So Mayo, we have so much fun stuff to talk about. We have new betas, new iPads, new Macs, and yet the first thing in our notes is some follow-up about your country's attempt to force Apple to add a backdoor to iCloud. Financial Times report this week said that Apple has made an appeal to the Investigatory Powers Tribunal to challenge this request from the UK government.
yeah this obviously follows them having to disable advanced data protection in the region right and maybe this legal challenge is the precursor to them having to do even more invasive changes like you know those other into and encrypted categories that we talked about before um maybe if this legal challenge fails they then also have to
figure out some alternative method for those things but at least they're challenging it right because there was some um blowback to them doing the adp thing which was like oh apple needs to stand up for this stuff and don't let you know don't let countries walk over them well
in practical terms they're bound by the laws of the region right and so as Tim Cook would say they follow the laws of the countries they operate in but they are also legally challenging it as reported here so they're at least trying to abate the the problem obviously it sucks that we're in this situation in the first place but Apple's at least trying they're not just you know cow tailing to every request even in a limited fashion
They are at least trying to put up a challenge, which is basically the extent that they can do under the law, because countries are more powerful than companies. And hopefully it sets a precedent for other countries who initially might have said all it took was this vague threat and they pulled.
Advanced data protection. We should do that too. At least this sets the precedent that Apple will fight back in at least some form or fashion. And all of this is made more complicated by the fact that, as we've said, Under the rule of the law, Apple can't talk about the law or the request from the UK government. So all of this we're learning from reporting from various different sources. Yeah, there isn't really any detail about the legal challenge either. Right.
Same reason, it's all behind closed doors. So who knows what will actually come of that, if anything. I guess it'll be, if we hear nothing, then it probably means Apple's legal challenge failed. But if it succeeds, then presumably we'll hear something. Perhaps, I mean...
The best possible outcome from this is that they turn advanced data protection back on in the UK. The worst possible outcome is they have to, like you said, remove those 14 other end-to-end encrypted categories from the UK. And the happy medium is... The tribunal decides that removing advanced data protection is plenty and the other categories can stay unencrypted. So we'll see. iOS 18.4 beta 2 is here.
We talked a lot about the changes in iOS 18.4 beta 1. There's a lot of them. Then 18.4 beta 2 makes a few more. So priority notifications. You can now choose which apps deserve prioritization. In the initial version of the feature in beta one, it was an all or nothing approach. So one single toggle to enable or disable prioritize notifications. Now you can view a full list of your apps and manually go through and say, I want this app to be included in.
the priority notifications feature, don't include this one. It reminds me a lot of the initial flow for notification summaries, where you can go through and pick and choose which exact apps you want included. By having them toggled on, it doesn't mean that notifications from those apps are always showing the priority section, just because they can be included in the priority section. It's taking them, those are the ones to take into consideration. So basically, it's most useful for...
If there's an app that gets put in priority that you don't want to be there, you can turn it off so it won't show up there again. basically what you can use this for right because it's all if you if you have priorities notifications on whenever you download a new app or everything's on by default so it's enabled it's more like a oh it's done it wrong it's put something in priority that shouldn't be i can go and turn it off
Or this app is taking advantage of the system to sneak its way through to party notifications and just turn it off entirely. Well, by putting some like text at the front, which is like important. that doesn't happen so much like people are pretty good on that notifications i think in general um like the priority system is very similar to what they do in the mail app but the mail app has to contend with you know phishing attacks and spam and it doesn't always
do a good job at recognizing that stuff but the notifications on the lock screen yes there is advertising and marketing that a lot of games and stuff throw through there but a lot of the time apps are pretty respectful i think of the lock screen um Although they might send a lot of notifications, it's not like they're complete nonsense, right? So I think generally the prior notification system will work better than Priority Mail does just because of the types of content that it has to filter.
There are some more shortcuts actions for basically all of Apple's own apps. So that's settings, books, calendar, freeform, maps, news, reminders, Safari, TV, voice memos, and weather. Just a whole bunch of different new actions and shortcuts for those apps. Having those actions and shortcuts is useful, but obviously the writing on the wall here is that this is just Apple continuing to lay the groundwork for.
the more powerful version of Siri with in-app actions and app intents. Yeah, because a lot of these actions are literally just like, get the current value of this particular setting and the settings for this app. and set this particular setting in the settings app for this app, which I guess you could automate independently if you wanted to. If you're being crazy, you could be like, well, on a Tuesday, I want them.
you know faster downloads option for the tv app turned on or not so you could theoretically all make that through shortcuts but the reason those intents are there is so that when the app intentified siri is available you'll be able to just tell that thing hopefully you know oh turn off um you know prioritize uh i don't want to use up a lot of mobile data when i'm using the tv app and then it can automatically find the corresponding setting and change it for you
in the perfect world because you have a little LLM in between to interpret what you mean and find a relevant setting that matches up with that. So all of these applications, and there's a lot in beta too, but I'm sure there'll be more coming in beta 3, beta 4, and in future releases too. of just settings for all sorts of things across the domains that
Apple is out the gate supporting, which covers stuff like... They're domains that they're prioritizing. There's about a dozen of them. And they basically cover the Apple apps, right? So you have web browsing, email, notes, reminders, messaging. And then there's one...
there's one like schema for basically spreadsheets i.e. numbers there's one for presentations i.e. keynote and there's one for word document i.e. pages and so across all those apps you'll see a lot lot lot of shortcut actions appear because they're all backed by app intense these days
And yes, you can use them inside the shortcuts, but most people, I think what Apple expects are going to ambiently run into them by asking Siri things. And right now, Siri can't do any of it. So even if it's not a perfect system... you don't have to be you don't have to be you don't do much to beat nothing right so even if it can only you know connect you to relevant actions some of the time that's still better than the status quo today which is none at all
And Mark Gurman had a report on Sunday, I guess, where he said currently Apple's goal is to ship this new version of Siri with iOS 18.5, which we'll see if that happens because the goal initially was 18.4 and they're still in the process of laying the groundwork. For CarPlay users, a small thing. There are dozens of us who will appreciate this change. So I've talked about this before on the show, but Apple Maps EV routing supported by three cars, the Ford Mustang Mach-E.
