WWDC24 Recap: Apple Intelligence Unveiled, BIG Updates to iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and More!

Stephen Robles:

Come with me if you want to live. Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the

Stephen Robles:

tech news that matters, and today I don't even have time for an intro. It is the big recap episode for WWDC. We're recording just a few hours after the keynote. I'm one of your host, Steven Robles, but more importantly, Jason Ayton, my trusty co host is coming at at us live from the show floor. I've actually wanted to say it because it's half true.

Stephen Robles:

Jason is sitting in Apple Podcast Studios, and what that's where I'm I'm there in spirit, Jason. Yeah. How's it going there? You look very comfortable.

Jason Aten:

Actually, I'm this is the most comfortable I've been since I got to California. 1, because there's plenty of air conditioning in this room, which I thank you to all of you who are here because that has been the highlight of this so far. So so we're good.

Stephen Robles:

Oh my goodness. So you are there in person. You got to take a selfie with Zach Hall from 9 to 5. I felt like it was breakneck speed. Even sitting at home with all my monitors and keyboards trying to keep up, how did it feel there, like, in the not the room, I guess, in the you're in the open air area.

Stephen Robles:

Right?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. And I mean, Craig Federighi talks so fast. I could, like, feel the breeze going by me. It was a very, very fast paced WWD. I thought last year was pretty fast paced because they had to have enough time for the Vision Pro.

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

And they got to the point where they got I'm like, they did iOS 40 minutes ago. What are they even gonna do? And then all of a sudden, it makes sense because there's a lot of things to talk about. But

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Absolutely. So outside, very fast vibe. I wanna talk about some of the highlights. We have our episode on Thursday, and so we'll go into more in-depth.

Stephen Robles:

We have a shorter recap episode today, and so we're not going to cover obviously everything. There's no way to do it, but we want to talk about Apple Intelligence. I thought it'd be interesting to talk about what we didn't see as some things that both were rumored to not see and came true and just some things I was expecting. But tell me what as you were watching the keynote live, which it was you're watching the video. Right?

Stephen Robles:

There was no

Jason Aten:

We've established that that yeah. It's not a live I mean, to be fair, Tim Cook always comes out at the beginning and Craig Federighi, and he says, good morning, and that's a highlight of the of the morning. But, the rest of it, yes, it's a video. We've established that on previous episodes.

Stephen Robles:

And during said video, were there any moments of audible gasps, big reactions? Was it Apple Intelligence? Any moments like that as you were there?

Jason Aten:

I mean, the developer event. And so it is mostly a developer event. And so a lot of the times when they talk about, like, and there will be an API for this thing, the developers get really excited. And I don't even know what they're excited about, but they're very excited about APIs.

Stephen Robles:

There seems to be a lot of APIs, not only for Apple Intelligence, but Control Center on iPhone and a bunch of other things we'll get into. Yes. The calculator app I'm not I'm not I've refused. I'm not gonna spend minutes on the calculator. But I will say that math app that you can get on iPad where you use the Apple pencil to draw equations and it'll solve it.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Math notes.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Math notes. Math notes looks amazing. Does it actually solve the equations for you? Like, do I have to restrict this on my kid's iPad?

Jason Aten:

Yes. It's you you write it the equal sign, and then all of a sudden it just generates the answer for you. And you can go back and change one of the variables and it'll just recalculate. It's like, I know I kept thinking about my 12 year old son who I love my 12 year old son, but he is a math nerd, and he is going to never put the iPad down. I'm not even kidding.

Stephen Robles:

I mean, I guess it's a good thing to to mess around with. Even, like, the drawing of the graph from an equation Yep. And the little dial that appears. I mean, just wild wild stuff. I mean, hand it to Apple to actually get me interested in math again after, whatever, 20 years being out of high school.

Jason Aten:

It never occurred to me that I was gonna have to put screen time restrictions on a calculator. I'm going to have to or my son will never go to bed at night. You think I'm joking? I'm not.

Stephen Robles:

No. No. I believe it. I believe it. It's it's very exciting.

Stephen Robles:

So we want to talk about Apple Intelligence first, but a couple of things we didn't get, this is Mark Gurman from Bloomberg, said this before the event that we weren't gonna get hardware and that did come to pass. No new hardware, no Macs, nothing like that. So we'll have to wait and see for Ultra, Mac Pro, Mac Studio, stuff like that. One of the big articles that came out before the event was Joanna Stern's screen time article and parental controls. I was hoping to see something, but correct me if I'm wrong, again it was going by very fast.

Stephen Robles:

No mention of screen time, I feel like, anywhere.

Jason Aten:

I I didn't I didn't see it, and I've tried to look through these things, like the all the press releases and documents, but there's just there's too many, Steven. There's too much going on. I have not found it yet. I will ask, but I have not found it yet.

Stephen Robles:

I did go to the Apple website to iOS 18, like, overview page, you know, where they actually add a little of the features they didn't talk about in the keynote, but I did not find screen time anywhere. So nothing there. No third party Apple Watch faces. I know every year we we look for that, but that didn't happen. And the, I have to so the password app.

Stephen Robles:

This was one thing we actually got that I wanted. Our listeners in the community requested. I was excited for the stand alone password app. I have the beta on my iPhone right now. Not my main iPhone, mind you.

Stephen Robles:

I didn't do that. Now, I have my secondary device. I just want everybody to see it right here. Just download this a few minutes ago. There's the dedicated passwords app.

Stephen Robles:

Very exciting. But there's a there's a but, Jason. Have you gotten to, play around with the passwords app at all?

Jason Aten:

Steven, I haven't stopped moving. Like I told you this is the most comfortable I've been. It's because I have not stopped moving between things, like, since the keynote ended, so

Stephen Robles:

Are are you allowed to say where you were right before this? I mean, that was

Jason Aten:

a public thing anyway. Yeah. It was on the record. There was a q and a with iJustine asking questions of John Gianandrea and, Craig Federighi. So yeah.

Stephen Robles:

And any information that came out of that that we didn't see in the keynote that

Jason Aten:

They definitely talked about some of the interesting things related to the Apple Intelligence. They talked about how the difference between what Apple Intelligence is doing, and that is built entirely on Apple's models versus the chat g p t integration. So those are 2 separate things if that wasn't clear. We'll probably get to that when we get to the Apple Intelligence stuff. But, yeah, there was some interesting stuff they talked about.

Stephen Robles:

And the last thing that was not mentioned, which as we move into Apple Intelligence, this was Siri having a better Siri was one of the big hopes that AI type features would bring. And the one device that most people interact with with Siri that, could be some consternation is HomePod. And I did not hear HomePod mentioned at any point in the keynote. I think I saw one. I I think in the TV and home section, I think there was a HomePod somewhere, just in the corner of my eye.

Stephen Robles:

But, I mean, it doesn't have an M chip. It doesn't have the A17 Pro. Those HomePods are can't run Apple Intelligence. I I don't know. I don't I'm I'm not sure what's gonna happen there, Jason.

Jason Aten:

I mean, this is early. Like, this is when they explain all the stuff. Huna, there's a lot of hardware to introduce this year, Steven. Maybe there's gonna be a July home. I don't know.

Jason Aten:

I have no idea. But it does seem like, yes, you're right. That the thing that people buy to talk like, people are gonna wanna talk to Siri now. Like, there's a good reason to do that. So it it wouldn't surprise me if that's something that is, like, on that prod.

