It's time for the Apple WatchCast Apple Watch users report vitals app detecting illness before symptoms, iOS 18.1 with Apple Intelligence releasing on October 28th, WatchOS 11 updates fixed battery drain and touchscreen issues and a rare Macintosh prototype goes on auction. Plus reviews of Akara wireless mini-switch, Google Notebook LM and the password app. This and much, much more, it's all coming up next on the Apple WatchCast.
This is the Apple WatchCast episode 477 recorded Wednesday October 16th, 2024. Curb Your Enthusiasm It's time for the Apple WatchCast, when we talk about any and everything Apple Watch, Apple's most personal and healthy device yet and the number one watch in the world. I'm your host Tom and joining me is Vincent. Welcome to the show Vincent. Is it Friday yet? Not yet. Okay. You're kind of halfway there. A little more than halfway. You had to cut more days. It doesn't weekend start on Thursday.
It's definitely Friday. Okay. You only got to wait till tomorrow. Also joining us is Chris. Welcome to the show Chris. Hey, welcome to fall, I think officially. Yes. Yes. Our show is delayed a little bit, but it's only because we wanted to do this in the fall weather. That's why. 100 percent. Yes. Oh, I meant to tell you guys, okay, I've been wearing my Apple Watch and normally wearing on my left wrist. I've been wearing it on the right wrist for the past few days. I'm not used to it.
I actually really don't like it at all. I got to say, I got some sort of, I think it was a bug bite or it might have been, and I put some new chlorine in the pool. Maybe I got a little piece of chlorine up under my wrist, my watch, and it got wet. Anyway, I got like a burn right where my watch would be kind of near there. It just kind of irritates it too much to keep wearing the watch there until it heals. So it's been on my right wrist. Muscle memory is a terrible thing to overcome anyway.
And since I'm not used to wearing a watch on that wrist, it's starting, that wrist is now starting to feel a little sore. Oh, no kidding. Especially with the, with the, with the ultra. Yeah, it's a big, yeah, like the little bone, I really, very, tiny wrists here in the bone that sticks up kind of getting a little bruise. But anyway, it's time to get an apple ring. So Apple get, get with it. Oh, yeah, that's how it happened. Are you sure the, the sensors in the fry hole in there? It's there.
It's, let's put it, it's right below the action button. Oh, the action button, I'll go. And the speaker. It's not directly under the watch, but the watch, you know, touches that area and it's taking a while. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, I keep putting it back on that wrist, but it's still a noise. You know, what out of me, so, anyway, switching was so weird. I put it on the other wrist. I tried turning it to the inside. That was a mistake. That didn't work.
Yeah, it just, I tried turning it around, putting the crown on the other side, you know, I switched it up every way you can. It's just not comfortable in my other wrist. I just, I'm not used to it. So anyway. Well, hopefully it's better. Yeah, it should be. I've also noticed that the connection with my beats of Power Beat Pros earbuds are much more reliable. And I used to have to check my connection to my watch before I left the house for every run just to make sure it would connect, right?
Otherwise, I put it back in the case, reopen it, repair them, all that kind of thing. Because it kept, it would screw up every now and then. Sure. I just leave the house and I get like to my next door now, just one house down and I hear that low battery or disconnect sound, you know, do do do do do, which means it's disconnecting from my phone, right? Because I'm not bringing my phone with me. And then just a couple of steps later, I hear the Bing sound of it connecting to my watch.
Oh, wonderful. Automatically like clockwork. I think it's gotten a lot better. It must have that maybe it's watch OS 11. It could be. It could be. It could be better. I suspect that's why. I've noticed my AirPods are better at like when I leave my phone behind and go do something outside with my watch and I got AirPods, it does the same thing a lot more robustly. Right. And I've also noticed that my watch will pick up whatever music is playing on a home pod in the house.
Yeah. Much, much smarter. There's no fiddling around. There's no opening up now playing all that nonsense. You just lift your wrist, scroll and it's right there. Wow. That's great. Yeah. That was that's really nice. So they're getting some things right. Anything else you want to talk about before we get into that? All right. So start talking about fixing things. There's been a release of 11.0.1 with a fix for battery drain and touch screen issues.
This comes three weeks after the release of watch OS 11. And it fixes an issue that could cause the music app to crash plus it addresses a bug that could cause the battery to drain faster and expected. And there's also a fix for a bug that could cause a touch screen to be unresponsive on the latest models. So it'll be the series 10 and the ultra to black. And a bug that could cause unexpected restarts. That's a lot of problems. Yeah. Of course, watch OS, you're going to have these things.
So anyway, very important update to do. I didn't do it rather quickly to both of my watches. So it's not must not be that big of an update in size. So yeah, definitely do that if you haven't yet. Very, very helpful. Were you noticing any bad, any battery drain on your 10, Tom? I didn't notice any of the, well, I did. But it was initially. Remember, I talked about it. Yeah. Right. I wasn't sure what was going on. It might have been that. But that was, I don't have twice. That was it.
I just chalked it up to new watch, still updating stuff in the background. You know, battery life's going to suck for a little while till it. Right. Even's out. Right. But maybe it was this might have been this. So anyway, we should check your, check your updates. Um, speaking of an update, now Vincent, you're running the beta. Still correct? Believe me. Yeah. You haven't switched. So you're on the beta three, right? 11.1 beta, beta five on the law. You're all the way up to five.
Okay. Yeah. Well, beta three, Apple actually had to pull it. Because of frozen devices. It was actually locking up the watch. I did not experience that. Yeah. I saw that. Yeah. And they said, if you're running, watch us 11.1 beta three, then then you don't have the issue because your watch would not be running. Obviously. Um, but even after reboots, it would just remain frozen. So how do you keep running the beta then? Is it, you can turn it on at any time and keep running?
Yeah. Okay. Okay. So this is, this is two betas before that then. This is, uh, it's still 11.1, but it's beta 11.1 beta one beta two beta three, another of the beta five. Right. Eventually, they're going to release it to the public as 11.1. Okay. Which they got to be getting close to if they're already at five. I would imagine. They should. Yeah. Maybe not. And you know what? I don't think that's come in until another week or two. Okay. I would actually have a story about that.
Don't wait for the, I think it's October 28th. But, um, so yeah, you're on five. So you sailed through it fine without that having to happen. Yeah. Not come with. Yeah. Somebody else said it, then talking about it, said it's currently locked up for the seventh time. Yeah. And in that span of 15 minutes. Yeah. Looks kind of annoying. That's a model. You know, uh, there's no way to revert the firmware without taking the watch to an Apple store or having it set to an offsite repair facility.
Yowch. Yeah. That's why they pulled it. It's pretty serious. Right. Yeah. I wonder why it only does it to certain watches. That's interesting. Yeah. That's true. I don't know. I don't know whether or not actually gipped it like it didn't update on mine. That was maybe at two and then just left it alone and then went to four. Oh, maybe. I don't know. Like they pulled it before my watch even got to the update. Right. So just a reminder. And I know I say this every, every single year.
When you run a beta, you're taking risks, even though I do it every single time. And say I'm not going to, I still do it, but there are risks and this is one of them. But so anyway, um, if you, uh, if you skipped over three, then that's good. You're lucky. Yep. Um, what else? Okay. Here's what I was talking about. October 28th Apple plans to release iOS 18.1, which I assume would hopefully be in lockstep with watch. Oh, yes. Right. But we'll see. Uh, there will be apple intelligence.
We'll be, um, I'm bored at that time. Yes. Yeah. Finally. Well, don't get too excited. I know. What's, what's that show? Curb your enthusiasm here. Mm hmm. You know, we probably should say that about every Apple device. Just curb your enthusiasm. Okay. Don't get too excited. Um, pretty, pretty, pretty, pretty excited. Okay. Too much, too much. So, uh, yeah, that's, I can't look at, I can't steer you down right now because we're just haughty.
