Thoughts on Apple's WWDC 22 (I went)

Where I'm from the tech reporter at KTLA Channel five in Los Angeles. I've only been here a decade. Can't seem to say it properly? And uh wow, wow wow. This week was a wild one. I was up in Coopertino for WWDC. I was up there for a couple

of days. And it's so interesting because WWDC was virtual this year, but then somehow it turned into an in person event and it was kind of sneaky, kind of a little secret on Apple's part, but they did a really good job of inviting people personally to this event and getting them up there. And the funny thing is I was talking to some of my journals. Well, let me explain. So you know Apple, you know, they do their thing, and they say, hey, you know, we'd love

to have you up there. Can you go? We can't really tell you anything. And so I'm like, all right, but it's Apple. You never know, you never know what they're gonna do, you never know what's gonna be like, so you go. And so they're one of a handful of tech companies that can do that. And so I went. And you get up there, and I still don't know what's going on. They just said, okay, meet it this time and place whatever, and so you meet and as a meeting there, I'm like, wait a second. This is

like there's a lot of a lot more people. And I'm starting to see tweets from other journalists saying that they're at WWDC. I'm like, all right, so what's happening. So anyway, I get there and it is a much larger scale experience than I thought. I mean, they had the entire Apple Park set up outside with this giant screen. It was the biggest it was. It looked like a drive in movie theater screen and with speakers, and it kind of reminds me of Io, like what Apple, sorry,

what Google does? Because they do theirs at kind of an amphitheater, so it's outside, but Apple had set up kind of an indoor outdoor area at Apple Park, and I'd never been inside the actual Apple Park headquarters. Typically when they take us up to or when we go to WWDC, they take us right to the Steve Jobs Theater, which is a circular building kind of off to the side,

and then that's it. But this time we went into campus, pretty deep into campus and into that circular building that you see sort of that spaceship looking building, and the event was held kind of indoor outdoor. It's tough to explain, but they have these giant like sliding glass doors on one part of the campus that just opens up all three floors to the outside, and so you sat in there, and then they had some people sitting more out on the grass, and then they had this big screen setup.

And so the part you probably didn't see online was that Tim Cook and one of the other executives it comes out and they kind of give like an introduction, like a welcome, and then they start the actual event. And once the event started, it was all on tape. And then at the end, I think they came back on I can't really remember, just to say thanks and whatever, and then we got scurried away to kind of a hands on area where we got to go hands on with the MacBook Air and some of the other features

that they announced at the actual event. So that was kind of cool. And that was back at the Steve Jobs Theater. They also had food. I mean the food that Apple serves at these things is just so unbelievable, Like it's it's super like cutting edge. Like the food that they have there is always very healthy, very thoughtful, very like if they serve any sort of snacks, like it's always a brand that I've never heard of but will be big in like six months to a year.

And I had, you know, like for lunch, they had these little like just a little finger sandwiches and stuff. I mean, it's unbelievable, and you know, it's just one of these things where it's a great experience to go because not only do you get to you know, I went to this podcast taping with a bunch of executives, you know, I got to go to this meeting with a bunch of the developers and you got to see this new developers building they have. I mean, it's really

quite phenomenal. And so it's funny. I was reading this blog post this morning about you know, these events that these bloggers and things go to, and how you know it could be construed is taking gifts from them, like if it's you know, if they go to like this big party and this and that. But the underlying message of the of the blog post was that, look, you know, anything I do is trying to get more information and

better information for my readers. And that's kind of the same thing with this, like Okay, oh Rich, you got to eat lunch at Apple's campus, Like, oh my gosh. But the reality is the access to people that you get, the access to information that you get, the basis of information that you get from doing these types of events is so much better than you could ever get covering it at home and never going to any of this stuff.

So yeah, it costs like real money to go up to Koopertino for a couple of days, and it's a lot of work and it's a lot of effort, and it's a lot of energy, and it's a lot of flying, but it's always worth it for the basis that you get and the perspective that you get on these products, and not only the products, but the company. So the understanding of Apple, like when I saw their headquarters, like now I have a real understanding of like how people work there and what they do and just how things

are run. And it's funny, the Apple campus is just as high tech and perfect as the iPhone, Like the way they design it, the attention to detail is just exactly the same. And so it just gives you that understanding.

And I work with a lot of tech companies, like I cover so many of them, and I talk to all the different PR people and I see how they do stuff, and I see how they send me their product and how it's packaged and how it's done, and you know, there are little patterns that you pick up and it really goes to show like a bigger system of what this company's all about. So anyway, it's just it's just phenomenal and I'm glad to be a part

of it. And it's it's just and by the way the people that they have, like only Apple can throw a party where they tell people nothing, and the quality and caliber of people that show up, Like when I tell you every single high end YouTuber, you know, from MKBHD on down is there and they are all there, and it's just you know, the journalists that are there. The quality of you know, the journalists that they can get at their events is just phenomenal. So anyway, I'm

not trying to be like overly a few. Is it effusive? Is that the word? I don't know if that's the word effusive? Yeah, effusive of Apple. But it really is a phenomenal experience. And you know, again, there's a lot to unpack from this event. Let's start with iOS sixteen. So iOS sixteen is going to be a pretty big I don't think it looks very different from the well I guess it does because the lock screen is totally different. There's a lot of let's just go through some of

the features. So let's start with iOS sixteen. So iOS sixteen coming out in the fall. They already have a developer's beta. Public beta's coming out I believe in July. And so the main thing is the lock screen is totally different. The lock screen, the best way I can describe it is it is now an Apple Watch lock screen, so it has widgets, it's customizable. It just everything is totally different because now you have these little widgets that

are basically Apple Watch complications. In fact, developers it's the same thing. So if they developed an Apple Watch complication, it's pretty much easy to bring it to the lock screen on the iPhone. So you can get all your information that you want, and you can customize this with calendar, events, weather, battery levels, alarms, time zones, activity, ring progress, whatever you want.