Jason Aten:

I hope that it's on the product road map because, yeah, like, a couple of HomePod Minis that can actually do that kind of stuff. Yeah. Or where you could just, like, talk to your HomePod mini and do some of the things that Frederique was doing where it's like, explain to me how long it's gonna take me to get to that play that my daughter's in. Just asking that kind of thing and having it tell you, and then it can say, do you want me to send those directions to your phone? Like, that's all stuff that just seems like it would be the logical next step.

Jason Aten:

So

Stephen Robles:

Exactly. Well, so let's talk about Apple Intelligence. This was the big section at the end. Last year was Apple Vision Pro, this year was Apple Intelligence. And just so many features kind of packed into this.

Stephen Robles:

A lot of Every year at WWDC we talk about, like, things that are Sherlock'd, meaning features that Apple has now built in that might obfuscate the need for third party apps or whatever. But in this regard I feel like the one big Sherlock is Grammarly. I feel like Yeah. Grammarly. I don't know anybody who's gonna pay for Grammarly after this.

Stephen Robles:

It's gonna proofread for you.

Jason Aten:

I wrote down I'm not kidding you, Steven. I wrote down apple, Sherlock, everything, like Grammarly, a lot of things. And that's fine. Like, these are things that make sense to be built in to the core. The password app is another good example.

Jason Aten:

Like one password, all those things though. I mean, you've explained a couple of reasons why, if you're using one password for secure notes or credit cards or those types of things, maybe they're still used and we'll have to see some of the sharing stuff that's like really good in those types of apps. But like, I literally wrote that down, like Apple Sherlocked everything.

Stephen Robles:

Apple Sherlocked everything. Very excited. They started by talking about, like, the privacy and security, of course, and said that money much of the Apple Intelligence features are gonna run on device, which then requires, they said, either an a 17 pro, which is the chip inside the iPhone 15 Pro or Pro Max, and an M series chip, which seems like relegated to iPads and Macs with those chips. So if you have an iPhone regular 15 or a 14 and older, or you have a Mac still running an Intel, or an iPad on an a series chip, correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like Apple Intelligence will not be available for your device.

Jason Aten:

That is something that, John, Gian, Andrea addressed in the q and a that they did, talking about how these you know, so Apple developed a series of models that are running on device, and they take a massive amount of compute to do that. And the quote from him was that it's the amount of compute that provides that restriction. Like, that is the reason. And so you have to have the devices that are capable. And I don't know who it was.

Jason Aten:

Somebody recently mentioned that one of the obvious reasons is RAM. Right? Like, you have to have that amount of RAM. And I I believe that the previous generation pro phones only have 6 gigs of of memory, whereas the new ones have 8. And all of the entry all of the m series chips have at least 8.

Jason Aten:

So that could be an obvious reason why, but that makes sense. That doesn't feel like the kind of thing where these things are just like gate gatekeeper locked because they wanna just sell more iPhones. I mean, this is the kind of thing we know. Like, if you ever done like, I run Whisper on this thing and it gets hot, and it's an m three max MacBook Pro. So I imagine doing this kind of stuff on your phone.

Jason Aten:

It makes sense.

Stephen Robles:

Well, one of the parts of that initial privacy and security is the private cloud compute, which is this new basically data center part of Apple Intelligence where queries that are too, processor intensive to run on device will run-in the cloud, but it's quote unquote Apple's cloud, their private cloud, on servers running Apple Silicon. They didn't say the chip, as far as I know. Right? Like, we just

Jason Aten:

m 2 series. They did they did say m 2 something.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. M 2 series. So on Apple Silicon servers in a private way where your query or question, that data will not be tied to you nor will it be sent outside of that. And so there will be a cloud component for those more processor intensive or more powerful queries. But as far as I could tell, I mean, security, privacy, it's all there.

Stephen Robles:

We'll talk about the chat gbt integration in a second, which also side note, did you see Sam Altman there?

Jason Aten:

I didn't see him here, but he was here.

Stephen Robles:

He was here. Okay. I thought I saw someone posted a photo of Sam Altman there.

Jason Aten:

Yes.

Stephen Robles:

Which no no stage, presence from Sam Altman or OpenAI. And I also thought it was interesting that Apple said chat gpt integration, not necessarily OpenAI integration.

Jason Aten:

Right. They did yeah. And and, from the keynote, they did not I don't think because I was paying very close attention to this. I do not believe that they said OpenAI at all. They just kept referring to chat gpt.

Jason Aten:

But in the news release, they made it clear where chat gpt comes from. Right? Like, I don't think they're trying to hide it. I just think like the thing that people know that users know is chat gpt. The average person who has an iPhone and thinks chat gpt is cool has probably never heard of OpenAI.

Stephen Robles:

Right. Exactly. So some of the features that Apple Intelligence is going to enable, and some of these are very exciting to me, normal LLM style features that you would think of like summarizing a long article or taking text that you've written in an email and rewording the tone to be more friendly, professional, or concise. You'll see all those options like in these little contextual menus. This is the power of building these features into the operating system as a first party, which means wherever you select text, I imagine, you can get these kinds of options.

Stephen Robles:

And also the ability to even, you know, create summaries from notes or whatever. But I was even more excited about like the image generation. So in some of these, like they showed this note, an Apple Notes, and there was a sketch of like a little building here. And you can literally circle a sketch that you have made and ask Apple Intelligence to create an image from that sketch. Or even better, if you haven't sketched anything, it'll use the content around that and generate the image for you.

Stephen Robles:

This was some of the iWork features I feel like we had talked about being able to generate slides or images. I'm curious how this is going to integrate with Keynote and, you know, how much can it generate? Can it generate full slides and all that? But these are the kind of, I think, useful features that AI in a first party integration like this makes it worthwhile. Right?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. And I think if you it looks it makes sense if you look at it because they started with the things that that already exist in the world. People like to play with, you know, DALL E or those types of mid journey, those types of things to create images. And so those are the first step. Didn't talk at all about what you just described, which is, like, take this group of texts and make me a slide, but you can see that progression coming down the road.

Jason Aten:

And you can imagine that that's a thing that has gotta be on someone's roadmap because you can do it with copilot. Right? So this is already a feature that exists in the world. And, and, and it is, I kept thinking about like, these are things that in this scenario only Apple can do because they control the hardware and the software. So they've got to nail all of those things.

Jason Aten:

And when you look at something where, well, in Windows, you can do this, I feel like that's gotta be coming at some point in the future because you've you've laid that groundwork, and now it's time for them, like because I think the image generation is really interesting, and that's the kind of thing that, like, people like to play with, but where it really steps into a productivity. Like, if you just look at, like, the the image generation is limited to 3 different styles, sketch

Stephen Robles:

Right.

Jason Aten:

Illustration and animation. And that makes sense because let's just be honest. I don't think Apple wants anything to do with, like, the weird fingers we saw in some of those, like, sort of videos or whatever.

Stephen Robles:

No photo realistic.

Jason Aten:

Right. But but there I think, like, we're just seeing the very beginning of this, so it makes sense to me that some of those things don't exist yet, but I have to imagine they're coming.

Stephen Robles:

Some of the features I thought, you you know, I didn't even think about these kinds of integrations is like in your mail list, Apple Intelligence will be able to rather than just show you the first few lines of an email in that little preview area, it will show you a summary of the email. And it's like that was a mind blown moment because, like, that's the power of these LLM style features in the operating system of the device where something like, rest in peace, Rabbit R1 or the humane AI pin, like AI gadgets can't touch that kind of integration and usefulness. And even something like ChatJPG where the app might be great for the iPhone, but there's no like, you would have to have either, you know, the Gmail app build it in, the Outlook app build it in, like you're it would have to be on the email server side for it to be like universal, whereas Apple just doing it in the stock mail app, I think it's just awesome. And I think it might sway some people back to the stock mail app. I know some people kinda pooh pooh it, but I use the stock mail app, and I'm excited for these.

