that thing in the settings and the privacy report

And most of the time it's completely blank. Yeah. So it's like, is my computer ever asking a private cloud computer for help? But sometimes it does, but it's not very often. And so like whatever first party...

server infrastructure they have to run ai staff it's not enough right and there was this big story about luca maestri saying well we're not going to give you all the money in one go we're going to you know slow roll it out to you so the ai team couldn't buy as many gpus as they wanted to and now there's

a lack of supply, so Apple's been kind of caught flat-footed. I think all of these comments that Tim Cook presents externally, they're all kind of intimating that. They're like, look, we understand we need GPUs, we understand we need server infrastructure, we're going to spend more money.

We're going to actually do it this time. That's kind of how you go interpret those comments. Obviously, he's not going to say it in those plain words, but that's kind of what I got from it. And the Bloomberg report about the company-wide meeting on Friday described it as an hour-long pep talk.

And there still was an element of defensiveness, I think, at least in some of the quotes from that meeting where Tim Cook said, we've rarely been first. There was a PC before the Mac. There was a smartphone before the iPhone. There were many tablets before the iPad. There was an MP3 player before the iPod. All of that is true, but at a certain point, they need to move on from using that excuse for the delays and the...

And it's clear that they weren't just holding out to see what happened in artificial intelligence and to see what the market did. It's clear that they were caught flat-footed, right? The excuse or this comparison to the iPhone, the iPod, the iPad, the Mac.

doesn't hold as much weight, I think, as maybe it does for, I don't know, something like Vision Pro even to a degree, where yes, there were AR, VR headsets before Vision Pro, but Vision Pro is different. It builds upon that experience. It's something that they've been working on for a long time. AI doesn't really fall into that category, I think. Yeah, I mean, the analogy with we've already been first, well...

It's like, yeah, we're ready to be first, but when we do do it, we're the best or at least market leading. And what they've done with Apple Intelligence so far, you can't really call it market leading, right? Right. They've already late. Because what Apple Intelligence did on device in many cases, which I guess was their small contribution, is basically what ChatGPT3 would do, right? Summarization, you know, rewriting, that kind of stuff. Basic image generation.

But that shipped at the end of last year. They were already not first, right? Track GPT was what? Three was what? 2022? So they're now even later than really they should be on some of this more advanced stuff. The biggest... gaping hole right now is like siri versus voice mode and equivalent features on open ai and everybody else right where they are now just getting embarrassed because you can have like a ongoing human conversation with an app

you downloaded from the App Store, but the inbuilt system assistant is just kind of stupid. They've acknowledged it's kind of stupid. And they're going to make it better, but they're already going to be late. And I think arguably it's unclear right now whether when they do deliver whatever they deliver, is it going to be market leading or is it just going to be like, you know, chasing the tail of the people in front? We don't know.

probably closer to the, you know, the less impressive version, at least right now. But I do think they have some opportunity to meld in all the personal context stuff, right? Still, like even today...

Other players like Google are getting better at it, but it doesn't feel anywhere near as integrated as the kind of vision Apple showed at last WWC for Apple Intelligence. So if they can ship that, plus make a more competitive voice system in general, I do think they have a bit of an edge. And Craig...

Federighi kind of discusses this a bit in this employee-wide meeting as well where he talked about embedding it in our devices as well as using server infrastructure so kind of the combo approach and he even said something like

the the first approach where we tried to do a hybrid right where they had the you know version a and version b and they kind of lived alongside each other the series didn't work but now what we're working on has made us better than ever and we're going to be able to ship something even beyond our original target

So they're kind of amped up about it, at least in their PR speak, right? So I'm hopeful that they're regrouping and what they eventually ship next year will be up to scratch. But I don't think the analogy to... the Mac and the iPhone really applies, right? Because if they had sat on the sidelines and then brought out something that no one else was doing or was clearly the best, you could use that analogy. But right now...

Tim Cook's thrown that analogy just in the sense that, yeah, we weren't first, but that's not good enough, right? Like, it's very easy not to be first. You also have to be good. And I don't think all parts of intelligence are bad. Like, some parts are. Clearly an improvement. The best example is PhotoSearch. PhotoSearch on an Apple Intelligence-enabled device is way better than what they shipped before. But if you look at it in the context of the AI industry...

you know, they're flagging a bit and we're seeing brain drain and we're seeing issues and there's been internal scaffolds about, you know, resourcing and money and stuff. And so the combination of this kind of pep talk and the earnings call was kind of like saying, yeah.

We did kind of muck up a little bit on our strategy. We're more aligned now to a more traditional AI approach, which means we're spending more money. One thing I saw some people suggest, though, is that even if Apple throws... billions of dollars at this problem, the one thing they're still going to run into is the fact that their approach to privacy just is fundamentally incompatible with how you need to create artificial intelligence technologies.

regardless of how much money they throw at it, that is going to be the bottleneck that they run into, and that that is potentially even a driving force behind some of these people leaving Apple's foundation models team for meta and open AI and elsewhere.

so they can create this technology without having to work around those guardrails. Do you think that's a fundamental problem? How do they get around that? Well, their proposed solution was that... The device would collect the relevant information from your phone when you asked a relevant request, and then it would send that information to private car compute, and then it would be analyzed.

in their kind of logless private cloud compute world and then you get an encrypted response back, right? So that was kind of their proposed solution before. Having higher privacy standards definitely makes this stuff more complicated and harder because...

It's a lot easier if you can just have a database with all your information slubbed into it and then they can just freely access it at any time and get you information and do work on your behalf while your phones and devices are turned off, right? You see this in the app intelligence story right now.