You can also change the look of the time and the date, so they have different fonts, they have different colors. The home screen or the lock screen itself can have different live wallpapers. You can see kind of like the weather. You can see the Earth, the solar system. You can have emojis on them. I mean, there's so many different things you can do. You can also swipe between lock screens, again very much inspired by the Apple It's you know, you can swipe through a couple like I have a

couple of different Apple Watch screens. One is for going out at night, one is for work, one is for you know, activity, and so you can swipe through those. Now you can do the same thing on your iPhone. The other cool thing is the live Activities features. So these are notifications that help you keep up with something that's happening live. So if you're getting like an uber that's arriving to you, you know, right now, Uber sends

you like fifteen different notifications saying, okay, we found your Uber. Okay, your Uber driver is on its way, your Uber driver is arriving. Don't forget to wear a mask in the uber. You know, all these different things, whereas now it's consolidated into one notification that has live updates. And this is something yes, that has been available on Android for a while, especially with sports scores, I think, but now you can see this on iPhone and it's It also works with

things like a food delivery order. So if door Dash we've picked up your order, your order is picked up by this person, they're preparing your order, arriving with your order, where should they leave the order. That's all just on your lock screen and you don't have to unlock your phone to see this stuff happening live. So that's really cool. The other thing they're improving is Focus, so now you can have lock screens linked to a focus. I haven't

really gotten into Focus. I should probably set it up because I like the idea of having one sort of look for my phone for work, one for play, one for focusing. But the reality is it's just kind of all intertwined and it's really tough to set those things up. Apple says they're going to make it easier to set up focus and your lock screen will correspond to focus and the widgets that it shows. You can also have

things filtered out in calendar, mail messages and safari. So let's say you only want text from work people during your work focus, they won't come through when you're on your personal focus. Now, this is tough again because our lives are so intertwined with work. But if you can set it up and it works great also though, unless they add third parties support for some of these apps, like let's say I use Gmail, I'm not sure that that would really work properly. Maybe it will, who knows,

We'll say. They've also got this iCloud Shared photo library, so similar to what you can do on Google Photos for many years now, you can now set up an iCloud photo library that is shared with up to six users, so you can all collaborate. You can share photos automatically, it can suggest photos to put into there, but basically you can have one shared library that you can all

kind of pull from and share pictures in. They're going pretty deep on this because even in the camera app, there will be a little notification at the top when you take a picture that says send this to your shared library, and you can do that on a one off basis, and it's just be kind of a persistent message up there, or just have all your pictures go into there for a certain amount of time. Mail is

getting some new features. You can schedule a message, you can cancel a message again, all things that have been in Gmail for a while. So a lot of these features. If you're just Apple, if you're just one hundred percent committed to that Apple ecosystem, these are great things. It's taken a while for Apple to get them, but they are arriving. But if you're using other apps, some of this stuff is like, Okay, I've had this for a while. Live text is kind of cool. They're just continuing that.

I think that that is just an amazing feature that Apple has, the live text. I use all the time to copy things from you know, like if I see something on Instagram that I like, like a quote or a recipe, I'll just take a screenshot and just grab the text off of there with live text again, something that's been available on Google Lends for a long time now,

but I think Apple does do this feature better. Now they've got this new feature where you can literally, when you're looking at a picture, just press and hold kind of like lightly tap on like a person or a thing, and just drag it out of the picture and it will automatically find the outline, drag that item out of the picture, and you can drag that into a text or somewhere else. I mean, pretty pretty wild. So it literally just lifts the subject of an image from the background.

That's pretty amazing. The other thing, and you know that I'm not a big credit card slash finance person, but Apple pay Later is this new feature where they will split any purchase into four equal payments over six weeks with zero interest and no fees of any kind. Now, just because there's no interest, just because there's no fees, doesn't mean that it's okay to do this with everything. Obviously, this gets into your financial what you like to do with your finances versus what I like to do. And

it's one tool that's out there. Use it at your discretion, but it is going to make splitting purchases into four payments very very easy for a lot of people. And it's kind of a nice thing that Apple is doing. What are the implications of that, I don't know. I mean, I think that there's got to be some sort of I mean, if there's no fees, I mean, is there a late fee if you pay it late? Like, I'm not really sure. Zero interest and no fees of any kind.

So I don't know. We'll have to see how that works. Car Play they are they showed off a next generation car Play that will basically take over the entire dashboard screen.

So I've every car that I look at nowadays has these giant dashboard screens, not just the one in the center, but it also has kind of like the instrument cluster is all digital, Like basically the entire screen is digital inside these new cars, and so CarPlay can now take advantage of all of the screens and show you, you know, your instrument cluster, you can you can add widgets that you want, your weather. I mean, it's it's an Apple

car inside, except it's being made by someone else. And Apple says they're going to show kind of or I guess, announce some of the first cars that will take advantage of this late next year, so we still got a while before we see this. But again, we're just getting a little bit deeper into this idea of Apple kind of taking over the car screen. I'll be quite honest, I've got a Tesla, and the idea of just having just seeding that control to Apple and CarPlay on my big,

giant Tesla screen would be phenomenal. I don't need Tesla's screen on there at all. I don't. There's nothing that Tesla does that's better than Apple or Google when it comes to their infotainment system. It's just it's fine. It's just not very good in my opinion. So what I love if Tesla said, you know what, here's a new option. Clearly this can be done with software. We're just gonna let you plug in your iPhone in the Tesla or use Apple CarPlay wirelessly, and we'll just let you control

your whole car from car Play. And when I say control your whole car, yeah, this has the integrations for controlling the radio, for controlling the climate, for controlling all of the vehicle data on your car. That's the idea here is that Apple can also control that, and they made a lot of illusions. I use a lot of words here that I don't even know what they mean, but they they said that the car makers will be

able to brand this in their own way. So they are giving car makers, just like Apple would typically do it, the ability to make this their own, but within the parameters of what Apple will allow. So that's another improvement. Safari. They're trying to get rid of passwords with this thing called past keys, And if anyone has the ability to do this, yes, it's Apple because they've got the iPhone. And if you're logging in on a website on your computer and it says, hey, can you scan your face

and will log you in? Sure, Apple will easily be able to do that. Apple maps getting multi stop routing, so that's easy dictation, very similar to what the Android offers with the newest pixel where you can have a text sorry, you can be dictating text on the microphone, but then go back, highlight a word and just type in the right word or change something with the keyboard because they're both on screen at the same time right now.

