New iPad Pro leaks, Powerbeats Fit, notification summary UI oddities

Mayo, you know that I'm always down to talk baseball on this podcast and you've actually added something baseball related to the show notes. Oh no, I've set you off. But honestly, if there's ever a week where I didn't want to talk baseball, it's this week. because the Cincinnati Reds made the playoffs. They backed into a playoff spot somehow, played the Dodgers in a best-of-three game series, and they were eliminated last night. So my baseball hiatus is about to begin.

I'm exhausted from watching this baseball team. This is an episode two where I wish you knew just enough about baseball where I could rant to you about some of the mistakes the Reds made. Need to have like John Gruber or Jason Snell on the show just so we can talk about baseball for a bit. Was it bad? It was bad. It was very bad. Have you seen the IT crowd? The IT crowd? It's a UK sitcom.

No, I did not recognize this. I'm ashamed of not. Well, an awful display was on last night. That's a reference. Okay, reference not acknowledged. Yeah, exactly. But the baseball thing that you added to the show notes is actually pretty cool. It's that Apple used iPhones to shoot some footage for Friday Night Baseball the past two weeks of games.

So the first time they did it, they didn't advertise it to anybody. They just kind of did it in secret using iPhone 17 Pros around the stadium to get certain shots in certain angles. Then presumably that test went well. So they announced formally that they were going to use iPhones to shoot at the Tigers and Red Sox game. This was last Friday. That game on Apple TV Plus, Friday Night Baseball. The last Friday Night Baseball of the season, right?

By all indications, it seems like it was a success. They had iPhone 17 Pros placed in four different spots throughout Fenway Park, including right inside the dugout and on the green monster in left field, which, sidebar, When you got the embargo on this, you first immediately texted me, what is a green monster?

When they told me, they were like, we put an iPhone on the green monster. I was like, okay. You know why they did the Red Sox, though? It's because Phil Schiller is a huge Red Sox fan, so he was probably in cahoots on that one.

Have you seen, by the way, have you seen Phil Schiller popping off on Sora? He made, yes, he made a video of himself. He's made like 10. There's one, speaking of the Red Sox, there's one where the caption is like, a young Phil Schiller playing for the Boston Red Sox or something. But yes, he's always the first to jump on new social media. He was on Mastodon. He was on Instagram Radio, right? Yeah. He's on Threads. He follows me on Blue Sky for whatever reason. But anyway.

Yeah, this shot on iPhone stuff at Friday Night Baseball is pretty impressive, I think. Yeah, I mean, it's just a fun ad right at the end of the day. But they did it. They did it not last week, the week before. And the footage was actually shown on the broadcast. They just didn't tell anybody it was iPhone footage. And then this week, they obviously made a big PR play for it. And when the iPhone shots were on screen, they put like a shot on iPhone logo in the corner.

of the of the screen to obviously because it's advertising um but the quality of the footage looks pretty good i mean i i think some people are being a bit superlative and be like this looks identical to the you know the other broadcast cameras they use and i'm like

I think if you look close enough, you don't have the same depth of field. It's not quite the same quality. If the iPhones were that good, they use them for every camera in the stadium. And they use them for four, not 40 or whatever it is. And the iPhones are being used for...

simpler shots than what the other cameras are being used for track. The other cameras are used for tracking fly balls, doing up close shots on the picture, like all of that more intense stuff where the iPhones, at least the clips I saw were kind of more like stag.

static yeah that's a good word i think one was on a roaming rig but yeah they can't use it for the shots where you like hit the baseball and it flies across the stadium because you need someone to be like actively zooming right with 100x range and obviously the iphone doesn't provide that um

But nevertheless, it's a good demo and a good show-off. And if they didn't put the Shot on iPhone moniker on it, I think it would have just been accepted and people would have, no, no, no, that's cool. And I was quite happy that it seems like they didn't reuse... Like all the equipment they used was pretty commercial. So they just had like a lens and they used the Blackmagic camera dock, which you can buy and it's like $250. And they had, you know, some cables and stuff and the iPhone.

But it wasn't like they were then using like 50 grand rigs, you know, to make the iPhones work. It was relatively bare bones. Obviously, it's all going into a very expensive mixer and all this other stuff. As a demonstration, I thought it was pretty nice. And I was kind of expecting them to do like a follow-up ad or a video about it, like behind the scenes of Friday Night Baseball shot on iPhone like a couple of days after, but they didn't do that.

They did provide us with some nice photos. So you can see it in the story of what it looks like. Are they going to do it? Is this going to become a regular staple? Like 2025 or 2026? Are they going to do it? I don't know. But it was a cool one off at least. Well, we still don't even know if Friday Night Baseball is necessarily coming back for 2026. We're still waiting.

We're still waiting on the official rights announcements from MLB about who's getting what for next year with the ESPN deal imploding. And there was that one report that said Apple was going to bail altogether on baseball. Then there's been some follow-up reporting saying that that's not true.

It seems like they're not going to get the Sunday night games, but they're going to carry on doing Friday Night Baseball. Seems to be the latest consensus from the Roman Mill on that. But yeah, it was a cool little stunt that they did. I was annoyed that you got the briefing on the baseball topic and not me.