That's right. Okay. Okay. Um, so yeah, this will be the first wave of Apple intelligence for the iPhone 15 pro and iPhone 16, uh, users. So what are we going to get in this first one? I think it's, um, enhanced writing tools for rewriting, summarizing, proofreading text, a new, um, you know, who user interface. Yeah. So you get that glowing screen. You're running that now, though, aren't you? I am. Yeah. Yeah. I've got all those things.
So little things here and there, all the quality of life type of improvements. Um, but yeah, I mean, it's, it is a little strange seeing some of those email summaries and text messages summaries. You're like, wait, that's not what it says. And then you're like, oh, that's the summary. Oh, okay. But the summary is correct, right? It's sort of. Really? Oh, really? It's sort of. It depends on what it chooses to summarize.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. It's interesting because there's a, in, in mail, which is where it's most obvious, there's a, uh, kind of a, uh, a summarized button at the top. And you can set for a priority types of things. Okay. And so I get, uh, you know, I get emails for my grade school kids, right? My, my, my eighth grader. And, uh, their, their teachers emails are prioritized saying, you know, tests are due and stuff like that. And so it, it doesn't know me versus the emails I receive.
So it's like, yeah. It doesn't know you yet. It's right. And so it's like, prioritizing things. Like, yeah, sure. She has a history test on Thursday, sure. Um, and it's, it's like the top things, most important thing. Uh, yeah. So yeah, you're, what you're talking about is, uh, notification summaries for certain apps like messages and mail. Yeah. And there's also a new cleanup tool in the photos app that can move unwanted elements from images, uh, using generative, uh, yeah, intelligence.
Now that has been around on the Android side for a number of years, actually, yeah. In some form. Now that I think now we finally have it on the iPhone, um, does it work pretty well? I haven't tried that part. Okay. Yeah, the images, but yeah, you just mentioned something about the, uh, the summarization of notifications. Yeah. That I can get a little garbled considering like, uh, I got a bunch of things from LinkedIn, for instance, and people posting.
So it just, it just gathers whatever it's able to collect and just mash it together. And you're like, what? So who did what? It is. No, that's not, that's not what it said at all. Well, I saw an article today. I didn't put it in the, in the rundown here for the show notes. But it was someone discovering that these summaries work with your Apple card as well. Mm hmm. So, so they were at, happened to be a Disney and, um, they have bought like two or three things. Mm hmm.
And they got a notification that says so far your total purchases are X amount of money from Disney. So we got a summary without having to add it up or go back and look and see what they've been spending. Yeah. And that sort of thing was kind of cool. Wow. That's the thing I'm looking forward to is the little surprise stuff. Can you turn that on and off then? The, the, um, Apple intelligence summaries on emails and text and things? You mean, per by app? Yeah. I think you can.
I think this just, you toggle on intelligence and that's it. Okay. Okay. Turn it on. Thanks for itself. Yeah, that could clutter things up quite a bit. Yeah. There's a new settings thing in there and you can choose a different voice for, for here. Yeah. There you go. Uh, and then, uh, with that, that is actually one of the most interesting was obvious things. The voice is a little different. Is it better? It's, I would say, yeah, it's kind of better. Okay. Yeah, it's better.
Cause I've been waiting for that too. The voice did not sound so. Yeah. Mm hmm. It's, it's more so used to it, you know. Right. You know, I'm surprised that that Susan Bennett's voice isn't in one of those options. Oh, it's not. It's not. Her contract ran out, I think. Yeah. I think she, yeah. For new listeners of the show, we interviewed her a while back. I think we interviewed her right about the time they stopped using her actual voice and kind of shifted to a digital version.
Yeah. Of her voice. And then that's more, it's more since then several times into different sound, different people. But yeah, she was the original voice of Siri. Mm hmm. Yeah, that would have been a nice option. The classic. Yeah. Exactly. That's a little nostalgia there. Right. Okay. As I mentioned, so that's coming out. October 28th.
18.2 is expected in December, which will introduce chat GPT support, image playground, and the full overall of Siri, which is going to have more precise app control and personalized responses, which is, I think, what you're looking for. Vincent, that is slated for early 2025. And I think you're probably talking February and March. Probably. Yeah. Yeah, I'm looking forward to the where it can, you know, record a phone call into a note and then do a AI summary of the phone call.
And probably be the release next year, I would assume. Mm hmm. Now, although Apple intelligence isn't officially supported for the Apple Watch, one of the key features of 18.1 will be available. And that is that notification summary we're talking about. Because all it's going to do is push it to your watch. So in a way, your watch is getting this power. If you were a, you just can't generate it on the watch. That's not native, right? It's just a push of what the phone has. Right.
So as long as you have a phone doing it, you will get those summaries. Yeah. Which actually is the best place to do it, because you don't have a lot of room to read it on the watch, right? You're going to want those summarized things. So. Well, this is, this is a good little article too, because it finally put into timing the Apple Intelligence release, because we're kind of in the dark until this came out, because it was kind of vague. Later this year or later this fall. So this is nice.
Three, three individual releases between, you know, end of this month and one queue next year. Right. That's that staggered release they've been, they were talking about back in the summer. So. Yeah. That's, yeah. And then. And I think it's, it's a bit of it might be their hesitancy to just spit it out there real fast. You know, I think they want to, they want to, they want to I think make sure they're not going to have some embarrassing moments. Right. That's fair.
Sure. Really, really works before they release it that way. So, so the reality and their TV commercials will match up early next year. Yeah, you're watching commercials from the futures. What you're watching. Yes. Oh, this is funny. I just, I was just, I was just like, then I'm watching you're saying that it summarizes the voicemail. Yeah. And I did get a voicemail.
And it was from spectrum, which I do not subscribe to saying that I have a 40% discount that is going to go away at the end of the month. And I should call them on my phone. It says it's a spam risk. But on my watch, it summarizes and said, Hey, spectrum is removing their 40% discount. Wow. Okay. There's something that should have been caught. And right. It should have said, Hey, don't and not pushed your watch. Right. So this is that's see this learning still to do. Yeah. How funny.
Are you going to, do you need to take a break here and go? Go go go. Run. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, I mean, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it notices it. I mean, it could pass us it and assume that it's a fishing, right? And, uh, I'm warning you. Or just ignore it or just ignore it. How do you block it? Yeah. Don't bother like a really good assistant. Don't even bother me with this. Right. Yeah. You don't, you don't even want to know. That's so funny.
It, the, the, the, the, the recent list says it's a, definitely a spam risk, but the voicemail goes right through. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Um, so yeah, that's, uh, we, it is going to be interesting to see all this shakes out with Apple. I did also read something again. I didn't, we had so many other little things to talk about input in the list. You know, I think it's Ohio. Apple has finally opened up one of their data centers. They've been working on for the past six years.
It finally is going to be open and running. There's a lot of reasons why it wasn't. And I think that had to do with. I think the, the town and getting things set and squared away with them and they're going to open it up in phases or whatever. But the first phase, first part of it is open. There will be opening now. And I think that might be because of Apple intelligence, they need to have more of these online, right? More of their data centers running.
Yeah. They are clearly getting ready for it. Yeah, I think it's like a new Albany Ohio, which is North of Columbus. And I think they promised to like, I think they got a big break from them, first of all, to put it there. They hire a bunch of people. They do a lot of infrastructure for the town, you know, so there's a lot of, um, give and take back and forth, you know, just that works for both, but that's interesting.
Yeah. All that time and now the first one's coming online seems to me like they knew this something like this was coming. Or they knew they had to expand into having bigger data centers and this is because six years that just doesn't happen overnight, you know, a data center that had to been in the works for quite a while. And looking at pictures online, it's, it's pretty, pretty big. Is it? Yeah. Oh, new Albany, I'm sorry. New Albany. Okay. I think that's East to Columbus.