The way the iPhone works when you're in dictation mode, the keyboard disappears now the keyboard will stay there and you'll still be able to dictate, so you can use both at the same time. Again, if you're on Android, this is something that you're used to, but if you're on iPhone, you've never had that before, so now this is something that's pretty nice. Fitness app is let's see, fitness app oh is gonna now be on the iPhone, so you can track your goals even if you don't

have an Apple Watch. So you can set up a daily move goal. And it's going to use some of the sensors on the iPhone to estimate your calories and help you close your rings. Are going to track steps, distance, flight climbed, flights climbed. The health app is going to add a medication section, which I thought this is actually really really neat. It's going to allow you to monitor

the medications like build. You can input all of the vitamins, supplements and medications prescription meds that you take and you'll see them all there. It can give your reminders on when to take them. Obviously, this would be helpful for you know, either elderly people or you don't have to be elderly. I mean, if you're going through some sort

of illness or sickness or treatment for something. You know, sometimes you're on a medication routine, and this could really help you organize your pills, get reminders on when to take them, and track the fact that you've taken them. It will also show you any sort of critical interactions on those medications. The other thing I didn't mention here is messages. Messages will enable you to edit or recall

a recently sent message. So basically, after you send a message, you'll have fifteen minutes to edit a word in there or delete the whole message from the other phone. Or you can also recover recently deleted message messages, so similar to when you delete a picture on the iPhone. Now the iPhone will keep your recently deleted I messages in a folder that saves for I think thirty to forty days.

So that's really nice. I think that got the biggest reaction from people on the ground at WWDC because Messages is really the kind of the biggest messaging app. I would say in the US and outside the US it falls off a cliff, but here in the US it is king and it is like the way that people message here in the US, I don't agree with that. I know that Apple loves loves loves Messages. That gives them the lock and key for everything else in the

Apple ecosystem. It's kind of like the basis of everything iPhone and really getting people locked into that ecosystem. I personally, if I had my way, would not use messages because I hate the fact that it is so so proprietary to the iPhone that it excludes other people that are on Android. It excludes people around the world that may

not want to use an iPhone. And to me, it is just your playing favorites when you're on I Message, and it's really annoying the fact that if you're not on I Message, all the I Message features don't work, and also your messages are It's just not a good thing. I just don't like it. And it's I know it's Apple. I know it's like their premiere thing, and it's it works great, but I just wish it was a much

more what's the word common messaging protocol between phones? Like, we are in an age of many many devices, and I don't care if you're on an iPad, or you're on an Android tablet, or you're on some sort of smart watch or you're on some sort of smartphone. Every single or on a smart TV, every single app, or every single device these days should be able to message another device using a common protocol. And maybe that's our CS, maybe it's something that's new, but it's not text messaging.

It is not I Message. It shouldn't be WhatsApp or any of these other proprietary messaging services. There should be a common messaging protocol that every device in the world should be able to do the same things on. I think it's tough because of safety and security and encryption, but I think that could be built and I think it should happen. Oh that was a lot for iOS sixteen. Let's get to the first question of the show. Debra says, Hey, Rich, I love all the information from Cooper Tino. I need

your expertise. I have a twenty seven inch iMac that I need to back up. I'm embarrassed to say I've lived a risky life not doing updates on here for a couple of years. Before I dare do some updates, I need to make sure everything is backed up. I've been using it for business remote working. My time machine keeps saying it can't back up because of system failure. So I'm worried this thing is going to crash. I'm

wondering if there's something you could recommend. I did look at a Seagate drive at Costco, wondered if I should go with something like that. Let me know. Thank you, Debrah, Debra, you're on the right path. You mentioned two things. You mentioned Seagate, you mentioned time machine. What you need to go What you need to do is go back to Costco buy that Seagate drive. The first time you plug that Seagate drive into the iMac, it's going to say would you like to use this as a time machine backup?

And you should say yes. And as soon as you do that, you'll see a little icon in your menu bar of a time machine going to work. And it may take a day or I don't know how long, depending on how much you've gotten this computer. It may take a while for that first time machine backup to complete. That will be a full backup of your Mac system. Now you can do the updates. Now what you want to do is do all the updates and then just

keep that drive plugged in. Bottom line, keep it plugged in for a week or two, and it will just update your computer. It will back up your computer. Sorry, it will back up your computer to that drive at regular intervals, so it'll do I haven't used time machine in a while, so I can't remember what the intervals are. But it's like, you know, a minute by minute, then it's hour by hour, then it's day day, then it's

month by month, then it's maybe year by year. But whatever it is, it will keep a nice backup of your system that if something ever fails, you can go back in time to that time machine, backup, see what they did there, and recover whatever you need. Maybe it's a file, maybe it's a you know, whatever it is. Maybe it's your whole system. But that's the way to do it. All you need is one of those Seagate drives.

