583: The 2025 Annies

Bye.

From Relay, this is Connected, episode 583. Today's show is brought to you by our sponsors, Ecamm and Squarespace. I'm your Ricky Benchman, Federico Vittici, and it's my pleasure to introduce for this very special episode. Steven. I really want to give you some title at some point, Steven. You gotta get good. You gotta get good at those games. We could be weeks away from me earning one. Maybe. Could. Yeah.

Maybe. Possibly. We're also joined by Mike Hurley. Hello! Special episode today, Stephen. What are we doing? It is. Today is the...

Annie's. So if you've not been around for one of these before, we are going to go through 2025's Apple News month by month, and we are going to score... Each month, according to the Tici scale, there is... It says more tech news than Apple news. Obviously, it's the stuff we talk about. Sure. Yeah, yeah. In fact, most of these links are from our own show notes throughout the year. Yeah.

Uh, you can see the teaching scale. It's in your podcast player. There's a link in the show notes to it. Uh, we, on one end we have nightmare and then we have, I'm just going to go from bottom to top nightmare, inferior, minus inferior. Decent, normal, good, good plus, and best I love you. Yep. Yes. Yes. So each month we'll get a score. Which we'll have to agree upon as a trio. Mm-hmm.

Yes. And this is not a contest, by the way. It's not. If you're listening to this show and you expect some kind of game, there's no points here on the line. Am I right, guys? Unless Mike has prepared. I'm so annoyed. I didn't, I didn't prepare a quiz. I should have prepared some kind of quiz, but like maybe like a blind writing, but no, there is no quiz. There is no quiz.

That you know of. I kind of want it, and I'm sorry to spring this on you guys, but I was thinking about the TG scale lately, and I kind of want to propose a tiny change to the TG scale. Okay. In the official visual rendering of the TC scale, the two extremes, the Nightmare and Best I Love You grades are visualized the nightmare with a bat and the best I love you with a blue heart. Now I've been thinking about this and the thing is I've been...

Okay, so you should know. My Instagram is basically, my feed is basically all cute animals now. Okay. And I have grown more fond of bats in my adult life. I think they're really cute. Have you ever seen a tiny bat up close? They're super cute. Not up close. I mean, when you say up close, do you mean on Instagram? Yes, on Instagram, obviously not in real life. I really do think that bats are cute creatures. And so I would like to propose an animal-themed update to the TC scale.

I would like to propose the following changes. Nightmare, visualized via a spider, because no man, those are... I'm sorry, spider-loving people. I don't even want to see. I'm sorry, spider-loving people. It's just I cannot bring myself to like spiders. They are terrifying. They have hair.

I would prefer not to even have this conversation or see a spider, though, if I'm being completely honest. Well, I am proposing this and you can think about it. And for the best I love you, I also wanted to have a cute animal in there. Have you guys ever seen... The Quokka. I don't even know what that is. Can you spell that for me, please? Q-U-O-K-K-A.

Your Instagram is very specific. Well, what is this? What is this? It's a cute, smiling animal from Australia, I believe. Oh, yeah. It's got a pouch. They are so cute. Wait, what? There's another one? They are so cute. Marsupials, baby. I just thought that was only kangaroos. Wow. Okay, Stephen, name another marsupial. Oh, I can do this. Let me think. The... I think I know one. I think I know one. Are opossums marsupials?

Hang on, it says the group of mammals commonly thought of as pouched mammals. Let me look at opossums, let me look. Can I just... Opossums are marsupials. This is always the longest episode of the year. We are talking about marsupials. Can we get moving? I am sorry. Federico, we will thank you for your suggestion. I like it. We can look at it for next year. We have 12 months to redesign the teacher scale. Okay. All right. And we start with January. The Switch 2 was announced.

Big news. Amazing news. Wanted it, got it, finally. Well, they showed it to us. It took many more months for us to get it. I was going to say. But it was exciting. It was exciting because there were so many things in that announcement which we hoped would happen and did happen. You know, like the specs of the Switch 2 and I'm very happy on my Switch 2 and I want there to be more games for it always.

Relay finally completed the beginning of our rebrand as a company. I don't think it's done yet. We had announced it in July, the year prior, and it started rolling out in January. Congratulations to us and not congratulations to the entire legal process of getting copyright. What was the copyright? Trademark? Trademark. Waiting on one, but it made movement just yesterday.

Yay, we love to hear. We love it. Deep Seek burst onto the AI scene and American technology companies got really scared and then I think set off the trend of reasoning and thinking models, which are now pretty ubiquitous amongst all of the... AI companies. The BBC got very upset about Apple intelligence notification summaries, which then resulted in Apple pulling that feature. If you could imagine, there was an Apple intelligence feature still that was available to be pulled.

And then stating that when it returns, it would be with warning labels, which it is, right? So like in 26, they now have little warning labels on them. And when you set it up, it's like this big red text of like, hey, some stuff might be wrong. Right. And it's, I think they have made progress on them. I think they are better than they were when they launched, but it is still, I mean, it's also just engagement bait online of like,

oh, look, these two things got smashed together and I think my family's dead, right? Yeah. Is that still, are people still posting those? Yeah, I think so. Okay. My threads algorithm is basically people complaining about Apple, so.

Yeah, mine's a bit like that too. I think everyone's threads algorithm is people complaining about something, you know, because I think that is what does well. I mean, it was the whole thing of like my four winners and losers of Apple's year. Like the first one was UI experts on. Social media. That was about threads. That was perfect. Loved it. TikTok goes offline in America.

And then Donald Trump extended the TikTok sale period for 75 days. It is the end of December, and that has not resolved. It's the longest 75 days in human history. We're still in those 75-day periods. It's worse than that. They passed a law. that they have to sell it, right? And then that was a 75-day period and we're just choosing to think that that law doesn't exist. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Which is hilarious because that law was begun in the previous Trump administration.

or like the idea of banning it. Very funny. And Samsung announced the Galaxy S25 Edge, a really thin phone. Imagine if a company could do such a thing. And also, all of the tech CEOs stood alongside. Donald Trump for his inauguration, and it made everybody mad. Yeah. What a start to the year. Switch 2, man. Switch 2. Switch 2 was great. Yeah.

Switch 2 bumps it up for me. So my starting point, if we're just talking about Switch 2, it's like, that's good. That was good. But then it kind of gets pulled down. The BBC story was interesting. It's like, it wasn't really a bad thing. Like I also don't really care. Nobody likes that. TikTok is like, whatever. I'm just going to say like in the grand scheme of things, I think this is decent. Yeah, I was going to say decent. Because if we...

If we allow the inauguration thing to drag it down, then every month of this year is going to be in the inferior category, right? I think that's right. Because all year... the world of technology and politics has been mixing in ways that that like is not great no matter i think where you are in the political spectrum it's just not not awesome so i i wouldn't want to to like

hang the month on that personally. So my opening would be this was a decent month. I can live with that. Yeah, me too. Cool. So January, you're a decent. Decent. February. So we're now into month two. Mark Gurman reported.

that Apple was moving folks around to work on its AI issues. This story was about Kim Varath, who I was not familiar with this name. But apparently they have quite a reputation with an Apple as a fixer. I was not familiar with your game, right? Isn't that like a meme? I mean, that too. That's what you would say. You would say that, right? Name or game. Exactly.

And there's a spoiler. There's going to be more of this sort of thing coming. And I'll just insert this here. The further we get away from WBC 24, just the more and more bonkers it seems that they announce all these things. It's unbelievable. Unbelievable. It feels like a different timeline, like a hallucination of sorts. Like, it's unbelievably weird that they did that. Yeah.

The BBC reports that the UK government wants access to encrypted user data and that that request for that data would remain private. This would have meant the end of advanced data protection. in the uk which is the uh sort of icloud feature that adds your own key into the mix so apple could see basically nothing and um

This was obviously concerning. We talked about this and Mike, you definitely had feelings about it. I think you turned off ADP in advance of this. Yeah, and that came back to bite me in a bad way because now I can't turn it back on again. Yeah, that's unfortunate. Yeah, because I turned it off.

in advance of them telling me I had to turn it off because I figured if I left it too long, I was worried that something bad was going to happen to my iCloud account. So I kind of just like gave up and did it. And even though things have changed, not completely. has, I think, come up later on in the show.

I cannot turn at least I'm going to check again, but I could not turn advanced data protection back on advanced data protection. Yeah, no long. It cannot offer this in the United Kingdom. And I'm not sure that they I don't believe they ever. cook it away from like they said they would. So I've ended up in the worst situation there. Yeah, that's unfortunate. Yeah. Big news in February.

Apple, I'm just going to read Jason Snell's headline. Apple invites invites to send you invitations. I could not believe. That was this year. Yeah. Yeah. Reading from Jason, Apple on Tuesday took their wraps off a rare brand new app, Invites. This, for some reason, is only available to iCloud Plus subscribers. And you can use it to set up a party or an event or something. Send an invite out to everybody. And people can respond. And you can do a group, like shared photo.

album through it which i think is actually really pretty great and i think the big reason this made news because already in february we were talking about hey there's gonna seems to be a redesign coming to apple's platforms and People thought that, including us, I think, the Invites app was a bit of a look forward to what that could be. And looking at these screenshots now, like this is not liquid glass, but it's definitely like a step towards liquid glass, I think.