Okay. Yeah. So anyway, um, so they're getting ready for all the inquiries that they're going to get. Um, what else is going on here? Oh, um, I always love to see this because it's kind of fun. Uh, and this in particular was kind of really interesting. I fix it, did a tear it out or what's in the series 10. Um, because it's so thin, um, I was really curious to see how they squeezed everything in there. And I'll put a link in the show notes for this. You can watch the video. Very interesting.
Obviously, it still did not get a great tear down rating of repair ability, et cetera. So I got three out of three out of 10, but I think the watch has always gotten that. I don't plan on preparing it. Yeah, I think it. Yeah. And I'm going to get it. However, unlike the iPhone, the Apple Watch's internal batteries attach with a simple adhesive that can be removed easily. So it's actually a little easier to replace the battery in this one.
But everything else just to get into it is still like really difficult. Yeah. But it's fun to watch the little tools I have to pull all these little tiny connectors out. Oh, I know. And it's crazy. And even went in and looked at the screen, which is just insane. Yeah. And they wanted you to know where the taptic engine is, by the way. Yes. Yeah. And that's a pretty big piece of the pretty big components in there. But they've also found one of the smallest screws they've ever removed.
I thought it was funny. It's a tiny, tiny, tiny copper screw. But they got little brackets and little screws and little cables and pin connectors and all kinds. And just, uh, it's quite amazing. It's a marvel of technology and what they've put into this watch. So yeah, watch that if you get a few minutes. And they confirmed that the antennas mold into the case too. Yes, built precisely into the structure of the case, as they say.
And the components they say are so well fitted that the gap between the glass and the metal is only 0.176 millimeters, which helps improve the water resistance. It looks like it's thinner and has even less, or even more less tolerances and things. Which is pretty cool. That's pretty cool. Makes sense. Anyway, I always love seeing that. They do a, they do a good job there of showing you all that. And I don't think they get it back together.
I think they, I think this watch gives it up its life to make this video. Oh, yeah. I don't think so. Yeah. Although you're watching it. I don't know why you couldn't put it back together. I'd never get it wet again, but I think you could put it back together and make it work. That's a different pod. That's a different YouTube channel. Yeah, I mean, they're not like cutting things. They're actually unscrewing and just taking them all apart. They are.
So you know, it's always easier to take things apart than you are putting back together. You always have a couple of screws left over and you're like, oh, no. Yep. Was that rattling sound in my watch? Why is it rattling? Why is time coming backwards? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Now, this is this, this next story is the one that that we've talked about this before on the show. Very excited that something like this is the possibility, the future of the watch. It's actually starting to happen.
We want to make too big a deal out of it, but it's pretty cool. Apple Watch users using the vitals app are starting to notice that it detects illness. Before they even have symptoms. This is what it's all about, right? Not really. Not really. The detection. Yep. Yeah, you talk about, I talk about the top of the show. They're, you know, healthy, the most healthy device yet. This is it. This is what it's all about.
That's the only reason you take any of these measurements is to be able to proactively do something. Right. Right. So the vitals app, as we know, measures certain metrics during sleep and gives you, helps provide you with early warnings of impending sickness. At least for some Apple watch, where is it actually works. Now, it's available on the series eight and newer models.
However, some people are reporting they got sick and that never, you know, it never told them that anything was out of, out of, it wasn't typical, within range. So your results may vary, but there's quite a few people at least noting this. Let's see, I'm going to read a couple of these. See, woke up today feeling off. Now is the evening is settling in. I'm feeling that old familiar feeling in my head. I'm sick.
And then the image showed multiple metrics falling outside the typical range days before they reported feeling ill. Okay. Now, I don't know why they weren't notified of that. Right. Maybe they just weren't paying attention. That's something was out. But detecting those outliers can also happen when you get a vaccine. So somebody said, my watch knew I wasn't a hundred percent after my COVID and flu shots as all three vitals, risk, risk temperature, heart rate and respiratory rate were outliers.
That's how the watch knew they were not well. And they thought that was pretty amazing that it knew it is. I think I, I think I told you I took that one, but what was it I took? It took something for a medication. One night and I got an outlier. So it knew it knew something was not normal. But did it tell you or you had to know it was well, I had that. I'm using the ultra modular face. And I have the vitals on the left side. And where it says typical of the bottom, it said one outlier.
So I knew the next day. Something was off. Or after a heavy Chinese meal. Or an evening of drinking. There you go. What also give you an outlier, I'm sure. We're getting close to where it's going to notify you. Yeah, but it's a doctor or. Yeah, in those cases, we joke about it, but you would know what why there was an outlier. But when things are going fine and all of a sudden you see an outlier, you're like, wait, what? You know, that's going on.
And of course, Apple says the apps not intended to diagnose or treat any condition. Yeah, exactly. However, it's it's turning out that it can do something pretty amazing. You have directional directional is good. And this is a little more detailed than directional. This is a, you know, it's gives you some data outliers and you could make decisions from it. Right. And it tells you what those outliers are. It's not just like, hey, something's off. It'll tell you, right?
Whether you're respiratory rate, your temperature, whatever. Not sleeping. Well, you woke up too much at night or, you know, all those things. And I, you know, I'll have a sort of restless night. Like, I don't feel like I got a really good night's sleep and I'll always check to see. And it's still within range. Right. So it wasn't too bad. But even I knew it was kind of off. Right. So anyway, yeah, maybe maybe it'll help with hypochondriacs or maybe it won't.
True. True. True. Maybe it'll say, well, they'll just say this thing is a working right. It must be wrong. I know there's something wrong with me. So anyway, that's pretty cool. I love that. I think it's just going to get better and better, especially they get this whole blood oxygen thing fixed and worked out. I think we'll have even more reliable data, which I think I think, you know, based on our story a couple of weeks ago, I think we're going to see something, hopefully maybe 2025.
Yes. There is hope that that situation will change. Again, that's my, was kind of my main reason for keeping my ultra. And I got the 10 was that I can sleep with the ultra. So I still get the blood oxygen levels at night, you know, when it's true. So I could at least still have that data, but. All right. What else is going on anyway? That's pretty cool. I love that. Oh, this kind of surprised me. Prime video. Apple and Amazon did a deal. You can now get Apple TV plus through prime video.
And you go there right now. It's on their site. So you can subscribe to Apple TV plus through Amazon and watch all of those shows without having to have technically an Apple TV, right? Yeah. Yeah. Or even go to the website or anything. You just do it through your own prime account, which means it'll, it'll simplify your billing a little bit, right? And then you can go through that one place. Let's see, Eddie, Q, Apple's senior VP of services that we want to make Apple TV plus.
It's award winning library series and films from the world's greatest story. I was available to as many viewers as possible were thrilled that prime video will now offer Apple TV plus. Give a viewers an incredible breadth of viewing options. But it's the same price, correct? It is 999 I do believe. Yeah. I mean, I get a little bit of a price break, but I get it. But you must also have a separate subscription for prime video, which can be anywhere from 899 a month to 1798.
So now I don't know about everybody else, but I already have all of these services. Yeah. Under the big package, right? It's hard to get rid of what now? What do you mean? Yeah, you have the big package, the Apple one package. No, no, no, I meant I have prime, I have hulu, Disney, I have, you name it. If we subscribe to it, of course, yeah, which means we now pay more than we ever did for cable. And now it's getting more difficult because now you're getting bundles.
And I'm like, okay, my spreadsheet's going to get a little more complex because I get our sandwich. The bundles are, and if there's a price break or not, or if it's included. Right. And it's always the question of, where is that show? Yeah. And I hunt. I heard about a show. Got to find it. Of course Apple TV makes that easy. You can search the textbooks, right? A voice search, except for Netflix. Come on. Maybe Apple intelligence will also allow you to say, hey, I want to watch someone so.
