iOS 18.2 Brings Visual Intelligence, ChatGPT to iPhone, New iPad Mini Review, AirPods Pro 2 Hearing Test
Download MP3Welcome to Primary Technology, the show about the tech news that matters. We got a huge Apple news this week. Ios 18.2, the first dev beta is out with things like visual intelligence, genmoji. We're gonna get into all of that. Jason and I have the new iPad mini in hand, plus you'll be able to actually publish spatial videos to Apple Vision Pro using the new Vimeo app and a ton of other news.
Stephen Robles:This episode is brought to you by 1Password and you, the members who support us directly. I'm one of your hosts, Stephen Robles. And every week, we do a movie quote, and Jason's gonna try and guess it. This week, it is this. This is the first stage nonobjective fragmentation.
Stephen Robles:My co host, Jason A10. Do you know what movie that's from? No. I thought you would get that. This is the first stage nonobjective fragmentation.
Stephen Robles:I had to I had to say it in a little higher voice there.
Jason Aten:Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. I just saw this oh, Inside Out.
Stephen Robles:Boom. You got it. You got it. Alright. Inside Out.
Stephen Robles:I was
Jason Aten:thinking it sounded like a space movie the way you said it the first time.
Stephen Robles:I know. I need to say it more in the voice of the thing. I was thinking first stage, second stage, because the other news is, anthropic. They have, like, you know, the the next stage of AI. I was thinking stages.
Stephen Robles:Anyway, maybe I think too much about those. But anyway Nope.
Jason Aten:I get it now.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Very good. How's it going, Jason? Let's hold up our our colorful iPad minis. Do you have your iPad mini there?
Jason Aten:Well, hang on. Let me take it let me take the color part of it off because that would be the case.
Stephen Robles:There it is. There you go. Here's mine. Do we have the same color one? Yeah.
Jason Aten:Well, I mean, it's hard to tell. They're basically they're all versions of the same color.
Stephen Robles:They're all silvery. They're all silvery. Yeah. Anyway, we're gonna talk about iPad mini. We're gonna talk about how I still don't have access to image playgrounds as we speak.
Stephen Robles:Have you have you how many devices have you tried accessing it on? An 18.2?
Jason Aten:Just just just a phone.
Stephen Robles:You just got your phone?
Jason Aten:Just my iPhone. Yeah. I mean, it's my my personal iPhone though. I put it
Stephen Robles:on here. Well, it's the same same here. I can I tell you something that the voice assistant is very good at is restarting a device? Because I did it, like, 12 times yesterday. You can just hold the side button and say restart my device, and then I see that I still don't have access to Image Playgrounds.
Stephen Robles:But, anyway, there's other things we're gonna talk about, like, chat gpt integration is in there, the visual intelligence. We're gonna get into all of that. We have a bunch of 5 star ratings and reviews. Thank you for all of them. So we're gonna go through them very quickly.
Stephen Robles:You can leave us a 5 star rating and review on Apple Podcasts. You get a shout out, top of the show. Nrm_, maybe it's norm, I don't know, from the USA, they said, we're refreshing, enjoyable, and they put their phone in their dominant hand pocket. That's the main reason why I wanted to read their review.
Jason Aten:Appreciate that.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Thanks. John Thunder from the USA, I'm gonna say this very carefully. It's f o c k r, but Fokker 82. But don't mark us explicit.
Stephen Robles:That's what that's his name in the review. Okay? Also, I thought this was interesting with the dominant hand. He has a theory about what pocket you put your phone in. He said, you don't know the age difference between the 2 of us, but maybe if you had, like, keys before you had a phone, that the keys go in the dominant pocket before you had cell phones.
Stephen Robles:However, if you had a phone before you had keys, maybe your dominant pocket gets reserved for the phone. I thought this was interesting. I think we've had a wide variety of age of you know, tell us what pocket they put their phone in, but I thought that was interesting. Did you have keys before you had a phone, Jason?
Jason Aten:Well, yes?
Stephen Robles:Like keys that you put in your pocket regularly?
Jason Aten:Yeah. I mean, I didn't have a phone until college. It was the first time I got a cell phone.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And I would have had to have keys to get into my dorm room in college before I had the cell phone. So I like, at a minimum, the answer is yes even if it was by a short amount of time.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:I don't I I mean, I think it's a good stab at why. But, like Yeah. Even if you had a phone first
Stephen Robles:Yes.
Jason Aten:And then you got keys and you you're right handed, you still probably use your right handed to use the keys.
Stephen Robles:But you don't wanna put your keys in the pocket where your phone is Even with those Right.
Jason Aten:So you would you would be like a normal rational person, move the phone to the other phone. No.
Stephen Robles:No. You keep it no. No. See, I see what you did there, but no. No.
Stephen Robles:And I think that was it because I had a phone my senior year of high school, which was a like a Sprint flip phone. I think that would have been the first object I kept in my pocket regularly.
Jason Aten:At what point do you remember when Levi switched the little metal nub button over to the right pocket? Because that's really the thing.
Stephen Robles:For that, I don't know. I don't know. We'll have to do another research, deep dive on that. Zach b from the UK, Conan Diamond Pocket. Thank you.
Stephen Robles:Michael Cork from Greece. They actually had an interesting point about Elon and SpaceX, which we talked about last week, but well, maybe we'll talk about that in another episode in the future. Zalman from the USA, pineapple 667 from the USA, also phone in dominant pocket. Thank you, pineapple. I'm just not reading the people who said that's in their non dominant, so it seems real slanted this time.