Yeah, I just had a funny thing happen where I opened invites, which I've not done in a very long time. And it welcomed me to Apple invites is like, this is a new thing, even though I've used it before. And I press continue. And, you know, so there's no upcoming events. So I pressed plus and I started adding a new event and I went to...

tap the image playground button because that's heavily featured. And then it showed me the welcome to invite screen again. So that went well. Good work to everybody, I guess. So I'm not exactly sure what happened. but that's fun yeah I will say every time we bring it up and make fun of it we get feedback that people are using it so well I mean people are actually using

The other apps, the third-party apps that do this, one that I can't remember the name of. Evites is a big one. Okay, there's another one. There's another one that apparently all the kids use, and that's the one that people are actually using, not Apple Invites. Coming up next in February. Partyful. I just did a search on the App Store, and I'm pretty sure that's the one. Partyful, maybe. Yeah, I think we did talk about that. Yeah. In February, we also got a taste of forbidden fruit.

when Netflix seemingly joined the Apple TV app. Turns out it was a mistake and was quickly undone. It was like 24 hours, right? Or something like that? Maybe not even that. That was so funny. I did have the thought, I mean, that's very funny. Like, clearly, I guess it's just a flag they had set wrong. But I do wonder...

If Netflix is allowed to buy Warner Brothers and they survive that because most companies who buy Warner Brothers don't survive it, would that change? Would you think Netflix would be... willing to revisit it once they have more content? I think HBO will probably remain what it's doing, but Netflix will just... I mean, the thing is, there isn't just a flag. They've developed the ability for this to occur, right?

So Netflix has built all of the TV and app integration they need, and they're choosing not to release that, right? You can't just like accidentally stumble into integrating with the TV app. They have spent the time to do all of the work that they would need to do on their systems to be able to get that content to show up, and then they're not doing it. There is an issue between Apple and Netflix that needs to be resolved. But my expectation is for as long as HBO Max is a...

is a streaming service of its own, which apparently, even if Netflix buy it, seems like they'll probably want to keep doing that. I reckon that that will probably just stay in the TV app. But I don't think we'll see Netflix move, though. Also in February, I'm reading from Instagram, Mike Hurley. Hello. Sophia Hurley, born February 22nd, 2025. Let's go, baby.

This is the point in the document. When I was putting this document together, I was going through our show notes and stuff. It's like there's this eight-week gap. I did not talk about any of this news, which is very funny to me. And that begins now, unexpectedly. Yeah. I will say that your daughter knocked me out of your top nine post. I feel like I'm usually in there.

And I was removed. Sorry about that. Yeah, I mean, I posted some stuff this year and just people seem not to like it as much as they like pictures of me having a baby. There you go. Like, you're in my Instagrams, like me and you, Hackney Empire. Yeah. Well, that would have been two years ago, but yeah.

No, no, no, I posted more. I did it again. Yeah, I did like one year ago today and I posted more on them, but they didn't like that as much. Just like get new content, you know, I think that's what other people are saying. A couple other things. In February, Apple announced a $500 billion investment in the United States. I just want to read a sentence from this press release because it reads like Tim Cook himself wrote it.

Apple today announced its, quote, largest ever spend commitment. Oh, yeah. And a bunch of stuff was included. Advanced manufacturing in Houston to build private cloud compute servers that were previously built outside the U.S. Apple would double its U.S. advanced manufacturing fund to create an academy in Michigan.

to train U.S. manufacturers, and they tooted their horn about a bunch of other things, including how much tax they pay. I love that. Apple has done this for many years under different administrations. A bunch of this was probably already happening, but it's good PR, I guess, in the current climate. Yeah, and I would say as well, just to set this up for later on because it gets confusing.

Apple keep making claims of how many hundreds of billions of dollars that they're spending. There's another one of these later in notion. There's two more. I think there's two more. It's actually mostly the same amount of money. They do increase it once. But they're just talking about how they're spending this money. But it makes it sound like they've spent $1.6 trillion by the time the year ends, which is not what they've done. But, you know.

Hey, look, if I was committing $500 billion, I would keep talking about it. Same. I wouldn't shut up about it. Every day I'd have a press release. Yeah.

And then also in February, we got coverage of the iPhone 16e. It starts at $599, which was 40% higher than the iPhone SE that it replaced. I think this phone is kind of famous for its weird mix of features. So it has a notch and an action button, but it does not have MagSafe camera control or the dynamic island. Only comes in black and white.

And it shipped with the C1. So this was the first phone with Apple's homegrown modem six years after Apple bought Intel's failing modem business for $1 billion. And, you know, I see them. Like, my brother actually has one. I bought one for somebody recently in the family. It's fine. I would not pay full price for one. Like, get one refurbished and bring the price down.

It seems like there will be a 17e. I think the mix of features and the price point just weren't quite right on this phone. The lack of MagSafe is truly... unbelievable omission. It has Qi charging, just not MagSafe. I want to be clear about that. But that's no good. Truly, I do not know what led them to make that decision. How much can a magnet cost? Yes. I cannot fathom what led them to make that decision for a phone that is $600. Like, not great. Yeah. So that's February. I want to say...

Regardless of everything else in this document, your daughter being born makes this best I love you. Thank you so much. I thought you were going to say like... I guess we'll give it to him. Apple invites makes it best I love you. No. Nope. You're so awesome. Y'all became parents. Thank you. Obviously, for me, it's the $500 billion investment.

I'm sorry. Oh, I love $500 billion. Money, money, money to Donald Trump. Yeah, there is also, for people who have not heard the Annie's before, there is the personal achievement override, which we have just enacted for February. Yeah. So February, best I love you. Yeah. Well, boys, it is now March 2025 and...

It's a big one. We begin the month with a statement from Apple PR sent to a bunch of press outlets, including... They're in Fireball saying Siri helps our users find what they need and get things done quickly. And in just the past six months, we've made Siri more conversational, introduced new features like type to Siri and product knowledge, and added an integration which had GPT.

So far, so good. We've also been working on a more personalized Siri, giving it more awareness of your personal context, as well as the ability to take action for you within and across your apps. It's going to take us longer than we thought. deliver on these features and we anticipate rolling them out in the coming year. This is the delay. of the more personalized, contextually aware Siri that was showcased at WWDC24. And Apple pretty much said, yeah, we're not going to do that.

this year uh it's gonna roll out in the coming year and there was a A whole lot of conclusion, a whole lot of confusion regarding what in the coming year meant. That needed to be secondarily confirmed, which is a very... I think if that's what your press release is doing, it's not a great press release. I don't even understand the terms.

But there's more from this website called Daring Fireball. Arguably, I would say, the most important article in the Apple community of the year. Maybe in a few years, something is rotten in the state of Cupertino. Just a banger of a story from John Gruber, sort of taking Apple to task for their delay and what John pretty much described as vaporware announcement of the... personalized, contextually aware Siri from a few months before at WWDC. Now, this thing is still not shipped.

and it's not clear exactly what happened. Was the thing, was the demo, not a demo, was the video that they showed at WWDC like a concept video? Sounds like it was. It absolutely was. I mean, they've said since that it was like, oh, I mean, it was working. No, it wasn't working. Like, sure. You definitely didn't show that. Because if you re-watch it...

which I have, you don't ever actually see anything happening. Yeah. It's someone's using a phone and there's like projected interface around them. Yeah. to kind of hint at what is happening more than what is actually happening, which is one of these things where on the face of it at the time, that should have indicated to us. And that's kind of what John's, one of the things John's article is about.

It should have indicated to us that something wasn't right. But we've also gotten used to a completely new style of presentation from Apple. So they're doing lots of interesting and weird things. But yeah, there is... It didn't ship, so there you go. Yeah, yeah. And again, I think one of... if not the biggest story of the year. And as we'll see later for WWDC, this what happened here sort of dictated a new approach for Apple.

came to announcing features that were actually ready giving out plenty of demos in briefings at WWDC This is a black eye, really, for the software department at Apple. Hopefully a lesson that they are and will continue to learn from given what happened. And again, still not shipped.

Who knows if and when, which model is going to be behind it? Is it going to work? Is it not going to work? Who knows? New Mac Studio. Also in March, two flavors of the Mac Studio with the M4 Max and M3 Ultra. And I remember when it was announced, the fact that Apple was doing a new Mac Studio with... two different chips from two different chip generations. It was very confusing when it was announced. But it became clear quite...

quickly that the M3 Ultra was going to be a fan favorite for using local AI models. In fact, I still have on loan from Apple an M3 Ultra Mac Studio with half a terabyte of... ram um kind of funny how expensive ram is these days you know you could sell this thing for a fortune at this point uh too bad that the ram is obviously soldered on the you know it's not a proper RAM module that you can sell on eBay Apple is now betting heavily on this stuff on local AI it's their only differentiator

arguably at this point, from the rest of the AI industry, as we're going to talk about later in the year with MLX and the performance on Apple Silicon. But the M3 Ultra was in the news again lately. We're going to talk about that later, maybe. for the things that Apple is doing with Thunderbolt 5 and DAISY chaining multiple Mac Studios in a little home cluster, if you will. And you want to run really...

big and computationally heavy large language models locally. They're doing fascinating work, and I think this is a fascinating computer, especially the M3 Ultra version, which is insanely expensive, but it's a really powerful computer. I have some real-time follow-up. Okay. So I kind of misremembered a little bit about what that demo video looked like. I wanted to go check it. Basically, the presenter would say a thing and then it would cut to...

a hand holding a phone, and a piece of UI would appear on the phone. And then it would go back to them again. So it wasn't like a live demo as such, but... I mean, the reason, because I don't think it was actually doing any of those things, but they had like mock-up UI that was happening on a phone, but it was like cut, cut, cut, cut backwards and forwards. Just correcting myself. Yeah. There's more hardware happening in March. The M4 MacBook Air. It's basically similar.