the Porsche Taycan and the Ford F-150 Lightning. Ford cars can charge at superchargers, Tesla superchargers. The Apple Maps EV routing feature has no knowledge that Ford cars can charge at superchargers. which for four drivers effectively renders Apple Maps EV routing useless because it doesn't know about the thousands and thousands of additional chargers we now have access to. In iOS 18.4, in the code,
There's evidence that Apple is working on a new setting to let you choose if you have a Tesla supercharger adapter. And if you do, it'll route you through, in addition to CCS charging stations like Electrify America, it'll also route you through Tesla superchargers. A huge change that has taken over a year to actually come to fruition.
dozens of us will care about this i very much am excited for this yeah i mean you call it useless uh you said your system was useless it's more useless than all the evs out there that don't have carplay electric that's true you know electric routing support at all in apple maps which is now more and more and more
and more of them um it's great that they're doing this but they really need to get ev rooting on more cars manufacturers um and as far as i can tell it like works on the back end something so like the reason it works like ford like the cloud
reports the battery percentage to the apple system somehow and that's how it like connects through to the maps app so it doesn't seem like it would be that complicated for other because a lot of the other you know ev cars these days have some sort of connectivity package
And so it doesn't seem like a million miles away where they could also just, you know, Apple could talk to them and get partnerships where the API links up and reports the percentage. It doesn't seem unsurmountable task. It's not like there's something, you know, super proprietary about the integration.
But it has now been, what, two, three years, and it's only three vehicles, which is very sad because every single day, more and more electric vehicles are being sold. And they all come with CarPlay, but you're kind of disincentivized from using the CarPlay mapping. doesn't have knowledge of your charging because charging with that is, you know, doing EV routing has so much relationship on the routing with the chargers. It's hard to...
Go, oh, use Apple Maps because it looks better and it's a nicer interface and it has better UI and it talks to you. But it can't tell you where to stop the charge, which is a real blocker. And ideally... Apple is also working on a feature that just came to Android Auto, where Android Auto now has the ability to tell the car when you're going to a charger and precondition the battery, which is something that you need, especially when it's cold outside.
to get the top charging speeds once you plug in. That's another huge limitation of using Apple Maps EV routing because it doesn't support that feature. So lots of times what you have to do is use the Ford navigation or the Porsche navigation. to tell it that you're going to a charger then it'll precondition the battery then you can use apple maps ev routing for other parts of your drive it's a whole mess it's a whole mess
And I hope Apple is working on it. Yeah, please, please, please. CarPlay has the opportunity to do so much more here. And baby steps are being taken now, I guess. But we need a lot more. Yeah, and it's so good in traditional petrol vehicles. But... With electric vehicles, without the routing being there, it's a lot harder of a sell. The Vision Pro stuff we talked about last week. So Spatial Gallery, the dedicated Spatial Gallery app is now on Vision Pro with Vision OS 2.4 Beta 2.
Pretty much what we expected. You open it up and you can scroll through a handful of spatial photos and videos. Mostly photos at this point from... There's one straight from Apple. There's some ones from Apple TV+. There's the shrinking one. There's a severance one. There's a couple from the Red Bull app. Just a collated area where you can view all of the...
Or some of the available spatial photos, spatial videos, and panoramas. The devil in this one is going to be how often new stuff is added. Because if they launch the Spatial Gallery app and people are impressed with the collection of content, then... Six months go by and there's no more content. That's kind of been the Vision Pros problem all along. So hopefully they have plans to add stuff to this on a daily or weekly basis. Yeah.
When it's just photos, there's very little excuse in terms of production timeline, you know, like you can just take a snap of your phone, upload it and get it in the system, which I kind of hope is where they're going with this, where they just have like, you know. all those you know those shot on iphone campaigns they do just have them take some spatial photos at the same time and just mix them in so you're professionally taking photos but they're not like you know they don't require
teams and teams of people with really expensive cameras like it doesn't matter if it's shot on the phone uh you know it's more about the subject matter right and the person taking the picture so hopefully they can just get like a steady feed of stuff in there which gives people on vision pro something to enjoy obviously i don't have a vision pro but i did see a youtube video of someone using this app and it
It's impressive to look at even through a 2D video screen because it's like a scrolling gallery of these photos. And as you tilt your head, obviously, it gives you a different angle on the pictures. And all of the pictures in this moving carousel shift around. It's a cool effect. So I'm glad they added this app in the first place. Then the Apple Vision Pro app for iPhone is in beta 2 as well. This is the app where you can scroll through and see some content highlights, some apps.
See nothing. Some TV content to watch. So a few things. It's the world's most basic app. It makes the Apple Watch app for iPhone look like an incredible feat of development. But it's here. It is useful to scroll through and see.
some of like the App Store charts and App Store collections, then remotely download the app from your iPhone to the Vision Pro. So then the next time you put your Vision Pro on, the app is there and waiting for you. Because that is something that I've noticed where I'll see an app recommendation. And then I won't put my Vision Pro on until later that day or the next day or whatever. And I'd forgotten about it.
Just because the barrier to go download a new app that you read about elsewhere on Vision Pro is so much higher than seeing an iPhone app recommendation and just tapping on the link and downloading on your iPhone. That's the most useful part of this app. Other than that, it's...
it is what it is it's very weird that they didn't bother doing it launch and then they wait at what a year and a half and here it is and it's literally like a one screen application which is basically an rss feed of some news you know It's like the, it reminds me a lot of the, you know, the third tab in the home app? What's it called? Discover. Discover. Yeah, and it's just like six tiles that never change. It's like, what is the point of this being a dedicated tab of anything?
But they did it. Maybe there's some future features that might go into the Vision Pro companion app that aren't there yet. Or like planned for Vision OS 3 or something. In the App Store, there are now AI-generated summaries for reviews. So you go to an app, scroll down to Ratings and Reviews, you'll see a new review summary that Applesys has automatically summarized from reviews.