Stephen Robles:I'm just skimping it.
Jason Aten:But just know that 85% of people
Stephen Robles:are normal. The Internet already spoke. Mike Ellie from the USA, Macho Frog Bear from the USA, and then a red pixel09, which I think he's led to review before, but I just wanna mention a dominant hand pocket as well. So there you go. I also said, it's a roundabout.
Stephen Robles:Traffic circle is boring. I don't know.
Jason Aten:I'm fine. I'm fine with that. I just
Stephen Robles:That's fine. Alright. And before we get to iOS 18.2, developer shout out, again, I mentioned on a past episode, if you listen or watch the show and you make apps, we'd love to give you a shout out. And another one, Jeff, developer Jeff actually reached out. He makes an app.
Stephen Robles:He makes several app, but wanted to point this one out specifically. It's called Learning Decks. It's a kid's app. It's for iPad and the iPhone. It's a fun way for kids to learn, whether it's, like, little math things, colors, objects, things like that.
Stephen Robles:Looks like a really cute app, and you can download it for free. Also, just so proud of all the developers that listen to the show. Look at that app privacy nutrition label. Data not collected. That's what we like to see.
Stephen Robles:So if you have kids or, you know, just download it and give them a 5 star rating review because you listen to the show. And so if you're a developer, you can reach out. Let me know. You can DM us in our community at social.primarytech.fm. We'd love to have you there, but learning decks, there you go.
Stephen Robles:Alright. Big one came out this week, Jason. Ios 18.2, the first dev beta. It has visual intelligence, which uses the camera control, has image playgrounds and Gemmoji, has chat gpt integration, plus things like the mail redesign with the categories, a bunch of changes. I'm gonna link to, this article in the show notes, which is, the MacRumors article.
Stephen Robles:They had a nice roundup of all the changes, not as many visuals because it's hard to get access to that image playground, which we're gonna get to, but MacRumors has it, and they have a video kind of showing image playground and playing around with it, creating wild emojis and or gen emojis or whatever you call those things, and a bunch of other things. Image wand is also I'm really looking forward to that, where you can, like, circle text that you have, maybe in, like, a keynote or Apple Notes, and it will create an image, And I've I have a lot of thoughts on visual intelligence, but do do you have try a chance to play with some of the stuff, Jason?
Jason Aten:Yeah. I mean, the the tough okay. There's 2 things. 1, this is a beta, so it's hard to really talk about a lot of this.
Stephen Robles:But
Jason Aten:we're definitely going. We're going to talk about it. We're just not going to review it.
Stephen Robles:No. No. No. No. We're doing it.
Stephen Robles:No. We're doing it. But I think it's weird because as
Jason Aten:I looked through this list, I think the chat GPT integration is a thing that people might notice when this actually comes out. The mail app, I'm the is the thing I'm the most interested in that of what has come out. I'm I'm very interested in checking out, like, I've I I use Spark. Right? But I'm very interested in looking at how the mail app does.
Jason Aten:And the bar is pretty high because so far, the priority note of the priority thing in the previous version has been terrible, like absolute garbage. It was prioritizing spam emails because there's, like, a sense of urgency in them and stuff. But the what's weird about it is I think the only thing that matters in Apple intelligence is not in there yet. And that's the contextually aware Siri. That's literally the, listen, you can talk all you want about image playgrounds and gen emoji.
Jason Aten:It's it's meaningless. It's just a party trick. Like I know it will be fun for people and it probably will be the thing that like the average person who doesn't care about any of this, we'll talk about the most, just like widgets became a thing that no one really expected. Well, in like, especially when it became to customizing your home screen and stuff, that whole weird thing that happened. But I don't think like that any of this matters in terms of actually making a difference in terms of Apple Intelligence until they get the contextually aware Siri, and that's just not in app intents, and that's just not in here at all.
Stephen Robles:Well, so I will the only counterpoint I have, which is slightly agreeing with you, I thought the one big feature after the iPhone event, which was this Visual Intelligence, which is what we'll talk about first, that was not announced at Dub Dub with Apple Intelligence. Visual Intelligence was not announced back then. It was announced with the iPhone event, the iPhone 16, and I thought that was gonna be one of the big ones that will actually have the most real world difference for a lot of users. Now, again, it is very early, so I just wanna talk about what it actually is right now, because it's not what I thought it was gonna be when I first started it.
Jason Aten:So when you It's not much yet.
Stephen Robles:It's not much, but it's okay. The visual intelligence, if you have an iPhone 16, you press the camera button, and well, no. I'm sorry. You don't press it. You can't press it.
Stephen Robles:You have to hold it, which, again, confusing confusing, interface for me.
Jason Aten:But Well, it's not okay. Hold on. Counterpoint to that. Yeah. It is generally speaking the same thing you would do with the power cycle button Right.
Jason Aten:If you wanted to pull up the voice assistant that we aren't allowed to talk about.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Right? So if you just do that to the camera button, you don't get the voice interaction version. You get the visual intelligence.
Stephen Robles:I would almost like a setting to not have it be camera control at all and just do visual intelligence. Because I have camera on my lock screen, I swipe over to the camera, I have the camera icon on my home screen, have it in the control center. I I know you actually use camera control. I still do not.
Jason Aten:All the time. All the time.