Stephen Robles:

Use stock mail Oh, no. Use I

Jason Aten:

don't know. Use the stock mail app at all, but I feel like they did solve a couple of the most obvious problems. There's still one missing, which is the share sheet, but we're I mean, they need more AI, apparently, to fix the share sheet. I don't know. But the categories is great, like being able to separate out transactions, you know, updates, you know, newsletters, promotions, whatever those types of things were.

Jason Aten:

And then your priority people, like, that's every third party app offers that at this point. And so the fact that it's now available is great. And I actually just like, the article the only article I've had time to write today is about, like, 5 things that were not AI that Apple announced that by the way, I know everyone's excited about the shiny new thing, but here's a couple of other really cool things. And the mail summaries, which I guess is technically AI AI, but it's, like, not a separate it's not Siri. It's not that.

Jason Aten:

But those summaries at the beginning of the, of the mail messages, like if you think about it, the first line of most emails is useless. Right?

Stephen Robles:

Exactly.

Jason Aten:

It's not a, it's not a helpful thing. And so having it actually just summarize that and give that to you in your inbox, I think that that's really cool. And then the ability to open up an a mail message and have it give you a summary at the top. Superhuman does that already. Spark does it already.

Jason Aten:

I'm sure that other one other email apps do that. But but, honestly, like, I'm looking forward to trying the the mail app and see, like, how these things actually work because, I mean, it's I like the stock mail app. It just didn't have these features. So

Stephen Robles:

Right. And also this was wild to me. So I use focus modes all the time. And Apple Intelligence will be able to see like if someone sends you a text message and the content of the message is someone that is not typically allowed to contact you during that focus mode, it will still show you a notification because the content looks important. Maybe it's time sensitive, you know, there's an actual time in the notification or a location, something time sensitive.

Stephen Robles:

That's just wild to me being able to to do all that. And again, privacy and security wise, any third party trying to do this on your phone, a, it doesn't have access. You know what I mean? Like the human AI pen, it couldn't see your text messages, so even that catch up feature, you know, just doesn't work. But this, your your iPhone itself, it obviously sees your text messages.

Stephen Robles:

Being able to do this, I mean, super cool. I'm just very excited for all this stuff.

Jason Aten:

So Deedan, I know we have to stay focused on WWDC, but I just wanna know, have you put your humane AI pin in a bag of sand yet? So in case it explodes.

Stephen Robles:

Jason, I'm at I'm at the existential crisis moment where, you know, the egg charging case, I'm not even supposed to use because it might blow up. So I'm like, I don't even know what to do with that. But I'm like, do I reclaim this 2 square inch footprint on my nightstand and just just take the humane AI pin and its charger, and then just put it in a drawer. I don't I don't know what to do with it.

Jason Aten:

I don't I don't think I'd put it in a drawer of a wooden thing because you just don't know it's gonna I'm just I'm looking out for you, Steve.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, you're saying it might just catch on fire. Am

Jason Aten:

I just yeah. I mean, they sent you an email saying it was a possibility.

Stephen Robles:

That is true. They yeah. They really did. So so one of the things along again Apple Intelligence is like the image generation, which is gonna be kind of all over the place. Not only do we have Genmoji which I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

How do you feel about that that name?

Jason Aten:

You can't I don't think you can call them emoji because that's a standard. Right? So they had to have some kind of a different name. And I guess if a Memoji is an emoji you create of yourself, then a gen emoji is one you generate using AI. I I make sense.

Jason Aten:

Like, I'm not gonna run around telling my kids, like, hey, that's a cool genmoji you got there. Like, I don't I mean, none of them are gonna have phones that will run. They all have iPhone s SEs, so it's not gonna work for them anyway. They're gonna all I just realized it's gonna be a really expensive year, Steven.

Stephen Robles:

Every youth is gonna want Genmoji. Yeah. Jason, we have emoji, we have animoji, right, we have memoji, and now we have genmoji. That's 4 that's 4 Jojis.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. That feels like all the emojis that we need for sure.

Stephen Robles:

I think I don't even want any more, Memoji. Anyway, it's gonna be a little confusing. But image generation is really cool. There's also like image playgrounds where you can kind of set up like I guess things you'll return to, subjects or styles that you know keep going back to. And I don't know why but this kind of breaks my brain.

Stephen Robles:

But you know you can generate an image and just based on you, like have it look like you, but in a different style, seeing this kind of AI generated image just in an Imessage conversation, like it kind of breaks my brain. Like, this is, this is DALL E. Like, this is, you know, I don't know, it feels

Jason Aten:

Steven, what what would your mom reply to you if you sent a picture of her wearing the cape? What would she do? Would she my because my mom would take me out of her contacts. I'm not kidding. She would just be like

Stephen Robles:

She would say don't come home for Thanksgiving. We're not you know, I was surprised, you know my mom, she know she has iPhone, iPad, she has all that kind of stuff, but she went to visit her brother and her nieces one time and she was doing the bitmoji, which is the bit Oh, yeah. Bitmoji is, you know, is like that Snapchat style one. Yeah. They did a bunch of bitmoji.

Stephen Robles:

So honestly, I I don't know. I think grandparents, I think I think this might be a big deal. Yeah. Might be a big deal.

Jason Aten:

I think you're right. Well, I mean, I heard recently that the 2 audiences that are most popular with like TikTok are like young teens and then our parents. So I feel like probably the same thing has gotta be true with, like, genboji. It's people who, like, are up on the current thing and then people who just have a lot of time to do to explore, like, what does this button do on my phone? Oh, wow.

Jason Aten:

I cannot believe the messages I'm gonna be getting from my friends.

Stephen Robles:

It's gonna be wild. Now Apple did add features that like, you know, matching what Google has done with like the removing of people in the background from your photos. So you can have that kind of stuff built in your photos app. That's great. Cleanup is what they're calling it.

Stephen Robles:

Lots of photos updates, which I'm excited for, you know, being able to just search for things like show me pictures of Whitney in New York wearing this kind of clothing, and it'll just find it and find that frame in a video, which is pretty wild. But I think some of the most, incredible stuff, Siri should get a lot smarter, but the one example that, oh, my HomePod's listening now. Nope. Sorry. You don't have Apple Intelligence.

Stephen Robles:

You can just turn off this.

Jason Aten:

You gotta be quiet right now.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. But the one example that Craig Federighi talked about was like, you know, say you get a meeting request via email in the afternoon, but you know you have to make it to your daughter's play that night. Well, you can literally ask your iPhone with Apple Intelligence, so your iPhone 15 pro or newer, you know, will this meeting like, can I do this meeting and still make it to my daughter's play? And it will use things like, if you got sent an image of the program via text, it'll find the start time for the play using that part of the intelligence. It'll find the travel time from work to the school for the play, calculate that with when the meeting time is, and basically just give you an answer which Yep.

Stephen Robles:

I'll be honest, very shortcuts esque. Basically kind of sidestepping the whole need to create these elaborate shortcuts and like I think it's great because it'd be accessible to more people, if it's surfaceable easily, like, if people just know to ask it. That seemed powerful to me, like, real incredible.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. So I do have a question and because this just occurred to me, Steven. You can now ask photos to find you mentioned your wife, find pictures of her in New York city wearing whatever the purple dress. And if there are none, now you can just ask it to make one.

Stephen Robles:

That's but it's cartoony. I can't even afford

Jason Aten:

it real. But this explains it's all making a lot more sense to me right now.

Stephen Robles:

Oh, I see. That's how you

Jason Aten:

do it.