Because you told me you had a briefing about something to do with Friday Night Baseball. I said, oh, that sounds more up my alley than the guy who doesn't know what the green monster is. Anyway. You spotted something or realized something in the Messages app. I think now that you have a main daily phone that you're using that has Apple intelligence support, specifically when it comes to the summaries feature in the Messages app, right?

Yeah. I mean, I guess like in the back of my head, I've noticed this before, but it's never quite the same when you're compared to doing it on test devices, right? And even the message app on the laptop does it as well. And obviously I have an M1 Mac, so it does it on there.

you mostly message on your phone and now i've been living with the iphone air i'm upgrading from the 14 pro so now i'm actually using notification summaries on the regular uh the thing that kind of like is a bit jarring is that if you have a like if you send me three messages in a row It's probably going to summarize it, right? And it cuts the little summary on the label on the cell of your name. But then as soon as you click on it...

it gets rid of it. So like, if I see a little summary, I click on it. I don't answer. I don't even type anything. And then I just press back. It then deletes the summary and just replaces it with the text of the last message that was sent. And it's just a bit...

odd like i quite regularly will like look at a conversation and they're like okay i'm gonna answer that later so then i'll go back but you just lose the continuity because the summary changes it's the mail app doesn't do it right the mail app summaries

It summarized the email. You click on the email. You read the email if you want to. You go back. It doesn't just delete the summary the moment you clicked on the conversation. But for some reason, the Messages app does. It's very odd. The one that gets me that relates to that is if you... Are in a conversation in the Messages app. Then you leave the Messages app to go do something else. But that conversation keeps going, specifically in a group chat. You go back to the Messages app.

It takes you right back to that conversation, right? And if you go back to the main view of the messages app, that thread has been marked as red or whatever. So you never see a summary for that conversation.

which happened to me yesterday when I'm in a group chat with my sisters and we were talking about something. Then they started going on a side conversation about something I didn't care about, so I left the chat. I would have liked to come back and see a summary of that, but not possible with the current interface. Yeah, because the summary is only shown the list view, right? Like if you're in the conversation thread, you almost need it. You know, they have that...

Little Arrow, they added a couple of releases ago where if there's a bunch of messages overnight and you go back in the conversation, it has like a little arrow which can like take you to the last unread message.

That arrow should maybe have like the little summary text attached to it or you like tap on the arrow and then it tells you a summary of the messages that come after. Because I actually get quite a lot of value out of notification summaries. Yeah. I'm certainly not going to turn them off.

They're at best harmless in my... experience and in some cases quite useful like if you know it makes more sense for group chats than individual chats but still it works and especially on the the watch funnily i know it's like an iphone feature but it mirrors the summaries to the watch In like my Facebook Messenger group chat, you know, there's messages in there all the time.

The summary comes to the watch and it's like at the very top when you get the little bundle of notifications on the watch face, you know, in the notification center on the watch, it'll put the summary at the very top and multiple times since getting the iPhone Air now, I haven't actually needed to like scroll.

with the digital crown on my watch to read all the messages because I just relied on the summary being good enough. I'm like, okay, I know what people are talking about. I can figure that out later on. So yeah, I get value out of notification summaries, but they almost need to like show them more.

more prominently especially in the messages app because like you say you're in a conversation with a group of people you tap into the conversation the summary's gone and you can't get it back it's just a very it almost feels a bit like hacked on or something like they

you know, the system just doesn't, it doesn't work the way you would intuitively expect it to. It's like doing a delete behavior where you don't expect a deletion to happen. So hopefully they can improve on that. But that was just something that kind of stuck out to me now that I've actually been using the...

I phone out full time for a couple of weeks. But you have the summaries on, right? I do. And one thing I was just trying to figure out, unless I'm forgetting it, is you don't see summaries on threads that you have pinned in the Messages app either, do you?

See, I don't use pinned messages. Let me see. I probably have. I believe you're correct because there's no place in the UI to show them. Yeah. No, I don't see them. And I have an unread group message right there. Yeah. So they want you to use pinned messages and then they don't add the feature to pinned messages.

It's one of the examples about some of the user interface elements of Apple intelligence that just don't click right with me. And I think a lot of people, writing tools is the other big example of that. I think writing tools as a feature is great. It's just as good as a lot of other LLM grammatical tools. But the interface just isn't meant for working with big...

large amounts of text and it's just an example of the interface not catching up with the power of the feature. It's almost like this is the prototype version, you know? Yeah. But this has behaved like this since it came out with iOS 18.2. um which is now what a year ago so they haven't changed it and i think it's got quite a lot of value um the i don't i think at the moment i

put on the summaries for every application. Like I just did all categories just to try it out. That's what I do. I don't get, I turn off quite aggressively notifications for a lot of apps anyway. So some apps I just don't get them for. But I haven't yet hit a summary where I'm like, this is just actively bad. But I'd probably eventually turn some of them off. But it's most useful for the group chat context.

I also have the priority notifications thing turned on. Oh, I hate that feature. Nope. So I'm probably going to turn that one off. Yeah. I actually think it does a decent job at like picking out.

notifications that are more important than other ones but i human curate my notifications quite aggressively so it's kind of redundant for me But if I'm thinking of a regular user who just like presses yes on notifications for every single app, this might be a way to kind of get out of notification bankruptcy for them instead of having to like go into that list of 300 apps and then manually sort it out, sort them out.