One of the examples here is the TikTok app, which the summary is, users say the app is entertaining and they enjoy the videos. They find it informative and a few say it makes them laugh. They also like using it to meet new people and to connect with friends. This type of stuff is so not useful, in my opinion. It's like when you go to Amazon and the review summary, which is also powered by their AI. It's like some users like the product, but some people have concerns about durability.
Most people find it useful. It's just the most generic slop imaginable. Yeah, but do you find the reviews useful anyway? That is true. On the App Store now. I don't know. At least a summary. Maybe in some cases we'll have like...
you know here's this this and this but there's this one thing that people noticed or something that's the ideal case for an ai summary right rather than you have to scroll through like 20 different cards yourself to kind of get the gist but i do know what you mean where a lot of them just end up being super generic and
Basically, you could put that same AI summary on like half the apps in the App Store and it would still apply, you know, because they just end up being very lowest common denominator. But in practical terms, I think it's at least worth a shot because...
scrolling through so many reviews um in the if you actually do care to go to the ratings review section app store is just untenable like you can never get a good gist or vibe of what the apps like from those things so trying to summarize it together using an ai thing I think it's a decent attempt. Obviously, in practice, it might just be pointless. But I think the reality is no normal person ever scrolls down to the reviews anyway. So will anyone ever see it?
I'd love to know. Apple must track these stats. Like how many people search for an app and then don't even go to the detail page. They just download it on the search tab and that's it. And they never even click through. And if you do click through, are you going any further down than like the screenshots? I highly doubt people ever read anything below the screenshots. As soon as you've got a scroll, they're out. The app store is a funny place like that.
Other things in beta 2, as promised, visual intelligence is now on iPhone 15 Pro via either the action button or control center. And on all iPhones, Apple has added that Visual Intelligence Control Center option and a new Talk to Siri Control Center option. Some new emoji, seven new emoji in total. Faced with bags under eyes, fingerprint, leafless tree, root vegetable, harp, shovel, and splatter. This did remind me of what people will think or how important new emoji are in like the Genmoji era.
I'd say interest in new emoji is declining in general. Like, do you remember the days where we would post about new emoji on 9to5mac.com? And it would be the top story of like the month. They'd get so many page views. And now it's just like, whatever. New emoji. They come every year. They're also just doing far less of them, right? You wait a year and you get seven.
And I think there was a time when the demand for emojis was high and the number of available emojis was still quite low. So the amount of people who were looking for a specific emotion or graphic to represent what they want was still quite there. you know now we must we must be on what like a thousand emoji built in or something so many a lot of the basic emotions and stuff are now just pre-available so people aren't hunting so much for things like those seven emoji just read out
I can't remember ever being like, you know what, that's what I really need right now. Because like a lot of things, you give people a thousand options and then every single person ends up having their own personal 20 that they rely on, right? And then they don't care about the rest.
um but now like you say for those more esoteric one-off cases uh gemmoji does kind of fill the gap um if you have a phone that supports it of course that's all in 18.4 beta 2 again released in april then 18.5 which will hopefully be a far more exciting beta cycle. Happy Hour This Week is sponsored by Indeed.
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And lo and behold, that meant new Air products for both the iPad and the Mac. Yeah, when I first saw that tweet, I just thought you meant MacBook Air, right? That's kind of what we were heading into the week for. It was like, oh, this is going to be the M4 MacBook Air update. But there was actually... A fair amount more. There's a fair amount of stuff in the air. So you could call it pollution, I suppose. Starting with the iPad, new iPad Air powered by the M3 chip.
Nothing more here than a spec bump, really. I think what's more notable maybe is there's a new Magic Keyboard to go along with the new iPad Air. Very similar to the Magic Keyboard that's available for iPad Pro, where you get a function row. and a larger trackpad. The difference, as far as I can tell, having not tried the new iPad Air stuff, is that this Magic Keyboard is not made from the aluminum build that the Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro is made from.
Yeah, it is cheaper than the previous Magic Keyboard for iPad Air, because I think... The old one was $299 and now it's $269 for the 11-inch size. Which is still absurdly expensive. Apple's keyboard prices are pretty insane. And I think the...
The iPad Pro one starts at $300, right? And that one gets you like a full aluminium enclosure and like, you know, a lot more premium of a design. So the fact that this one's only $30 cheaper and it's fabric based is kind of... kind of sucky comparison but all of their keyboards are too expensive they should be like half the price they are um but yeah you get the function row you get the slightly larger trackpad size um so it's kind of
close to the iPad Pro keyboard, but it's not made of metal, I guess is the difference. And I think the iPad Air is like really popular. It seems so. That's the kind of sense I get. There was speculation, I think, from Gurman, who was talking about after Apple reported their cue. One earnings, the holiday quarter earnings, that a lot of the growth or strength of the iPad segment was the launch of the 13-inch iPad Air, which we always forget about exists in the lineup, but it is there.
And it's a pretty enticing option at $799 compared to the 13-inch iPad Pro, which is, what, $1299 nowadays? To get a 13-inch iPad for $799 is... Pretty good value. And with this new M3 generation, pricing is unchanged. So the 11-inch model is $599 and the 13-inch model is still $799. It's a good value. Yeah, a pretty quick revision because the M2 13-inch was...