Stephen Robles:I don't use it at all. Like, I'm gonna use it now for visual intelligence, maybe, but anyway, so you hold the camera control button, it launches visual intelligence, which is this is just like a camera view, and then I thought you were gonna be able to kind of talk to it like you do the voice assistant, like you point it at something and you say, what am I looking at? Or where am I? Or whatever. And it's not that.
Stephen Robles:You basically have to take a picture first, and so I'm gonna take a picture of myself here. I don't even know what's gonna happen. And then once you take a picture of yourself, it really doesn't show you anything right away, unless certain pieces of data, like if you take a picture of an address, a phone number, the things that, kind of were recognized before, and it could, like, auto add an event, you know. So I I basically wrote down, like, a time and a date, and if you do Visual Intelligence on that, it'll basically let you add it to the calendar. You can title the event and then go from there.
Stephen Robles:So that kind of data, it will prompt certain things, and I think if you're at, like, a business, and if you use visual intelligence pointed at the building or whatever, I have to test this, I think it will offer you information about that business. But most of the time and for most queries, this is all you see. You basically get a search button and an ask button, and neither of those are Apple things. Both of those are third party services. If you tap the search button, it will actually just do a reverse Google image search and show you that, and then if you tap the ask button, it will ask ChatGPT, which you have to have integrated.
Stephen Robles:We're gonna talk about that integration in a second. So, like, if I tap the Google one, it'll just say, searching with Google. Oh, nice. I get no results, from my face, which is interesting because, I mean, there's lots of pictures of me out there, but then I it brought me back here, like, I can't even re search on it. Now if I do it again, if I do the ask, which prompts chatgpt, I have to type something to chadgpt, and let me type, who is this?
Stephen Robles:I mean, I don't I mean,
Jason Aten:you could talk. You could do the voice detection.
Stephen Robles:You can you can talk. Oh, no. Now it's supposedly listening to me, and it actually, opened Shazam. Anyway, I don't know what's happening. What You just got Shazam.
Stephen Robles:So so what I did as soon as I updated, I went outside, and I tried Visual Intelligence on a bunch of, like, plants, because I was expecting it to like, if I took a picture of a plant, do the lookup thing, which is already a feature in Apple Photos. Like, you can do this right now. You take a picture of a plant, and if it recognizes it, you'll see that little eye icon or sometimes a leaf icon in the Photos app. You can tap that, and it's an Apple built in feature called lookup, and it'll give you information about that plant or whatever. And I thought Visual Intelligence would at least do that, like, let me take a picture of a plant, and then tell me about it.
Stephen Robles:Tell me what it is, but it does not do that yet. Maybe that's coming. I'm not sure. But right now, you basically have to do a Google image search of chatGPT, and I will say both of those could identify plants. Like, if I did the Google image search, it would say, here's photos of that plant.
Stephen Robles:If I did chat gpt, it would say, that looks like a blank, and it would tell me about the plant. But there's not, at least right now, a built in, like, Apple information database aside from parsing things like phone numbers and addresses and things like that. So it's just a very different experience than I thought, and in in the event, if you remember, the iPhone 16 event, the guy, like, stoops down, takes like, uses visual intelligence on a dog and asks, what dog is this? And I can't remember what's actually in the keynote. Maybe I'll try to find it while you tell me your experience, but, like, you can't really do that.
Stephen Robles:You basically have to take a picture of the dog, tap search or ask ChatGPT, and they will tell you, what it is. But I don't know. Have you had any different experiences in that?
Jason Aten:I I I actually have a more global thought about this, which is, like, I'm sort of confused. I know this is a beta, so it's hard to judge the final version. I I don't see them shipping visual intelligence in this form because I just think it's, it's just too confusing. Right. The, in the keynote sort of premise, what you described, where you could walk up to the dog, push this thing.
Jason Aten:It'll doesn't even need to, like, take a photo of it. It just will show you. And and actually, maybe, like, right now, the reason it's like that is because, like, you described the photos app will already do some of this. Right? If you take a picture of a dog, it'll already show you, like, information about the dog.
Jason Aten:But I I'm really kinda surprised because I think the expectation people will have is you walk up to a poster, like, this is what they showed in the keynote. You push the, camera control, visual intelligence will pop up, and it'll just say to you, do you wanna add the date of this concert?
Stephen Robles:So I just yeah. I just calendar. I just found that part of the keynote, and so, again, for an Yeah.
Jason Aten:That is not the flow of what anything happened.
Stephen Robles:That one's close at least now, but here's actually the the dog part, and I'll link the keynote, in the show notes right now. We're at, like, 56 minutes. And see that is not what it's doing. And so in the keynote, it shows No. He, you know, he he double taps actually the visual intelligence button, and it just pops up the name of the dog breed.
Stephen Robles:It doesn't have to go to Google or ChatGPT, which is not the flow right now. Maybe that'll be a future beta.
Jason Aten:Well and to be clear, if you hold the camera control and launch visual intelligence and then you hit it again, it does the whole photo thing for you. You don't have to tap the screen to to take that photo. Right. Right. Right.
Jason Aten:Okay. So, like, maybe that's what he's doing. He's just double tapping it, like and it's, like, opening camera control, artificial. I don't know.
Stephen Robles:I don't know what he's using. It doesn't surface any answers right now. Like, it just
Jason Aten:Well, that's because no one knows what that is.
Stephen Robles:That was a rabbit r one. I just
Jason Aten:It's a dead rabbit is what
Stephen Robles:if I hold on.
Jason Aten:Wouldn't it be hilarious if it was, like, dead rabbit?