Because you could just be like, okay, only receive, set your focus mode so you get the intelligence breakthrough for the prior notifications and nothing else. And I actually think it does a decent job at like siphoning the, what's the phrase? The chaff from the...

something from the something there's some phrase about siphoning the chaff or something anyway basically getting the good stuff and borrowing the bad stuff yeah that you don't care about um so yeah i was relatively impressed with it but If you've already gone through the effort of painstakingly tweaking your notification settings to reach your life, then you don't really need it. The animation's cool, though. It's got a cool effect on the lock screen.

I am meticulous about which apps can send notifications. Then I also use focus modes on top of that, which obviously further gives me the flexibility to control what notifications I see at what time of day. So no real use for priority notifications for me either. I think if you're a brand new user to the ecosystem, they should have it turned on and it should be the default for the Apple Watch. Because I think you get so much...

more benefit of the Apple Watch by having less things. Like if you have every single thing buzz your wrist, then it becomes like unwieldy, untenable, and people just hate their watches. This is a good automatic default.

um that they should employ at the moment i think they're a bit hesitant to do that because obviously the watch can't do pro notifications independently it has to rely on the iphone to sort it out but in the fullness of time they'll be able to you know rectify that and then i think it's a decent system

But it is one of those features that the first time somebody misses the notification because that feature is on by default, they're going to be very frustrated and they're going to turn it off altogether. The first time it fails, people will give up.

But I guess on the iPhone, like even if you don't, you can do it so that it doesn't like... actively not send you notifications at all right it just puts the ones that are most important in a separate group at the top and then you can still scroll down and see the rest of them which i guess is the current default so it's less aggressive than like actively blocking them out obviously if you go into the reduce interruptions focus mode

or you turn on the intelligent breakthrough stuff manually, then it is obviously pruning. But the default is quite safe. And we are what now? A couple of weeks after the 26th release and the BBC hasn't got mad yet that they turned the notification summaries back on. Do I think they've changed the models in a different way since...

This all blew up? Not really, but... Well, they've certainly made them less aggressive in summarizing, I think. I think when it gets confused now, it just kind of gives you a list of names from notifications... of people mentioned in the... It loves a semicolon, yeah. Yeah, yes. It just says like pronoun, semicolon, pronoun, semicolon, pronoun. But yeah, I am getting value out of notification summaries in general. There's just some weird...

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It's been a big week in your house this week, right, Mayo? Because your vacuum has gotten an update with Matter support. So it's a bit... So it had Matter 1.2 or whatever before. That's right, yeah. Now it's got Matter 1.4. And it's...

And it's a surprisingly big improvement, I think. It actually makes, I don't know how much of it is necessarily related to the additional features you get from 1.2. Maybe they've just been working on the firmware for a few more months. It feels a bit more baked now.

I mean, this is the SwitchBot S10 vacuum system, home vacuum and mop thing. And it was one of the first ones that rolled out MatterSupport to work in the Home app, right? So it appears in Apple Home. There are other options on the market now for sure. But this is the one that I have. They sent it to me. They were very nice about that. When the initial matter integration came out, though, yes, the vacuum did appear as a tile in the home app. And yes, you could click on it and start a session.

But you know how something just doesn't quite feel like it's synchronized properly. It's a bit creaky. It's a bit slow to respond. It's a bit glitchy. It was definitely in that camp. And I'm not sure whether it was Matters full, whether it was Switchboxes full, whether it's some overlap of the two. But with this new firmware update that has come out, the performance of it is way faster.

It works better. It feels more like a native HomeKit accessory in general. It just, you know, the responsiveness you get or you expect, it's just there now where it wasn't before. And I get some new features like in the Home app, you can now choose the room regions for the vacuum to go into.

You get a few more options in terms of like picking the speeds and picking the settings, which you couldn't really do before. You had to use the third part. You have to do that. But now you can do it inside the home app. And one thing that really got on my nerves was... I would ask the HomePod, start the vacuum, right? And it would do it before.

But the top of the HomePod would glow for like five seconds while the vacuum is now off and starting, right? You can hear the fans starting to go and it's starting to clean. And then after about five seconds, the HomePod would go, sorry, your accessory is taking a while to respond.

Even though it's often doing it, right? It's in operation. It's doing exactly what I asked it to. But for whatever reason, the reply response wasn't making its way through the... the protocol and then so the home pod wouldn't know that the vacuum had understood and was actually doing it with the 1.4 update it just start the vacuum off it goes and it shuts up immediately

So that's just an example of the kind of weird bugginess of the integration that isn't there anymore. So it makes it a lot more of a solid recommendation. And I'll probably write about it on the site sometime this month. Because it actually feels like proper now. There are still, to be fair, there's still a couple of buttons in the home app integration that's exposed to the home app that don't work. Like there's a...

The one that's like play sound to locate me is a button that appears in the home app, but you click on it and nothing happens. This was the same on the older software as well. And I've Googled it and loads of people have this problem. Not just with the SwitchBot one, with the other one. you know, Roborock and other manufacturers too. I don't know whether it's Apple's fault or Matter's fault or who's fault, but the button shows up and it doesn't do anything.