Watches, HomePods, Apple TV, they have no Apple Internet story because they don't do any on-device processing, right? Whereas if you look at OpenAI, what do they ship? They ship an app that basically just talks to a server. There's no on-device. element to it at all. So it's all stored in the server and it's definitely not all stored in an end-to-end encrypted fashion because that's not how it works. So 100% privacy is an issue, right? And I think we've already seen Apple...

waver slightly on some of the principles and that and i think part of this re regrouping they're going to waver even more and give you an option right it's going to be like do you want to share your data with us to do this x and y and 99 people just say yes because they just want the features and but They are going to continue to have a higher privacy standard than competitors, and that will impair some functionality, for sure. But as it stands right now, there is a huge chasm.

of ai functionality that they could ship without any need for personal data or privacy world knowledge does not require personal private data right world knowledge is just about slurping up wikipedia and as much as the open web as you can and then putting that into a big model that can provide answers. And what was their line up until now? It's been, we don't care about world knowledge, we'll just defer to ChatGPT for that. I don't think that's the case anymore.

Does that have any privacy implications at all? Right. No. And speaking of all of this, Bloomberg also reports that Apple is developing its own LLM AI answers engine. So this is a team. called Answers, Knowledge, and Information, led by our old friend, Robbie Walker, the guy who was previously in charge of Siri, who had that stripped away from him and given to Mike Rockwell. So he's back from the dead working on this team.

Bloomberg describes it as a system capable of crawling the web to respond to general knowledge questions. And Apple is currently developing it as a separate app. but obviously I think at least the end result here is this gets integrated into the existing Siri experience in one way or another. This whole project, I think, is such a stark comparison to how Apple has publicly talked about chatbots.

And this is something that they've been doing for several years at this point. They've been saying people want AI in other ways than just a simple app where you talk to it and you talk to it to give you answers. They want something that's proactive, intelligent. goes out and does things on your behalf. While I think people want all of those things, I think people also do want a chatbot. And that's why chat should be TSO popular. Even as recently.

as WWDC. I think it was the Joanna Stern interview, and I'm pretty sure it was Greg Joswiak, who again was like, who wants a chatbot? That's one form of talking to AI, but what people really want is X, Y, and Z, the stuff we're working on but haven't shipped yet. This report from Bloomberg suggests that at least internally or within one team inside Apple, they're finally getting to the point of recognizing that we can do all this other stuff, but also give people a chatbot they can talk to.

Yeah, and it might not even be exposed as a chatbot, right? But they're just collecting basically the data you need or the models that power a chatbot experience are kind of what you need just to power. a trivia answering experience right you don't have to present it in the same way um and i think in the long long term ui will come back in a form where

Not every interaction you do with your computer is going to have a text box that you talk to, right, or voice dictation. There's going to be buttons and toolbars and things like that, right, which... But I think it's going to be more like the AI will on the fly generate you the toolbar that you need for the current task.

An open in a text box is suboptimal, but right now it's the best expression we have for accessing the power of these models. And Apple does not give you access to any of these models themselves in any way, shape or form. So everybody uses chatbots.

And chatbots have been quite popular. And what is Siri? In many ways, it's a chatbot, right? What did they even do as part of the Apple Intelligence launch? They did type to Siri, which kind of made it look even more like a chatbot. It just doesn't work like a chatbot. So they've got to reconcile that.

And the way they're going to reconcile that is they're going to give it more chatbot-like features. And this, hopefully, is them admitting all that world knowledge stuff, we can't just palm it off to a third party. We are actually going to have to do at least some of it ourselves. And hopefully this project will turn into that, right? And that's part of what I think...

Craig Federighi is getting at when he's talking about oh now we've regrouped on Siri what we're going to deliver is something even more than what we originally promised because what they originally promised was on-screen awareness and personal context right

But what people want from a voice assistant is also the ability to just ask any question you can think of and get a decently cogent answer out of it. Something that chatbots like ChatGP2 do exceedingly well and Siri does not. You can already ask Siri random trivia questions.

In most cases, it won't give you an answer at all. In some cases, it will give you a snippet from a web result, right? You just want it to be able to answer more of those questions, ideally all of them, right, in a decent way where it can give you the answer, maybe give you some references and sources. And I think...

That is kind of where they're going with this answers project. I agree with you. It doesn't need to be a standalone app. It will be exposed through voice assistants. It will be exposed through... Like when you go in Safari and you can type in the bar and it gives you some of those like top hit answers. You could just directly give you AI generated answers in there. And this would be a server thing that runs on a server. It doesn't need any local processing, which then means it can also run.

on the TV, on the HomePod, right? All these things which are just open-ended voice experiences. You want to ask questions and get answers. I literally had my family around at the weekend. We were talking about F1 and Japan and stuff. And they want to know where was the Japan circuit for F1 in the country. They're like, so they asked the home pod that was in the room, you know, where is the F1 circuit in Japan? And it said, it can't help me. Or it said...

I can search the web for that. Ask me again on your iPhone. I just know if there was an actual LLM power in that version of Siri, it could give you a paragraph worth of a decent answer and tell you exactly where it was, right? So that's what they need to deliver.

And I think they are actually working on it. They're going to be late to the pie, but I think they're actually going to do it. All right. I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple Podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review. Find an ad-free version of the show with bonus content each and every week at 9to5mac.com slash join for $5 a month or $50 a year. Send us feedback happyhour at 9to5mac.com.

I am on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? At BZA Mayo. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.