Roughly about a year ago, right? It was like May time. I think I saw it was 263 days ago or something. Yeah, it was like May last year. Now it's March and we've got another.
we got another bump when and like you say the bump is small because it's just a chip bump but i think some people come into this and like they think every new apple product has to be like have a bunch of new features and go in really crazy directions and if you go back in time like when apple was let's say like the mac only company right or like predominantly mac centric they would have updates on a like you know the macbook pro get updated on what an 18 month schedule something like that and
That was where all their attention was going and the product was just less mature than it is today. So they had more scope to add stuff in or whatever. Now... They're more keen on doing just like yearly bumps, it seems. They just put the new Apple Silicon chip in and keep going. And that means necessarily you're not going to get like other changes, but I'm pretty okay with that. I'd rather than...
update the product every single year. So if you are the person buying a new iPad Air right now, you're getting the latest spec possible rather than holding stuff back for two years and then doing a slightly bigger update, you know? So... And they didn't change the price. It's not that they made it more expensive. So it's the same price. You just get a faster chip. And it's only one year since they did the previous revision, which added the extra screen size. So I think it's a pretty...
inline update for a year, you know, year over year refresh. Yeah, Dylan McDonald on Twitter pointed out it's 293 days since the M2 iPad Air, which makes this the second shortest lived iPad ever. only to the iPad 3, the infamous iPad 3, which was available for 221 days. And I think the previous narrative about the first generation 3 nanometer TSMC process, meaning that Apple wants to get off M3 as soon as possible.
is now summarily debunked. That was my next question because we've been saying that a lot. And we had the A17 Pro materialized in the iPad Mini. The M3 is now in the iPad Air. And as we'll talk about... In a little bit, there's a new M3 Ultra in the Mac Studio. So that whole theory, while probably true in some regard, that it is maybe not the most efficiently made chip. There are or were yield issues.
Apple clearly either perfected a lot of those problems or it just made a lot of them and it's still selling through its stockpile. I think Apple just has a really lucrative deal with TSMC where... TSMC is the one on the hook for all the yield issues. And so there was actually a report, I believe, about the information a couple of years ago that TSMC, unlike most other customers, Apple does not pay for bad yields. So if there's a bad...
If there's a bad fab of a chip, Apple doesn't have to pay for that. TSMC takes the brunt of it. So basically, I guess, TSNC's probably sitting there like, please, Tim, stop making M3 stuff. And I was like, well, whatever. We just got, you know, this makes sense for us. We're just going to carry on charging forward. How about a more complicated version of the M3? How about we stick two of them together and we call it the M3 Ultra? How's that for you?
Yeah, so TSMC has probably got water in its eyes every time they see a new M3-based announcement. But I guess for Apple it works out. And at least in this case, it maybe is... some parts reuse or something because the iPad Air has a... 9 core GPU whereas the default m3 was 10 core GPU when it was in the MacBook Air right so there might be some inventory magic going on here but clearly they are still actively producing some amount of m3 fabrication
They're transitioning to the M4 stuff, the second generation 3nm stuff, but the first generation 3nm has lasted a lot longer than we first expected based on the supply chain reporting. And it was either completely wrong or... It was right, but Apple doesn't care because they're not the one footing the bill for it. Anything else on the iPad Air? I think that's about right, and...
If I was promoting someone to get an iPad, this would definitely be one of the options, right? The iPad Pro, as nice as it is, it's very expensive, I think. And for products where... I mean, I have not a vendetta against the iPad, but I just struggle to find places in my life where I'm like... No, you have a vendetta against the iPad. No, it's not a vendetta. I mean, Apple sent one, right? I've got it downstairs. I literally haven't touched it in months.
Like, I got it before Christmas. I'm not sure I've touched it the entire 2025, apart from installing the latest beta, isn't it? Because I don't know what I'm going to use it for. You know, on my desk, I'm way more productive on a MacBook Pro. But the screen is great on it. Like the hardware is great on it, but you just can't quite use it. And so I would struggle recommending the iPad Pro to people because I just feel like you're paying a lot of money for...
largesse, excess, you know what I mean? It's a luxury. The essentials of the iPad experience you can get on an iPad Air. Or even a base model iPad. But if you want that bigger screen size, the iPad Air is the go-to option. Speaking of the base model iPad, if you scrolled... All the way down in the press release for the M3 iPad Air, Apple had a subheading, iPad updated with double the starting storage and the A16 chip.
So this is the base model iPad that Apple sells for $349, upgraded from the A14 to the A16, which Apple says is 30% faster. The base storage goes from 64 to 128 gigabytes, so now your options are 128, 256, and a new 512. The story here, though, is the A16 chip. Contrary to some rumors that we heard, Apple did not feel the need to add Apple Intelligence to the base model iPad. Instead, it opted for the A16 from the iPhone 14.
Which is a good chip, and it's a big upgrade compared to the A14, but you will not get Apple Intelligence. The thing I come back to on this is a lot of people's takeaway is that that's fine. Apple Intelligence sucks. And in some ways it does. I mean, in some ways it's not as revolutionary as Apple's marketing would lead you to believe. I wouldn't buy a new, I wouldn't upgrade any of my current Apple products because of Apple intelligence. I think it's a nice thing to have.
And it's a cool bonus. But I didn't feel compelled to change my personal iPhone 14 to iPhone 15 and 16 because of Apple intelligence. I have an M1 MacBook Pro that got Apple intelligence features for free. like the email summaries and i use the email summaries a lot you know i actually find them very valuable but i'm not like
If the new Mabra Pro was the only one that had Apple Intelligence features, that wouldn't be the reason to upgrade. It's nice to have. And the Siri stuff is hopefully going to be great. It might not be. But again, even that, I'm not sure you would upgrade because of it. It's just another thing in the...
arsenal of reasons to upgrade right but it's not like the key difference like that's what makes me laugh you remember on like the last um quarterly call when cook was going well in the areas where apple attendance was available the iphone sold better it's like
Was it really because of Apple Intelligence? Like, I don't know about that one, but at least personally, I don't recommend people upgrade their stuff because of Apple Intelligence. I think if you get a new thing and it supports it, that's great. And there's some nice stuff in there, like Jemoji, like the summary stuff. But it's not a reason to upgrade on its own. And with this new iPad, the fact that it doesn't have Apple intelligence support now is fine, I think. But where it gets me is...
Somebody who buys this iPad probably wants to keep it for three or four years. In three or four years time, Apple intelligence could very well be like a major part of people's workflow. There could be new. There's the new Siri. There's still stuff Apple is working on.