Very similar to the previous one. It comes in blue now. And there's a better webcam with support for center stage and desk view. Have you guys ever seen desk view in news outside of Apple? remote briefings only if I accidentally do it well and also I think I did it to you on a call recently for fun and it was really rough I think I turned on desk view and then got in the frame

to throw you on a Monday. That's it. And also, finally, this computer supports two external displays officially. No hacks necessary. nice computer the blue is not really blue but you know what you gotta do I think it's a lovely computer. I mean, I know a lot of people in my real life who have purchased an M4 MacBook Air and they love it. I think it's a great computer. My wife has one. It's great. Yeah. There were also updates to the iPad Air and the base model iPad M3 chip on the iPad Air.

A16 on the base model iPad and a new version of the Magic Keyboard for the iPad Air that is kind of similar in terms of construction and mechanism to the Magic Keyboard for the iPad Pro, but it comes with a... it's... It's not like an aluminum one around the keyboard. It's got the same silicon material as the outside, effectively, and doesn't have haptics and doesn't have backlit keys. So it's got a magic keyboard light.

so to speak. I don't know anybody in real life with an iPad Air. I kind of struggle to see the point personally of the iPad Air, but it's also a nice iPad at the same time. I don't know what's going to happen to this line. If you ask me, they should just call it iPad and have multiple flavors of iPad, including a less expensive one. But...

I don't know. I personally find the iPad Air kind of confusing at this point. I think the iPad Air is good if you want an iPad Pro but don't want to spend the money on one. Yeah, maybe. Because you can get a keyboard and you can do that whole thing without spending, you know...

over a grand or whatever to get you in the door. Maybe, maybe. We have another quote for the month of March, and arguably an even better quote. We swam hundreds of miles. We set a Guinness Book for World Records for swimming distance, but we still didn't swim to Hawaii. And we were being jumped on, not for the amazing swimming that we did, but the fact that we didn't get to the destination. This is a quote from Robbie Walker. Previous Siri chief will...

Talk about Robbie Walker again. Later, he would leave Apple in September. And he called the Siri delays in an internal... meeting and memo ugly and embarrassing um and also provide also use this incredible quote one for the ages really uh that the more you look at it especially when you read it The more you proceed in this sentence, the less it makes sense. Yes. Whatever.

I don't know who's jumping and what they're jumping on. Are they like jumping on you while you're swimming? I have two issues with this quote, right? One is that it is cringe, but it's like... i understand it at the same time like you're trying to like be a team leader here right and you're like i don't know you're just trying to like make people feel better but the second part that i have is like the whole framing of this quote is like

We did so much great stuff and shipped so much great stuff, but people are upset about what we didn't ship. But I would argue that they didn't ship great stuff. Like Apple intelligence is not good, right? Like what they actually shipped. There's like a couple of features that some people like me like, like notification summaries or whatever, but like image playgrounds, are we really proud of this? Like writing tools, do people use them? I don't think so.

It's like, oh, you integrated with ChatGPT, right? What they actually ship wasn't really that good. So I don't think there was actually a lot of amazing swimming. Yeah. Unfortunately.

I saw this incredible conspiracy theory. I think it was either on Reddit or on X a few days ago, this post saying, somebody said, I actually think that Siri is like the... greatest piece of like intentional sabotage internally for corporate espionage like because that's the only reason that it would make sense that it's so terrible I mean it's definitely like

Where all these people have then gone to meta, it does kind of feel a little bit like that, right? Like Mark is saying, you know those billion dollars? Like, I'll give you all of it if you just make cereal better. But please, please make sure that it absolutely must suck. It needs to be terrible.

And while Robbie Walker was reminiscing about all the amazing swimming that had been done toward Hawaii, but not really quite reaching Hawaii, Apple named Vision Pro Chief Mike Rockwell the new... head of siri uh with john janandrea uh moving to a different position what was the official role for janandrea do we remember the uh I don't think there was one, at least not that we would necessarily know. Okay, okay, yeah. We still don't know.

Because Siri hasn't really changed, right? We still don't know if moving Rockwell to the head of Siri is actually being effective or not. We don't know what's been Rockwell up to so far, in addition to the Vision Pro with Siri. No idea. No idea. We'll see. And that brings us to the end of March.

Let's see. Let's take a look at the chart again. Look, it was not like the news was not great, but it was a great month for content. Yes. Yes. I would... I think this was good. This is a good plus month. Yes. I mean, because, like, there wasn't anything... that was going to pull me back from my paternity leave. But something rotten in the state of Cupertino was the closest. I really had some stuff to say about that article.

So, yeah, I think good plus is a nice rating for that one. Yeah. I'm up for it. Okay. This episode of the show is made possible by Ecamm. If you're a Mac user who's creating video content or podcast with your Mac, you need Ecamm. It's the all-in-one studio built exclusively for macOS, so it looks, feels, and performs like a native pro app should. That's important to me, and I bet it's important to you too.

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Our thanks to Ecamm for supporting the show and all of Relay. There wasn't a lot of news in April. I have two stories. I'm going to start with the second one, actually, because it was the least consequential. Apple and Meta hit with the EU's first DMA fines. They fined both companies half a billion, so $500 million. And then that also kicked off another round of changes from Apple to better fit in the rules of the DMA. which are supposed to start in January.

And there's been no more information about those. That was something I was looking at this morning because as we're recording this, they just announced a similar kind of set of stuff for Japan. But then it's similar but different. Anyway, I look forward... to on January 1st, finding out how all of the DMA stuff is actually going to work again. But that was that. The big news in April was tariffs. This was tariff time. It freaked everybody out in the world of technology and otherwise.

Taris was absolutely the biggest story of the month. It affected everything. And then most of the news was focused on Taris one way or another. Right. So like. Apple being in and out of various schemes, right? First it was chips are not included, then smartphones are not included, and then maybe they are, and then it depends on where they're made.

That then started talk of Apple moving production out of China and maybe to other places. And then just generally in tech, the threat of everything becoming more expensive and nobody knowing what's happening. That was essentially the entire month of April. It was just tariff time. So I would say absolute nightmare. Yeah. Nightmare? Yeah. Nightmare, yes. Okay. Just a terrible time. Yeah. It was.

All right, that brings us to May. More Apple legal stuff. May? May the force be with you, Steven. And also with you. As they say on Star Trek, right? They do. They love to say that. They do. They do say that. Okay, so we had a bunch of stuff with Apple, but now here in the US. So this is one of many steps along the path of Apple and Epic and Apple's App Store control legal nightmare, but here in the U.S.

In May, the news was that Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers ruled that effective immediately, which was also a fun thing about this, it wasn't like... Oh, in six months or like the new year is like, no, right now, Apple could no longer collect fees on purchases made outside of the app store. And they had to stop restricting how developers pointed users to where they can make purchases.

outside of the app stores remember like the scare screens and all that stuff this was pushed back against that um surprisingly apple announced that they were going to appeal but once this door was open a lot of things happen. So basically, instantly, we saw apps like Hay and Spotify take advantage of this, or you could just go out to the web and purchase a thing and then come back. Fortnite came back to the iPhone.

And just another example of Apple choosing some wild hills to die on. And it's still going on. Yes, it is. Like, even this week. It never ends.

Because basically the update to it now, because I don't think we've got this in the show for later on, is essentially Apple can charge an amount, like that will be the result of this, but nobody has decided on what that amount... should be it's like a fair amount so what does that mean we'll find out later but until this is resolved and again I don't know I'm not sure when it's going to be resolved this remains as is in America

It's something that if you're a developer, I would be hesitant to say, okay, we're going to rush out and do these changes. Because it could go away or it could change again. And I mean, maybe the argument is we'll make hay when the sun is shining. But if you want to go outside of the App Store structure, that is... ground that is changing under your feet almost all the time and uh and differently in different markets so which is what apple wants right they want you to be in the app store

Then something happened that I don't know if Apple wanted to happen. It's hard to say. Our boy Eddie Q, while speaking at the Google search trial, so this was the... Is Google a monopoly and do they have monopolistic power because they, for instance, pay Apple a bajillion dollars to stay the default in Safari on the phone? So Eddie Q said this.

Incumbents have a hard time. We're not an oil company. We're not toothpaste. These are things that are going to last forever. You may not even need an iPhone 10 years from now. How do you go from oil company to toothpaste? Look, the man's mind is magnificent. It's jazz. It's jazz, isn't it? Is he just riffing? Yeah. This was in...

The context of this is like, well, AI is coming. It's going to change search. It could change Apple. It could knock the smartphone off the market. We may have something new. That was all sort of in the background. But in a vacuum, the quote is bananas. Oh, there was one other quote, right? Wasn't this when he also said Google searches down? Yes. And Google like exploded in fear. Yeah. And Google like came out and was like, no, that's actually not true. It's like, wait a second.

they didn't really say that. They said like queries, like, you know, that they were very, I mean, in my mind, Google gave a statement that confirmed what Eddie Q said about saying it. But yeah. Total.