In the unlikely event that when you plug this drive in your computer does not recognize it, you will have to format this drive to be used on your computer. So what you want to do is find something called disc utility. You can press command space bar on your computer, search for disc in spotlight. You should see the disc show up. You want to erase that disc and so you want to erase it and format it as a I think it's like what is it? Osh, gosh, what

is it? Mac os? I don't have a disc here, see what it's what the format is, but I think it's OS extended or something like that. But just do that and you'll be fine, and there you go. Okay, let's talk about Watch OS nine. So I would say, after the iPhone, my second favorite gadget is the Apple Watch. And sometimes I've said the Apple Watch my favorite, but I can't edit video on the Apple Watch, so it

can't be my favorite. Apple Watch is Apple knows that Apple Watch is the second stickiest gadget that they make after the iPhone. This is the thing that really keeps people in the Apple ecosystem because once you have an Apple Watch on your wrist, it is really really tough to go to any other smart watch. It's really tough

to not have it. For me anytime that I switch back to an Android and literally I'm talking when I switch switch, like put a SIM card in it, and it is just I can't tell you how different the experience is because I'm so used to having my phone on silent that when my phone is on silent, I don't miss a thing because everything just redirects to my wrist and I'm in a studio most of the time, or in some sort of TV station setting, or in a shoot where I'm recording audio, and so my phone

never ranks, is never ever not on silent mode. So when that happens on Android, I miss everything because you can't hear anything, and unless your phone is in your pocket vibrating, you're not gonna hear any of your messages come through. And so that's why the Apple Watch is so amazing that I can never miss a beat because even though everything is silent, I'm still feeling the vibration on my wrist and looking for the message. With all that said, Watch os nine got a couple new watch faces.

I don't really get that excited about watch faces, but you've got that portrait mode has more depth effect on cats, dogs, and landscapes. You can have the Apple Watch face switch with your focus mode. We talked about that earlier. The Workout app as better metrics for measuring your performance. You can now make custom workouts, which is kind of like. There's an app I use called Seconds, which I used to use to time out this podcast. It kind of

does interval timing for workouts. You know. Three minutes on, three minutes off, three minutes on, three minutes off. That is now sort of built into the workouts app. It pretty much is. And then there's new alerts including pace, power, heart rate, and cadence. So if you want to make sure you're hitting a certain heart rate, you can add that alert to your workouts and you can hear when you reach you know your target heart rate. For triathletes, there's now a multi sport mode, so it can switch

between swimming, biking, and running workouts. And let's see, there are new running form metrics including stride length, ground contact time, vertical oscillation. I am a big runner and I don't care about any of that stuff. I don't even know what that means. But hey, if you are an even more intense runner than I am, if you're working towards some sort of goal that I don't really understand, then

those are gonna be great for you. And swimming, you've got kickboard detection and it can also classify the stroke type. I mean, this stuff. It's just truly remarkable what Apple is doing with with on device learning, so it can identify using algorithms what you're doing in your workouts. It knows it all. This is kind of cool. If you're on Fitness Plus and you're a subscriber to that, you know, you don't let me slow down here. You no longer need an Apple TV. It can now airplay your workouts

to a compatible third party TV and device. So if you're at say a hotel that works with airplay, which I have yet to see, you would be able to stream your workout to that TV in your room, which is really cool. Now can you do that right from your watch? That would be amazing that that would be Wait, is that truly what you can? Yeah? I guess so I wonder if you need your iPhone. I don't know.

That's that's interesting. I gotta figure that out. Okay, what else? Uh? Sleep? Oh, sleep tracking is coming to Watch OS nine, So this means I'm gonna have to start wearing the Apple Watch to bed because I do want to get these rich sleep metrics. Uh. It will tell you let's see here ram sleep, core sleep, and deep sleep, and it's using the accelerometer and the heart rate monitor and of course, uh, some sort of algorithm that Apple has built. So that's

really cool. Aphib history detection, So a FIB is if your heart is working, it has like some sort of abnormal you know, I'm not a doctor, so I don't really understand. But if you're if your heart, I guess when you have a FIB. Your heart works normally a lot of the time, but sometimes it's the heart rate is atypical and so that's a FIB. And so a lot of times this can lead to stroke if it's

left untreated. And most of the time, as I understand it, to detect a FIB, yeah, you can do a one off test or now with the Apple Watch, it will be able to look at your heart from over time, like I'm talking all the time, and it can tell you when you went into a FIB, so whether it was for a couple of moments at you know, seven am on a Saturday it always seems to happen, or on a Sunday night, whatever it is, it will tell you like here's the times when you typically experience this.

And with a doctor they can go through and tell you like, look, okay, maybe you need to sleep better on a Friday night, or you need to drink less, or you need to work out more, whatever it is.

I don't know. I don't know what the factors are but this is the first time apparently that you can see a much longer APHIB history then typically doctors get access to because most of the time they got to hook you up with all these sensors to see what's going on with your So you can download a detailed PDF with a history of your a FIB and also your lifestyle factors, and you can talk to your doctor

about how to make this all better. Medications app I think we already talked about, so that's gonna be on Apple Watch as well. And I think that's it for the Apple Watch. I mean there's a lot, obviously a lot more that Apple announced, but those are like the big main things, and I just think the Apple Watch continues. I've said this a thousand times on the podcast. The Apple Watch just continues to get better and better and better. I can't wait until they set it free. I know

why Apple is not setting it free. There should be no reason why you shouldn't be able to just activate this thing as its independent line. Right now, you still need a family member to do it on an iPhone. But it just Apple needs to set this thing free because it is so phenomenally helpful, especially with the Cellular Connection twenty four to seven, that this is one of Apple's best products and it just continues to get better. All right, Rosa, it says, maybe you can help. I

recently got an iPhone eleven. I'm having problems keeping it connected via Bluetooth to my JVC aftermarket car stereo. It just continually breaks up when I try connecting Spotify or iHeartRadio. I was told to download the firmware from the JVC website to a flash drive. How do I decompress the files that are downloaded from my Mac desktop to my flash drive? I only see the option to compress them. Thank you, Rosa. Rosa, sometimes things are so obvious we

miss them. But to decompress, I'm guessing you mean unzipped the files that you downloaded. Typically when you download a firmware update, it comes as a ZIP file, and so to decompress or unzip those, you would just double click that file and it should do that now. I a lot of times when you're using a flash update, you just go with the zip file and the actual device will will unzip those and kind of let it run

through its motions. I don't know how the JVC car stereo works but typically what you would do is you would go on the website looks like you I already did this. You would find the firmware update. You would download it to the flask drive. You plug that flask drive into the JVC, You go into the settings menu and you say update firmware. It will find the flash drive, find the software on that flask drive, run through the software, update the software, update the firmware, and restart the JVC,

and your phone should work better. I don't know why your phone is breaking up. That is odd. It shouldn't be happening. It could be as easy as unpairing the JVC and repairing it. It could be resetting all of your network connections on the JVC. That's a setting under general and reset that will wipe all your Wi Fi connections and things away, so you will have to reconnect all your Wi Fi and cellular and Bluetooth. But that could fix it, or it could just be that you

need to restart your phone. That could fix it. I with the iPhone rarely see choppiness with Bluetooth. It's something that I often see with Android device is Back in the day, I wouldn't say much anymore, but it was definitely much more of a of an Android thing, but it should not be. It sounds like whenever there's choppiness, you know, something is maybe running in the background. So you can maybe go through your apps, delete stuff that you don't need or don't want, and then restart the phone.