Stephen Robles:

That's how you do it. Okay.

Jason Aten:

It makes sense.

Stephen Robles:

These are these are very exciting. So it's gonna be locked to the a 17 Pro Chip and M Series Chips, which I assume iPads. Right? Like iPads with M Series Chips? Yep.

Stephen Robles:

Yep. Can do yeah. Yep.

Jason Aten:

You can do it.

Stephen Robles:

The, also English only at launch. This is gonna be English only. Still beta. It'll have the beta tag even when it becomes available in the fall, and they said some of the features I think will be coming even farther into the future. Which again, I hate to give it to him, but Mark Gurman, like, he kind of said all this Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Which is kind of wild, but yeah.

Jason Aten:

Well, and in context, it does make sense because if you watched Google IO or even Microsoft's, surface event that they had before Microsoft build, all of the like, Microsoft or Google was showing off things that they didn't even say when it's coming. It's like, we're gonna do this someday. Right? It's gonna be a thing we we really promise, and then we won't kill it. Right?

Jason Aten:

So it it makes sense. Like, this is a this is a thing that is gonna take some time. And I don't know that it's like, oh, someone's sitting there. They haven't written the code yet. It's it's like we have to this is like an incremental thing, and we'd like to see how things roll out and, like, let's because there's a you know, they're building their own server cloud thing that's gonna be handling a lot of a lot of things and that, like, scaling that.

Jason Aten:

Right? It that's the other reason it almost makes sense that it's limited even if it wasn't limited by the actual compute power. Right. There's what, 1 and a half 1000000000 iOS devices somewhere in the universe. Like, I

Stephen Robles:

don't know. A lot of requests.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I feel like limiting it to a 150,000,000 makes a lot of sense at first. There's gonna

Stephen Robles:

be lots of people generating images of their mom wearing a cape. You know, you gotta limit that stuff. You never know. Right. So I wanna talk about the chat gpt integration in a moment, but one question, I don't know if you know the answer to this.

Stephen Robles:

So on non M devices, so like I have my iPad mini here, Trusty iPad mini, which is not gonna get Apple Intelligence. It's not, it's not quick enough. For something like these safari summaries, this was announced in the macOS Sequoia section where safari reader is going to get features like a highlight, where if you're on like a hotel website, but you just can't find the address, it'll surface that information right at the top. Or if you have a long article, it'll literally summarize it and give you a table of contents just right in Safari Reader, which is amazing. Those Safari Reader features, specifically summaries and highlights, those are not Apple Intelligence.

Stephen Robles:

Correct? Like, you'll still be able to do those.

Jason Aten:

Well, I don't know if you'll still be able to do them. I mean, I I haven't figured that part out yet, but you are right. And I do think that's an important distinction. Right? We for the first half of the keynote, there were a lot of things they referred to as machine learning, ML, whatever, that is separate.

Jason Aten:

Those features are really, they're they are, like, some form of AI Apple intelligence, but they're not branded with that marketing term because they are features that are coming. Like, for example, in the mail app, the categories. Right? That's just a change to the mail app. It doesn't doesn't matter which device that you have.

Jason Aten:

So I do think that, like and I was really interested in this, especially the highlights feature for Safari because that's like, that is the, one of the killer apps. One of the killer uses for being able to pull up a, a webpage and have it like give you that information just as a summary. And so, yeah, I don't, I think the net, I think that that kind of thing will work even on your sad little iPad mini that, I mean, I don't think Apple Intelligence is the first thing that needs to be upgraded on that, Steven.

Stephen Robles:

Well, that's the screen display would be nice. But anyway, yeah, I'm I'm hoping the summaries and table of contents, it seemed like because it was announced prior to the Apple Intelligence section that those features are coming just to Safari in general

Jason Aten:

Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

On your non M device. So that's what I'm hoping for. So we did finally towards the end of the Apple intelligence section, they talked about ChatGPT being integrated. It will be free to use if you want to connect your ChatGPT Plus account, then you can access those, you know, higher features if you want to do that, but you don't have to. And if you don't, chatGPT is free to use.

Stephen Robles:

None of your data goes to chatGPT when you use it. And it's going to be interesting to see when it pops up because several of these screenshots and during the keynote it's like, okay, if you wanna generate a bedtime story, that'll call chat chatcheebiti. Or if you're trying to do a recipe from certain things, then ChatChapiti will be called on for that. So but I couldn't tell if it's, like, more generative things that's when it's gonna call chatJpt. Is there any kind of distinction that you could tell, like, when that might show up?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Well, okay. So this was one of the things that they sort of talked about a little bit during their conversation, this afternoon. And you have to think of the 2 things completely separately. Right?

Jason Aten:

So Apple Intelligence is built entirely on models that Apple built, And, primarily, those things are designed to run. Like, they have that 3,000,000,000, parameter model that will run on the phone, And that that's the sort of thing or on your Mac or whatever. That's like Apple Intelligence. And then for some tasks, when it needs other information, it'll go to the private cloud. Right?

Jason Aten:

That's that's apple intelligence and that's completely separate from chat GPT. Right? So one of the things that they actually said is that, like, you can ask it to use chat GPT, but it'll actually then ask you, did you want to send this photo with your request? Did you want to send this text? Because they, I think that they want very much to make it clear your your stuff's going out into the wilderness.

Jason Aten:

Right? It's it's going out there. It's it's a scary world out there on the Internet. We just wanna make sure you know that we're sending your information somewhere that we don't like, it's they they don't have the same kind of control over what happens on chat GPT servers versus what's happening.

Stephen Robles:

Well, but they do say, like, even here in the newsroom article, the IP address is obscured, OpenAI won't store your requests, and so it seems like if you don't connect your chat gpt account, like, not as much information is shared and or saved.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Yes. But you're but you still might be sending an image somewhere that's not being handled on your own device is is all I'm trying

Stephen Robles:

to say. Like, if you wanna

Jason Aten:

if you're sending extra information with it, it's like, it'll ask, do you want me to do you really wanna send this? Not doesn't say do you really want to, but it's it's letting you know that you're now using chat GPT instead of Apple Intelligence.

Stephen Robles:

Right. And I saw in the keynote, like, many times, it's, like, do you want to do chat GPT? And then once the result comes back it's like this is definitely chat GPT, make no mistake. It's very specific about that. But it's interesting.

Stephen Robles:

And Craig Federighi during the section also said that this is not gonna be exclusive. That there's going to be other large language models and AI platforms integrated in the future, maybe things like Perplexity. I know it's another popular one. So it's not like this is a Chachapiti only. Like this could be, you know, we'll get more in the future.

Stephen Robles:

I'm cur it's the the recipe thing is funny because it's gonna send the recipes to chachapiti like it can't do that on its own, but also the highlight feature, which pulls stuff from websites and safari, they never showed a recipe example and had me a little worried because I'm like recipes from a page is like the main deal that you would want in the highlight thing. So I'm I'm just curious how that will work with recipes.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. And I don't know if this is a perfect way of, like, delineating between the 2 because I have not had, like, any of the briefings that hopefully will answer some of these questions. But I think when you think about Apple Intelligence, that's focusing on your own personal information, right, versus Cheggpt is they even I think Craig Federigh even said this at the beginning of that section, or I'm not sure who was actually it was Tim Cook at the time. We talked about, like, world knowledge versus personal knowledge. Right?

Jason Aten:

So if you wanna go out into the world and be, like, make me up a story about a thing. Right? That's not based on your information. And so it's gonna send that information out, like, to chat gbt. And so I think, like, that makes sense for recipes because unless you just have a whole bunch of recipes and like that you've taken pictures of in photos, because if you did, you could just be like, what was that recipe for banana bread that we really, really liked that my sister-in-law texted me and it would like apple intelligence should be able to find that for you.