And then on the old integration, the return to dock button also wouldn't work in the home app. It would show it there at the bottom, but you click on it and the vacuum would just ignore it. On the 1.4 version, the return to dock button does work. That's good. That's an important feature, I feel like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So obviously you could do it through the switchboard app, right? And my big question now, though, is that I don't know what voice commands the Siri implementation supports.

because it's a vacuum and a mop i've called it a vacuum in the app in the home app and i can say start the vacuum but like it doesn't go into the mop mode like i don't know what i can say to it to make it do stuff you know apart from start and stop which is a limitation. And I think there are commands I can use. There's more voice commands you could ask it.

But Apple has no documentation anywhere on the kind of things you're meant to be able to ask it and find out what happens. Like in this 1.4 update, the home app will show the different zones of the house where the vacuum's mapped it out. And so you can like in the UI, check the boxes and say, I only want you to vacuum.

vacuum and mop in this room in this room again functionality that was previously only available through the proprietary app and i'm sure if i know the right incantation you could probably get to do it with a voice as well but i i haven't figured it out and There's nowhere I can look to find it. There's no list of all the possible home app commands for the matter accessories. So one day I'm going to say something and it's going to...

figure it out. But until then, I just kind of either stick to what I know or I take random stabs in the dark until we find out what things I can do with my voice. So are you mainly using the HomeKit integration just for voice control with the HomePods and Siri? Yeah. You're not doing much with automations or manual control in the home app? No. Not because you couldn't, just because I don't really know what I want. I don't vacuum or mop on a regular basis.

Well, that's the point of having somebody or something do it for you. You should set a schedule. Yeah, but it feels a bit wasteful to be like... Yeah, I guess you don't have like pets or anything. Yeah, exactly. So obviously I live in the living room, right? And obviously one of the problems with robot vacuums is they can't climb stairs. So it's confined to the downstairs spaces, which is like the living room in the kitchen, right? And the entrance.

and stuff and so i'm in there all the time if i think it's dirty i'll go i'll say start the vacuum or click the button in the home app right uh i haven't really found a thing where i'm like every monday at this time i want you to do it on schedule because you know what if i'm not home what if i'm doing a call and it's too loud because it gets quite noisy or whatever so yeah that kind of stuff i haven't fully like figured out what would match with my lifestyle really.

And the proprietary SwitchBot app has even more complicated and fine-grained schedules you can set up and, you know, it has all these different features, but I don't use any of them either. Not because it couldn't do it, just because I haven't figured out what I actually want it to do. So, yeah, I just tell it on command and it takes, you know...

two seconds as I'm walking through the kitchen to talk to the homeboy in the kitchen, be like, vacuum, please, you know, and then off it goes. And still, even with a robot vacuum...

okay you know less often but you still kind of have to go around with the vacuum as well just because there's bits and little corners it doesn't quite pick up or certain dust and stuff it's never going to get or you know surfaces it's never going to dust down whereas you can take the wireless vacuum cleaner i've got and just you know

do it manually but it definitely helps in the mopping i never mop the floor ever now you get a nice shiny wood wooden floor and stuff so yeah i'm happy with it but yeah i don't really use any of the automation side of life

I've been telling Emily that now that there's proper HomeKit support for some of these that I'd like to get one and try it out. And she is not on board with the idea of a robot vacuum. And I think that's rooted in the fact that we had one from a brand called Neato. In like 2020, I think. And their unique selling point at the time was that they supported shortcuts. So there wasn't HomeKit integration, but you could kind of automate things to a degree with your voice using shortcuts.

That feature worked pretty well, but the overall reliability of the vacuum was just not very good. It would get stuck, it would. just kind of go into a corner and just start banging its head into the wall, basically. It had the Siri integration down to an impressive degree, but the actual robot vacuum functionality wasn't there. And they actually, I think I was just looking it up, Neato is out of business now.

That says a lot. Not very neato anymore. Not very neato. Yeah, I mean, even the latest generation ones, they still have those kind of problems on occasion. And I've had it where it all like...

suck up something that it's not meant to but then it knows that it sucked it up but it can't it can't get rid of it so it like then freezes and it's like i need a i need help there's a tang my tangle sensors going off so this is another reason why i don't do all automations because you don't really want it to do it when you're not at home

just in case you've accidentally left. Like one time it got my shoelaces off my, you know, shoes. And it's like, having a, you know, it's alarms going off, but like... there's a tangle you go and you pull your shoelace back out the thing um and so now strategically the shoes are put in a slightly different place and you can like yeah zone out an error in the map and you know do all that kind of stuff

So it doesn't replace the need for manual vacuuming and you do still have to be like the nanny of it. But there's definitely times, you know, I'm working up here. I just say, okay, I know the kitchen's a bit dirty. I just set it off for half an hour and it can wash them up my floors for me. If you've got like flat, lower floor, like flat, like ground floor area, in my experience, it works pretty well. If you've got kids and they put in loads of like toys and stuff all the time, it'll...