But that's what I would recommend, go through those steps. But once you get that firmware on, you know, maybe try the stuff like restart your iPhone, see if that helps, but and then disconnect it for sure from the bluetooth on the JVC. Restart your iPhone, then reconnect it and see hopefully that should work out because there should be no choppiness. I don't know how old. I mean, it's an iPhone eleven, it's not that old. The JVC, I mean,

Bluetooth is not like a new thing. It's not like it's this, you know, wild thing you're trying to do. It's it's pretty simple. So I would just check those things and see if they work. All right? Do we want to talk iPad os sixteen. Now, it's tough for me to get excited about the iPad because I do not do anything of use on the iPad. The most I do on my iPad is look at the Wall Street Journal and use the Peloton app on there. That's basically it. I mean, there's not much I do on

the iPad. I don't really even read books on there because I read them on my kindle. So the iPad to me, has not really evolved in a meaningful way in many, many years because I don't use one tenth of the power of the iPad. And I think the iPad is absolutely Gosh, you're really going to tell me I'm an Apple fanboy by the end of this podcast, But the iPad is the best tablet out there. It

just is. It does what you need. It's amazing. Yes, there are cheaper tablets out there, but if you want a tablet that lasts a really long time and is super powerful and very easy and it works, the iPad is the way to go. Yes, you can get a fire tablet from Amazon. It's just not going to be as The experience is going to be painful at best. Okay, the experience is going to be fine, painful at the worst. I guess I should say. Let's talk about the new

features on iPad os sixteen. The number one feature is Stage Manager. This is kind of Apple's way of tiptoeing into making the iPad a real kind of computer device. So there's been a lot of talk about Apple killing off laptops and Apple killing off the Mac, but that's not happening. The Mac computer and the iPad are here

to say, are they getting similar features? Is there some overlap? Yes, yes, yes, But the reality of the situation with the iPad is this, If you can run your personal computing life on an iPad and maybe with a keyboard or a pencil and an iPhone, that's amazing. That is just congrats, that's so cool. But if you're like me and you want to do that but you can't because you edit video on your computer and you write video on your computer, then that's just not a possibility. Like I need final cut on

my laptop. If you don't need that, if you just do emails, if you just do word documents, maybe spreadsheets, although I think that's probably way easier on a laptop. But if you're just doing even photo editing, maybe you just need an iPad and it's amazing. So Apple is adding features to the iPad that makes it similar to a computer, but I don't think they're trying to replace the computer in the process. If it can be replaced

for you. Like I said, that's awesome. But they're trying to give people options and they're trying to give people different ways of doing things. So one of those things is Stage Manager, which is a whole new way to multitask with overlapping windows and full external display support. That is coming to the iPad in iOS sixteen, but only if you have an m one chip inside your iPad, which is basically the recent models of the iPad. They also have this thing called Freeform, which is an app

that is kind of a flexible canvas. They describe it as kind of like, you know, you can collaborate with your family on there, or you're sorry, your your colleagues, your friends or family. This has given me major Google buzz vibes. I'm gonna call it doa but we'll say, well, you let me know if you use it. I just can't imagine anyone will ever use that. But we'll say mail same thing. You can schedule a piece of mail, you can unsend a message canceled delivery before it reaches

someone's inbox. So I guess they'll give you a couple of minutes to do that. You can move in an email to the top of your inbox to send a follow up. The iCloud Shared library is there. Let's see the weather app is coming to the iPad. I don't know why I looked forward the other day. I was planning a trip and I was like, oh, let me see what the weather's gonna be like. And I couldn't believe that the weather app was not on the iPad. So I'm glad that they're bringing the weather app to

the iPad ten years after the iPad debuts. Let's see what else I talked about. The stage manager lets you create overlapping windows of different sizes in a single view. You can drag and drop. You can open apps from the dock, create groups of apps. Again, only on the iPad Pro and iPad Air with the M one chip. And I think, I mean, look again, there's a whole bunch of stuff. But that's kind of the high level stuff that I think is interesting. So yes, there will

be more, but that's iPad in a nutshell. Hello. As far as Internet security for your computer, what is a good recommendation for a home computer, McAfee, etc. I would appreciate any assistance in this regard. I just bought a new HP. We also have an IMAX, so I never really worried about it before. Thank you, Louri Laurie. No one likes to hear the answer I have, but I don't think you need a lot of Internet security on your computer. I think Windows Defender that is built into

your computer will be just fine. I think the more important thing is really watching what you click on the Internet. That is the main thing you have to watch for. Downloading apps that are just either garbage or malware, or links that are malicious. That is the main thing you need to look out for. Because, yeah, mccaffee, you can install it and it's gonna have a million warnings and pop ups and says it's protecting you and it's doing

all this. But like, really, when it comes down to it, if you're not clicking links that have malware, you're gonna be okay. If you're not clicking links from untrusted senders, you're gonna be okay. If you're not downloading things that could have a virus, you're gonna be okay. If you want to protect yourself, you know, I think Windows Defender, keep that up to date, keep it running keep it on. I think that's gonna be your best bet. It's free,