And it'll boot it up for you. Well, maybe and Erie Lee should not boot it out. I'm good. I don't care for boots it up. At least tell me where it is. Right. Yeah. I don't need to go directly to the show, but I need to know what service it's on. I want to check. EBT does that. Which I guess it could do that now if I searched that way. But I think so. Sort of. Yeah. You can do that now. Sometimes it's a mess. It's a mess, isn't it? Yeah. That's all the streaming things that complete mess.
Yeah. I'm sure there's a whole website devoted to it. Yeah. And now you've got all these things where they're doing these weird, first of all, a little bone to pick with prime video. See something I want to watch. Cool. I don't notice the little tiny dollar sign or bag of gold or whatever. You click on it. You got to buy it. Right. Right. Right. Keep that out of the rest of the put it in a separate section. So I'm not, you know,
or make it obvious. Yeah. And they all have ads, right? I mean, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, prime as ads doesn't matter if you pay for it. Obviously, but it's like, there is no. Well, I guess you could pay an extra three bucks a month. Oh, yeah. That is an option. There is an option. Yeah. But by the way, I did ask that Chetch EBT for a couple of shows and it quickly told me what streaming service are on. So you could ask. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So that's good. Yeah.
So when that comes to in December, when that comes to just ask you to do it that way. Ask AI. Right. Okay. We're speaking of AI. This is this is the thing I was talking about earlier. So Apple did a study. And what they call what they say is it reveals critical flaws and AI's logical reasoning abilities. And a lot of this sounds like, well, yeah, who didn't know all this. But it's still interesting to see a study that confirms it. And more importantly, I think it's
interesting to see where Apple is coming from. I think this shows how Apple is thinking about all of this. Yeah. So this research team, I'm covered what they call significant weaknesses in the reasoning and ability of large language models. What they're saying is an evaluation of a range of these models, including those from open AI meta and other developers, was done to determine how
well they could handle mathematical reasoning tasks. Findings reveal that even the slightest change in the phrasing of the question can cause major discrepancies in the model's performance and can undermine the reliability in scenarios requiring logical consistency. Apple draws attention to a persistent problem. They're reliant on pattern matching rather than genuine logical reasoning.
Yeah. Several in several tests. They demonstrated that adding a relevant information to a question details that should not affect a mathematical outcome can lead to vastly different answers. I thought this was cool. So what they did was they involved a simple math problem asking how many Kiwis a person collected over several days.
When a relevant details about the size of some of the Kiwis was introduced, models such as open AI, meta's incorrectly adjusted the final total despite the extra information having no bearing on the number, the solution. That is eye opening when you're talking to an AI about giving it too much information. Yeah. Yeah. That you wouldn't think would affect it. Right. Well, if you asked how many Kiwis can you hold, it might be a logical answer because
it's bigger. You can only get hold of so many. But that I think it was more along the lines of this person has six. This person has four and this person has three large ones. When they put the word large in there, it came up with a different answer than when they didn't put the word large. Where it shouldn't, right? It's basic math. So that's what they call hallucinating, right? Yeah. Still got to verify. Still got to verify. So I was trying to figure out what Apple's goal was in doing this.
Well, yeah, it has to understand the limits so that it doesn't break trust with the user. So when they're going in there and they're asking it, math problems like that, that could have pauses in between and weird inputs, that it won't kind of just give you back the wrong answer. I don't know. They're probably literally pairing away about, you know, it just providing wrong incorrect information and losing trust. Right. So Apple suggests that AI might need to combine
neural networks, sorry, I'll lose my voice here. Neural networks with traditional symbol-based reasoning called neuro symbolic AI to obtain more accurate decision-making and problems of it. Sounds like they're talking about making, putting the intelligence into artificial intelligence. And they are. There is a next generation beyond pattern matching and that is kind of like
allowing it to think slowly and infer data and process. So that's what they're actually starting to, like even just the next monetization model for AI is to be able to say, well, great, I can do this pattern matching thing and spit back some marketing material for you that matches and looks and feels like everything else you've written. But if you want me to think about it, I want to charge you for that time too. And that's fine, it'll mind paying it, but right now we can't do that.
Right. It can't do that. It's working on it. They're working on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's all as I said, it's all a big magic trick right now. Very good one. I might add kind of an amazing, but it's not actually performing magic. Right. It's still a trick. Well, there are some going around recently and I wish I could remember because I'm going to sound stupid. But someone sent me a TikTok and it said, ask Open AI how many it wasn't like S's in Mississippi
or something else. And it gave the wrong answer every time. A hundred letters were in the word. And yeah, I said, okay, that's kind of odd. I mean, very clearly, yeah, you can see there's four of them and it wouldn't give the answer four. Yeah. Well, it was the number of ours in strawberry. That's what it was. That's what it was. Thank you. I knew you would know. They don't mean out every time. And it was not three as an answer every time.
No, it would not. Oh my gosh. I think it's fixed it. I think it's fixed it. Okay. They were like straw berry. Yeah, exactly four. What? Yeah. So when you talk about something like image creation, right? So you're like mid-journey. I always found it interesting. I type in something and I get four versions of something. And I typed in. I just copy and paste the same sentence and ask it the exact same thing. I get four completely different things.
And so it's doing something there where it's changing every single time you ask it. Right. Right. So you know, and for art and stuff like that, that's fine. Yeah. But when you talk about math, it's only one answer. Yeah, I admit journey. I would ask it to go get specific things for the picture and it wouldn't do it. It just wouldn't do it. Yeah, it's hard to get it to it's hard to steer. Yeah. And I know those people who really know how to do it. Yeah. But it takes a while to get
what you want. It does. Yeah. You can give us some guidance by sharing with it another picture. I've never done that yet. I tried to do that two vents and I don't think I was doing it correctly because the same thing was happening. And I was like, I just want you to go get this logo that's clearly right in front of you and do a couple things with it. And it would just recreate the logo every time, not even close to the current logo. Wow. So but again, I think it's mean
probably how I was doing it. First, it's definitely operator error. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. I don't know. Remember the days where Tom would ask me to go do that. Yeah. That's a very ace of logos. That was that was your job. I said, what? And then you could ask your kids to do it. It just doesn't get done. That was pretty good with my input because you came back with some really good stuff. Yeah. That's so that all worked out pretty well.
Yeah. Man, I am so glad I'm not that business. Oh my gosh. What would you do? Yeah. Yeah. It's challenging. Yeah. You can't trust anything a copywriter or an art director brings you. But they actually did it. Right. Oh. Well, that's crazy. They have to be pretty good at, I'm saying this. And again, I may sound stupid because you have to be pretty good at using the AI to get a pretty good output that doesn't look
like AI. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It depends on what you're asking for. But yeah. Yeah. And it depends on how complicated it needs to be. Right. Right. Right. I've seen people put stuff in the mid-journ is like three paragraphs. Yes, it is. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, that's pretty specific. Yeah. And I always wonder, are you getting better results than I am with my simple sense? Sometimes. Sometimes. Sometimes.
What do you think like a product manager and you're writing requirements for something and you write it very, very detailed narratives? It does pretty good. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm marketing department asked me for 500 words snippets sometimes to do postings on blogs and on our website. And and I started writing with AI and they said, hey, did you write this with AI? And I'm like, is it because it looks like it's written by AI or it's just too good for me? And they said it
away. They said it was too good for you. Yeah. See, you got to be smarter than that. That's right. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. I could you could immediately tell when someone didn't do something. I think it was more the first one than the second one because you could really tell the difference, I think, but but I would write them and then I kind of edit the crap out of them. Yeah. But you can still you can still tell that some of the words I don't use. Yeah. Yeah. Kids should not turn
in their homework directly without. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah. I haven't tried this yet, but you can with with the developer paid version of open AI, you can upload samples. Many samples of your writing. Yeah. You say, hey, write it based upon the same style. So you could try to get away with the marketing department on that one. So okay. And maybe where I'm getting ahead of my, so maybe it's not quite there yet. But if I had a great idea for a horror story. And I uploaded several
Stephen King books. Could I have it write this story that I this original story I created? Right. Yeah. Could it write it as Stephen King? Well, yeah, it probably already has all the Stephen King's. Okay. Well, then folks, and then you can do is say, yeah, you can ask. Yeah. Yeah. Write it in the style. Steve. Write it as Stephen King or the style of Stephen King. Yeah. That is so cool. And at the same time is not right. Yeah.