It does a pretty good job of navigating around everything. But, you know, like if there's a circular object. it can kind of work around it in like a hexagon. So there's still going to be gaps and stuff. And obviously you still want to actually clean the bit of the floor that something is obscured by. So if you're doing it manually, you'd first remove the rubbish from the floor and then do it. This just has to like work around it.

But it won't like bang into stuff. Like it won't like, you know, get confused or get lost. You can kind of pick it up and drop it and it figures out, I think it has LiDAR on it. So it kind of figures out where it is. Yeah. And if you like, I have a conservatory.

but obviously the conservative door's not always open. And it can, like, the LiDAR can see through the, like, the glass of the windows. So, like, it knows it's all in there. But some days it can't actually get in there and other days it can. And so if you go in the SwitchBot app, it will show you where it's been and where it can't access right now and stuff. So obviously, it's still a very basic robot, but it is a robot and it does help.

Yeah, they're tempting because we have dogs and they do shed. So we have to vacuum a couple few times a week. But at the same time, you wonder if having dogs that shed, there's a lot of dog hair, if that would make it struggle more. And the fact that there's dog toys laying around. And just the fact that the dogs themselves would theoretically have to be locked in another room while it was vacuuming. Because they would try to.

Attack the moving thing on the floor. Like one of our neighbors has a, like a, like a robot vacuum, but for a lawnmower, like a robot lawnmower thing that looks just like a Roomba or whatever, but it mows the lawn. And the other day I was out walking Blake and she, we were just peacefully walking. And all of a sudden she goes berserk, starts barking, starts pulling, starts lunging. And I'm like, what is happening? Or like, is there another dog? Are we about to like.

Is the world ending? No, she was trying to attack that person's robot lawnmower. So that's probably reason enough for us not to even try a robot vacuum.

New Beats headphones this week. This is always fun. The Power Beats Fit. These are the follow-up to the Beats Fit Pro that first launched in 2022.

The big news here, I think, is not necessarily any of the changes to the design or new features. It's that they've rebranded them from the Beats Fit Pro to the Powerbeats Fit. That probably signals... A combination of maybe the Beats Fit Pro branding never really clicked with people, but also the power of the Powerbeats brand name, especially with the revitalized Powerbeats Pro that launched in February.

Because if you look at the new features of the PowerBeats Fit, they're focused a lot on improving the comfort compared to the Fit Pro. Beat says the wingtips are 20% more flexible. So hopefully they'll fit people better than before because the fit of the power beats fit is that they don't have ear hooks that go over your ears, but they have a small wing tip design where that wing tip goes like.

inside right above your ear canal basically it's a unique fit and i think it works well for people who don't want the ear hook design but there definitely were some fit complaints about the first version so Ideally, this more flexible wingtip design will help. Otherwise though, everything is largely the same as the Beats Fit Pro. Still has the H1 chip from Apple.

Same battery life at six hours with ANC or seven hours without. Charging case is a bit smaller, but still gets you a total of 30 hours on a charge. Four colors, jet black, gravel gray, power pink, and spark orange to match your iPhone. But yeah, I think the new name here is kind of the most interesting change.

Is Powerbeats like a big brand? Is that why they've done this? I think it's really big in the hardcore fitness community, especially. I mean, the original Powerbeats Pro were so popular, like beloved, and they went so long without an update. It kind of reminds me of Apple trying to abandon the MacBook Air name. They didn't recognize the brand power of the MacBook Air, and I think Beats ran into something similar with the Powerbeats brand name.

And it just makes it look like you have a more cohesive product line, too, because Beats makes so many headphones, so many different shapes and sizes. Having the Powerbeats Pro and now the Powerbeats Fit has two options in. the category of earbuds that have something additional to keep them in your ears. So better for high intensity sports. I think that makes sense. Yeah, it's clever, but it's basically just.

A name change, right? A name change, yeah. It's like the AirPods Max. Still the old chip inside. No new software features, really. Comes in orange. Comes in orange. I got the orange once in. for review yesterday and it matches perfectly with the iphone 17 pro yes you had that photo right where you had the those were the power beats pro okay that's the power beats right okay but the beats i forget i forget that

headphone manufacturers can possibly make more than one color or something. I know, it's revolutionary thinking. You're telling me that Beats had made orange headphones like a year ago? Headphones only come in white and that's it. Unless you get the headphones that they don't care about, then they come in like five colors. None of which are black still. But yeah, basically just like a branding update.

They obviously come on the heels of AirPods Pro 3 too. Mayo, you put in our note here that you've seen some reports on Reddit particularly where AirPods Pro 3 are kind of divisive in terms of how they fit. The AirPods subreddit is not happy.

Really? Yeah. There is a lot more complaining than you would think. Because the change in fit, like we talked about it, is not drastic, I don't think. Like the overall shape is still... mostly the same the difference is the tips are angled a little bit differently and The tips have the foam infusion on the inside. Those are the two big changes, which I wouldn't think would be enough to really frustrate people. But I guess I'm wrong. I have seen dozens of subreddit threads.

on the AirPods subreddit of people saying they've tried AirPods 3, they hurt too much, they're returning them. Wow. Loads. And you then have a Venn diagram of people who also don't like how they sound. People don't like the...