it's built into Windows, and I think you'll be okay there. Now, if you think you already have malware on your computer, I would maybe recommend installing malware bites on there and running it and seeing what it comes up with. But I don't think so, because you just bought a new HP. What I would do is go through the programs I'd removed programs on the HP and get rid of all the garbage that is pre installed in this computer. There's probably a ton of it. One of those apps is

probably McAfee. You're probably getting some sort of you know, free trial to some sort of security program and antivirus program, and la la la, I'm falling asleep just thinking about it. You don't need it. It's like scare tactics. It's just so many pop up windows you have to deal with. This is why when Microsoft still had stores, I recommended buying computers from the Microsoft Store because they were what

were called signature additions. If you sold your computer in a Microsoft store, you could not install crapwear or bloatwear on it. You just Apple or Microsoft did not allow it. Now, if you're buying a computer from Dell, if you're buying a computer from HP, what are the other big brands acer you know, these computers just come pre installed a lot of stuff because these computer companies get a lot

of money. They get a lot of money from nor In, from McAfee, from all these computer companies that install little parts of their program and say, hey, we'll pay you a fifty bucks each computer that you would you would pre install this on in hopes of the person that gets that computer will be scared enough into subscribing to that program, and now they'll get a little bit of money on the back end from that subscription. So I don't think you need it. I think it's a lot

of like busy work with all these things. I think you just you know, we're doing most of our work online in the cloud anyway, So if you're using like Windows or sorry, yeah, I mean Windows three sixty five, or if you're using Gmail, or if you're using Google Docs, like, a lot of the stuff we're doing is happening online. So the amount of apps that you're actually downloading to your computer, you know, probably isn't very much. And if

you're downloading apps, usually they're from a reputable source. You know. The main thing is to make sure when you download stuff, you're not using that top link that says add on Google. So if you're searching for Chrome, you know, scroll down to the fifth or sixth link whatever. It is. Used to be only three links at the top on Google where the sponsored links. I think now they've extended that

to many, many more. But you know, make sure you're scrolling past the sponsored links and going to the actual link and downloading programs from there. If it looks like some weird website, you know, check the url. Make sure that it's not like Chrome downloader dot com. Like no, no, no, no no, make sure it's coming from Google. If you're downloading any sort of like free app or whatever, just

make sure it's coming from a reputable site. Now I'm not saying that you don't ever need security on your computer. I'm just saying that the level of security you need a lot of it is taken care of with something like McAfee. If you need something else, there are there is a website that will that ranks this stuff, and it's it's av test avdash test dot org. And you can go and see the windows ten. What they rank as the top security that you need for Windows ten.

So they like something called on lab ahn lab. Then it's a VAST, then it's AVEG, then it's a Verra, then it's Bitdefender, then f secure. I mean McAfee ranks like pretty low. Actually Windows Defender ranks under them, which is surprising. Nor In is even lower than all of that. So again total av even lower, trend Micro almost at

the bottom. So again I would check, you know, just check these rankings on there and go with something on there if you want a program that's sort of running all the time in the background to sort of monitor for all of this stuff. But I don't necessarily think y'all need it, but you do have to. You do

have to keep yourself safe out there. I mean, there are a lot of people that are trying to scam you in different ways, but ninety nine percent of the scams that I see nowadays, a lot of it has to do with fishing links, and not just phishing link links, but also social engineering. So techts that have malicious links just a lot of a lot of social engineering to get us to click and hand over our information to

the bad people. And it's just not good. All right, let's talk about some of the hardware that was unveiled at WWDC. We got a new MacBook Air and a new MacBook Pro. They updated the MacBook Pro thirteen inch. They redesigned the MacBook Air. I went hands on with the MacBook Air, and yeah, it kind of takes the design language that Apple has been using a little more

like cyborgy. I don't know how to describe it, but it's kind of like much more like metal, like with these edges that are a little bit more like commanding. But yeah, so it has the M two chip inside. This is the second generation of Apple's own processor. Remember they made their own processors for the iPhone. Now they make their own processors for computers. M two is the second generation, you know, is it like, oh my gosh, so much better than the M one. I don't know.

I'm not a processor like tester person, but I know the M one got very rave reviews. I'm sure the M two is great. It also delivers support for up to twenty four gigs of memory, so now instead of sixteen, you could have twenty four gigs, which, of course, if you're doing something like video editing or something like that. It's gonna be a lot better. You can't have enough memory. MacBook Air has a new design. It's two point seven pounds.

It's thinner, it's lighter, it's faster. It also has two new colors, Midnight and Starlight, So in addition to space gray and silver, if I was getting this, i'd probably get the Midnight. Honestly, that's a pretty nice color. It's like a blue color, dark blue navy. If I had to translate, Starlight is kind of a like a cream color, I would say. So. I did not see that one in person. I'm sure it was there, I just didn't.

I missed it. They also have a three point five inch audio jack on there, and it's got mag Safe again. Now mag Safe has come back to the MacBook Air. If you're not familiar with mag Safe, it's instead of plugging in USBC to charge your laptop, it's a proprietary connector, but it has a magnet and so when you trip over the cord that is that is connecting your cable to the wall or your your computer to the wall,

your computer does not go flying and get ruined. The cord just yanks itself out of your computer because it's just held in there by a magnet. They also say that the HD FaceTime camera is better now it's a new ten ADP FaceTime HD camera, the larger image sensor. We'll have to see how much better that is. But I'll talk more about the solution for the camera that Apple has in a moment when we talk about the

new Mac os. Let's see the charging the charging brick, whatever you want to call it, is actually kind of cool. They have this new one which is great. It has as two USB C ports in it, so now you can charge your laptop and something else at the same time, and that's a great thing. It's gonna cost you a little bit more to get that, so it's not included as far as I can tell, it's not included in the laptop. Let's see, the thirty WAT USB C power adapter is thirty nine dollars, So do they not include