That it can do that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's why I mean, it's not the exact same thing, but that isn't that why the actors and writers all went on strike. I mean, yeah, it's because, you know, there's it's easy to create content that's not you. And you should still be paid for it. Because it's you or near each of you. Well, that means that that means if Stephen King gets tired of doing this, he could just do that. He can. He wants to make it. He wants to crank out a book real
quick. I think that'd be one way you could do it. I think he's done a couple books like that anyway. Yeah, you could. You know, he could write a whole horror about a I that he could. He's probably working on it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Man, you know, I have been just too busy working. If I was completely retired, I would probably be so far down this rabbit hole. Because it's so interesting. All right. Let's talk about what's coming up. We got basically the rumors are we
got at least four products coming. And there was an update to one of them already. But four products coming from Apple this year that probably will be at an event sometime this month. First is an M the an M4 MacBook Pro case. We're going to do some new chip and all that was leaked. Right. That was the one that was that was the one. If you believe it, is it real? Yeah. Okay. It was on a Russian
site that they got a hold of the actual thing and unboxed it. And it might be real. I mean, I don't know where they would get unless Apple was so far ahead of their deal that someone stole some, you know, a palette went missing or something. Yeah. Well, it could be. But it's supposed to be the M4 M4 Pro and M4 Max chips that'll get announced. So it's I think it's a MacBook Pro 16 gigs of RAM minimum for the first time space black extra Thunderbolt port. And then the one I'm most excited
for the Mac mini M4 that the largest redesign to the Mac mini in over 14 years. Yeah, your big Mac mini user, aren't you? Well, this one in particular for doing live streams for our product and stuff when we do a live stream like through stream yard or something and more participant even. When I set all that up, I don't even have ports. I got to drag in the monitor and whatever. And I've got adapters and all kinds of crap. Well, this new Mac mini is supposed to have like,
four or five different. Oh, I remember that. We have a lot of other ports. Yeah. It's supposed to have enough to make it more powerful and more and small enough to be easy to move around and set up. So I just need a decent monitor and we'll be off and running. You know, as a studio device, I think these would be amazing. And it's going to drop USB A, by the way. I won't even be on there. So yeah, again, M4, M4 Pro, at least 16 gigs of RAM. And then something M4 Mac,
so then bump up the M3 to an M4. As well as going from 8 gigs of RAM to 16 on the base, you know what they're doing here, forgetting every one of these devices ready for Apple Intelligence. Yeah. Yeah. That's all it is. I'm a home to breath one more time. But it's possible. We'll see a new magic keyboard and magic mouse and trackpad updates with USB C. I tied because of the European regulations. I kind of have to have it, right? This would be a good time to do it. And then the
last thing on the list was an iPad mini seven, which came out Tuesday. Good. Yeah, they didn't even wait to do it in the event. So now the rumor is we might not get an event. Yeah, that's right, right? Why do you need one just to announce that everything's faster and Apple Intelligence coming. You could do that release. Right. But they did one last year for the scary fast event for Halloween, right? Right. Right. Introducing the chips. I think they could do a similar thing with
the M4, right? The chips alone would take up a good chunk of this event, right? Describing how they created them and what they're doing and what they're capable of. I don't know. That could be incredibly boring though. I was going to say it's not. I'm not scared and did it pretty good. So 99% of the people would be a snooze fest. Yeah. Well, otherwise they wouldn't unveil like the first major redesign of the Mac mini just on their website, wouldn't they? Yeah. If it's not that huge
ideal, yeah. Maybe I don't know. Part of me thinks they're going to want to do an event so they can continue to push Apple Intelligence. Yeah. That's why they're coming out with these devices. But don't we have a story about there won't be an event? That's what I'm talking about is that the rumor is now not an event because they released one of these four on Tuesday. The iPad mini. So that leaves three devices, new chips, pushing Apple Intelligence. It could be a 30 minute event,
right? That just kind of tells you that where they've come now, it is a feed and speed game for them now. With you. Well, and I guess I should say that rolling the Apple Intelligence on top of it is the exciting part. But until they do that, it is just speed and feed game and then you don't need a big event to do that. I want an entire event just to show a redesigned magic mouse. I want to know how it's not going to charge from the bottom
anymore. That's what I want to seek. That is worth an event. That alone. I would take an Apple Intelligence event when it's fully rolled out. Yeah. They got all the devices. Why not do a couple hour event on just Apple Intelligence? Like a free user conference or something. You know, that would be amazing. Right. Well, that's the other thing. If it's at the end of the month, come October 28th, we get the first big release of Apple Intelligence sort of. They could tout that
as well. I'm just saying there's enough here to do an event. But yeah, I guess I don't know. They did it last year. We'll see if they do. If so, we should hear about it within a week or so. But this also kind of tells me that really Apple has no new products on the near horizon. There's just nothing out there. It's exciting. Yeah. I mean, other than what Apple Intelligence can bring to everything, all the devices that you have and those that need to
be updated for it. I think that's the story Apple's trying to tell right now is we've got this incredible software coming out that can do amazing things. But oh, by the way, you're going to need update your devices to do it. That's the story they want to tell for the next year, at least. Until the new little home robot iPad thing comes out. Sometimes next year. Yeah. Anyway, it will be kind of interesting. There's going to be a whole bunch of devices that Apple has
out there in the wild that does not have a key feature that they are promoting and pushing. Yes. Yes. So it will. I mean, either you're going to bite the bullet and go and buy new hardware or most of these things are just perfectly fine. Right? Right. Right. Right. Yeah. Unless you unless it's that tempting to go out and get something new. Yeah. Exactly.
Well, it's it's the FOMO right? If you hear all about it once it arrives and everybody and it's gets positive reviews and people are loving it, but you can't do it with what you yeah, you're going to want to do it. So it absolutely has to be that good. Otherwise, people are going to be like me. Okay. I don't know. I'll wait. I can deliver that. Yeah. Or switch. Let me turn that off.
I think I think the only thing that's doing that is Apple intelligence. If it's not exciting and doesn't do what what makes people excited, they're not going to go out and buy all this new hardware. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's been tough for Apple ever since they came out with the phone. It's like how do you or even before that with the iPad? I say, how do you create? Yeah. I keep selling the same thing over and over. Ring on the ring. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, it's so many new products and they're definitely deep into the lifecycle of a lot of these products, which you know, the lifecycle curve is like it's every product goes through it and the phone is there. Right. And there's so many things we've talked about in the past that Apple has never touched that once they reach this saturation level of all we can do is update the speed or whatever. Right. Process or screen with with the watch. It's the bands. Right. How many smart bands have we
reviewed or talked about in the show? Not reviewed, but talked about the patents for that they've never come out with. That would give you a reason to upgrade constantly. Come out with a new type of smart band every year. And then the other thing is all of the what is it? The um oh folding phones screen folding screens. We're talking about the iPad for the phone. That would that would create a whole other category for them to upgrade all your devices for. So there's
still a lot out there. They just haven't touched. And I don't know why I don't know why they haven't gotten in any of this stuff yet. Yeah. They just have to look up patently Apple when yeah. Yeah. You've got to work on that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. Go out to the garage and look at all the stuff sitting out there. You got a ton of things. Yeah. Apple needs to go back to the garage. Right. We're just right. That's right. Yeah. Just look at the patents on the wall. Yeah. Exactly.