The high vibrancy of them or whatever, the different sound signature. Then there's a load of people saying, well, if you change this set and this set and turn off headphone accommodations and then do this, that fixes those problems. There's also some people that are moaning about the hissiness of transparency mode.

I've seen that. I have not experienced that at all. Yeah, but the number one complaint I've seen is definitely about fit. More people than I thought have upgraded from AirPods Pro 2 or AirPods Pro 1 and been like, I don't like how these feel.

Interesting. I don't know whether the foam earbuds, like for some people, take a while to adjust your ears. Like, do you get used to it? If you've been living with silicone tip ones for... five years you know and then you put these in and then maybe they're a bit bigger and then it takes a few days for your ears to like adjust and you get happy with them but a lot of returns on the airpods subreddit for sure

I have definitely seen some people say that the fit gets better in the first week or two. Like I know on upgrade last week, Jason Snell and Mike Hurley were complaining. Their first impressions of AirPods Pro 3 were.

Pretty negative, I think. Okay, if you take the upgrade opinion from last week, that's like on the regular on the Apple. But I was going to say, this week they both seem to be coming around to the new design and saying that it works better for them and they've gotten used to it after a week.

I guess it's kind of like, maybe it's like when you get a new pair of shoes and initially you're like, oh, I don't know if these fit quite right. And then you break them in. Yeah. Yeah. Like maybe that's the foam aspect of it. That's weird though. Cause for me it was instantly better. And it seemed like for most, if not all, of the people who reviewed them under embargo, it was at least the same, if not better. Yeah. It is interesting, though, in terms of how they...

how Apple is balancing the fit versus wanting to improve noise cancellation. Like they clearly thought the trade-off of maybe making some people mad by slightly changing the fit was worth it to improve ANC. For me, that's a... That's the proper trade-off, but again, that's because they feel great in my ears, and that's apparently not the case for everyone. It's interesting as well that with AirPods non-pros...

When they did the AirPods 3, which had that quite dramatically different design to the AirPods 1 and 2, the AirPods 2 actually kept being sold, right? And there were quite a few number of people like, I don't like heavy AirPods Pro 3. They fall out my ears. But...

They carried on selling AirPods 2 for a long time, so it didn't really matter. Maybe they've considered doing that as well for the 3s, and then you could have like a series, and you could just choose the one that fits you best. I don't know, but maybe they didn't anticipate there'd be... And maybe it's not that many people. Maybe it's just the vocal minority. But I promise you, my algorithm on Reddit app is full of people complaining about the AirPods 3. I wonder if they could sell separate...

that you could attach to the new AirPods Pro design, but maybe those ear tips don't have foam. Because I would imagine that it's not the angle at which the earbuds sit now, but more so the foam that's frustrating people. I don't know. I just opened the Reddit app while we were talking four hours ago. Another AirPods Pro 3 return. That's a post. That's about the fit. AirPods pre whistling sounds. AirPods 3 ANC problems. AirPods Pro 3 returns.

AirPods 3 don't cancel noise. AirPods 3 not connecting. Honestly, you'd be surprised. We saw the initial reviews come out, and obviously you did your coverage as well, and pretty positive universally, right? I'm sure the products... Great overall too, but there was a lot more dissent than I expected from the Reddit at least. Yeah. I guess it's a highly personal thing, how something fits in your ear. So it's...

And AirPods Pro Fit hasn't changed in generation one or generation two. So it's been the same since, what, 2019? Is that when the first AirPods Pro came out? Mm-hmm. So the first change at all to the form factor since then, you're bound to upset some people. But this is a lot of reports, more than I would have expected. Finally this week, Happy Hour is brought to you by Square. Square is the business tool trusted by over 4 million sellers around the world.

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It's kind of crazy that we're about to talk about a story like this again for the second time in a year. Because remember last year, an unboxing video of the M4 MacBook Pro leaked on YouTube before it was even announced? And now this year, that same YouTuber has somehow obtained the M5 iPad Pro. which hasn't been announced, and posted a full unboxing video this week. And do you remember what the big thing was about, like, Sherlock Holmes in the Map of Pro League last year?

And I'm pretty sure I was on this camp too. I said, this can't be real because the wallpaper on the box is the same. And what did they do? They came out with a new map of ProVision with the exact same wallpaper. And what is this? It's an M5 iPad Pro with the exact same wallpaper.

Yep. And now we trust this guy too. So there's no reason to think this isn't true. Even though if you put the M4 and the M5 iPad Pro right side by side by each other, don't think you could tell a difference. Unless you can see the second camera, right? Which is a big sticking point because that's something Mark Gurman reported was in development. And this video, if there's a second camera there, this video makes no mention of it. And you can't tell based on looking at the product.

I think the second camera is there. You do? I'm skeptical. It's hard to tell, but I think... Someone, some other Russian person got it as well. Yes. And they had a slightly different video with a slightly clearer photo of the second camera. I think that video insinuated that it's not a second camera, but more so some sort of second sensor for like desk view or something.

Well, what does DeskView do? It's a camera. I mean, kind of. I don't know. I mean, DeskView uses an ultra-wide camera, right? And it just tilts the thing. So it's going to be a FaceTime camera on the other side. Not a FaceTime. Oh, yeah, a FaceTime camera. Not a FaceID camera. Not FaceID, yeah. FaceTime. I think your face ID essentially would be more useful. Yeah, so do I. Because I think we spoke about this when Mark Gavin first reported about the two camera lens thing.