Stephen Robles:If I ask Chad GPT, what's this? And it's a picture of the rabbit r one. It's still everything's listening. I don't know. Anyway, this is the first beta.
Stephen Robles:We we we should we're not reviewing it, but oh, this item is known as a Loupedeck CT, a customizable creative tool designed for enhancing workflow efficiency.
Jason Aten:That definitely does not increase workflow efficiency. I promise. I promise.
Stephen Robles:So maybe that's coming. Maybe that lookup stuff is coming. This is not the experience right now. So And
Jason Aten:I just from Apple, though, you know, think about things that we take so much for granted at this point, like universal clipboard. Right? Or, like, where you can just I do this all the time where I will just copy something from my phone and paste it on my computer or the, or more often the other way around. I'll type something in the notes app on my computer, copy it and drop it into something on my phone. Like I never have to think about it.
Jason Aten:It just works a 100% of the time and it's like, whatever you, or you can drag your mouse over to the edge of the screen and then it'll show up on your iPad. It's like, it's just, what would you think you would do to move your mouse over there? You just do that. And it just, it, it just works nothing about the way that some of these things are set up at this point, have that same of an same experience. And obviously this is extremely complicated stuff, but for apple, it has a lot riding on the, it just works.
Jason Aten:And I feel like right now, I mean, even, even the chat GPT integration, I think that's great. But it's still isn't a thing that quote just works. There's it's fiddly. Right. And that was the complaint about the camera control as it was fiddly.
Jason Aten:And hopefully they're able to reduce complexity over time as it get closer to releasing this to people, because I think that what will end up happening otherwise is that apple intelligence will be the thing people just use to make gen emoji, which is like, again, people are gonna love that. Like, that's fine. My kids are gonna think that's amazing and I'm gonna be terrified to get emoji text messages from them, But that's not, like, transformational for Apple.
Stephen Robles:Right. So you mentioned the ChatGPT integration, and that, actually, I think is one of the more powerful features you could try right now, at least in the 18.2beta1. So once you update, you can go to the Apple Intelligence settings. There's a whole ChatGPT section there. You can sign in if you have a ChatGPT account, and then basically what that will do is fall back the assistant on your phone will fall back to ChatGPT whenever you ask it something that it is unable to do.
Stephen Robles:And you can also if you don't toggle this off, it will ask every time, like, do you want us to send this to ChatGPT? Do you know that's not actually Apple? It's actually gonna go to the cloud. And so you can actually turn that off. There's a confirm chat gpt requests toggle, and if you toggle that off, then your assistant will just do the things without asking.
Stephen Robles:And 2 interesting features, 1, I had a shortcut gpt voice conversation starter. You don't really need to do that if you integrate the chat gpt with your Apple intelligence, because now I can ask you things like write a haiku about being a tech podcaster. I just asked the assistant to do that. And it's automatically gonna send it to chat gpt. And there you have it.
Stephen Robles:Voices in the air, bites of wisdom softly shared, echoes of the sphere, headphone emoji. And so I didn't I'm
Jason Aten:not terrible.
Stephen Robles:I'm terrible. I didn't have to approve it or anything. It does give you the ChatGPT like tag, and it says, mistakes can occur, verify details, and you know it was ChatGPT that generated that haiku or whatever, but now you can basically have that ChatGPT voice request, and I think it's actually faster than trying to start a voice conversation session in the ChatGPT app. Like, this is actually faster, and so I find that integration to be pretty good. Also, with the writing tools, ChatGPT now makes those way more powerful, because before, you could never actually insert instructions to the writing tools.
Stephen Robles:You could tell it's summarized, give me key points, or just rewrite it, but there was no, like, details that you can add or changes you can make. Well, now when you go to the writing tools, after you do you know, select some stuff, you can describe your change. That's a new that's not ChatGPT. That's just a new Apple Intelligence feature. But if you ask it to generate text with that ask for change, it will often call out to ChatGPT if it's not gonna do it on its own.
Stephen Robles:So I actually find the ChatGPT integration, which is ironic, because it's not Apple Intelligence, it's Chat GPT. I find that integration to be pretty useful. I don't know. Did you did you connect your OpenAI account? Have you done?
Jason Aten:I've been trying the whole time you've been talking, and it just keeps telling me there's a problem. Okay. Oops. Something went wrong. That should it just keeps telling me this over and over and over again.
Jason Aten:And I mean, I have a OpenAI paid account.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so do what, though. No. Did you update did you update your, chat JPT app?
Jason Aten:I apparently, I did. Apparently, you I I don't know why you would need to do that, though. Well, it
Stephen Robles:just says you're using does it say yours connected? Because it says sign out right there.
Jason Aten:No. It said sign in.
Stephen Robles:Oh, just kidding. Never mind.
Jason Aten:But Okay. You what I don't understand, you don't have to have the chat gpt app on here even to do this.
Stephen Robles:But you need to be signed in, I think, to
Jason Aten:Not to the app? Not to the okay.
Stephen Robles:Well I
Jason Aten:don't think I have to be signed in to the app. Like, I guess I'm what I'm saying is this is sending it to chat gpt. You don't actually have to separately have the app on your phone.
Stephen Robles:I guess that is fair. What I'm thinking is, you know, if you don't pay for chat gpt, there is a limit, I think, on requests. You know, like some kind of so if you want that unlimited access, you know, the benefits of your chat gpt plus account, which I don't know how, the 4 o model plays into it, and you and that is a point, like, there's no way to, like, tell Apple Intelligence when you access chat gpt, use this model, like, there is no option for that. It's just going to use chat gpt. So you're right, you probably don't need to have, the app or maybe even sign in, but if you want the benefits of your chat gptplus account, then you do have to do that.