Start doing something with them. Okay. Uh speaking of changing bands. I had to put this in there because I ran across it. I thought it was the most. I want to ridicule it. But it's the most silly thing I've ever seen for the Apple Watch. It's a company called Swap Bandit B-A-N-D-I-T. That's all one word Swap Bandit. They got a trademark approval for that name, I guess. For this little
device that, okay, I got to use their words to describe it. They are thrilled to announce the official approval of the trademark marking a significant milestone of the brand's mission to simplify the often frustrating process of changing Apple Watch bands designed to make band swapping effortless for Apple Watch models ranging from 40 millimeter to 49 millimeter across all generations. Swap Bandit takes the hassle out of band changes for users everywhere. Do you have a problem changing
the bands on your watch? I do. You do. What is your problem? It's just you've got to push the little button on the back and sometimes it's stuck. Now, if you don't, specifically, specifically, if you don't have all Apple branded bands with perfect fit, you will run into this issue. Yeah. That's fair. That's all I have though. I don't have any non-Apple banded brands, a bands. But, okay, again, they say, Gone are the days of struggling with tedious time consuming
I've never had a time consuming band swap. I mean, yeah, it may take a couple of pushes to get it set through, but it does. Anyway, this device is designed to set over the back of your watch and push down. Yeah. It's like half a case cover. Right. And it pushes those buttons in so you can then slide the bands out. Yeah. I mean, yeah. Yeah. Okay. I think they're just over. Yeah. They're over making their case here for how difficult it actually is. Sure. A little hyped.
I mean, it could have been released as a 3D printed thing. Which, that's, yeah, it's a piece of plastic. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. 29.99. I need to plan on 95, probably. But I don't know how much is this thing. I didn't see a price in the store. It needs a hurry. It's a press price. Actually, I went to their site. Oh, you did. Okay. How much is, I was like, okay. Okay. I'm going to get this 20 bucks. Let's find out a shop now.
25% off with this code. Oh, look at that. 20 bucks. Oh, okay. That's the sweet spot. Right. Is it worth it? Vincent, would you pay 20 bucks? I would not. But it's going to make it effortless. Yeah. I don't change bands anymore. Is that frustrating? Yeah. I just said we've got on there. I just leave it. Yeah. This is too much trouble. No, it's funny. One of the reviews is it says it's very hard to you. They're devices hard to use. Is that what you say? Yeah.
That's the thing. You know, come to think about it. It might take more time and be more difficult to push this thing down and slide bands out than it would just to push that. Yeah. At first, when I saw the article, I thought it was something that you would attach to your bands to. Oh, okay. And then you just attach this thing to your watch. You know, and then you could just have a whole bunch of these with the bands already attached to it. Oh, my God. That's very confusing.
Well, that would be a band in case, all in one kind of thing. Sort of. Yeah. Yeah. Like it's kind of just grabs onto your watch there. And it took me a while to figure out what this action was doing. Right. And you have to put your watch flush on on a surface to push this on the back or do you put it on the palm of your hand? And then either way. Yeah. And then you just have to buy a review. Of course, that's not. No, I think it would be more complex because
you just push a little button slide thing out. Right. So I do your band. And this looks like you have to push both ends of it. I started. Yeah. Yeah. You only you only put it on there. The video they have is you put it on there to slide it out. But you still put it in the normal way. Wait, what and what? Yeah. Yeah. You use it. Like, you know, it's like, you don't need to push the button in to put it on. Oh, no, I guess not. It'll just snap in. Yeah. It makes it easier if you do.
Yeah. Yeah. Especially with those third party ones. Okay. Little little tip there, by the way. Okay. Forget one that's really tough. Yeah. Keep that button pushed in and it will slide in a little bit easier. Yeah. Sometimes. Well, hey, let's let's bookmark this. Let's come back in six months and see if it's still around. Okay. Okay. Well, sorry. I knew I knew when I marked this story, everyone was just quite all over the world. Beat the crap on it. But it just struck me as
best of luck. Yes. Good luck. One day, it may end up at an auction, which is our next story. Yeah. So if you buy one, keep it in the package. It might be worth something. Rare Macintosh prototype with a proprietary Apple Drive is set to hopefully have a record-breaking sale at auction here in a few days, actually. So this is a very rare early prototype from 1983. And then the serial number on this thing, the model number M001. Nice. Yes. But it has the proprietary
infamous Twiggy disk drive. It's called Twiggy. That was the code name for that drive. Due to performance issues, Apple adopted the Sony drive instead of their Mac models. So there was not that many of these down. Although I think the Twiggy drive was in some of the earlier Lisa computers. And there's only two of these known to still be around. And the first one sold 100 for $150,000. Yeah, that was kind of amazing. One, this is like two left. Two that price.
But this is in this one's number one. Yeah. The first model of it. So it may go for more. Yeah. $150,000. So I looked it up the auction. And let's see where is it. Let's try to let me refresh this thing here. Starting bid is $65,000. Wow. You have six days and 15 hours and 30 minutes left. Vincent. Hurry up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Get bid. Apparently, it doesn't show you the current bid, though, on this site. We have to log in to bid. Sorry. I got you. Okay. Yeah. I'm not going to do that.
But yeah, this is from a company called Bont Bombs, B-O-N-H-A-M-S auctions. They do a lot of these sort of things in the past. They've done some really rare Apple stuff. You can I'll put a link in the show notes. You can look down. They have an Apple phone, Apple iPhone 1 sealed in box. Eight gigabyte smartphone from 2007. Between 15 and 20,000 is what it will go for. But that's some other cool little things here from Mac.
For sale. Anyway, I thought that was kind of cool. It's definitely say who owns these, does it? Yeah. They've got a warehouse somewhere of this stuff. So that's the four-site for this stuff. I know. To hold on to something that long. But I also wanted to know why it was called Twiggy. Do you know why it was called Twiggy? I do not. That was a code name. I thought Twiggy was a name of Buck Rogers' robot. No. I don't think it was. But it wasn't for that.
But it is named for something. Can you think of anything else named Twiggy? I immediately got, I immediately went, oh, I wonder if it's for this and it is. Yeah, there is a Twiggy out there. I just can't think about it right now. What is it? Tom. 1960s. There was a woman called Twiggy. Right. It was a rock star model. A model or something? Yeah. That's what it was named for. Is that not weird? Did you drop acid with Steve Jobs or something?
Maybe. I don't know why they would call it Twiggy. I think it may have to do with the size of the drive or something that it could do more. I don't know. I don't know what it was. That's kind of odd. That weird. We don't know how these things get named. But anyway, that's what it's from. It's from the woman in the 60s. I don't know. Buck Rogers' robot is Twiggy. You were close. So close. What'd you say, Twiggy? Twiggy. Twiggy. Okay. Very close. So that's T-W-I-K-I. Oh, okay. Yeah.
It's different than Twiggy. Definitely. All right. One last story here. I saw this today. You know who Jim Kramer is, right? Oh, yeah. Yeah. That's not it. He was getting ready to do a little spot, a little piece in his show. Talking about watchmaker was it Brightling, B-E-R-E-I-T-L-A-N-G, the high-end watch company. And as he started to speak, filming this, his Apple Watch went off with a siren, like three times, interrupted him. And behind the scenes, you hear the people laughing.
They're like, the watch is, Apple Watch is jealous. You're talking about another brand of watch. Anyway, if you guys watch this, it's a siren. I don't know what was going off on his watch. That would cause that sound. Unfortunately, Tom, that, that, that link had so many pop-ups I couldn't get even. Oh, yeah. Sorry about that. It's the only copy of the story I could find. Yeah, Twitter. Yeah. It's like a siren. It's like three re-re-re-I-T-L-A-N-G.
I don't know what that is. I'm trying to think of what would be set as a alarm, maybe a alarm. I thought he was waving his arms around in a way where I thought it was, he was had fallen down and there was no most detected or something. He does have a lot of misnade. Doesn't he get kind of graphic with his... But me waving my arms around, I've never had that happen. Yeah. Yeah. It was weird. I mean, I could play it here, but you're not going to be able to hear it.