And ever since, it's annoyed me even more. The rare times I use my iPad, I always pick it up and put my fingers over the Face ID sensor. And it's always like, the face ID sensor is covered. I'm like, if it had a camera on the other side, I wouldn't have this problem. If it had a face ID sensor on the other side, it wouldn't have this problem. But that's not what this is. It's just for like doing video conferencing, right?

But yeah, the M5 iPad Pro design-wise is basically identical. The most interesting thing here is it's our first look at the M5 chip, so there's some benchmark results in the video. It has a nine-core CPU, which is the same as the M4 iPad Pro. It's around 10% faster in single-core performance and 15% faster in multi-core performance. In Geekbench testing, the Metal graphics performance is up.

38% compared to the M4. And in Antutu testing, the GPU is about 8% better. I think for the most part, that's what we've expected for the M5 chip. Yeah, because the base architecture is what you see in the A19 Pro. Yep. So if you look at the differences in the A18 Pro and the A19 Pro, you get a pretty good, you know, you can extrapolate from that to get what the M5 would be.

So yeah, this is about right. The big GPU bump is partly because of the, what do they call them, neural accelerators that they now put in all the GPU cores and stuff. And that will have an even more... exaggerated impact when you go to the Pro and the Max M5s because obviously they have a lot more GPU cores. The RAM thing here is also interesting. So right now in the M4 iPad Pro, the 256 and 512 configurations have 8 gigabytes of RAM.

and the one and two terabyte configurations have 16 gigabytes of RAM. The iPad Pro in the video is a 256 model and it has 12 gigabytes of RAM. So that signals that those two base configurations will get a slight upgrade in RAM, but still not match the most expensive one and two terabyte options.

And that kind of follows what they've done with the iPhone as well, right? Where they gave the iPhone series, apart from the base 17, a ramp bump this year as well. And obviously that carries through. Anything else on the M5 iPad Pro? I mean, this basically confirms that it's coming probably this month.

Yeah, it's got to be out soon, right? And I think, again, the most fascinating thing about this is that it's happened twice now with unreleased Apple products. The Russians are really good at leaking things that look identical to the Eurogo model. Imagine it's because the MacBook Pro and the iPad Pro are made, I think are assembled at least in Vietnam a lot. And other Apple products like the iPhone are not.

made or assembled in Vietnam. So that's the speculation I've seen about where these leaks are coming from. Is Foxconn in Vietnam somehow? Don't know if that's true. But I did see that somebody commented on this guy's video. and said, show us the new MacBook Pro next. And the channel liked the comment. So I wonder if this guy is working on his M5 MacBook Pro video now. That's funny.

But yeah, they're spec bums. Your other source for Apple leaks this week, though, the FCC here in the United States. Not right now because it's shut down. That is true. Yeah, that source is drying up as we speak. The FCC this week did publish some documents referencing unreleased model numbers for the MacBook Pro, the iPad Pro, and the Vision Pro. Again, nothing that you can discern from this other than...

further confirmation that new versions of those products are coming. Yeah, I mean, the Vision Pro had like a graphic that showed the physical design and shocker, it's the same as the first generation. But this is obviously the M4 slash M5 spec bump. And if it's hitting the FCC, Apple applied with confidentiality, but they don't put them to the FCC months ahead, right? They do them just as late as they have to. And so you have to imagine this is meant to come out.

Again, this month. There's going to be new products in October. You're going to get the iPad Pro. You're going to get a Vision Pro that everyone then, it'll give everybody a nice moment to be like, oh, Apple doesn't know what they're doing in Vision because who wants to buy this thing because it's still really expensive and all that's different is a price spec bump.

I would at least say it's better to sell something for three and a half grand with a modern CPU than a non-modern CPU. So, you know, roll it over. Unless it's the Mac Pro, apparently.

And then with the Maverick Pro, Gurman keeps saying that he doesn't know whether they're coming out now or coming out early next year. And maybe there is a latitude. But if they're on the FCC, you've got to think they're ready to go, right? Well, and Gurman reported... in power on last weekend that apple is i think he said nearing production of the new macbook pro with the m5 chip inside so well that russian youtube is nearing his video

They're coming off the production line straight on the camera. Then Gurman also said that Apple is nearing production on two new external displays for the Mac. This story continues to perplex me because we don't know... much really about what to expect from these displays, but this is now multiple times that he has confidently said there are two new models in the works.

logically you would think that maybe one is the follow-up to the studio display and one is a follow-up to the pro display xdr or maybe it's two new versions of the studio display one that's cheaper and one that's slightly higher end but not as expensive as the xdr Either way though, I think of all the rumors, the idea of new external displays from Apple is what excites me the most.

Oh, completely agree. Yeah. And German for a while, he was on about the second gen Pro Display XDR. Then those kind of reports fell off. And then he was on about the second gen Studio Display. And this newsletter, I feel like, is the first one he's been like... There's two new Mac monitors coming very soon. Like before he was kind of just like hedging. He was like, oh, maybe there's a new studio display coming. Now it's like pluralized in print. So they're doing two monitors.