a power adapter at all? I don't know. The thirty five WAT dual USBC port adapter is sixty dollars, and then you have a thirty five WoT dual USBC adapter for fifty nine. What's the difference US thirty five WAT dual USBC I don't know. Oh and then you okay, never mind. So anyway, it's sixty bucks if you want that dual one. Maybe it comes with a regular one. I'm not sure. I didn't. I didn't get that information. Computer prices MacBook Air with M two starts at twelve

hundred dollars. It's eleven hundred if you have an ED education ID or your student teacher whatever. A thirteen inch MacBook Pro with M two starts at thirteen hundred and twelve hundred for education. So those are going to be two solid computers. I still say that Apple needs to make a computer that is five hundred and ninety nine dollars,

that is a laptop. Take that old M one chip in two years or maybe a year when it's finally kind of out of its life cycle with your regular laptops, and pop that into a computer that is just basic laptop and make it six hundred dollars. And I'm telling you that thing will sell like hotcakes. This is what Apple needs, because it is that's the price point that the average person wants. The average person does not want to pay eleven hundred or twelve hundred dollars for a laptop.

They want to pay five to six hundred dollars. That's how do I know that? It's because those are the emails that I get on a daily basis. When people ask me for a laptop. They don't say, rich, what's the best most expensive Mac laptop I can purchase? I've got a budget. That's just you've earn in a hole in my pocket. No, they say, Rich, I love Apple, I want a MacBook, but I want to spend five

hundred dollars. What can I get for that price? And you know, I tell them, look, you know you're gonna have to get an acer or some sort of you know, laptop at best Buy that is five hundred dollars or six hundred dollars. It's it's tough to get a six hundred dollars laptop that's really that good. They're not going to be as good as the MacBooks. And I tell people, look, you spend the twelve hundred dollars on a MacBook and it's going to last you four years, minimum, five years,

six years. I mean, these laptops can last a very long time. And that's what people forget because we're so instant gratification in our world that you want to spend five hundred six hundred because that's what you've saved up, or that feels like it's it's approachable, but you're not realizing that that laptop is going to bore you to death in three years with how slow it is, and so you're just going to be wanting to replace that

after a couple of years. It's going to be slow, it's gonna be laggy, it's going to be at a date by the time you, you know, have it for a couple of years, whereas the MacBook. I'm telling you, these things will continue to perform at a very very good clip for five, six, seven, eight, you know, eight years. Maybe I'm trying to think because I replace mine every couple of years, but I pass it down, like my

my dad has my old laptop. Uh before, I've had my old laptop which my other kid, which my kid has, and then my current laptop. So I'm gonna be passing these all down again when I end up buying a new laptop. But my dad, the one that he has is probably a twenty sixteen at this point. I mean, you're talking that's what four or five six years old. That's and it's still fine. Like when I go over there, I kind of clean it up a little bit. It's yeah, it's running a little bit slower, but it's still fine

for like what he's doing, which is mainly Facebook. Let's be honest here, all right, let's get to the next question of the podcast. Here, Lisa says, Hey, Rich, I just read your article on VPNs. I'm looking for an idea. What do I need to put on my iPad and iPhone when I travel to make it more secure? I visit internet cafes. My next trip will be aboard a ship. Do I need to get some other security besides a VPN in addition to other security? What are recommendations on

packages like I keep getting messages from McAfee. I'm afraid to install it because I've read the reviews and some seem like there's difficulties in connecting after installation. I hope I've asked all the pertinent questions. I am in no way security expert. I've had Apple products for years, and I've totally dropped the ball because I think they're mostly

safe from attack. Thank you very much, Lisa. Lisa, You're right, they are very much safe from attack, and I don't think you need any special software on them whatsoever, on your iPhone or iPad at all. The main thing, like I said from before, you have to watch out for is phishing scams. You're not going to download an app on the iPhone or iPad in passing because it's just not allowed. You have to go through the app store, and the app store is vetted. So, yes, could there

be malicious software on the app store? Perhaps? Does it happen? Not really, so I think you're going to be okay there. When it comes to antivirus all that stuff, you don't need any of that stuff on the iPhone. Now, when it comes to a VPN, yes, I did an article on VPNs, and this is a great segue to talk about what the experts told me. And so when do you need a VPN? You do not need a VPN in your computer for day to day use. It's just something that you don't need. When do you want to

use a VPN? I would recommend a VPN in this situation when you want to protect your web surfing and secure your internet, when you're doing anything private or sensitive like banking, when you are on an untrusted public Wi Fi connection. Now that's a lot to unpack. In general, I don't think you need a VPN unless you are on some sort of sketchy Wi Fi. If you're on

you can expand that to public Wi Fi. So if you want to secure your browsing and anything you're doing on your computer on public Wi Fi, yes, get a VPN, turn it on when you're on public Wi Fi. Use it and you'll be fine. I'll talk about the VPNs I recommend in a moment. If you ever want to just secure your connection, if you're somewhere where you are doing you know you need to look up your credit card,

your bank account, whatever. All you have to do is switch into cellular mode, turn off your Wi Fi, get on cellular, and you'll be fine. Cellular is very secure. If you want to use your laptop, just use your hotspot from your cellular connection from your phone, and that's

also very secure. Now, if you want to use a VPN, like I said, if you're doing any sort of banking or any sort of sensitive information, most of the websites you're connecting to, by the time you go to Gmail dot com, yes, the Wi Fi connection, we'll be able to see that you've gone to Google to Gmail, but they're not gonna be able to see what you're exchanging on Gmail because Gmail is encrypted. You can tell that a site is encrypted by looking at the little lock

next to the website name. So anything you actually do on that website is going to be safe and secure. Your ISP or the Internet service provider will be able to see the websites that you go to. They may be able to see the URLs, but they won't be able to see what you're doing on that website, the information you're exchanging with that website. So what VPNs are recommended? I talked to a couple experts and molvad m u lll VAD is the top recommended VPN and I actually

really like them because their pricing is super easy. It's five dollars a month. Whether you use it for a month, a year, a decade, it's five dollars a month every month. There's no like you know, pre pay for three years, prepay for four years, five years, a decade, whatever. It's five bucks a month and it checks all of the boxes that are expert liked, which is no log which means it doesn't keep a track of what you're doing on there. It does not servers and lots of locations.