I think it's probably set up that way. Yeah, I'll put a link in the show notes, although I won't warn you there are a lot of pop-ups on this. Yeah. This web's particular website. It's a... Which has been... Zingga.com. Oh, yeah, yeah. You're going to need to direct me to the Twitter post as well. I think that... I have to go on Twitter to do that. I don't do that in here. Yeah. Sorry. I don't, I don't, I don't go there. X. X. X. I don't go to X. Sorry. That's not going to happen.
Yeah. Um, where you can just look it up for yourself. Type in Jim Kramer. Yeah, just be that. I'm going to ask you to watch a lot of them and you'll see it. Yeah. It was pretty funny though. The timing was just perfect. Absolutely perfect. All right. What else we got going to. Oh, I had a couple, I had at least one listener feedback here that was talking about our 500th show coming up. Yeah. Yeah. This is Gary Saurisby. Saurisby, Saurisby, sorry. Sorry. Sorry, Gary, I missed your name there.
He says, they have a great idea for your 500 episode. Why don't you re-board one of your loyal listeners with a brand new Apple Watch. He said, you could have some kind of contest to determine the winner. If you start promoting it before your 500th episode, you could break a record for the largest audience of an Apple Watch podcast. You might be able to get convinced your local Apple store to donate a watch for promoting their store in the contest.
He says, P.S., I sure could use a new Apple Watch. I think I know where you're going with this, Gary. But that is interesting to think about. We're at 477 here. We're going to be getting close to five. Very close. As to what we do with that. And I'm not sure. I'm not sure if we celebrate or we shut it down. I don't know. We want it to. I don't know. We have to be up there with the top number top podcasts for volume. No, there's ones that have been doing it longer.
And they do more episode somewhere daily. Yeah, sure. Yeah, they get up there in the high numbers. This week in tech, or even Macbreak weekly, I think they're in six or 700 land, as far as the number of episodes. Mark Marron, I think, is WTF podcast is way up there too. Because they do quite a few. We drop back to every two weeks or so. We used to do it every week. But that's right. Well, maybe we get a duration award. Yeah, there you go. But it's interesting.
We're coming up with our 500th, right around the time of the 10th anniversary of getting the first Apple Watch. So that's true. That's pretty interesting timing. We'll have to figure something out. Yeah, we'll do something. Not sure what. A call and show. Yeah. Does it get Tim Cook on the show? Answer some questions. We got some questions for you, Tim. That's right. Anyway, that's some sort of feedback there. We'll have AI writer really compelling email to him. There you go.
I always just have an AI version of them. Very sure. That's even better. Sure. I hate that. It works. That work great. Should I have an AI write, write a mo letter to give us a watch to go away? Yeah, go. Yeah. Yeah. Why not? Anybody out there who knows him? Yeah, put it a good word. Send us his email. The real one that he answers. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'll do it. I'll do it. I'll put it in a message. Just put a LinkedIn message out there. All right, we'll get to our tips here in just a minute.
But first, a quick reminder as we approach our 500 episode, that the Apple Watchcast is brought to you by the wonderful support of our Patreon subscribers. Become a patron of the Apple Watchcast and for as little as a dollar a month, you can help us to keep producing this show. Check out our page. It's at patreon.com slash Apple Watchcast. Just subscribe and become a patron of the Apple Watchcast. Big thanks to all of our patrons. You make this show possible.
And I just want a quick note to let you know Patreon is changing its pricing structure because of the way Apple requires it to be done as a subscription through their app. So what will happen is if you currently subscribe as a patron to this show, nothing will change. It will be your monthly payment as always. If you're a new subscriber as of, I think, November, starting in November, you will be put, I think, on a, say, it won't be a monthly thing. I think it might be a yearly thing.
Not quite sure how that's going to work out and what that's going to be, but it's going to be subscribed in a different way. So I will get all the details on that and kind of let everybody know what it's going to be. But things are changing and I think that begins in November. So just FYI, again, if you're already a patron, thank you so much. Nothing's going to change for you. For new patrons, it'll be a little bit different. The way prices won't go up, but the way you pay will. So, all right.
So what do we like this week? Vince and Wunch kick it off. Yeah, so, okay, cover your ears a little bit of blasphemy here. But I think I like this week is from Google. No, it's a part. It's called the, it's an AI experiment. Definitely experiment with an astray. There with called notebook, LM. And I just came across this thing, not quite sure how. But what you can do or what I did was at least you can upload from your Google docs, which I use for my Apple Watch notes and stuff like that.
And I shared it with the AI. It processed it and then created a very realistic podcast type of, you know, presentation that reviewed the notes, where there was a female and a male voice kind of, you know, gathering back and forth and discussing, you know, elements and highlights within the notes that I had shared with it. It's amazing how it was able to process, you know, all the little tiny pieces and weave it all together in kind of one comprehensive, you know, narrative.
As if there was, like, here, the topics, here are the sections. And they moved fluidly from one section to the next, talking about, you know, all the way down to Apple Crab or reviews and all the way down there. I didn't get that far. It did have for crap. All the way down there at the bottom. And then it talks, it was like a 10-minute summary of, like, maybe I get 20 pages with it, no sense there.
But like it talks about, you know, the Apple Watch 10 and, you know, my hesitations with it, afraid of bumping in the things. It picked out all those little details. Oh my God. And read it back to me. Oh. And it's so amazing to actually listen to it. Okay, wait, wait, wait. You're following my mind here. Yeah. Did they do an episode of Apple Crab? No, they didn't. Oh, okay.
But it just talked about like, hey, you know, there are, there are like, there are things in here that you reviewed and things that you'd liked about it and things you didn't. And so it's a way of kind of digesting for a lot of complex materials that you might have had, or just had notes and just have it read back to you. And it's a, it become, they kind of market it kind of like a study guide or a briefing doc. So you can put all your stuff in there and it kind of just reads it back to you.
So you have kind of a recall mechanism. But then they also on the, the web interface allows you to type in questions. And it will query the source and give you back answers based upon that and site specific areas within the notebook that, that, you know, it referenced. But overall, I mean, it was like, it was mind-blowing. It took some, a little bit of time to process. You upload your notes and you can upload as many notes as you want.
You can take even the, the, the, the answers that it gave back and feed that back into the notes. And, and, you know, use it as kind of your assistant of all the kind of little things that you've been collecting. But the, but the, but the, the way they spoke was just like we're speaking now. Yeah, they had the little interruptions. They talked over each other a little bit. There was a size. They were like, yeah, it was so surreal.
If you took a snippet of that and said, hey, listen to this latest new podcast, you would not know it was AI generated. Actually, let's see if you can actually hear this. I'm going to move my micro-cube. Yeah, see if you can play a piece of it. Play some of this. It was pretty amazing. All right, so here we go. Erie's 10, exploring all the ins and outs of WatchOS 10, even dissecting those tiny, but mighty sensors, you've been busy. What stands out to me is your meticulous approach.
You're not just jumping on the latest release. You're really peeling back the layers of the Apple Watch experience. You're digging into the details. You said it, bit, bit. And speaking of diving depth, you've transitioned from the rugged Apple Watch Ultra to the sleek sophistication of the series 10. Yeah. So that's, yeah, it's crazy. That's crazy. That's crazy. If I didn't know any better, I'd just say that's some people reading. That's two people reading.
Yeah, right, right. Yeah. Yeah. And I told you I was going to try this. I didn't have a chance to do it this week, but I gosh, we got my head spinning as to, hey, maybe for a 500th episode, we're going to plug in our, all I have all these recordings of our voices. Yeah. Upload that to what learns all three of our voices. And I'm going to automate this thing to where all I have to do is link stories. Here are the stories. Talk about it. Here's the stories. And here's what you guys like this week.