Jason Aten:

You shouldn't need chat gbt. If you want a recipe that probably will put glue into your pizza, then that's when you go to Chat gpt here. Well, that was Microsoft. Well, I don't know who yeah.

Stephen Robles:

That was that was Google. That was Google. Yeah. That was Google. But but it but it does raise the question or at least this is probably how they solved it, like with hallucinations, you know, if you do ask ChatGPT to tell me about Theodore Roosevelt or whatever and it says well he invented the iPhone, Apple is basically like that's what a big Chat GPT label is on the results.

Stephen Robles:

Because Apple is like wasn't us. That was not us. Right. We didn't give you that information. So I'm excited to try all this stuff.

Stephen Robles:

We'll talk more about Apple Intelligence on Thursday's episode. I do want to touch on the other operating systems because like this was that was just like the last 45 minutes of the keynote. We had everything from Vision OS and iOS, so let's touch on some of the big ones there. And they did start with an Apple TV Plus, like, originals trailer.

Jason Aten:

Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

I have to be honest, I was pretty hyped about that trailer. That was pretty exciting. I don't know. I'm excited.

Jason Aten:

I mean, I think I don't didn't recognize I mean, I recognize a lot of the people. I didn't recognize a lot of the shows. Not because we like Apple TV plus.

Stephen Robles:

Severance. We just

Jason Aten:

don't have time. We have 4 children, Steven. Like and they all do things all the time.

Stephen Robles:

Sit down with listen. Sit down with the kids and watch a nice

Jason Aten:

severance? Sure.

Stephen Robles:

I was gonna say a nice, wholesome, easy show like severance. You won't have to have any conversation about it. I can't

Jason Aten:

even watch shrinking with our kids. Come on.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. That is true.

Jason Aten:

Which we love. That was the last show that we went all the way through, and we just, like, I'm kind of glad we didn't watch it when it came out because we were able to basically binge it at our own pace, and we basically finished it in 10 days because there was 10 episodes.

Stephen Robles:

I may I do need VidAngel for shrinking, which can just just a side note. I know VidAngel is something I talk about on movies on the side. VidAngel is a service where you like, you know, you can mute curse words or cut certain content out of movies or whatever even via streaming services, which really only works with Amazon Prime when you buy a movie. But anyway, we watched the Terminator last night, Jason.

Jason Aten:

The original, the OG Terminator. The OG Terminator.

Stephen Robles:

Special effects do not hold up, neither does the makeup, let me just say. I've only seen that movie I guess on TV, like when I was younger. Using VidAngel, the first 10 minutes of the movie, silent. You just hear nothing. You just see just if people reacting to like Arnold Schwarzenegger, like, lightning bolting from time and the thing, and it's just it's just totally silent.

Stephen Robles:

I just thought that was hilarious.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. But I mean, some of those shows that are really good on Apple TV plus, like shrinking, you can't watch it that there's no point. There Yeah. Yeah. Harrison Ford is not funny if he doesn't say the things that he says.

Jason Aten:

So

Stephen Robles:

That and also you would hear none of the dialogue, which is kind of important, for shrinking. So but silo coming up and there's shows with, like, Brad Pitt and George Clooney.

Jason Aten:

The Wolves. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

The Wolves. Yeah. So very very exciting stuff. That was cool. But, let's talk about Vision OS 2.0 actually took the stage first.

Stephen Robles:

There was No, usually iOS opens the show, but we got vision OS 2.0 already, which is pretty cool. The ability to make spatial photos from your 2 d photos, so it's gonna use, you know, this In this part of the keynote they said, machine learning.

Jason Aten:

Right.

Stephen Robles:

They saved the AI stuff till later, but they said machine learning and it'll be able to make, you know, photos into 3 d which is pretty cool. Redesign photos app, new gestures, which I was actually grateful for. You'll be able to go home just by kind of holding your palm up and tapping, which I think it's welcome, rather than tapping the digital crown. You use Vision Pro every day.

Jason Aten:

I use it every day. You're you're so excited about this. I'm like, when is the last time you even charged your VisionPRO, Steven?

Stephen Robles:

I watched, it was over the weekend. I watched something over the weekend in it. Dune.

Jason Aten:

Complex. You watched Dune again in in your Vision Pro?

Stephen Robles:

No. I went back and watched some Marvel scenes in it because I just No.

Jason Aten:

I do think that the spatial photos from 2 d photos, that's amazing. I think, like, that's the kind remember how I told you that the thing I really liked the most about using the vision pro was the panoramas. Right? Those are look, because they're personal and it's experiences that you had, but the ability to do that, I think that that will be just amazing. I wrote that down, and I also wrote down the the improvement to the Mac virtual display.

Jason Aten:

Everyone was hoping that they'd give you 2 displays and the kind of did, they just made them one wraparound display that, you know, can so it's basically the equivalent of 24 ks. Honestly, I think that's better. Right? Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

I think so too.

Jason Aten:

You know, I because I when I sit at a desk with 2 studio displays, the thing I keep thinking about is I'm just staring the entire time at the seam in between them. And I just I'm like so then I have to, like, move one of them, and then it's like I have this weird battleship thing going on. But being able to just have that, like, yeah, I'm I'm gonna put the, beta on the vision pro as soon as I get home. No question.

Stephen Robles:

You know what? I should probably just do that.

Jason Aten:

Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Because it's it's not like it's not a mission critical device.

Jason Aten:

You're not actually using it, Steven. It's gonna be fine.

Stephen Robles:

I think I'm gonna do it. Yeah. Because I actually this the Mac display stuff got me excited because higher resolutions

Jason Aten:

Yep.

Stephen Robles:

And the ultra wide which shout out to former co host William Gallagher. He already knew that. That's what

Jason Aten:

I was thinking is is William. Yep.

Stephen Robles:

William had a 50 inch ultra wide display. Now he's probably gonna get vision pro just to do this so he can have a wrap around thing. But no, the Max's play setup was actually pretty exciting. I'm excited to try that. Also, I don't think this was mentioned in the keynote, but you will be able to customize your home view, Jason.

Stephen Robles:

You'll be able

Jason Aten:

to move

Stephen Robles:

around. Yes. It's right here. Vision OS 2. You'll be able to customize it.

Jason Aten:

Not say that because maybe because no one would have heard anything else that said if you would have told us finally that we could do that.

Stephen Robles:

Well, I think because John Syracusa would have grown from the audience because he doesn't like just moving icons on his phone. Do we have to do this? He was like I

Jason Aten:

don't I don't think he even has a VisionPRO. It's fine.

Stephen Robles:

He can No.

Jason Aten:

He doesn't. Customize your home view.

Stephen Robles:

You're right. Yeah. That's right,

Jason Aten:

baby. There's jiggle mode on the VisionPRO. I cannot believe that they didn't tell us about this.

Stephen Robles:

Jiggle mode on the Vision Pro. You'll be able to move your icons around, and then yeah. Look at that. It's Yep. Magic.

Stephen Robles:

Magical. So that's exciting. I'm excited for that.

Jason Aten:

And it looks like you can put compatible apps in the home view. They get out of purgatory. They don't have to go into iPad app jail anymore. They could be actually on there. I'm so sorry.

Stephen Robles:

You could finally put Slack on your Vision Pro like you've always been wanting.

Jason Aten:

I you know, I put Slack on there, opened it once, logged in, and then I took it off. Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

I just Honestly, I did the exact same thing. I opened up Slack, and I was like, oh, I never wanna see Slack this big.