Stephen Robles:But yeah. It's been interesting.
Jason Aten:I'm getting no I'm getting no benefits,
Stephen Robles:but whatever. Anyway, I I actually found that to be interesting. And if you ask for, like, general knowledge things, which the Apple Assistant wasn't great at in the past, it can just fall back to chat gpt. And it's it's a nice integration. Again, I don't know what that says about Apple Intelligence and Apple's assistant specifically, but I like that it's there.
Stephen Robles:And so that was probably a good call. That's probably a good call on it. Do you do you
Jason Aten:think that the reason that or I guess I should ask, do you agree though with my premise that the only thing that's really gonna matter is, like, the contextually aware Siri and app intents?
Stephen Robles:I think that's yes. Yes. Because one of the big things for me is the most I use Chat GPT now is actually in shortcuts, and in things not necessarily the Chat GPT app, And unfortunately, at least in this first beta, there are no shortcuts actions still, or any of any Apple Intelligence features. Like, you can't even get, like, the writing tools summarize as a shortcuts action to actually use in a workflow. And so I I find you know, it's kind of cumbersome if you wanted to let's say you had a large piece of text of video transcription.
Stephen Robles:If you wanted to use Apple's summarize writing tools, Apple Intelligence on it, you basically have to, like, copy it all, which means you're, like, either, you know, hold, select all, or you're dragging these little endpoints. And once the text is selected, then you can apply writing tools to it. And that even just that little process right there, especially if you're dealing with a lot of text, I think it's too cumbersome to actually be useful that like, I'm not inclined to do it. I'm just gonna go back to my shortcuts. But I think the people that actually wanna use it for those kind of productivity instances, it needs to be easier to kind of access and throw things to it.
Stephen Robles:And so I do think the contextual awareness, when I can ask my assistant, you know, how long like, one of the things that it supposedly came out in this beta, but I didn't see it yet, is, like, if someone sends you a location, someone texts you a coffee shop, you should be able to, like, be looking at your text conversation, hold the side button and say, how long will it take me to drive there from home? And it should just tell you. That's cool. It doesn't do it yet, so I think that would be more useful for more people. Will I be able to pick up my mom from her flight if I go to this meeting?
Stephen Robles:That will be, I think, yes, more useful for more people, but it has to be really good, and I don't know I don't know when it's coming.
Jason Aten:Well, like, I tried as soon as I downloaded it, the first thing I did, which I should have known that it wasn't gonna work, but I wanted to say, how long will it take me to get from my appointment this afternoon to the soccer practice? It had you know, all it did was show me my calendar. Like, it at least understood that those were calendar related things. But the funny thing is it just shows me my, the, the calendar app, which I don't even use. And granted everything is still on there because I have all the calendars in there, but it's like, no, no, no.
Jason Aten:You, you didn't quite, it's like, you're trying little, little buddy. You really did try, but you didn't fully understand what I was asking for. And you just, and it w it almost would have been better in that case for it to say, I'm sorry, I can't do that yet. Right. Is it, as opposed to just here's your calendar?
Jason Aten:Like, yeah, I know that there are 2 things on my calendar. What I wanna know is how long will it take me to drive from one to the other so that I can make sure to allow enough time.
Stephen Robles:So I'm gonna I'm gonna say a quick thing just because we're gonna talk about the Craig Friederige interview with John Stern in a minute. You can see if you agree or disagree with the statement. If Apple had not pushed to get Apple Vision Pro out the door and instead focused all that time and energy on getting Apple Intelligence 100% launched with the iPhone 16, I think every conversation about Apple Intelligence will be vastly different and vastly positive if it all worked and it was all out now. Do you agree?
Jason Aten:No. But k. Fair? Here's why. I, I don't think apple knows what to do with apple intelligence at this point.
Jason Aten:And the reason is you, when you compare it to chat GPT, for example, that's the, that's the product that they make. Right. Open AI makes that's the only product. Right. And so the only thing they're thinking about, and at this point, literally the only thing they're thinking about is how do we monetize this product?
Jason Aten:They've given up on the whole like research part of it. Like we can, we'll talk about that many times over the future in the future. But apple is thinking about this in the context of how does it fit into this device, which is the single most successful consumer product in the history of everything. And they should be thinking of it in that regard, but that's why it's popping up in terms of like, you can make custom emoji or you can take a thing out of your photo. And I think all of those are useful.
Jason Aten:Like I think those are great features, but no one at apple is thinking of it from like blue sky. What should we be doing in terms of apple intelligence and let's ship that kind of thing. And I don't think the vision pro had anything to do with it because the vision pro was so far along in its development at the time that apple realized chat. I mean, think about it. Everyone was caught off guard by Chad GPT.
Stephen Robles:That's true.
Jason Aten:It was like literally just a little side project that open AI put out there and it became the fastest growing like tech product and like service in the history of the universe, because it like went from 0 to a 1000000 in like what, a couple months or something like that. It was like absolutely bizarre. Even opening. I didn't expect that that was what was going to happen. There's like, here's the thing we made.
Jason Aten:You guys should look at it. Tell us what you think. And it's like, we want more of this. So every company had to just fast track anything that they working on in terms of generative AI and apple's coming along and looking at it as, as okay, so great. How do we actually make this useful?