Total nightmare fuel, all that stuff. For them. You know, I think about what Marco said like 10 years ago, like don't bet against a smartphone. Yeah. It's hard to beat it. Apple rolled out rebranded CarPlay Ultra. Just a mere three hours, geez, three years. Three hours. Three years after its unveiling. It was shown off at WBC in 22. And in finally 25, we saw CarPlay Ultra. That branding was new and it was only on an Aston Martin at first. And as a reminder, what this is.

It is CarPlay breaking the bounds of infotainment. For years now, if you have a fancy car with multiple screens that supports it, CarPlay can project into, say, the screen. behind your steering wheel like for maps or music or something this goes many steps further where carplay is managing your things like your speedometer and uh maps and music it's all integrated more nicely the design of it can be done by apple and or apple in conjunction with the car brand and the car brand still has to quote

punch through carplay ultra for things like the check engine light or other there are other things that require a real-time operating system like on a car that will come through this and and so you can have a mix of carplay and carmaker user interface kind of at the same time. It's not surprising to me that car manufacturers have pushed back against this. In fact, in 22, when Apple announced this, there was a whole bunch of logos on the slide.

And a bunch of those companies in the years since have said, no, we're not doing it. But hey, Aston Martin, if you want us to review this, just shoot us an email. We'll take one for the team. And of course, GM and others are leaving CarPlay altogether. So there's that going on too. Also this month, we got an open letter from Sam Altman and Johnny Ive.

Mm-hmm. And they had that video in San Francisco where they closed down the city and talk about how much they love it. Johnny, I was walking with his arms. Looking back on this, like I reread this. Have we read some coverage of this? Right. They're announcing a partnership. They're going to make some sort of chat GPT, open AI powered hardware. That's not a wearable, but also not a phone. So something else.

And this was a partnership between Johnny's sort of existing love firm work and what OpenEye was doing, a new company called IO that was founded by Ive, Scott Cannon, Evan Sankey. and some others later it was thanks to a lawsuit announced that they can't use that name because some other company had it just hilarious right on brand for open eye really just try to take someone else's name and then get sued for it

But here we are. They're going to have a partnership. News was also reported that... So Johnny Ive and Lovefirm are still independent. So this is like a third thing. And they have now taken over a lot of design stuff. for open AI. Sam Altman, I think, views himself as a Steve Jobs-like character, and what do you do to say that? You go hire Johnny Ive, and you take a black and white photo of him hugging you. My view of Sam Altman is...

is lower and lower as time goes on. No way. I have not gotten that impression at all. This is one of my favorite moments in the history of the show. This was live, right? Yes, this episode was so fun. We were so excited. I still think we were right to be excited in that moment. And the excitement might actually come back again. They may deliver an incredible product. I agree that as time has gone on and we've heard them talk about it more, it seems like...

They actually didn't have as much of a plan as we thought they might have had. But it was so much fun. I think we would keep over and over again shouting, Apple is cooked, which was so... Mike started shouting, let's go. Let's go, let's go. It was, oh my God, it was amazing. What incredible news that was to drop live in an episode. That was so fun. And then we also saw...

uh, in May, uh, this is from Federico, uh, a look at sky. So this is from the folks who are short for workflow became shortcuts. They left Apple. to do this. This was AI integration automation for macOS. And the demo you showed and the article you wrote were incredible. They have since been purchased by OpenAI. Yes. The app that would never ship. Yep. Which I think is what you're, maybe just in private, your guess was, but... No, it was also my conclusion. Was it? Okay, then it may never ship.

Yeah, and I speculated that I wouldn't be shocked if OpenAI ends up acquiring this even before it ships, given that I believe Sam Altman himself was an investor in software. incorporated, software applications incorporated. So yeah, hopefully this will be the future of the Chagypt app for Mac. That would be my guess. And we'll see. I don't know. I had access to this. I've never mentioned it until right now. I had Sky. I was using it for months. It was really interesting.

yeah yeah yeah and then it stopped stopped working at some point yeah uh and and we all kind of figured that something was up and uh yeah it was updates and uh then a little while later it was done yeah yeah yeah It was very interesting. Very interesting product. Yeah. So a lot of stuff in May. I feel like it's normal. Oh, I don't know. The App Store stuff was really interesting. Yeah.

I would say that this was good. Good. It was a good month. Good month. Okay. Yeah. Okay. I think. I can be persuaded. Good it is. I love that. Thank you so much. Good.

Which brings us to June, usually. A big month for Apple, and this year WWDC was a pretty big one. I don't even know where to begin. Let's just use these two magic words. Liquid gas. Love it. Oh, man. So good. Nothing's going to go bad. I don't even know. what to say here. Like, we were all expecting a major redesign given the rumors leading up to WWDC. What happened? You know, they announced this and it became... pretty clear that a lot of people online yes yes upon further reflection yes yes

Get it out of your system now, Stephen. Okay, what else? If anything, their plans were pretty opaque. Okay, okay, okay. Anything else? You know, I don't know. That's it. That's all I got. The line between rage baiting on Instagram and actual design critique is pretty blurry. you know yes okay uh but yes honestly that is the thing uh that it became obvious that lots of people were gonna have lots of opinions in in the coming months

And Apple spent the better part of the summer tweaking liquid glass. They still are actually still tweaking liquid glass now. They will be doing that for the next three years. Yes. Yes. But this was a major announcement, a brand new design language, not a redesign. I mean, iOS, you take a look at iOS 26, it's not... drastically different from iOS 18. But you have this new material, you have this new design language, and it's more successful on some platforms than it is on others. Mac OS.

Liquid Glass, can you believe it? It's also on tvOS, believe it or not. It's also there. It's on the Apple Watch. It's everywhere. Look. I do like Liquid Glass, especially on iOS. I think it's fun. I think they have solved the most glaring accessibility issues of Liquid Glass. But they are going to spend, like Mike said, the next few years tweaking, refining, especially the glass part. The liquid one, I think, is pretty cool. Like all the animations.

To kind of tack on to what I mentioned, I kind of threw it in there. Even if people liked liquid glass, they would still be spending years tweaking it. Right? If you're redesigning an operating system, it's never done. You're going to keep changing it until you do the next redesign. The iOS 7 design, that just kept morphing year after year after year until they redid it. What we had in iOS 18 was still part of that lineage.

And then liquid glass is a bigger take than moving forward. Yeah, but you often aren't doing that in your point one and point two releases. That happens every year. They're moving much more quickly. But I'm saying both is going to be the case. I think that it happens in the point releases and then will continue to happen for years. Yeah, I am. You'll see. In addition to Liquid Glass, it was also an amazing year for the iPad.

Incredible changes in iPadOS 26, windowing, local capture, improvements to file management, more keyboard shortcuts. I mean, there was so much... in iPadOS. They had me interview Craig Federighi about iPadOS 26 and the history of the iPad. Working on that story is one of the highlights of my career at this point.

Thank you. And it comes with many, many details and personal moments that I... told you guys privately, but the making of that story and how it happened during the week, it is one of my greatest achievements so far in the line of work that I do. And I'm really happy about that. And I'm really happy about iPod S26. And I think lots of people are. And once again, just liquid glass, they are still improving.

They're listening to feedback. They restored the split view and slide over. They improved local capture once again. I think they... It feels like for the first time in many, many years that the iPad and especially the iPad software has momentum, which is not a phrase that I could have used. up until this year um so we'll see hopefully they do keep it up

And it's not going to be, you know, oh, yes, we improved a bunch of things for you guys last year. Now, please stay quiet until, you know, let us forget about the iPad for another couple of years and then we'll come back. Hopefully it's not going to be that. I don't think it's going to be. I don't think so. either for a variety of reasons, but HyperOS 26, pretty awesome. Other highlights that I just wrote down in the document, just going off my memory here, workout body.

He was, for some reason, stuck in my brain forever. Because you like the name. I remember that I kept asking, and I think Apple PR maybe at some point thought that I was being weird. I kept asking during briefings, like, does the body have a name?

And they kept saying, no, it's Workout Buddy. I really wanted to understand, like, is Buddy an affectionate way to refer to the workout digital person or do they actually have a name? And they kept saying, no, the name is Workout Buddy. I was like, okay, sure. secretly, I do think that the workout body internally at Apple has a name, but they wouldn't tell me. It might just be Buddy. That's not a name. It is a name. I mean, only...

Name a person named Buddy that is not Buddy Holly. Buddy Oliver. One of Jamie Oliver's children is called Buddy. Buddy Hackett was an American comedian. I'm ready to go. I had that one in the chamber. Buddy Oliver. Okay, all right, cool. And also the translation with AirPods. I haven't been able to test this because it's... Is it in the EU now?

Oh, I think it is with .2. I think that was one of the .2 features. So you can test it out now and report back. I can translate myself. I can just, you know. Nice. Okay. Obviously...

Shout out to 512pixels for starting this controversy regarding the Finder icon in macOS Tahoe. Steven, what happened with the Finder icon? Yeah, so in the first... build of Tahoe the icon had a white background with the blue face on the right instead of the left the way it should be I wrote this the day of the keynote and Did some history, showed a bunch of Finder icons, and it was widely circulated. I think it's the most popular thing on 5.12 in like two years. And they fixed it in Beta 2.