Image Playground could be absolutely incredible by then. Genmoji could be a huge social hit. And you have this iPad that you bought in 2025 with an A16 chip that doesn't support Apple intelligence. It is a bit of a perplexing decision. So you're anti this? No, I think I'm in the, this is fine camp. I'm in the main, this is cheap. It's $350. I'm in the camp that it's fine, but it sets people up for disappointment in a couple of years.
And maybe that's Apple's call. I think what you said, there's too many ifs. That is true. Let's say there is a next generation of intelligence features on the way. They might require even higher minimum specs. Just because your current phone supports Apple intelligence...
the next round of app intelligence features might require 12 gigs of RAM and the phones aren't even out yet. I'm not sure that the baseline of what we have right now is enough. And I think if you look at Apple, they're kind of...
scrambling if you want to be mean and so they don't have it all planned out so it's not like you can rely on the stuff you're buying now to have a road map of that stuff i think a lot of it's going to be kind of running by the seat of the pants as they can get stuff out the door and oh it happens to require this this and the other
So I wouldn't be buying any of the stuff right now with a view that in three years time I'm going to get even better Apple intelligence features. I feel like that's a huge question mark. And the iPad. like who's buying the ipad a lot of people are and they're not buying it because of like they just want to watch videos on it you know yeah like do some email and look at safari like i really don't think it's an essential tenet of that product that it has to have um
you know intelligence capable chip inside of it and it's an upgrade from the a14 right so literally yesterday you got an a14 today you get an a16 so you've jumped two generations of chip performance and you're getting twice the storage right so the the base storage is now doubled um for the exact same price like this feels far much like better of a deal to me than like the iphone 16e which does support apple intelligence but it's 599 dollars so like
I think the equation is a bit different. Yeah, that's fair. if they could give it an a17 instead that would be even better right because there would be some degree of future proofing but when you're buying the budget ipad i don't think future proofing is really your concern like the people buying this ipad are probably the people that bought this model of ipad that existed five years ago and it's time for them to
grade but they're going to be doing the same kind of task that they've always done like i know apple's marketing shows it with like someone's drawn like on a on a blueprint drawing app they've drawn like this robot sketch um That's not what's happening on these iPads, right? What's happening is movies, videos, streaming, social media, web browsing and email. And it's really hard not to suggest a $350 iPad for that purpose.
this is the ipad that all my family have like not this particular model right but like this version the cheapest iteration which um was around which has always been around 350 of you know the most recent times and they love the thing and then you know they use it for five years and they it gets a bit slow and gets a bit um you know older and then they update with the new base model ipad and it's even better And they don't care about Apple intelligence one eye over for that price point, you know?
When you're buying an iPhone that's $600 and above, it's a bit different in terms of a calculus. Disposable is not the word, but you know what I mean, right? It's like you're getting the iPad for this purpose and then you're fine with it. You don't really care about any of the...
peripheries on the edge and in fact i know one of my family members is having storage size problems because i think the base model at the time was 32 so they got the 32 gigabyte one and it's really hard to live on a 32 gigabyte ipad on ipad os 18 just because everything uses load of space um so now that this starts at 128 i mean that's a big draw i think it's good it's decent i'd still just think i don't know future proofing is always a good thing
Let's say somebody buys this and they just want to make a Genmoji because that's not like the next generation Siri. That's not any of the more complex Apple intelligence stuff. But if somebody just wants to buy an iPad and use Genmoji and use Image Playground.
it would have been nice to get Apple Intelligence at that $350 price point. If that is what they're coming into wanting to do, you're better off buying an iPad Air that's a couple of years old or something and finding out a third-party retailer. That's a good point, yeah. Because you can buy an M1 iPad Air for probably the same price as this. Yeah, probably about the same price, yeah. For the Apple lineup, I think it's fine for this iteration to not have...
An Apple Intelligence baseline. Because we see the cheapest A17 product they sell is the iPad Mini, right? Which is, what, $500? That's another $150 on top for a smaller screen product. See, I think it's okay. I was quite happy when I saw this. If they could have come out with this product and it could have had an A16.
and not twice the storage. And I'd have probably been like, yeah, this is fine for this year, for 2025. The fact that you're doubling the storage as well is like a huge price cut, you know, in relative terms when you actually consider how much you have to pay for the storage upgrades. So...
I was giving this a thumbs up. You're probably right. Anything else on the new iPads? New iPad, new iPad Air. I think that's good. Oh, I'll just repeat the keyboard complaint again. Because as good as this iPad is at 350. The keyboard they sell for it is, what, $200 or something? And it's the weird one, right, with the kickstand on the back? The keyboard folio. Yeah, that thing. So, yeah, sort that out, Apple. But baseline pricing is very strong.
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Now we have new Macs. So starting with the M4 MacBook Air. M4 chip, new sky blue color, which I think stole some of the headlines because it is a pretty nice looking color. It's very subtle. It's Apple's classic. pastel shade of blue which is i think kind of what you want in a laptop you want something a little bit pastel you want something a little bit not too flashy at least that's what i would want in a laptop looks nice though i think and it replaces the space gray right
So now you have midnight, starlight, silver, and sky blue. I am not too upset to see space gray finally go away. We've had so many years of space gray. Space gray has meant so many different things. Do you remember that? I think it was our old colleague, Michael Stieber, who put together a guide of all the various space gray color shades over the years. And that was in like...