Could it just be a studio display that's 27, a studio display that's 32 inches, right? Yeah. I'm kind of on... I have no idea, right? But I... kind of don't think the Pro Display XDR sells in anywhere near enough quantities for them to care about it. Yeah, what an idiot buys that. Yeah, exactly. The Pro Display XDR is firmly in the Mac Pro camp.

All our hopes for the Mac Pro have gone out the window. So are they really going to do like a whole five grand new XDR display again? Seems unlikely to me. I kind of think they're going to do like a studio display of them. Either just a studio display in a different size. Or it would be like Studio Display Pro. Yeah. And it's maybe the base one is still 60 hertz and then the higher end one gets 120 or something. Or 5K versus 6K maybe. Yeah, yeah. And it won't be...

It won't be like how the Pro Display CR has like all the different dimming zones and stuff. It'll just be like whatever the base Studio Display gets, is that what it will do? Yeah. They'll drop the weird stuff. Because the other thing with the Pro Display... it's not even that cutting edge anymore because it's so old like you can get monitors from other people that are just better and cheaper and so it's just kind of like falling out of favour even if you ignore

The insane price. Don't need to be mean. But it is 32 inches, so I'll give them that. But yeah, I could kind of see them just doing like studio display and studio display 32 inch model instead. But I'd be down. I've been waiting for the second generation Apple monitors for a long time.

Maybe not to buy one, but like to at least choose, right? This is the moment where I'm going to choose. Am I going to get an Apple monitor or am I going to get a third party monitor? And up until very recently, there weren't any compelling third party options. So are you tempted by this new LG Ultrafine 6K display that they officially put up for pre-order this week? Yes. This was the one they first showed off at CES.

or kind of showed off at CES. I don't think anybody has ever seen it, but it looks pretty good. It's a 32-inch display with a 6K resolution, the same resolution as the Pro Display XDR, so that's 218 pixels per inch. It has DisplayPort, HDMI, two Thunderbolt 5 ports, and three normal USB-C ports. It's not as advanced as the Pro Display XDR in things like brightness and HDR. Yeah, it doesn't have all the dimming zones, right? But it...

is only, quote-unquote, only $2,000 compared to the Pro Display XDR at $5,000. Yeah, this is more like a studio display, just in a 6K size. In 32-inch size, yeah. Yeah. It does take after the Pro Display XDR and the fact that it doesn't have speakers or a camera. The design is... good at least in these pictures it looks very studio display slash pro display xdr ish that's too great including the stand by the way yes yes and the stand that is fully rotatable and height and tilt adjustable

Goes all the different ways. So is that cheaper than the Apple Studio Display with the tilting stand? I don't think so. It's close, right? It's definitely close. Let's have a look. Bye, Studio Display. Standard glass. It's the same price. $1999. The thing with LG displays, though, is this build quality looks good on paper.

And the bezels look nice and even, but obviously you want to try it and see it in person. Yeah, the bezels being even is a big plus. Compared to some previous Ultrafine products. Yeah, so I'm... At least on the photos, I'm pretty pumped for it. Because the other thing that is a big decision maker for me in terms of what to buy, the Apple displays, the current displays only have one port. That's not true.

They only have one display in. Oh, display. Yes. Sorry. Yes. Yes. That's what you mean. So. Because you have your PC to consider. Exactly. Yeah. I have two computers at the desk and there aren't any good like switches. You know, there's not a good box where you can put in a 6K signal and split it out to two different laptops or two different computers. It just never works. I've been exploring these options for the previous generation Apple monitors and never found anything satisfactory.

The LG one has HDMI as DisplayPort, so I could plug in the Windows computer to one and the Thunderbolt dock for the other for the Mac and then just switch them on this screen. The Apple displays that they sell right now only have one port.

Wouldn't be surprised if the new Apple displays only have one port too, because they didn't expect you to use them with a Mac, right? But a big convenience for me is being able to use the same display across two computers. So that is definitely a big factor. But I would...

I'm not going to rush out and pre-order the LG LG 6K. Yeah. I will wait to see what the Apple displays are. I will wait to see the hands-on with the LG display. I mean, I've been waiting a decade. I can wait a few more months, you know. But then one of these products is I'm going to buy.

So you say within the next six months to a year, you'll probably have a new display. Assuming the Apple displays come out within that time frame. Yeah, because at this point, I might as well wait and see what they are, right? And at least consider them. And if they had, because obviously the LG display doesn't have like 120 hertz, right? Oh, yeah. So if the Apple displays came out and they had a high refresh rate, I might buy it anyway, even if it did only have one port, you know.

I guess I have to have two monitors on my desk. But if the display specs are basically identical, then I'd be more lean toward the LG one for the convenience of having the mobile inputs. But as it stands right now, I'm happy to wait and see. I'm not buying anything. This Pro Display XDR is going to my grave with me. Even if they make a Pro Display XDR 2? I think so. I don't...

I don't think I can justify this again. This was a decade plus investment for sure. All right. I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple Podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review. Find an ad-free version of the show with bonus content each and every week, 9to5mac.com slash join for $5 a month or $50 a year. Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5mac.com.

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