Jason Aten:

Go away.

Stephen Robles:

You

Jason Aten:

know how I use Slack in the Vision Pro? On my iPhone. I just, like, my phone. I'm like, oh, look. I have a Slack notification.

Stephen Robles:

Which, can I just say, we'll get to macOS in a second? MacOS got the iPhone continuity feature where you can use your iPhone in on your Mac and just click around like using your phone. Why did they not do that to Vision Pro? That's where we need it. I need to be able to use my iPhone and Vision Pro because I can't see the screen because it won't do face ID.

Jason Aten:

Oh, yeah. The face ID thing is kinda weird. Especially because you can do like, your phone should unlock with your watch, but it must not be able to see enough of your face to trigger whatever that feature is.

Stephen Robles:

Here's Yeah. Here's the thing, Jason. This is a very personal thing. I I charge my watch at night before I go to sleep, and the only time I use Apple Vision Pro is also at night while my watch is charging. So so my watch can't unlock my phone.

Stephen Robles:

And so when I have Vision Pro on and I'm trying to look at a text, it's impossible.

Jason Aten:

You don't remember your passcode? Is that what you're saying?

Stephen Robles:

You can't. Well, I mean, the it's very dark in the bedroom, and I can't it it's so fuzzy. I can't see anything. The noise is out of control.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. But The Aero 300 are really just overpowering everything.

Stephen Robles:

That's it. But supposedly, you can you can use the Apple Vision Pro now as an AirPlay destination. So you'll be able to AirPlay from like your iPhone or iPad to Apple Vision Pro, which I guess might be useful for Netflix, so you can like airplay your Netflix to your Apple Vision Pro, and maybe even be able to screen mirror, but that would be maddening if I could screen mirror to Applevision Pro on my iPhone, but not interact with it in Applevision Pro, like it'll just be

Jason Aten:

I don't think you're gonna be able to screen, like, share play or whatever you just said, like Netflix or whatever because of the DRM type stuff. But think about, like, continuity is one of the best benefits of being a part of an ecosystem like this. Right. Like, the continuity, like, the the universal clipboard, universal control, like, the continuity camera, and now being able to do those, like, the mirroring of your phone onto your mat. Like, that stuff is just, like, it feels like voodoo magic, but it also it's like, they should just do everything should do this.

Jason Aten:

Like, when I pick up the Android phone that I use occasionally, I'm just like, what is wrong with you? Why why do you not why why can't you behave and do all these things? I just don't understand. Yeah. It's it's amazing.

Jason Aten:

So

Stephen Robles:

So yeah, it is gonna it's mirror content. So that's interesting. Into Apple Vision Pro. Also, you'll be able to use a mouse and Bluetooth devices with Apple Vision Pro, not just the magic trackpad. So there you go.

Stephen Robles:

Nice. You'll be able to use your magic mouse and do stuff there. So yeah that's Apple Vision Pro. Also, they said they had a train support which actually I've used mine on a train. I don't understand what it couldn't do before.

Jason Aten:

Well, I think the thing was that if you're sitting on a seat on a train that you'd put a window somewhere, didn't you see the Casey Neistat video where he's on the subway and he put a video and then it's just like, he the trains are moving in the in the thing started just like flew

Stephen Robles:

away from Travel mode stops that anyway. Like, it's it's stopping for me. I was on a train and I I didn't. So, yeah, I don't know anyway. Alright.

Stephen Robles:

I'm gonna put the weight on my Apple Vision Pro, Jason. Let me do it. That's that's the one main device.

Jason Aten:

What is it gonna hurt? Like, I mean The

Stephen Robles:

Dune 2 might freeze while I'm watching it. I mean

Jason Aten:

I mean, I don't know.

Stephen Robles:

I'm watching it.

Jason Aten:

It's still not gonna catch fire. It'll be fine. It's still That's true. We'll see. Still in a better situation than the

Stephen Robles:

AI pin. It will catch fire. Alright. We got iOS. I at least wanna hit macOS too.

Stephen Robles:

So iOS 18, bunch of features coming. I was surprised they did this. The home screen, not I'm not surprised at the app thing. You'll be able to put app icons wherever you want. That's a long time coming.

Stephen Robles:

But the tinting of the apps so not only will we be able to move icons wherever you want, but if you want to tint all your apps a single color, it will just do that. And not just the first party apps either. I think it'll just do it to all the all the 3rd party apps on your phone as well. You can have basically all those, like, icon packs that people make. Like, Apple just Sherlock did all.

Stephen Robles:

You could just do it all there. Yep. Wow.

Jason Aten:

No. I mean, this just makes sense that all of this stuff, like, people that's the thing people like, widgets. Right? The whole reason Widgetsmith became a thing is people wanna be able to do stuff to their to their home screen. And Yeah.

Jason Aten:

I mean, I'm glad they finally did this stuff. I don't know why it took this long, but, like, yes. And and these are all things that people were predicting And people it's it's amazing to me when people see the hear the rumors, see the rumors, whatever. And they're like, no. Apple's never gonna make it so you can tint all the apps.

Jason Aten:

And then they're just like, see, now you can tint all the apps. Like, and it's just, like and they just it just seems as obvious as can be once they actually do it. So

Stephen Robles:

Oh, you're gonna have to tell me if you actually do this. So here's actually my test iPhone with iOS 18. I just tinted all my apps. There it is. Mhmm.

Stephen Robles:

All tinted. Yeah. I don't I'm cur I don't know if I'm gonna be tinting them. I kinda like the non tinted.

Jason Aten:

Okay. But do you have a kid? I mean, I know you have kids. My I have

Stephen Robles:

3 kids.

Jason Aten:

My my I've shown I've sent you photos of my my oldest daughter. First of all, she has no icons in her home screen. They're all, like, widgets. There are shortcuts. There's something that open them.

Jason Aten:

So there's literally just solid color of, you know, whatever squircles or whatever. And you have no idea what anything is, and they're all, like, designed to be aesthetic, not practical or useful. And I just asked her. I'm like, how do you even how do you know how to open apps? And she kinda remembers where things are.

Jason Aten:

She's like, or I just pulled on and I searched. I'm like, then what do you even have? Why do you have any of these things on your home screen? Because it looks really good. I I promise you she'll be tinting her apps immediately.

Stephen Robles:

Well, I'll I'll play around with it. You can change the color, and you can change look, I'm in the customized thing now. You can also change the light and dark mode. Even Apple's first party app will actually have a dark mode. That's pretty cool.

Jason Aten:

Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

They actually look they actually look good, so that's fun. Also, iOS 18, you'll be able to do things like lock and hide apps behind face ID. So, you know, locking photos, Snapchat, whatever. Control Center gets a big update and not only is it redesigned and have multiple pages for control center, but third party apps will be able to put controls in control center. This is a first for that.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Huge deal. Huge win, for control center. I'm excited about that.

Jason Aten:

I mean, I don't really ever use control center except for to turn on the lights in my office, but that's it, or to change the volume. But I I understand why you're excited. You're very excited. Wow.

Stephen Robles:

Wow. You don't use it to, like, play start playing your podcast again?

Jason Aten:

Never. Never.

Stephen Robles:

Really?

Jason Aten:

I have a well, I have a widget on the home screen.

Stephen Robles:

I do have a widget for that.

Jason Aten:

Or I have if I pull down the if I my phone's locked, it has a, what do they call those things? And live activity. There you go.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. The live active yeah. That is true. I am curious how the you know, one of the things, like, the airplay situation sometimes with control center is a little wonky. Like trying to figure out like what am I airplaying to or control.