Thank you for your service. Go team. Thank you, Steven. Mark Gurman reported that Apple was debating a deal about buying perplexity. The AI search startup doesn't seem like it actually... went through obviously propensity is still operating independently and uh but that kicked off a an interesting series of conversations about like what

Could Apple do with perplexity? Why is Apple thinking about perplexity? And that was in the context of the rumored, and also... upcoming, it seems like in 2026, version of Siri that will be able to tap into world knowledge. for answering questions that are found on the internet with AI sprinkled on top. And Perplexity is pretty good at that, I would say. But maybe the...

You know, the fact that Perplexity is a company swimming in lawsuits, including a most recent one by the New York Times, I'm sure that didn't help the perception of Perplexity at Apple. And they were doing their due diligence about this company. Yeah. I do think for perplexities to be here in five years, they do have to be bought by somebody. But I think they're probably, because of the legal issues, they're...

pretty toxic, and maybe someone will get them on the cheap at some point, but yikes. I think they will, my wildcard prediction is that they will end up getting bought by one of the companies that are suing them. Ah. Oh, interesting. Plot twist. The New York Times. Some personal news. I mean, you joke about it.

But also, like, it would actually make sense to have perplexity as an internal tool for New York Times journalists who are doing research about stories. I don't know. We'll see. MacRumors reported toward the end of June that Apple was testing. based on some code snippets that they found a MacBook with an A-Team Pro chip. This rumored budget MacBook will likely be one of the bigger stories of 2026.

if it happens, including the potential plot twist, once again, of Intel making that chip, potentially? Who knows? Maybe. At least making it in the future. They might not be making it for this. machine when it ships initially but that would definitely be in their target if that's true yeah and lastly uh the only movie that i've seen so far in 2025

Maybe I think I found somebody to come see Avatar 3 with me because Sylvia couldn't care less. Nobody really cares about Avatar. Sylvia keeps referring to them. To the people of Pandora, she thinks they're humanized dogs for some reason. Huh, okay. She keeps saying that they're dogs. Interesting. And I told her, look, the Navi are not dogs. The Navi, look at him. Yeah. You're such a Cameron head.

Oh, yeah. I don't know if the James Cameron fans have a fandom name, but you would know if they did, and you are one of them. I just love my guy, Jim, you know? Yeah, old Jimmy. Anyway, the only movie that I've seen so far, F1, and I actually saw it at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park. It opened in its opening weekend to 100%. $444 million around the world. Everybody was really happy. Apple is really happy. This is a hit. This is an unexpected hit. Good, fun movie.

Not exactly a realistic depiction of what would happen in Formula One, but it's a movie with a, you know, a... It's about a comeback story. It's about a love story. It's about driving fast cars and competition. It's fun. It's good. It looks beautiful. And it sounds great. Basically a perfect action movie, if you ask. Yes. Yes. It's a lot of fun.

I did not go to WBC this year. It was the first time I didn't go other than COVID since 2013. And I got to say, I liked covering it from home. It was a nice change of pace for me. I think one that was needed. But that night when a bunch of my friends were at the Steve Jobs Theater watching this movie and I could see them all and find my together was pretty sad.

It's like Stephen's got his face pressed up against the glass of the Steve Jobs theater, you know. Hey, guys. Let me in. I want to see the movie.

So what do you think about June, Federico? Where is it? Well, okay, so if you ask me personally, because of... going to WWDC. I mean, obviously it didn't start out great given how they stopped me at SFO and took me in a room. I don't think I've ever mentioned this on the show, but they did. That was not fun, but it was resolved quite quickly, thankfully.

I mean it was a it was a best I love you month for me given the iPad and given the Craig interview however I will recognize that interviewing Craig is not equal to birthing a human you can't do that no no no you can't do that we cannot measure the best I love you's against each other it just doesn't it just doesn't work it's like so earlier Kate mentioned we haven't given a nightmare since me getting COVID apparently

at WWDC which I feel like we so I'm happy we've given a nightmare because we absolutely need to recategorize nightmare that like it doesn't have to be that bad you know what I mean like it can't just be bad news month which is what we gave it to so we I think it's Yeah, we shouldn't compare these things to each other, I think, so much. So you're saying that it's okay to give Best I Love You even though a baby was not born? Absolutely, yeah.

Yeah, the personal achievement override. Yeah, I think we both have them. I mean, you got to interview Craig, which really, I reread that last night. I was like, this is so good. And I had the Finder thing. And so I feel like both of us had personal achievement overrides. Yep. Best I Love You it is. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Let's go to July. Mike, what's up? Okay.

So the F1 movie became Apple's highest grossing movie in cinemas. It overtook Napoleon. And this is also when rumors began that Apple would be bidding for F1 rights. Jeff Williams retires as Apple's chief operating officer, replaced by Sabi Khan. This news started the discussion of succession planning again. Oh, little did we know how the rest of the year was going to unfold. Hold on to that thought. Yes. Meta.

started paying huge amounts of money to hire AI talent. They hired a bunch of people. I don't know if it is now, but I'm just going to say it now, including Robbie Walker, previously mentioned Hawaiian swimmer. went to Meta along with a bunch of other people. Meta was just hiring from everywhere, paying some people up to a billion dollars in total compensation, which is just honestly just stupid.

to pay someone that amount of money if you ever want them to continue working for you. That's too much money to give somebody. Apple makes a $500 million commitment to expand US manufacturing. Wait, what? Wait, what? They did it again? This was mostly focused on a partnership with a company called MP Materials, and this is Apple setting up.

a plant in the US to recycle rare earth mineral elements. So again, so what I will say is like the way in which they announced this stuff is just always like... ridiculous because it's always trying to placate the government as Stephen mentioned before and they did it in the Biden administration as much as doing the Trump administration but I do like the things that they spend this money on typically and I think that this is one of them

I think it is good to invest in manufacture in the country in which your business is based. I just think that's a good thing, like spreading it around the world a little bit more, giving more people more opportunities around the world. And I also think Apple recycling more things that they need rather than trying to get them fresh from the ground is a good thing.

Then Apple sued Jon Prosser for stealing iOS secrets, which is one of the weirdest stories I have ever covered in my time of doing this for a living. The short short of the article is the news itself is that it is alleged that Prosser paid the roommate of an Apple engineer. to have a FaceTime call to see the design of iOS 26 that Proster then made a video about. This story will come up again later on in the episode, but this was when the lawsuit was filed.

wild stuff super strange uh filming began on season four of ted lasso with uh The whole cast essentially returning, bar a couple of exclusions, but the most important part is that Jason Sudeikis is returning to the show for season four. And... This is one of the times in which the glossiness of liquid gloss is ramped up again.

throughout the whole beta cycle as mentioned before. It was changing, and this was when beta 4 came out, and it became very gloss again, because in beta 3, it had been more frosted, and in beta 4, it became more transparent again.

How do we rate this month? Normal? This was like a very normal month. It's a normal month, yeah. Like, it's just stuff is happening, right? But none of it, you know, good for Jeff Williams, you know, retiring. That's great. Good for Jeff, but just a pretty normal month, I think, in the state of the year. Yeah. This episode of Connected is brought to you by Squarespace.

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to get 10% off your first purchase. Our thanks to Squarespace for the support of the show and all of Relay. That brings us to August, where it was reported that... Apple had shipped its three billionth iPhone. Billion with a B. Alison Johnson at The Verge put some homework together. In 2016, Apple passed 1 billion phones sold. In 2021, they did 2 billion. In 2025, they did 3. So picking up the pace, just...

Absolutely hard to believe the scale. Like I cannot wrap my mind around this. It's totally crazy. Apple is very much the iPhone company still, right? I mean, I know ADQ said his thing, but if you look at the charts. and the graphs that Jason does every quarter. The iPhone is still the bedrock of Apple's business. AI, Vision Pro, other things have not yet moved the phone off its base, but you never know.

If anything has its services. Services is the only thing that has taken out of the percentage, like to bring it down to less than half. Yeah. Like that's the only thing. And the services that are dependent on the iPhone, right? Absolutely. As the iPhone grows, the services grow. It's not the iPhone replacing the iPod, right? It is a little bit different. Good point. Hey, huge news.

Okay. Apple commits $600 billion to U.S. manufacturing. Wow. No way. This is like the DJ Khaled meme, another one. I don't know. $600 billion. Wow. So what was yours last month, Mike? Was it a 500 billion? Okay. So I care about the country more than you do. Well, I mean, this was a $100 billion increase. They did actually say that to this one. But yes, sure, it's more money. Yes, I will say the headline in the press release, Apple increases U.S. commitment to $600 billion.

So they want you to read it like I read it, announcing $600 billion. Really, it's just a new $100 billion commitment. This is focused around, again, manufacturing. recycling those sorts of things a part of it though was uh corning so corning is going to get or got 2.5 uh billion of this And that is to make 100% of iPhone and Apple Watch cover glass in Kentucky, which is just to the north of my state, Tennessee. Corning has been a partner of Apple for a really long time.

And this is another in a series of investments Apple has made, some under the previous Trump administration, some under the Biden administration, continuing to strengthen this partnership. Corning obviously has lots of their business tied up in Apple. It's good for both companies. And there's a guy holding a sheet of glass in the press release with gloves on. So that's exciting. And, you know, you would say that like...