I don't know, 2018 or something. And even at that point, Space Gray had meant so many different things. And now we're seven years later and Space Gray seems to be finally. phasing out of Apple's product lineup. Well, at least on the MacBook Air. We don't know what their plans are elsewhere. You never know. They might throw it back in somewhere else. Yeah, I generally don't like it when they take out a neutral color.
and only have like colored options like when they had the that year uh with the apple watches where they had no like neutral black or whatever they just had like starlight and midnight but the macbook airline amp is now midnight starlight silver and sky blue and the midnight is yeah pretty close to neutral color like it is blue tinted but it's pretty close to dark uh just a dark kind of neutral gray with a bit of blue in it so i think that's fine and the
At least on the pictures, the Sky Blue looks a lot more appealing than the Space Grey ever did. I don't know if I'd choose it myself because it's a bit more ostentatious than my preference. I'd probably go Midnight if it was Band of Remember Care. I'm shocked. But as the new... Pretty color option. I think it's kind of cool. It looks good on the homepage, for instance. I think the biggest news with the new MacBook Air, though, is the price. So previously, it was $1099 for the 13-inch for the M3.
and $1299 for the 15-inch, but you had the M2 in the lineup at $999 for the 13-inch. Now Apple has done away with the M2 and the M3 entirely, so the two MacBook Airs you can buy. The 13-inch M4 is $999, and the 15-inch M4 is $1199, and that is an incredible bargain. I don't think going into this, anybody expected the M4 MacBook Air to be cheaper.
especially after they doubled the amount of RAM in the base model MacBook Air last fall. Well, and with all the looming tariff stuff, there's been some analysts expecting Apple to up prices. That is true, yeah. They went the opposite direction.
that the ipads and the macs have really good value options the phone is like apple knows everybody wants an iphone so they keep the prices high as you see in the iphone 1680 where they've now taken away their cheapest iphone se which has got 420 and now the new baseline price
$599. But on iPads and Macs, they're very happy to give you pretty good options at the inexpensive price points. Now, everybody still hones in on the base models only having 256 gigabytes of storage on the MacBook Air, right? But... It's way, way, way better than the previous thing where it was $100 more. Because now you can pay $1,200 and you get the 512GB version. Whereas before you'd have to spend $1,300 or whatever it was.
I still think a lot of people can get away with 256, but if you need to upgrade the storage, it's $100 less than it used to be. You can't complain about that. I'm sorry. It's such a good situation. The RAM is...
way better like because before you have to upgrade the storage and the ram and the base price was a hundred dollars higher now you have to pay one of apple's exorbitant upgrade prices and to have a 512 gig machine with 16 gigs of ram and the base price is a hundred dollars lower like the price
pricing is in such a better shape. I'm so happy. That's the new MacBook Air. There's not a whole... It's a spec... Oh, the other thing I will mention, I know we've talked about this before, the M4 chip finally means that... The Apple Silicon MacBook Air beats the Intel MacBook Air on every metric because it supports two external displays without having to have the lid closed.
because they did that funny compromise with the previous gen and they're like yeah it does support two externals but you can't have the actual laptop open so i only supports like two displays total now with the m4 there's enough display controllers they can have the laptop screen on
And you can have two proper external displays coming out of the, you know, the DisplayPort interface on the USB-C ports. So you can actually have like a proper office environment can have them just give people MacBook Airs. They don't have to go to MacBook Pro to be able to give people, you know, dual desktop.
screens which I think was actually a really big thing that kind of went under the radar where these companies who buy in bulk were kind of annoyed that the MacBook Air when they went to Apple Silicon couldn't do what their Intel MacBook Airs they used to buy do because people sit at desk with two monitors and I think it's become maybe even more common post-Covid where people are just more used to having monitor setups at work and up to literally just right now
the Apple Silicon replacement was inferior. We finally got to the point with the M4 where you can do two external displays and the laptop that can be open. So we've got there, finally. Yeah, a lot of times after Apple launches, I do like a... interview radio hit thing with ABC radio. And it's very much targeted towards your average consumer, like the person listening to ABC radio on their drive home from work or whatever. So usually it's not a very technical conversation, right? There's no...
deep dives into core counts and three nanometers and five nanometers and any of that. It's a very big picture. Who is this laptop for? But even in that conversation, that expanded support for two proper external displays came up. And I think that tells you exactly what you need to know about how. widespread of a limitation that was. Because in all other aspects, the machines were so much better. It was just unreal. And then it was like, well...
oh, you know this little issue here with the two screen thing? Well, we'll just pretend that doesn't exist for a while. But then they finally come up. Because when they did it with the M1, the immediate answer was like, oh, they're just trying to upsell people to the pro model. It's like, no, that's not what's happening. They made this chip. It was better in every single way apart from the display controller situation. And so you're not going to not replace...
intel with apple silicon because of that issue but it's a big enough problem they've obviously had it on their to-do list and they finally managed to architect the base chips to be able to have multiple display controllers and so now there's no like upsell opportunity it's just you get two displays on every mac
two external displays bought on every single Mac. At the lowest price it's ever been. You also get a 12 megapixel center stage camera now. That's the same camera that came to the MacBook Pros last year with the... Desk view feature. You don't get nanotexture. There's no nanotexture option, which kind of is a bummer because I've gone to really like nanotexture, but it seems like Apple is pretty content in making nanotexture and MacBook Pro.
and higher option, like iPad Pro, MacBook Pro, Pro Display XDR. But it is on the iMac, interestingly. Oh, I forgot about that. That completely disproves my point. So yeah, maybe it should be on the MacBook Air. Maybe it should be, but it's far less relevant than to external display support, if you see what I mean. So if they want to make nanotexture an upsell to a higher-end model, I'm okay with that. Then we have the new Mac Studio.
which we didn't expect iPads going into this week, but we knew iPads were imminent. Mac Studio, I did not have this even remotely on my bingo card for the week. The other thing I did- And especially not the M3 Ultra. So the new Mac Studio is available in two configurations, M3. See, I've already screwed it up. Available in two configurations, M4 Max and M3 Ultra. M4 Max and M3 Ultra.
So this is the same M4 Max chip that debuted with the MacBook Pro last year. But this is our first ever look at the M3 Ultra. Apple says the M3 Ultra uses its UltraFusion. packaging architecture, which is basically they just link two M3 Max chips together to create the M3 Ultra. Right off the bat, I think we should talk about the...
perception or like the marketing confusion that potentially having an M4 Max and an M3 Ultra available in the same computer where the M3 Ultra is the faster option. What do you think of Apple's strategy there?