Stephen Robles:

Oh I think I just found a bug. Anyway I'll report that. I went into jiggle mode in control center, but now nothing's happened. I can't I can't get out of jiggle mode. I'll just turn it off.

Stephen Robles:

I'll turn it off and on again. Owen, our community actually requested this. We talked about it last week. You'll be able to swap out those lock screen controls.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I cannot believe Steven, I would have bet everything that that was not gonna happen. I think I even I was wrong. Who whoever you said that said that I was wrong. I was wrong.

Stephen Robles:

It's they did it. You can take away the flashlight or the camera icon and and put your own controls. Wild. Big photos redesign, the entire library. But one feature I was excited to hear, you can just hide screenshots.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. That's all I needed. Yep. Exactly. That's table stakes at this point, Because if you like, no one cares about you take them because you need to remember something later.

Jason Aten:

The problem is most people forget to delete them. But you don't wanna look at them when you're scrolling through, like, your trip to Alaska and all of a sudden it's like screenshots of random stuff. So, yeah. I it's awesome.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. And also huge updates to messages. You'll be able to bold, italicize and strike through, which is fun. I actually just texted you before we recorded something and I put asterisk around the word because I was trying to emphasize it. Like I'll be able to bold this pretty soon.

Jason Aten:

Yes.

Stephen Robles:

Just bold, strikethrough, you do tap backs with emojis and well not not gen emojis, just emojis. I don't know. I don't know what anything is.

Jason Aten:

I can't remember, but you can do like stickers and tap backs now, and emojis, and

Stephen Robles:

stuff. Schedule send? This was a big request from our community too. Schedule messages to send later. I didn't think that was gonna happen.

Jason Aten:

Listen. I probably Apple is the only instance of scheduled to send that I will ever trust because I there's there's no scenario where I will schedule an email or a Slack message. I won't even schedule articles. I will just get up and push publish. Forget

Stephen Robles:

it. See, I, I mean, I schedule emails. I've scheduled emails in Gmail and they've they've gone. Nope. YouTube.

Stephen Robles:

I've scheduled YouTube videos. Those are fun.

Jason Aten:

Alright. RC s. Yeah. YouTube CMS is probably yeah. Okay.

Jason Aten:

But I don't make YouTube videos. This is the only thing I've

Stephen Robles:

done with Google. I've scheduled Gmail's and YouTube videos. So I guess I trust Google's scheduling system. Yeah. But I trust Apples too.

Stephen Robles:

We didn't get actual snooze though, I was a little disappointed. Like, if you snooze an email it doesn't disappear from the inbox.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. We

Stephen Robles:

did get RCS, so rich communication will be coming with Ios 18. Still green bubbles, hilariously. So sorry, yeah, still still green. We got the the mail updates we kind of talked about. This grouping of messages seems pretty cool too.

Stephen Robles:

So if you get multiple emails from, like, United about an upcoming trip, get a nice little, like, designed page basically, where it'll summarize all the stuff for you, that's super cool. With all the that you travel, that's probably gonna be really useful.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I mean, that I yes. But, I mean, I just use flighty for all of that stuff, so I don't even True. And not even like, honestly, I fly Delta and flighty almost always tells me when my flight is delayed before Delta does. Like, I don't even I don't understand how it knows, but it'll tell me.

Jason Aten:

And then like 15 minutes later, Delta, I've walked up to the counter at airports before and been like, my phone just told me that this flight is going to be moved to a different gate and the person at the counter has no idea. And then 6 minutes later, sorry, folks, we have to move this flight to a new gate. And I'm like, what are we even doing? How is it possible? Where did where did he get the information from if not you?

Stephen Robles:

I don't know how flighty does it. That that is some, that's some Apple Intelligence behind the scenes.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Stephen Robles:

We also got so this is on the iOS 18 preview page. It shows the highlights for Safari, like pulling the address from a website. And this does not seem to be attached to Apple Intelligence, just throwing that out there. Same with like summary and table of contents. So again, I just I have not seen it on the 5 seconds that I've used iOS 18 on my on this iPhone, so we'll have to see.

Stephen Robles:

I imagine that's coming. We have the passwords app. Yeah yeah yeah. The Maps update which is topography and hiking. Apple loves hikers.

Stephen Robles:

Yes. Apple and hikers are like this. I don't know. Maybe there's a bunch of VPs that hike. A bunch of, like, Apple Pay stuff, which I wasn't the tap to cash, I understood.

Stephen Robles:

So if you wanna send somebody money like in person but not share your email or phone number, now you can do that. But then they also said something like Apple Pay online or something or Apple Cash online. Did you catch that?

Jason Aten:

It's third party browsers will now be now support Apple Pay online.

Stephen Robles:

Oh. Okay. Well, that's great. Okay. I didn't catch that from you.

Jason Aten:

I think it was in one of those bento box things that Yeah. This is what I do at a live event like this. I write furiously, and then I take pictures of the bento box.

Stephen Robles:

The bento box is what you need.

Jason Aten:

That's what

Stephen Robles:

that's what you need.

Jason Aten:

Okay. Hold on. We have 10 minutes left.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. There's no

Jason Aten:

way we're gonna make it through everything. No. So we should pick the things that we're most impressed about the other the other, OSes. Because I have one for watch OS for sure, and I have one for AirPods. Okay.

Jason Aten:

I don't care about macOS, so you have to have some favorites

Stephen Robles:

for that.

Jason Aten:

I do. I'm just kidding. I just

Stephen Robles:

Well, the macOS thing, you know, it's ironic because Apple basically just like announces features on one of the operating systems even though the feature is everywhere.

Jason Aten:

Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Exactly right. Like the messages features go with Ios, but are also available on iPad and Mac. So I totally get it. Well, I'll tell you what, let's go back and forth. Let's call this the lightning round.

Jason Aten:

Alright. Good.

Stephen Robles:

So so for me, I'll mention a bento box that they did not talk about this, but in the audio and home section, in the Bento box, it showed robot vacuums are coming. Native support for robot vacuums to Apple Home and guest access for Apple Home, which I was very excited about. Meaning, you'll be able to, like, allow Here's the Actually, let me share the screen. This is on the iOS 18 preview page, because again, it's, you know, everywhere. But basically, you'll be able to set a certain guest schedule where the front door, garage door, whatever, can create schedules for guests to use and you send, I assume, like an invite or a link and they can use just the accessories that you specify at the time that you specify.

Stephen Robles:

Huge deal. This is really needed. So guest mode is a big deal and also express mode where if you don't even want to like if you're holding groceries and you can't tap your Apple Watch to unlock your door, you just walk up to it and like the near field whatever will will unlock it. So audio and home had some good things in that bento box. I'll say that.

Jason Aten:

Okay. Mine is the Apple Watch translate app, which I just think is awesome. I think that's, like, such a great place to put that that app to be able to use the translate on your watch because, like, that's so much more useful than if you have to pull out your phone. I mean, it's not like it's hard to pull out your phone, but, like, that is I've told you before that in my mind, the the Apple Watch, maybe it's just because the battery life, I haven't charged my apple watch ultra 2 since I left my house yesterday. And it's still at like, I just checked 54%.

Jason Aten:

It's doing fine. It's like this thing. I mean, what is your humane AI pin at? If you added the humane AI pin and the rabbit r one together, it would not be 54% of this thing. Right?

Jason Aten:

I just wanna be clear about that. They they would not even last to the end of this podcast, and we only have 8 minutes left. So anyway, I just think having it on the watch, that is where those things are really really the killer app. And having live activities in the smart stack. Like, finally, a good use for the smart stack is those live activities.

Jason Aten:

Because that was my watch one I wanted to see.