Jason Aten:And I think that that's actually the right approach. I just think that apple is unable to sort of do the math yet because their approach is so different than the way, like they're not starting with the peer approach of AI, which is what open AI is doing. And Google has the same problem. Like Google has to figure out how do I, how do we put this thing out here? Because Google is better positioned than anyone to do this.
Jason Aten:They have the compute power, they have the distribution they have, but they also have this cash cow, which is search ads. And how do you continue to make money if you are just putting out these generative AI answers that people don't click on links. Right. And so I don't know. I think I don't think that the vision pro is the reason apple is so far behind on apple intelligence.
Jason Aten:I think it's just the fact that they may they sell a 150,000,000 iPhones every year, and they're like, how do we not ruin that?
Stephen Robles:I do. Yeah. Okay. I'll I'll take that. I I do think Apple, the biggest company in the world most of the time, like, once chat gpt hit, if Apple was a faster moving company, I mean, they could have thrown so much money at it.
Stephen Robles:Like, money is not an issue for Apple. And if OpenAI can throw money and develop as fast as it's going, I feel like surely but it was also untold, like like it was unknown even when chat gbt, like, 3.5 launched. What does this mean long term? So I go, okay. I'll take your point.
Stephen Robles:I'll take your point. You're you're really tempted me to talk about the Craig Federighi interview, but we're we're got a week.
Jason Aten:Well, you you you you can have all the money in the world, which Apple basically does.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:But you still have to have a plan for what to do with it. And that's the part where I think apple is trying to figure out, like, what, what should we do with this thing? Because they are so they are so tied to the iPhone as a device in that experience. And again, I think that Apple intelligence, the way that they are approaching it is ultimately like the right process. I just think that we have not quite seen what the end of that process looks like yet.
Jason Aten:And now and there's no one at Apple, I think, who's quite figured it out. They're sort of like just gonna put up a bunch of things, and they're like, did this did this work? And part of that could be because they saw what happened with things like widgets. Right? Which I don't think anybody expected widgets to become, like
Stephen Robles:The biggest one.
Jason Aten:Such a huge thing, especially with, like, the TikTok crowd. Right.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Yeah. Neither. I mean, I'm just court. David Smith was not expecting that.
Jason Aten:No one would. I mean, I interviewed him after that and it's like, he attributed it directly to like the Tik TOK people, which here's the thing, the audience of power users of iPhones who would want widgets for productivity purposes and the people who use TikTok to customize their home screen, there's a zero overlap there. So
Stephen Robles:Right. Alright. 2 quick, 18 dot 2 things. And then, so mail, you also get the, categories in mail, which is like transactions, updates, all that kind of stuff. This is very much like the Gmail categories, if you're familiar with those, but it's built into mail, so it will apply to all of your mail from different accounts.
Stephen Robles:So if you have 5 or 6 different email accounts, you can put it in there. I you can't turn this off, by the way, because I was I kind of immediately turned it off. There is a you tap the 3 dots, you can go back to list view, and you can also tag the show priority section, which is Apple Intelligence. You could toggle that on or off, And I I don't like the categorization because I'm always like I feel like I'm just checking more categories, like I'm always just gonna go back and I'm gonna look at each category anyway just to see if there's any male there. So I I I don't categorize.
Stephen Robles:Do you?
Jason Aten:Really?
Stephen Robles:Do you
Jason Aten:Oh, yeah.
Stephen Robles:No. No.
Jason Aten:Well I think it's huge. And the reason is because they're like, okay. I the transaction's 1. Right? Like, that's great, but I don't need to see any of this stuff in the transactions on a regular basis.
Jason Aten:Like, this is not I don't need this stuff right now.
Stephen Robles:But you don't go to inbox 0, do you?
Jason Aten:Oh, absolutely. Every day I get to inbox 0.
Stephen Robles:So what
Jason Aten:are you what
Stephen Robles:are you gonna do with everything in that category? Are you gonna put it all in a folder?
Jason Aten:Yeah. I'm gonna look and see if there's anything in here I need to actually pay attention to, and then I'm just gonna archive it all. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Well, maybe maybe I should try that. Alright. I'm gonna turn the categories on, Jason. I'm gonna try I'll try it again.
Stephen Robles:Because for me, like, every time I open my email app, I'm just gonna go to each one, and I wanna, like, filter the mail away as I go. And it's like this might it's just more taps, but okay. I'll maybe I'll try it. I'll try a once a day strategy that you have. And one other thing, so you got Genmoji visual we're not gonna be able to talk I can't talk about it.
Stephen Robles:I've seen people posting their Genmoji selfies, They look cool. I I still don't have access to it. Apple, you're listening. Just just open it up. Look at that, I've been staring at the screen for like 24 hours.
Stephen Robles:Just just open it up. Anyway, there's that. There's also like some other pretty interesting features in 18.2. You can set defaults now. There's like a whole area for default apps like for mail and things like that, which, you know, pressure from the EU, all that kind of stuff.
Stephen Robles:One other thing though, voice memos. I didn't even know this was coming. In voice memos, you can now have multiple tracks. You can actually have multiple participants, and, again, this is the the MacRumors article. You can have 2 tracks layered on top of one another and then even separate the layers and edit the layers.
Stephen Robles:So, like, you can have, like, a 12 separate the layers. I'm, like, trying to make this thing, like a podcast app.