What, in terms of the way they've named it? Like, it's messy, right? It's messy. It is, it is. Because obviously what they're trying to imply is that... the m3 generation all have one particular architecture of cpu and gpu core right those core designs change with the m1 the m2 the m3 and then in between those
families you have different numbers of core counts essentially which is what the main differentiate are between the base m3 and the m3 max and the m3 ultra and so this is called m3 ultra not m4 ultra because the core design is
the same cause as the M3, not the M4. And presumably then it's also built on the seemingly deprecated, but Apple doesn't care, first generation three nanometer process. But that does mean that it is... superior to the m4 max but this is technically true like with the m2 like if you had i guess it wasn't available in the same machine at the same time that was the difference right but like you could have the
MacBook Pro M3 Max would be inferior to the Mac Studio M2 Ultra that was sold at the same time as it, right? So that's how you've got to think about this. The weirdness is they're introducing this at the same time in the same generation. And I think it must be, right? The first product ever where... I guess they sold multiple models in MacBook Air, right? At the same time with different M2 and M3.
But this is weird because it's like the high-end option. Like they haven't really done a high-end machine before of Apple Silicon where you could get like the previous core counts and then the new one. Like it was always, I guess the MacBook Pro, the base model was just the M3 or the M4.
And then the higher ones were M4 Max and M4 Pro. This is the first time you've got like a high-end Apple Silicon machine where they're selling two generations of core design at the same time. I guess it implies that it requires a lot of resource and time investment for...
relatively little return for them to make the ultra chips for whatever reason and there were some interviews that came out alongside this announcement where apple was basically saying don't expect an ultra every generation which i guess is them implying that the m4 there won't be an m4 ultra right that's kind of what I took away from those press interviews was that they don't want you sitting there being like
oh well i'll just wait a few more months and there'll be an m4 ultra max studio like i don't really think that's what they were getting at what they're saying is here's the m3 ultra this is what we've put our time investment into and we might we're probably going to skip a year or two so don't expect m4 ultra we might be back with an m5 ultra
uh in a couple of years and i guess at that point the it would it would line up so at that time you'd have like the m5 max and the m5 ultra in the in the max studio but then the next time it came around you might only have the m 6 Ultra and the M7 like this discrepancy will come around again depending on what year it is right but this time around is the first time it's happening I do wonder whether they wanted the M3 Ultra to come out sooner
potentially you have to think yeah yeah like it's in the m3 family so maybe the m3 ultra was scheduled to be like a last year thing and then they would have followed up with an m4 max anyway um
It's dumb naming in one sense because, yeah, it is confusing, but it is at least true to itself in that you know what actually the chip's made out of. Like, there's no law of... science that says apple has to name this thing an m3 they could have just called this the m4 ultra anyway and just pretend and just like it actually uses the previous generation core designs right but i guess they're just being honest for themselves where it's the m3 family it's the ultra version
And ultimately, I'm just glad that they, even though they were presumably running behind schedule, they still shipped it anyway. There's a world in which Apple would have said, we hate the... confusion or the dichotomy between having the m3 ultra and m4 max available so we'll just scrap the m3 ultra all together it's the standard apple silicon march that we've seen where
They just release chips when they're ready, even if it's some awkward timing, even if you have the M4 in an iPad Pro before there's any M4 version of a Mac, right? They ship the chips when they're ready, and that's fine.
yeah you have like a co-temporaneous um like research and development lab with johnny suruji just running and he's like guys it's time for a new product we've got this chip right go with it okay and now it's time for another product we got this chip ready and then you know they just pop them off the line
isn't like this like oh there is a strategy but they're not beholden to the strategy or the schedule right so when stuff slips or some stuff's ready sooner than others they just they just push that out the door regardless of any slight confusion about the naming and the particular exact moments of stuff's coming out. And presumably the M3 Ultra is what they'll start using for their private cloud compute stuff, right?
Because it seems quite well designed for that because you can equip it with up to 512 gigabytes of RAM, or obviously what they call unified memory, which must come in handy for model inference situations because they're all very RAM hungry. And this is... over half a terabyte, I guess technically it is half, they call it over half a terabyte in their press release, but 512 gigabytes is half a terabyte of...
memory for that model now that model of m3 ultra will set you back a small fortune because i think it's like 14 grand but it is there and i guess it's the only computer ever to ever offer unified memory of that scale On the Mac side, the 2019 Mac Pro, you could get non-unified memory because it was obviously just Intel at that time. You could get RAM on that up to one and a half terabytes. So they haven't quite topped their previous record for...
The max amount of RAM you can get in a machine. But this is the first time, obviously, it's on package with the chip and the GPU sharing the same memory in close proximity. You can also get up to 16 terabytes of storage now, which I think is... Double what you could get in the M2 Ultra configuration. Yeah, I think it maxed out eight before. Yeah.
Apple says that an up to 32-core CPU with 24 performance cores and 8 efficiency cores, the most CPU cores in a Mac, and up to 80-core GPU, which is more than any Apple Silicon chip. And they particularly specifically compare it to the M4 Max and they say nearly two times faster performance than M4 Max and workloads that take advantage of high CPU and GPU core counts.
Then they say up to 2.6 times faster than Mac Studio with M1 Ultra. Yeah, because you can spec it with up to 32 core CPU and up to 80 GPU cores. So any multi-core heavy workload, it will trance the M4 Max because it just has more cores. That's just, you know. Which number's bigger? Science. Okay, there you go. But yeah, on single core workloads, it will be slower. Yeah, right. Right, because the M4 single core is higher than the M3 by about 20%.
so on single core workloads it'll be slightly slower but on mobile workloads obviously it'll be it'll be better and if you need that half terabyte of ram for your workload then you're going to buy it if you're doing you know video production or maybe some ai stuff although i think most ai stuff happens on you know PCs and the video chips be practical but you know what I mean right like I think Apple previously showed how they could have like entire scenes of 3D 3D rendering done on
mac studios where previously you'd need like a server farm to do it just because of the unified memory availability and that will only be exaggerated with uh this model um it is interesting like what counts as like the chip Because in the press release, Apple says very explicitly, M3 Ultra is built using Ultra Fusion, which links two M3 Max Dice together. But the M3 family did not support Thunderbolt 5.