And it will do a review and see if it can auto-generate the podcast on its own. You just have to give us some criteria on time. It was a week back with like an eight-hour podcast, right? You have to say, do a one-hour podcast. Right. Well, it would have that if I upload all of our stuff, it knows, right? Yeah. Well, yeah, true. True. Oh my gosh. This is getting crazy, isn't it? Okay. That's cool. There it is. It's called Notebook LM. Yep. It's an experimental mode. It's free. Free? Totally free.
Yeah, totally free. How did you just upload a PDF? Well, I had, like I said, my notes are already in Google Docs. So when you select a source, you can choose Google Docs. As one of your sources, but you can upload PDFs, text files, markdown, audio files, MB3, so you can. And it'll process from that as well. Or website, thanks. How much stuff can you upload? It does not say. Yeah, there's 50 sources that you can upload. That's what I'm saying. Okay, so each would one dot, well, okay.
Did you do that? I'm creating an account. You create an account and it's, you said it's free. It's just, it's just your Google account. If you have a Gmail or something like that. Okay. Just go to notebook lm.google.com. I have notes going back to episode one. If I put all those into a giant PDF and fed it to this thing, I wonder what would come back with. Yeah, give it a try. You'll come back with a 30 hour podcast. You would.
Yeah. I don't know what, what, what, what, it's how it arrived at that time limit. But it might, the whole thing is about nine minutes long. And I listen to the whole thing. I have to ask you though, your notes did have anything about any stories. It is. It did. And that story news in it. Oh, no, not the full news. It had links out to other things. Oh, links. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. I could do that. Yeah. This is just, this is just your personal notes and preparation for one of our podcasts.
Uh-huh. 141 pages were actually not out. Look at it. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's my boy. Yeah. I have one long note in it. The notes happen. I could gosh, I could. Yeah. I'd be scrolling for a month to get the first episode. Wow. Okay. Notebook LM. Again, if I was retired, then I'd be so down this room. Yeah. One day Apple will do this automatically. Oh, my goodness. You just ask it. So to do it for you. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Chris, what do you like this week?
Well, time I just have a little snippet of two or three things here. First, um, I have the pleasure of going to my first major league playoff game tomorrow night. Hmm. So I'm going to see Cleveland play New York in Cleveland. It's going to be a little chilly and the and the Cleveland team is behind. But, uh, yeah. Good luck. Good luck. Thank you, my son. I'm going to that and looking forward to that.
Um, before the show, I told you I wasn't something I didn't like this week was the lack of Apple intelligence, but as we go on through the stories, we realized we're getting close. Yes. So that's going to be really exciting. That's going to turn into what I like this week when we really kind of, um, learn about it. And then one little thing I'll add here is, um, we haven't talked about it much, but the password app, I've, you know, I've really converted over to the password app.
And I'm, I think I'm about there because I used a different app. I use something called keeper, which is 50 bucks a year. Yeah. And I think and my keeper, it renews in March. So I have three or four more months to make sure everything sorted out. But I don't plan on renewing it. So I'm going to save $50 a year with the new Apple password app. So I like that. That's great. Yeah. That's, yeah, that's definitely when they mentioned that new. It's going to sure lock a bunch of things.
Yeah. Now, I think over time, it'll get better because right now it's just segmented by like the type of password is like a network password or general password or a key chain. Um, when I'm not key chain, um, we call that, um, let me open the app and tell you. But I think that it, you know, it doesn't have, um, the same level of organization is some of the password apps. It has, it has all it has pasties, codes, wifi security and then deleted.
But you can't make a folder and put like all your work passwords. Right. You can't do that yet. But I think that's coming down the road. But it's a, it's a good, it's a good app. Yeah. That's interesting. I've never, I never used one of those pay, um, password services. I've always just used keychain. So when this came out, it was really easy to just, it's keychain, right? So it's great. It's kind of the same thing. Um, it is it, did it move? Does it move your keychain stuff over?
I think it does. It does. Yeah. It was just all there. Yeah. It's all there. It's all there. It's all there. It's all there. It's all there. Cause there is no more keychain, right? Right. And it also tells you if you've kind of reused passwords and gives you, you know, because if you reason, you know, if you have the same password, there are multiple times it tells you. And, you know, puts an indicator on that password and you could go and change it. It's got a lot of intuitive capability in it.
Do you, do you use the suggested password from them? Yeah. I am not. I am not. Which is, which is like the paragraph long. Yes. It's a huge. I'm always a little hesitant. I mean, I do it. But I'm like, I hope it remembers. I'm not going to write this down. I'm not going to have no record. I'll never be able to get back into something. If I ever, if it ever loses that for whatever reason, right? And that's why I didn't do it in keychain because it kind of goes away.
But now it's right in front of you and it's easy to find. Yeah. And then also, you know, there's another little security feature where you can, you know, face ID, an app on your phone. Yes. So that's a, that's a nice little security app too. There is another layer of security. Nice. All right. I have another handy smart home device to that I like this week. And I'm not sure if I've already reviewed this or we, and someone here may have reviewed this. I still think it's great.
And it's worth reviewing again, even if we have it's from Akara, a, a Q a array. And it's what they call a wireless mini switch. I call it a button. It's basically a button. It's about an inch and a half square with a circular button in the middle. And what you do is you add it to your home kit and you're going to need an Akara hub for this, by the way. But I already had an Akara hub because I have some of the other stuff. And once you do that, you can then it'll then show up in home kit.
So, but you can program this button in three ways. One button press does an assigned action. Two button press, like a double click, does another action. And then a long press does a third assigned action. So you can, you can do three different things with the one button. So you can also do, and this is pretty important. You can do a range test that will tell you if you're too far away from the hub for it to work effectively, which I was with one action that I was trying to use it for.
So I have in my desk, my main computer desk in my office, a little vibration sensor that's sitting on the desk. So if I bump the desk or tap on it, I have tied to my Hue play lights that will come on behind my computer and light on. So as soon as I sit down, boom, those lights come on, which is very handy. However, I don't have a normal work schedule in that room. So basically, there's no schedule at all. So whenever, you know, it's, it's, it's whenever and for however long.
But so I also put, so I couldn't really like tell it to turn off in three hours or to turn off whenever time. There is no schedule, right? So I took the button, programmed it to one button, turned it off those lights. Another two tabs will turn it on, but I mounted that light right next to my light switch as I leave the room. So I can just turn it into a light or an actual light switch, turn that off and control it that way.
Another thing I put one of them in our dining room, I put one next to our light switch to open and close those smart wing shades that I told you about. They come with a remote. The shades do, but again, it's much easier to have access right next to the light switch instead of trying to find the remote each time. And then push the right button on the road and do that. It's easier just one click. They go down to clicks. They go up. Right.
Anyway, there's lots of uses for this type of a little mini switch, and I'm sure I'm going to find a lot more. It's available on Amazon. It's a 1439, $14.39 with Prime shipping. But again, you can need that hub as well. If you already have a hub, this is a no brainer. Anyway, I'll put a link in the show notes for it. And no, this is not an affiliate link from Amazon. We don't do that. It's just a handy link so you can find things a little bit quicker.
Okay, so I'm having fun with that type of stuff lately. Anything else before we pause the activity of the show for a few weeks. I'm loving the new pause activity feature on the watch. That's right. That's right. It's really nice. You know what I love about it in particular? Not just just pausing for a full day, but the option of pausing it just for that day. And then I don't have to go back and turn it back up because it just resets my normal default. Can you, can you, can you say to do that?
Or do you have to go physically do it? I just, I just do it on the watch. Okay. Take a say, I've never tried that. It's just because I could try it. It might make it easier. All right. Well, that is all the time we have for this episode. Thank you, Vincent and Chris is always for being here. I really do appreciate it. I get everyone out there for listening. Again, if you want to support our show, check out our Patreon page. It's at patreon.com slash Apple Watchcast.
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