Jason Aten:Well, I I think it was David Pierce who said something like, this is gonna be great for people who just wanna record an interview as a podcast, is you could call somebody and have it do this, whatever the new phone recording thing is instead of, like, messing with Zoom. I think Riverside is a much better option, and I don't even work and I don't work there. So I can say that. But and they don't sponsor our show. They just, you know, pay Stevens mortgage, which I guess is basically the same thing, but.
Jason Aten:But I just think, I think it's interesting. I don't know that if I'm recording a phone, like if I was being recorded on a phone call, I like the idea that someone could edit that, but I guess, I mean, Steven could make me say whatever he wants right now.
Stephen Robles:That's right. And I do every week. Every week.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Absolutely.
Stephen Robles:I just try to make Jason sound more and more wrong every week to no avail, unfortunately.
Jason Aten:I'm doing a good job on my own.
Stephen Robles:No. Alright. We gotta talk about the iPad mini because we both have those. I'm gonna review it, but before we do, I wanna thank our sponsor for this week, 1Password, the secure enterprise like next level. We're talking about 1Password extended access management.
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Stephen Robles:Thanks to 1password sponsoring this episode. Alright, Jason. You wrote a review of the iPad mini. Got a little got a little early, a little earlier than I did. I have I have mine right here.
Stephen Robles:I just set it up last night, and, I might have to start doing in store pickup, because my UPS guy has been running late. He's been getting it to me late in the day. Can't be doing that kind of stuff. You know, I'm trying to do videos over here. So I have it here.
Stephen Robles:I've not used it a whole lot. I basically just updated it to 18.2 because I'm trying to get image playgrounds on some device. But anyway, Jason, do do you think there's jelly scrolling on that thing?
Jason Aten:Listen, I don't think there's I didn't really no. And I didn't ever saw it on the original one. This is like
Stephen Robles:Oh, well, that's okay. Well
Jason Aten:This is the most made up thing. This is
Stephen Robles:No. Don't now hold on a second because there people are messaging us. I've seen so many videos, so many opinions about the jelly scrolling. I've I watched all the the early reviews, like, here's Brian Tong's review, and he was talking about jelly scrolling, and he said it's it's gone. So this is him, like, trying to scroll fast on a thing, like, not there, and then I see other people who will go, like, super slow mo.
Stephen Robles:They're doing, like, 240 frames per second, and you see and by jelly scrolling, what they mean, because it took me a while to understand this. It's, like, if you're scrolling on the screen in portrait mode, the side that you're swiping with your finger moves a little faster than the other side. So if you slow it way down, you see, like, this waviness because the part that you're scrolling with your finger is refreshing slightly faster than the other side. In some of those slow mo videos, I've seen it. Listen.
Stephen Robles:Here's the bottom line. I really don't think it matters.
Jason Aten:Here's the thing. Apple makes a lot of iPads. And if this bothers you, buy one of the OLED ones.
Stephen Robles:Okay. So I will say
Jason Aten:No. No. Really. Like, who's buying a $500 iPad mini? Like, that's like saying, well, the Kindle is great, but, you know, the refresh is pretty slow.
Jason Aten:It's e ink.
Stephen Robles:I know. And this well, I will say, I think Dave David Pearcey, you know, he wrote the review for The Verge. I do think there is a question of where is the iPad Mini in the, like, entry level to Pro model. I think, you know, you have the base model iPad 10th gen, iPad Air or iPad Pro. Does the iPad Mini fit in between the iPad Air and the iPad Pro, or does it fit in between the base model and the iPad Air?
Stephen Robles:Because it uses the Apple Pencil Pro, which the base model doesn't, and it's kind of priced more like an iPad Air, even though it's a smaller screen, but it doesn't have, like, the camera well, the camera's in portrait, which I feel like for the iPad mini of any iPad makes the most sense because you're probably gonna hold it like this. So I don't know. I mean, is it is that confusing? Like, where it is in the lineup?
Jason Aten:I don't really understand the rationale other than like this is a it is okay. Yes. It's confusing because it's just the iPad mini. So you would think that it's a less version of the iPad, right? It's not the iPad air mini.
Jason Aten:Right? The iPad mini. Right. Well, it's definitely not the iPad pro mini. But I mean, it's basically like, it's like they call it the iPad mini, but it is sort of an iPad air mini, but it's got a processor in between the 10th gen iPad and the M2 iPad air.
Jason Aten:So in that sense, it is kind of confusing. Also, honestly, this thing is way over specked for the normal uses you would use this for because you used to edit podcasts. Maybe you still do in fair, right? On the previous a 15 Bionic, and it was fine. Right?
Jason Aten:Like, have you ever had a problem?
Stephen Robles:Yeah. It was fine, but you do sense the slowness sometimes. And so I'm curious to try it on this new one because master processor. But
Jason Aten:I'm sure it'll be great. It'll be basic I mean, because it's essentially an m 2, but the iPhone version. Right?
Stephen Robles:Like, so,
Jason Aten:I mean, it'll be just no. Actually, it's the m 3, but the iPhone version.
Stephen Robles:Oh, yeah. That is yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's right.
Jason Aten:So, I mean, it's gonna be just fine. It's gonna be able to handle it. I think I think that the what's I wish they would for the price. $500 is kind of pricey for something that looks like, I don't know, like, where do you, what does this compete with? Is it a small iPad or is it a really nice content consumption device?
Jason Aten:Because they, like, it could use some updates to things like the display. And I don't mean the jelly scrolling. I'm just like
Stephen Robles:Refresh rates. I don't know. The refresh rate.