Ceramic Shield 2, which came out this year, was one of the fruits of their labor together. But then I would say it's the only iPhone glass I've ever broken. So I don't know what to say about that. Oh, when you dropped it with the stroller? Yeah. Yeah, because he preferred the baby to the phone. I preferred the baby to my phone. I mean, the baby got Best I Love You. Will the iPhone 17 Pro get that? Stay tuned. Oh, by the way, I took a chunk out of the aluminum rail yesterday. Are you serious?

I mean, I hit it against the countertop. It's just a little, it's like a scratch, but it's like a deep scratch. Nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah, nah. Or you need a titanium railed iPhone Air. I don't care about a scratch on the rail of the phone, but I can see a tiny sliver of silver peeking through my orange now. So aren't I special? I bet you don't have that. This partnership with Corning not only brought us new iPhone glass.

It brought us a 24 karat gold statue that Donald Trump got handed by Tim Cook. This happened on August 6th. Keep that date in your mind for a second. There was a White House press conference to discuss Apple's new U.S. manufacturing plans, the ones we just spoke about. Reading from Jay Peters at The Verge, CEO Tim Cook presented a gift to President Donald Trump. A unique piece of glass from iPhone glass manufacturer Corning set in a 24 carat gold base. In all capital letters.

It says President Donald Trump, Apple American Manufacturing Program at the top. It has a cut through of the Apple logo and then a, I guess, laser etched somehow Tim Cook signature. Tim Cook's signature, not really what I thought it would be. I gotta say, I'm not. Is that the real signature, though? Or is that the, like, fake signature? Right, because if you're Tim Cook, you can't just go, like, throw in your actual signature around. I don't know. I don't know.

Well, I mean, Trump doesn't like one if you don't use your real signature. Is that true? A little inside political joke for people. Yeah, he's trying to undo pardons from Biden. that were signed by Autopen and not signed by the president directly. Oh my God. Yeah. Made in the USA 2025. How do you just like... This was maybe the most divisive story in our corner of the world this year. Yeah, really? Really? I mean, I can't get anything worse.

No, I am agreeing with you. Are you saying there were a lot of opinions about this? There were a lot of opinions. Definitely not continued even into December. No, clearly not great. I hate it. But the next day, August 7th, Trump exempted smartphones from upcoming tariffs on India.

Most iPhones sold in North America have their final assembly in India. This would have really put a hurt on the iPhone. We were talking about this as like, what will iPhone prices be in the fall? Will tariffs be a part of it? So. You announce another $100 billion. You give a trophy to the president. You get exempted from tariffs. Make of that what you will. Yeah.

Later in the month, Apple launched a redesigned blood oxygen feature on the Apple Watch. So if you remember a couple of years ago, right at the end of the year, There was an injunction against Apple over patents held by Mossimo that the Apple Watch in the U.S. was not able to do blood oxygen reading. And so you would buy... an Apple Watch on one day and it would have this feature and the next day it wouldn't. The hardware was there and it was functional outside of the US but not in the US.

And Apple, so this legal stuff has been going on in the background. We're going to revisit that because one of the cases has had some news later in the year. But Apple sidestepped this by moving the... processing of the sensor data onto the iPhone. So obviously the sensor is still on the watch. It's collecting it. It sends that data to the phone. The phone does the processing and then the watch shows you your result.

and they believe this was enough to get around the patent time will tell um but it's it's wild this went on so long and it made we talked about this a lot it made the product worse like this is a good feature for the apple watch And it made it worse. And so I was happy to see this return. A lot of people, I think, held on who cared about this or knew about it, maybe held on to watches that had it.

I know certainly we had Sleep Plus Plus customers that were like, hey, why doesn't this work? And then you have to send them an email and be like, uh, lawsuits. So I'm glad it's back. There's something weird about that, though. Like Massimo said that they... were not made aware of this at all, which is like, because this was with the Trade Commission? I think so.

Like this wasn't done in the courts. This is like with the people who decide whether something can come into the country or not. It's like how this was resolved. And Massimo say that they weren't involved in this decision, which doesn't seem like the way it should be done. I feel like. I don't know. I don't know. If there's a thing between two parties, maybe the other one should know. But nevertheless, here you go. It's back. So there you go.

And then also in August, the UK dropped its previous demands for a backdoor into Apple encryption. Into American Apple encryption. The worldwide requirement, that's what they dropped. At the time, people were like, hooray! They're not asking for this anymore. But since... It looks like they may be asking for it again, but maybe just in the UK now. It's very unclear because of the way that our version of the Secret Service essentially will... It's more like our version of the CIA, I guess.

says that you can't talk about this stuff. It's all shady stuff, but unknown as to what's happening with this. So, yeah. So, there's a lot of stuff in August that I don't think many of us like. The three billion iPhones thing is cool. Blood oxygen coming back to the US is cool. But I think the tariff trophy situation really drags this down to me. And I would say...

This is inferior. I think it's inferior minus. I can be on board with inferior minus. Yeah, I'll do it. I don't want to put it into Nightmare just because I just don't want to. It just continues to be just everything about it is just really annoying. And so, yeah. Yep. All right. Federico, save us.

Okay, so that brings us to September, usually a busy month. It was a busy month again. Apple event, iPhone 17, iPhone 17 Pro, and iPhone Air. I think obviously everybody was looking forward to the iPhone Air, to this futuristic, super thin model. But I think a lot of people were thinking, oh, this is going to be the cutting edge, top of the line iPhone.

And in some ways it is from a visual and hardware engineering perspective, but it's not the best iPhone, right? It's obviously compromised in a bunch of different ways. And I still love mine. It's the phone that I use every day. And this event, you know, I would also say that the 17 Pro and the 17 Pro Max are... incredible phones honestly like the new design the orange color obviously the vapor chamber cooling the cameras the cross-body strap

which I have seen a couple of people with a crossbody strap, even though it's very expensive for what it is. I think we're looking at a really interesting mix. of an iPhone lineup this year. I think this has been the most interesting iPhone event for me, for my taste, in a while. Don't forget the 17 as well. Yes, I was going to say, the base model, this base model iPhone 17 is a really good phone this year. No complaints, really. Apple Watch Ultra 3, which I got immediately. AirPods Pro 3.

which I also got immediately. I think a really strong event, the iPhone Air takes the crown for me. I know that it's not for a lot of people because of the one camera, because of the battery, because of like, you know. It doesn't have all the fancy stuff of the 17 Pro and Pro Max, but I love this futuristic phone so much. Sometimes I stop and think about the fact that the whole computer is inside the camera.

plateau um it's crazy it is it's wild it is a feat like yeah whether or not this phone is popular like When we eventually, at some point in the future, do a tier list again, this phone's going to go high on that list, I think. They did a really good job here.

But it is unfortunately compromised in the two ways that are most important to most buyers, like realistically, right? Yes. Camera and the battery. Like they are the two most important things about a phone. Like if you improve those, you're doing a good job. And this was a phone that just like necessarily...

had to have some compromise, and unfortunately, I think that has resulted in its lack of popularity. But they did not compromise on... durability and strength i mean there's several tests or the display yeah also the display yeah yeah so it's it's it's a it is a good phone it is compromised but i do think it's one of those products that like the iPhone is going to look a lot more like the iPhone air in the future. I think so.

Also, let's all collectively remember the video from Tom's Guide featuring Greg Joshriak and future Apple CEO. Mike's hardware daddy. Number one. Favorite Apple executive John Turner's. all-time favorite, where they tried to break the iPhone Air and couldn't, and also Jaws threw the iPhone Air across the room. This is one of my favorite...

Eclipse of Video of the Year. It is like a Renaissance painting, but in video. I put in the show notes a link to, it's a timestamp link, but I am going to talk through what I'm seeing. Jaws is... saying something. He's very excited. He picks up the iPhone Air, throws it to Lance Ulanoff, who tries to catch it in one hand, doesn't. It bounces out of his hand, smashes into a table, slides off the table, and then into a seat. Ulanoff then tries...

to bend it with all of his might. Literally all of his might. The phone flexes a little and then that's the end. So good. Oh my God, it's so good. JerryRigEverything had to put it on a piece of machinery to bend it. It is so strong. Apple knew the brief. They understood the brief. They did. Like, if you're going to do this phone, people are going to try and break it. You have to make it as strong as possible. Otherwise, don't do it. And they made it as strong as they could. Yep.

Instagram on the iPad finally launched and it was terrible. Yep. I believe, Mike, we recently talked about the fact that they slightly tweaked the homepage. At least for me. That is for you. Famously, they launched this app and the main feed was not feed was actually reels such a strange release after so many years of people asking for an Instagram for iPad experience and what they give you is

Temu TikTok. I really don't get it. It's so weird, so strange. But it's meta. They have no taste. What else is in September? Oh, yes. the Google and Apple search deal that, you know, the $20 billion one, obviously not as big as $600 billion, but $20 billion. It's nice, nice, nice pocket money. The deal lives on. Leaves on to see another day. It was allowed to continue by a U.S. judge. And so there's that. You will continue to see Google search in Safari.

And, you know, I guess it's going to be powered by Google Gemini and AI mode at some point. So good job, U.S. judicial system. And lastly, you know...