And yet, the M3 Ultra does support Thunderbolt 5. So there's obviously some loosey-goosey use of terminology, right? Where... the die and then the bits around the die kind of are a bit more interchangeable than what apple likes to present sometimes so like the the cores of the cp and the gp are obviously shared and made on the same fab but they're on this package that has some interchangeable parts like the thunderbolt controllers i think
which is how you get an M3 Ultra that does support Thunderbolt 5, whereas previously Thunderbolt 5 was an M4 family feature. So you get four Thunderbolt... Five ports on the back along with two USB-A ports, 10 gigabit ethernet port, 3.5 millimeter headphone jack, and two USB-A ports. Then on the front, you get two normal USB-C ports and an SD card slot. Same overall. or port count as the previous generation Mac studio, just with Thunderbolt five support. Like you said, the M for max.
Configurations start at $19.99 and the M3 Ultra configurations start at $39.99. For the M4 Max configuration, that gets you the 14 core CPU, 32 core GPU. 32GB of RAM, and a 512GB SSD. The base configuration of the M3 Ultra is a 28-core CPU, 60-core GPU, 96GB of unified memory, and 1TB SSD. And like you said earlier, Mayo, you can really spec that thing up all the way to $14,000. And if you want to go crazy, you can connect it to eight Pro Display XDRs.
The M3 Ultra has enough display controllers to run eight Pro Display XDRs at whatever crazy resolution that is. What, 6K? So 6K times 8. A lot of Ks. Pretty insane. Yeah, a lot of Ks, a lot of Ks. The only question is now, what happens to the Mac Pro? The Mac Pro. I'm going to go out on a limb and say nothing happens to the Mac Pro. Dead or just continuing on?
You would think that they would have updated it now if they had any imminent plans to update it because it's just going to get the same M3 Ultra chip that the Mac Studio just got, right? And when the last time they revved the M2... lineup of Macs with the Mac Studio and Mac Ultra. They got updated at the same time. If we don't see a new Mac Pro at WWDC, I think the Mac Pro is as good as dead.
WWDC is like the last hurrah, the last chance for the last hurrah for the Mac Pro. Yeah, because as pointless and extraneous as the Mac Pro was before, right now... It's even more so because... It's terrible. Its highest performance is the M2 Ultra, right? Which is easily tranced by the M3 Ultra. And they didn't rev it with the M3. So...
There is still the outside chance that they have another chip in mind that their Mac Pro will get exclusively, right? Yeah. I mean, maybe there's... Yeah, maybe there's an extreme in the wings, but... if they're not even going to commit to doing an ultra on every generation, do you really think they're going to commit to making an extreme for the sliver of people who are interested in Mac pros these days? Like, that film's even more far-fetched. So...
I'm kind of leaning like you, maybe more close to dead, unfortunately. But I say unfortunately, but realistically, it kind of been a dead man walking for... ever since apple silicon came out because they've never they've never made an apple silicon chip that supports the exclusive features in that pro i.e the modularity and extensibility right um in terms of
soldered on ram and gpu and cpu so everything they did with the 2019 map pro in terms of making it super customizable extendable with a crazy enclosure that can fit all this stuff was completely completely nullified when they did apple silicon but uh And they haven't shown any interest in making it better since then. So unless there's some crazy skunkworks project going on for it that's going to have some dedicated chip, it does kind of seem like it's just going to fade away.
If you zoom out and look at the Mac lineup right now and exclude the Mac Pro because who cares? You have the best MacBook Airs you've ever had, the best value for the MacBook Air you've ever had. The M4 MacBook Pros are very good. even if they aren't dramatically different than the M3 MacBook Pros. We're waiting on that potential big redesign next year, OLED screens. We're waiting on that next pivotal generational leap for the MacBook Pro.
Yeah, there might be another spec bump MacBook Pro this year for the 2026 big redesign. But yeah, that's obviously what's pending in the wings there. But to be fair with the M4, they did give the base... m4 macbook pro the 14 inch one they did give it like the you know the space black look and the better screen and everything so like you don't have to buy the m4 pro and the m4 max chips now to get like that stuff um so that was like the big win on the m4 pro refresh
So I think you can say best value for Money MacBook Air, best value for Money MacBook Pro. And a lot of that's just driven by the RAM upgrade, right? Because that saved everybody $200 for having to pay for the RAM bump. iMac, give it all.
I like the iMac. I like the iMac, but I can't... I've been against the iMac ever since they've revved it because I really hate the chin on it. You hate colours. I don't mind the colours. The chin... I just feel like they could do an iMac design that doesn't have that fat bezel at the bottom. Like, get rid of the chin, please. Which we could be due for an iMac redesign at some point. It's been three years since that.
It was 21 when they did the iMac. Yeah, so I'm coming up on four years of the iMac. Yeah, but the iMac's so low volume that you've got to wait at least half a decade, I guess, before they bother switching that up again. Mac Studio, good. Yeah.
Mac Mini really small. Forgot about that. That was October, wasn't it? Yeah. Really good lineup. I don't think there's a, with the exception of the Mac Pro, I don't think there's a Mac somebody could walk into an Apple store and buy and be disappointed with or have problems with.
everything and your money goes further than ever on most of these models the the value for money yes max is still expensive and yes they charge you over the knee for further upgrades to storage or whatever but that's always been the case
The base model now is so good that you can even afford to do an upgrade and still not feel like you're getting super ripped off. Really, give them all the plaudits. 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. Send us feedback, happyhour at 9to5mac.com. Find an ad-free version of the show at 9to5mac.com slash join for $5 a month or $50 a year and get bonus content each and every week.
I am on threads, Twitter, or elsewhere, at Chance H. Miller. And, Mayo, what about you? At Beezade Mayo. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.