It works on a variety of devices. It's fast and so moulvad m U l l v A D seems to be a really good one. The other recommendations IVPN surf Shark and tunnel Bear. And we also talked to someone from Mozilla. I've been using their VPN to test it out and it seems to check all the boxes as well. And again, you're going to be paying five to ten dollars a month for a good VPN. You're not going to get a good free VPN. Again, do not use a free VPN. You get what you pay for,

and I'm telling you it's just not worth it. So don't get the free VPN. All right? Is that it? I think that's it for that topic. But yeah, and I think that's it when it comes to the you know, the Apple products. You don't really need much more on there. All right, let's get to the final thing before we go here mac Os Ventura. It's named after Ventura in California. I believe it's Ventura County. I don't think there's like a Ventura rock that they mentioned, but Ventura they said

they were. You know, it's an area of California, just outside Los Angeles. It's also Ventura County, and they said they were inspired by the colorful wildflowers and the surf of that area. So yeah, a lot of surfing, a lot of beach. Ventura has it all. So I thought that was kind of cool. They stage Manager is coming to the Mac again, same thing like I mentioned on the iPad. Then they've got continuity camera. This is interesting.

So they're making these clips in association with Belkin that you clip your iPhone to your the top of your laptop screen, I know, kind of weird, and then you can use your iPhone as a webcam on the Mac. And so it automatically recognizes that you're using the Mac and the iPhone, so you don't have to wake up your iPhone. It just automatically triggers the webcam when you hang it there apparently, or when you kind of I don't know, I don't know how it triggers it, but

it does. And it also has this feature called desk View, and so it's doing this neat thing where if you have your iPhone clipped onto your laptop screen, it will it uses the back cameras and one of those cameras is a wide angle camera, so somehow they're using AI to use that wide angle to see what you've got in front of your laptop keyboard. So it almost makes it like a top down camera where you can show little demos of like a magic trick that used as

an example, or you know anything. Let's say you're carving a bar of soap and you want to show people on your live stream what you're doing. You can show that with your phone that is facing you, but somehow it's angled down, so that's kind of cool. It's called desk view. I can't wait to try that out. They also say that the iPhone is going to give a clearer webcam, a better looking webcam, and there's a whole bunch of other features on mac os, but those are

sort of the main ones. There's also handoff coming to FaceTime, so you can start a FaceTime on your iPhone and then you can continue it on your Mac computer. So that's kind of cool and I love that. All right, Let's get to a couple more little items of note here before we go. Anthony says, thanks for the Verizon discount. I heard you talking about your last episode of the Verizon loyalty discount is actually true. I thought it was a scam. I just call them now. I'm getting twenty

five dollars a month discount on my bill. Thanks so much for letting your listeners know, Tony. Great. Yeah, that was quite the thing. I talked about it in the last podcast, the Verizon text that people were getting for the discount, and boy was there a lot of discussion on my Facebook page about that. But yes, if you got a Verizon text, call in get the discount. It is legitimate. But be careful about any sort of text like that. I thought it was weird that Verizon did that.

Raymond says Doctor Squatch Soap at Walmart. I'm an avid listener of your podcast, and I thought i'd let you know that I was able to find Doctor Squatch bar soap at our Walmart here in Las Vegas. So far, they carry wood barrel, bourbon, pine tar, fresh falls, and citrus cedar. Hopefully they have it at the Walmart near you. They're selling for five ninety eight a piece. I just thought you could save on shipping. That is awesome. You know, I love my Doctor Squatch and I do order it

on the Doctor Squatch website. I did order on Amazon once. My last Oh interesting, they don't put the prices in my last order. I'm looking up here, but my last order had Alpine Sage, Cold Brew, Klein's Wood Barrel, Bourbon Bayrum, Pine Tar, and the Batman Collection. But I will tell you that all these flavors that you mentioned, wood Barrel, Bourbon, pine Tar, Fresh Falls, and Citrus cedar are all excellent. I'm sure that's why they did them because of probably

the most popular ones. Six dollars apiece sounds pretty good. I mean, I think if I could tell how much I paid for these, it'd be great, but I can't. So I think that that's a great price for doctor Squatch. And if it's at your local Walmart, why not, more power to you. So I don't go to Walmart often.

Oh here we go. Oh wow, that's actually a great price, because if you buy them online, it looks like they're seven dollars apiece, and then I usually get a little bit of a discount depending on the whatever code they have, and shipping is free, so it looks like it's four dollars off. So yeah, I'd say it's about the same price you'd pay on the website, but obviously you can get them instantly, so that's really cool. Thanks for the for the note. I'm glad you're looking out for me.

If you haven't tried The Doctor Squatch, it's excellent. I'll put a little link in the show notes. I'm gonna try to do the show notes. I know I get a lot of complaints on Twitter about the show notes. I personally literally use show notes on podcasts like once, like every ten episodes on a show, I'll be like, oh, they mentioned something, but I know I talk about a lot of useful stuff. So I will try to put the show notes back in so you got the links

to the stuff I mentioned. Well, that sound does mean that's gonna do it for this episode of the show. If you'd like to submit a question for me to answer, or comment or feedback, whatever, go to my Facebook page, Facebook dot com, slash rich on Tech hit the big blue send email button, or go to Richontech dot tv hit the email icon to send it. I would love if you would rate and review this podcast. Just go to the listening app of your choice, write a quick

line about what you love about this show. That way you can help other people understand why they should listen. You can find me on social media. I am on all platforms at rich on Tech and no matter where you live in the US, download the free KTLA plus app on Apple TV, fireTV, and Roku. Once you do, scroll to the tech section and watch all of my TV segments on demand. My name is rich Demiro. Thanks so much for listening. There are so many ways you can spend an hour of your time. I do appreciate

you spending it right here with me. I'll talk to you real soon.