I guess the folks at Relay and St. Jude also raised some money. Let me read this in Italian because I think... I think it's got a nice sound to it when you read the full amount of this money. 700,000. Actually, 753,756 dollari. Oh, that's beautiful. That is nice. $753,756. That's a lot of money. You know what I'll tell you what it ain't? It ain't $500 billion.

It ain't that, you know? Keep doing Relay for a few lifetimes. Good point. We'll get there. If it grows exponentially, you'll get there. Or we pivot into magnets. We could do what Apple do, and we could just keep restating, right? So we could be like... Relay has raised $4 million for the kids of St. Jude. And then the next year, Relay have raised $4.5 million. We could just keep saying it that way. I mean, it is technically correct. It is correct. We, to date...

$4.82 million. So there you go. So we have raised $4.8 million for the kids. We have. It's fantastic. Good job. Good job. No, honestly, the only thing, the only thing. bringing this month down is Instagram for the iPad. Yeah. I think it's good plus. I would take a plus. Yes, yes, yes. I think it's the best line of iPhones Apple's had.

In a really long time. Yeah. I think ever. Maybe ever. Probably ever. Considering how many there were, and they were all really good in their own ways, I think it's maybe the best lineup of iPhones. Mm-hmm.

So that brings us to the month of October. We're into Q4. This stuff is going to start to feel more recent because it was more recent. Apple removes the IceBlock app from the App Store after a request from the US government. This is an app. that let you track where ICE agents were being, I guess, like in the app, you could say, hey, they're here, and then you could see that on your phone if you wanted to. The government asked them to get rid of it, and they did. The UK government...

Once again, once a backdoor into iCloud. This time, hey, it's just the UK this time. Apple and the NBA partner on immersive live games coming to the Vision Pro in 2026. There are a bunch of caveats to this, but if you have the NBA app, you'll be able to watch basketball in immersive video. Fascinating.

In a very specific place and care about a very specific team. No, no, no. That's to do the Spectrum thing. The NBA app is everywhere. Okay. This is why it's super weird. The announcement wasn't great because Spectrum announced it. So they heavily leaned on their offering. Gotcha. But then later on, it came out that you'll actually be able to watch this in the NBA app everywhere. Okay. It's super weird. I really do think that...

Especially live sports are like one of the holy grails of immersive video. Yes. Yes. So the spectrum thing is live. So the only way to watch it happening live is. in Spectrum. Got it. You can then watch it on demand later. Yeah, that's less exciting. It's less exciting, but still you get the effect, right? Like you'll be able to get the effect, I guess. We'll see. We'll see. We'll see.

Slide over returns to iPadOS of iPadOS 26.1. A reorganization at Apple sees Eddy Cue take supervision of the health and fitness teams and Craig Federighi taking ownership of watchOS. Both have previously been under the eye of Jeff Williams, but then with him retiring, they've moved those around. The M5 MacBook Pro, iPad Pro, and Vision Pro were announced and I think started shipping in October with the dual-knit strap.

and PSVR 2 coming to the Vision Pro. Apple announces their deal with F1 starting in the US in 2026. John Prosser says he has been in active communication with Apple over their lawsuit, even though Apple's lawyers say otherwise. This is when we start to get reports of iPhone Air sales saying it's not doing very well and production is maybe cut. And 26.1 then launches as well as having the iPadOS improvements. It also adds a toggle for how much glass you would like in your liquid. Yeah.

It's a lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. A lot of stuff. But it's all pretty recent stuff. It is. There's a lot of it, but none of it seems... extreme money they're in it well okay so the ice block thing obviously that's bad a lot of reasons upset people um but because it's apple doing things that they do in other countries in america um

The MBA thing is good because it's like, we've been asking for Apple to do this and they've finally done it. Slide over is really good, right? Because that's, you know, people wanted that as is the glass toggle. Like if it really bothers you, you can change it. And then there was some products and we love products. So products.

And then the F1 deal is very exciting. I'm very excited about that because I'm intrigued to see what that is going to be. So I would say, you know, I think that you could say it was a normal month. I would say it was a good month because I think the things that are good in this month are really good. Okay. I can do good. I can get behind that.

Now through the end of the year, we are running a discount on memberships. You can go to giverelay.com and you'll get 20% off an annual membership of any shows of your choosing. Obviously. Right now, I'm going to tell you about Connected Pro, which is the longer and ad-free version of the show that we do each and every week. We have a topic at the beginning of the show, Just Remembers, and we have banter, and we choose the title after the show.

And those episodes have no ads in them. So you don't hear any ads if you're a paying member of Connected Pro. GiveRelay.com has also the ability to send a gift link to somebody. So if you have... that nerdy person in your life, or you have somebody who's got to buy you a gift and they don't know what to get you, send them that link and you can gift a membership as well. 20% off means that...

Connected Pro is basically a dollar a week. Comes at 56 bucks or 52 weeks in a year. The math is pretty good there. So for a dollar an episode, you can get... longer ad-free versions of the show. That money goes to support the three of us directly. And you also get a bunch of goodies from Relay. You get newsletter, a couple of members-only podcasts, and access to our amazing

discord. So go check out the link. It is give relay.com. Thank you to everyone who has already signed up during the sale. It's been a huge success so far. You still have until the end of the year. So go check it out.

That brings us to November where, huge news, Apple released a new, what do you call this, Mike? Do you call it a stinger? You could call it a stinger. Some call it a sonic logo. Sonic logo. Yeah. That's fun. I like that phrase. What is the other word? Mnemonic? Maybe. Maybe. I don't know. I don't know. Fanfare, I think. Fanfare. So this is the little thing that plays at the beginning of the show. It is still very appley.

The sound design was done by Phineas and the visual design. There's a link in the show notes to this. I'm sure people saw it was done practically with like big panes of glass swinging around. Super cool. I think it's a really nice evolution. You know, Apple, this was announced. It was such a strange thing. They said, we're dropping the plus. We're just going to be Apple TV. This is part of a new vibrant identity, but it wasn't already. Like this came out.

It's like, just do it. It was in like the end of a press release. Yeah. It wasn't even its own press release. It was kind of sloppy, but anyways, it's here. I've seen it now, you know, several times. I think it's, I think it's great. I like the visuals. I don't like the sound. I think that the old sound was more impactful. I think this new sound is really forgettable. It's too quiet.

I think it's too muted. It doesn't have the same punch to it that I think a lot of these ones do. Interesting. That's my feeling on it. Okay. I love the look. The look is fantastic with the colors and all that, but the sound, it's not. The old one was way more like... boom like you knew you're it's like hype right like you felt like you were getting ready for something this new one is really muted and i don't like it it was also a bit more mac like i think

That's what I liked about it. I liked the lineage. And that's still in there, but now it's more of a reference, like a reference on a reference rather than the thing. Yeah. Major League Soccer is coming to Apple TV starting in 2026. Wait, didn't they do a thing with MLS? This is an expansion.

Next year, all MLS matches will be available to stream for all Apple TV subscribers at no additional cost. Up until this point, there was like a standalone MLS pass you could do. That's going away, just being folded in.

to Apple TV as we know it. Like F1, Apple continues to deepen this partnership with Major League Soccer. And part of this will be every regular season match, like I said, but also... the league's cup tournament the all-star game uh and a bunch of other cups and playoffs that all have names that people know if they watch mls i don't but hey there you go um this quote

helps anticipation grow for the 2026 World Cup. There you go. Sports. I think it is the right time to do it because of the World Cup. The World Cup is in America. And so I think that's going to mean more Americans will be interested in football and they will then maybe want to watch Major League Soccer afterwards. There is a link there, but also it becomes really weird.

to continue offering MLS separately when F1 is included. So I think that's one of the reasons they did it. They kind of had to smooth that out a little bit. Yeah, it brings it kind of all more in line. Same with like Friday Night Baseball, right? It's all just there. Yes. The biggest, really honestly, the biggest product news of the year, I think. Two words, one thing, iPhone pocket. Well, I remember an electrifying review that nobody had any questions about.

What have you done with your iPhone Pocket since then? It hangs behind me. It's currently hanging off the upgrade pennant. So it will live in my quote-unquote set forever. So if you ever watch me on Upgrade, you will see the pocket hanging behind me. That's very exciting. I'd forgotten about this until Monday when I turned on my camera and saw it there. I was like, oh, wow, there it is. There it is.

Massimo's back. More news. A verdict came back awarding Massimo $634 million in damages and concluded that Apple did infringe on the patent covering... low power pulse oximometer. Yeah, that's the one. Oximometer features. Apple said they would appeal. Quote, the single patent in this case expired in 2022 and is specific to historic patent monitoring technology from decades ago. And the feature, as we discussed earlier, is still available. So this will continue.

Yeah, so Massimo, as well as doing the trade thing, they are suing Apple in a bunch of states. This is one of the results of one of those cases. So they may actually win more money out of them, but this doesn't affect The reason that people can't use it on their watches. It's a different thing. Very confusing. And then a couple other things. I'm going to go a little out of order here. Google on the Pixel 10.

updated their quick share feature to support airdrop. And it's absolutely wild. Pixel 10 for now, they say it will expand. Google also says they did this on their own. This wasn't like an Apple-Google joint thing. Airdrop, I mean, I think Apple Views is part of their ecosystem. Not a collab. Not a collab. Apple X Google. You know?