Stephen Robles:

Okay. Well, I'll do another lightning round. This was another audio on home, which was tvOS 18, has gonna have a new feature called insight, where when you're watching a show or a movie, you can bring out you know, just tap the remote. It'll show you what actors, you know, the cast that are on screen at the time that you're watching. And if there's a song playing in the background of a movie or TV show, it will show the song in the album artwork right there on your Apple TV and you can tap the plus button to add that song to your Apple Music library.

Stephen Robles:

That is ecosystem with a capital e, Jason.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I didn't write down a single thing from that section because I didn't really care, and so I was trying to catch up on my oh, wait. I I did write down the Apple TV captions thing. Yes. I did actually write that piece

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. If you

Jason Aten:

And the Snoopy screensaver.

Stephen Robles:

Get out

Jason Aten:

of here. Somebody loves and there's a Snoopy watch face now. There's the Snoopy screensaver. But okay. My next lightning round 1 is the AirPods shake your head or nod your head feature to, like, to Siri be like, do you wanna answer this call and you can just shake your head no.

Jason Aten:

I that that's like I like that kind of thing because it's like that. It's one of those that just works. That's what you should be able to do. You shouldn't have to say to Siri, nope. Or like, you should just be able to interact with it.

Jason Aten:

So yeah.

Stephen Robles:

And I'll do I'll do another lightning round with Apple Intelligence. And I don't know if this is just Apple Intelligence, but you'll be able to double tap on the bottom of your iPhone to type to Siri so you don't have to talk to Siri Yeah. On your phone. Yep. I'm excited about that.

Stephen Robles:

Alright. You good?

Jason Aten:

That's a good one. Okay. You didn't wanna talk about the calculator on the iPad, so we'll skip that one. But the smart script, I think that's really cool that you can be writing and it will, like, learn your, like, handwriting. So that way you add if you copy paste, like, if you paste text that you copied that was actual, like Type.

Jason Aten:

You know, computer type. Yeah. Exactly. It'll turn that into your your handwriting, and I think that's where it go. I don't spend a lot of time writing with my Apple Pencil on my iPad, but, honestly, maybe I would because it's they did add a lot of features to that.

Jason Aten:

Like, the ability to just, like, move stuff over or to erase it, like, the they gave a little bit of love to that. So

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. That was cool. I'll say the journal app didn't get a lot of updates. Like, we didn't get import export features or, like, a calendar view, but we at least now have search. So you can search your general entries, and that's a big step forward.

Stephen Robles:

I tried search real quick on on this test device and, like, you couldn't search for a date. You had to search for, like, a word in the entry or the title or, like, a place, but at least we have search. Yeah. A thumbs up for

Jason Aten:

that. Okay. So I have a question and not a lightning round. I wanna know from you, did they fix Siri? Like, where does it now rank compared to the other the voices whatever voice assistance, like Yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Yeah. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

Is it is it has it made it out of the wherever it has been relegated for the last couple of years?

Stephen Robles:

I've been thinking I think only time will tell. I mean, it's the excitement about it is there. I feel like immediately, Siri, it will invoke excitement, like to try it. Like let me see if it can do this thing. That initial experience I think is going to have a big part of like coloring how people feel about Siri going forward.

Stephen Robles:

Like, can I do the request just do it Apple intelligence wise or what? But what about you? I mean, are you excited about it?

Jason Aten:

Yeah. I mean, I think that it will the things that it's talking about doing are exactly what we want. First of all, understand me, please. Typing to Siri. That's great because there are a lot of times when I would love to use Siri, but I'm in a situation where talking to my phone doesn't necessarily make sense.

Jason Aten:

But if I could just be like, create a reminder to do this or tell, you know, without having to open an app or go into these different things, just being able to tell Siri to do that. I actually really like the new animation that where it glows around the outside of the, of the screen. I think that's where I go. And they gave it like, a a different icon. Like, is that actually an icon that you can see now?

Jason Aten:

Did you see in the, in like, every time they showed it, it had a completely different icon. Like, it wasn't that, like, glowy orb. It was actually something different. And I don't know if that's actually an icon for it or if it's just, like, the visual representation of Siri.

Stephen Robles:

I don't. On on my on this iPhone 14, that does not have Apple Intelligence. It's just a normal problem. Orb. Yeah.

Jason Aten:

Yeah. You don't

Stephen Robles:

So that that Siri is still not it's not there yet. Alright. I got one more landing round on it, and if you have one more and then we'll we'll close it out. But iPad OS, which unfortunately we did not see a lot of updates to iPad OS. Let's be honest, that's a little unfortunate.

Stephen Robles:

But share play, you'll be able to not only mark up another person's iPad screen remotely like over a FaceTime call.

Jason Aten:

Oh yeah.

Stephen Robles:

Even control another person's iPad using SharePlay remotely. Huge feature especially if like if you're helping your parents or grandparents use their iPad, the ability to actually control it. I'll be doing this all the time, like, with my mom and her iPad. That's thumbs up. That's awesome.

Jason Aten:

Yep. Okay. My last one, we got, like, 3 minutes left, is speaking of things that got Sherlock. I the app I use every single day is Otter. I use it all the time.

Jason Aten:

I use it to record meetings that I'm in. Like, if I'm interviewing somebody, I the first thing I don't know if I should say this in this room. The first thing I did after the keynote is I downloaded it, turned it into audio, and put it into there so that I would just be because listen, I can't rewatch the whole thing, but I can read for different things. Right? And so I'm doing like and now you can do it all in notes.

Jason Aten:

Like the transcribe feature in notes is like, that's going to save me a couple of $100 a year. Cause I'm not gonna have to pay for Otter anymore. Although I literally just renewed for a year, like last week, Steven, I'm so mad about it. I'm not gonna talk about it anyway, but I think that's great. Like notes is such a great app, Right?

Jason Aten:

It is such a useful app on on on all of the devices. And the fact that you'll now be able to, like, drop audio into it and have it transcribed or just record, like, the same thing I'm doing in Otter, I can now do that on on my devices. So, yeah, that's great. Right.

Stephen Robles:

The the transcription, I'm really curious about to see how long you'll be able to transcribe something, because that's been previously, like, I've used the shortcuts to transcribe actions, like, you would time out after a certain amount of time. So I'm gonna test it out. There's even, like in the voice memos, there's a new like transcription option. I'm just looking at that now. But anyway, we'll test all this.

Stephen Robles:

We're gonna come back on Thursday with our normal episode, go in-depth even more, see what discoveries are made this week. So subscribe to the YouTube channel, youtube.com/primarytechshow. All the episodes are there and listen in your app. 5 star rating and review in Apple Podcasts and Spotify. Also, I started adding video to our Spotify podcast.

Stephen Robles:

That's actually a new thing you can do with Spotify. So that's all there. Jason, thanks so much for joining and thanks to Apple for hosting you in the Apple Podcast Studios live from the show floor.

Jason Aten:

Yes. Thank you.

Stephen Robles:

It's amazing. We'll see you again Thursday. Thanks to everyone who supports the show, our members of the community. You can join that social.primarytech.fm and we'll catch you next time.

Creators and Guests

Jason Aten
Host
Jason Aten
Contributing Editor/Tech Columnist @Inc | Get my newsletter: https://t.co/BZ5YbeSGcS | Email me: me@jasonaten.net
Stephen Robles
Host
Stephen Robles
Making technology more useful for everyone 📺 video and podcast creator 🎼 musical theater kid at heart
WWDC24 Recap: Apple Intelligence Unveiled, BIG Updates to iOS 18, macOS Sequoia, and More!
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