They say it is secure and direct peer-to-peer, just like AirDrop is. I don't know what Apple can do about this. Probably nothing. I don't think they want to sue Google, so... Well, I mean, the thing that they could do... They could change Airdrop. They could change the way Airdrop works, but now the awkward thing is they also now can't change the way Airdrop works, right?

They're in a bit of a catch-22 on this one, I think, now. Because if they change anything, it's going to look like they're doing it to break the Android compatibility. So, it's weird.

And then lastly, in November, Financial Times, Apple intensifies succession planning for CEO Tim Cook. Reporting says John Ternus is the guy. Financial Times said it could come as early as January. Gurman and then the press release about Lisa Jackson and some other folks that we're going to talk about in a second seem to indicate that Tim Cook will be there in March.

This set off lots of conversations. Could Tim Cook be chairman? That's sort of my actually pet theory. The chairman is getting ready to age out. I could see Cook being there, continuing to hand out trophies to presidents, but letting someone else run the day-to-day. So we'll see. This is the backdrop of a lot of stuff Federico's going to talk about in December.

But for November, what are we thinking? Your iPhone pocket, best I love you. No, no, no. One of the greatest things Apple's ever released. Normal? I think normal. How dare you? Absolutely. Do you want a decent? What, are you taking me down? I will. What is happening? All the pocket heads out there, they're going to rise up against us. The pocket heads. I think normal it is. Normal. No, it's more than normal.

Come on. The succession stuff? That's exciting. It's at least good. Okay, good. All right, Federico, take us home.

Brings us to the end of the year. Just two quick items before we talk about the big stuff. There's a report saying that Apple, as I mentioned before, may use Intel. for some chip production in the future uh these rumors are suggesting that maybe intel will be manufacturing some of the i was gonna say less important low-end processors. Minchiko is referring to low-end end processor. We'll see what may happen here.

I wouldn't be shocked if they end up producing the chip for a future low-cost MacBook, but we'll see. There was also the rumor earlier in the year that Apple was going to invest in Intel. or something like that and maybe this is actually what it's about like the investment is actually apple saying all right fine intel we're gonna let you produce some of our low-end chips you know the best kind of investment is a continued contract forever you know what i mean like that's a really good

That's really good. Something that's been, I think, missing a lot in the Apple-centric reporting of this is that Intel's on the ropes. And the now former CEO who came in and then got canned. It came back to Intel, like a Steve Jobs moment, and they got canned. The idea was we're going to make our own stuff, but we're also going to become a fab like TSMC and build chips for other people. That part is something Intel hasn't really done a lot of.

And they're going to be looking for customers. Apple could be one of those customers. So we'll see. I think the world needs Intel to be in it. And if Apple can help them do that and also Apple diversify where their chips are made and who their chips are made by, and they can do this in the US so they can do a press release about it. Like those are all mostly good things, I think. Yeah.

Also, Apple Fitness Plus is expanding to 28 new markets. Okay. So, Apple Fitness Plus continues to exist now in more countries. That brings us to a series of news about Apple executive departures. Number one, Alan Dye goes to Meta. So, the head of design at Apple. is leaving Apple and joining Meta. Meta is forming a new design lab. What are they calling it? Design studio something? Yeah, a design studio inside of the...

hardware division, which they also have a funny name for. I'm doing a bad job here. I'm sorry. Alan Dye is very excited about this on Instagram, saying that it's going to work on the future of wearables. Reality Labs. Reality Labs, yes. So Alan Dye, the much criticized person in charge of Liquid Glass, amongst other things, is leaving the company, joining Meta. John, John Andrea is officially retiring from Apple after having been put in the backseat of AI, is now officially retiring.

There are two additional executive transitions at Apple. The head counsel, what's their name? Kate Adams. Kate Adams. has been serving as a general counsel since 2017, is Living Apple, replaced by Jennifer Newstead. And Lisa Jackson, the Vice President for Environment Policy and Social Initiatives, is retiring in January 26. And that department... The environment and social initiative teams will report to the Apple CEO, Sabit Khan.

and the Jennifer Newstead will now be Vice President, General Counsel and Government Affairs. So... Lots of things happening in this executive team and it sure seems like they are getting their affairs in order for a major CEO transition. Maybe in 2026. Also, there was the report from Mark Gurman following a rumor that Johnny Shruji was going to leave Apple. But actually, Shuji sent an internal memo telling staff that is not leaving Apple anytime soon.

So maybe it's leaving Apple anytime later. For that, you know. semantics am i right uh the english language such a beautiful beast um it's not leaving anytime soon so they're gonna they're gonna keep making chips for now. Now, that brings us to today, guys. In fact, a couple of things. Today, Apple announces changes to iOS in Japan.

new options for developers to distribute apps and process payments and new protections, and I'm reading from Apple Newsroom, to help reduce privacy and security risks that the MCMSCA creates. Mike!

What is the MSCA? I hate that you've done this. This is the Mobile Software Competition Act. It's essentially Japan's version of the DMA. And there really is a lot of... similarity between them uh which is kind of the thing that jason's been mentioning for a long time on on upgrade that like the dma created the framework that every other government across the world could could ape from yeah it's a template right oh we want that too

Well, because also Apple can't argue that they can't do it. Yep. Right? Like Apple in the past have made lots of arguments about things they can and can't do, especially security stuff, for good reason. But... We now know they can do these things. So alternative app stores, alternative app marketplaces, new terms for developers who want to be in them. There will also be new terms for developers that want to distribute their apps out.

outside of the app store and also have apps outside payments and stuff like that. There's also kids online safety stuff, which is also in this, which I don't believe is in DMA, but it's probably coming in a separate thing. I'm going to be honest. I have not read. this in detail yet um i've just glanced at it because i tried in and in glancing at it this morning uh i was incredibly confused by the numbers and then decided i didn't want to look at that yet so that will be for next year yeah

And finally, apps in ChatGPT have launched last night. There is Apple Music. As part of the initial rollout of apps in chat GPT, submissions are now open to all developers and those submissions will roll out in 2026, OpenAI has said. Now these apps in chat GPT, those are... effectively, MCP connectors with a little UI sprinkled on top. They're based on the MCP protocol, but they have UI components. And unlike, you know, in contrast...

to what OpenAI said months ago, they are also live in the European Union. And I can, in fact, use apps in chat GPT. You can, you know, you can connect Apple Music. You can use it without an account just to search Apple Music. or you can connect your account and create playlists in your Apple Music library from ChatGPT. However, you cannot access your library or the contents of playlists from ChatGPT. Kind of weird imitation. Similar to how Spotify works. I can't use them.

Like they don't show up for me. Oh, interesting. I think they are rolling out globally, but I wonder if maybe because you have an American Apple ID, maybe that's helped you get access to it. No, I have an Italian OpenAI account. Oh, okay. Because I do not even see an option to use them. Interesting. But this is a... A new thing. Also, MCP is actually standardizing MCP with UI. Oh, when I logged on the web, they showed up. Yeah, they're not on the Mac app, but they're on the web. There you go.

MCP with UI is going to be a thing in 2026. I know OpenAI is just getting out in front of it with apps in chat GPT. I think it's an interesting time. in terms of what it means to have What it means to be an app right now. And clearly, OpenAI wants to build an OS. And obviously, there's no OS without apps. And now they're betting... pretty heavily on the idea of ChaiGPT is going to be your launcher for everything. We'll see how it goes.

These app integrations are kind of janky right now, but it feels like the beginning of something. Maybe, you know, we were talking about Beats Music a couple of weeks ago. Maybe this is how I rebuild the sentence.

Maybe. I can have my own The Sentence and it can make me a playlist. Maybe, yeah. Look at that. And that's December so far. Good plus. I think so. Sure. I think so. Interesting month so far. Very interesting. Very, very interesting. And that, everybody, is 2025. Let me go through the list. January. Decent. February. Best I love you. March. Good plus. April. Nightmare. May. Good. June. Best I love you. July. Normal. August.

inferior minus september good plus october good november good december good plus You know, it's funny, right? Because if you think about a year, you're like, but this has clearly been a good year. Yeah. Overall. I think so. Because it's been good and interesting. A lot more good in there than bad. We do have a nightmare, but, you know, it happens. Sometimes you just stumble into it. It happens. It happens. Sometimes it's tariffs, you know? Yeah. Well, thank you, everyone.

for another great year of Connected. What a time. We've been in the show a long time. Still very much enjoy it. Thank you all. We are off next week. Next week is Christmas. We're going to take that week off. Then we have, there's a special episode on New Year's Day. Don't think so. It's hard to say. Don't think so. We're not recording until the 8th. I don't know what you're talking about. There will be no episode of Connected until the 8th.

of january that's what i know to be true you know to be true okay well i mean don't don't remove us from overcast is what i'm saying i don't think people would do that I think it's okay. Hit that bell. Okay. Deleted. So yes. So we're going to take a little bit of break for the holiday. If you want to find links to... How many links are in the CMS, Mike? Let me look. We're at 98. That is incredible. Go read all those one by one over your holiday break.

They're at relay.fm slash connected slash 583. You can become a member, get Connected Pro, go to giverelay.com. We're running a sale on that through the end of the year. I think our sponsors this week, Ecamm and Squarespace. And until next year, guys, say goodbye. Arrivederci. Happy New Year, everybody. Bye, y'all. Buon anno.