Jason Aten:The refresh rate or make it OLED and charge an extra $100 or something. I don't know.
Stephen Robles:Here here's where I'm at. I'm gonna try and precariously present 3 devices at once on screen here. Okay? Here is this is not gonna end well.
Jason Aten:Oh my gosh. Here's The scratches on all those devices right now.
Stephen Robles:Here is the iPhone 16 Pro Max with the iPad mini with the 11 inch iPad Pro. Now I understand not everyone has all these devices, but I love the 11 inch iPad Pro. It is one of my favorite devices. I edit this podcast, the audio version, on that iPad every week. There's not really a reason for me to also have a mini.
Stephen Robles:And, like, maybe that's obvious, but I I think that goes to what iPad is for who or which iPad is for whom. You know, if you wanna do work on an iPad, like you wanna dock it, or connect to an external display, or use a Bluetooth keyboard, like, you need to get iPad Air or iPad Pro. Like, you need to do that. If you're not doing work work and you're doing content consumption, well, you probably want a bigger screen. Like, maybe the 11 inch, iPad Air is actually a better option anyway.
Stephen Robles:So what is this left to do? Read. Sure. That's great. I'm getting a Kindle Colorsoft next week, and I have a sneaking suspicion that that will be a better reading experience than this because it's e ink, and my eyes are not gonna be as, you know, whatever.
Stephen Robles:So I'm I'm gonna edit podcasts on the mini because I wanna feel what that is like, and I'm gonna compare it to my iPad Pro. I have a feeling it's gonna be the same thing I said last time, like, I miss the higher refresh rate because when I scroll in a podcast and I'm looking at waveforms, refresh rate matters. And then it's like, I don't know. I don't I don't know what I would do with this. You know what I'm saying?
Jason Aten:Send it back?
Stephen Robles:Well, you know, that. But it is great as it like, I the the lightness and the thinness is one of the reasons why I loved editing podcasts on this for a long time, because I'm holding it for over an hour when I'm editing a podcast. A lot nicer to hold this than an 11 inch iPad Pro, but I don't know. Aluminum chopper
Jason Aten:pro Is it though? Yeah. It
Stephen Robles:is. Here's the thing. First of all, you know what to do
Jason Aten:with this. I'm sure there's a spot next to the Rabbit r one and the HumanAI pin just for this device, and I promise this will be much more useful for you in the long run. True. But, like, honestly, then, like, I've got the 11 inch iPad Air. I also have a 13 inch iPad Air and the m 41.
Jason Aten:The the standard has been put, like, they made these things pretty thin, the m 4 iPad. They're not like that heavy. So I don't know. I I actually really like the iPad mini. I put in that review.
Jason Aten:It is the perfect device to be sitting out, like waiting for a soccer practice to finish or whatever, because it's small. You don't look like you're just sitting there with an iPad. I can't believe you're doing that, that that 13 inch or that whatever that bottom one is, it's gonna have a
Stephen Robles:I just wanna I'm just trying to show that the 11 inch M4 iPad Pro is thinner than the new mini.
Jason Aten:Yes. I'm just And the, 13 inch is even thinner than both of those.
Stephen Robles:That is true.
Jason Aten:Anyway Oh,
Stephen Robles:okay. But okay. Let let me ask you this, Jason. If someone has 0 iPad, maybe they have a Mac and an iPhone, do you suggest this as the iPad they should get?
Jason Aten:11 inch iPad Air.
Stephen Robles:Okay.
Jason Aten:Hands down. 100% of the time.
Stephen Robles:So and okay. That's scenario 1. The mini didn't make it. Scenario No. Scenario 2.
Stephen Robles:Someone has a Mac, a 13 inch iPad Air, maybe they just got it, and an iPhone. Do they should they buy the Mini?
Jason Aten:No. No. Probably. This is for pilots, Steven,
Stephen Robles:and doctors. Pilots.
Jason Aten:Pilots and doctors. They carry that.
Stephen Robles:It's the perfect size to put
Jason Aten:in a white coat or to strap to your leg. And if you are not carrying things in a white coat or strapping things to your leg, you should just buy an iPad Air.
Stephen Robles:I think it's honestly, I think that's that's the review right there. It should have been one sentence. If you're a pilot, you're a doctor. I have heard that, like, this is the perfect lab coat doctor iPad. It is.
Stephen Robles:Okay.
Jason Aten:That's great. I have heard it said that this is the perfect size for putting in a into a white doctor's lab coat.
Stephen Robles:There you go. But you did I will put the link to your review in the show notes because I think as you said in the review, like, if you're looking at year over year, it the chip is faster, but, really, it's Apple intelligence.
Jason Aten:They just wanted to be able to say, like, that all of these devices are capable, and you can't although I will say like, for people who like the iPad Mini, I actually think this is a good sign even though this is kind of a as minimum of an update as you could possibly make to make sure that this thing will be able to run Apple Intelligence. Right? That's basically what this is, but it's a good sign because it could have just been like, yeah, we're just the iPad Mini is never gonna come to Apple Intelligence. It's no longer going to be a product in our life. They could have home potted it.
Jason Aten:Right?
Stephen Robles:Like they
Jason Aten:could have just let it just lay out there and just be whatever. The fact that they wanted people to be able to take advantage of apple intelligence on the iPad mini says they plan to continue the iPad mini. So that I think is a good thing. Maybe in a year or 18 months or 3 years, we'll get something better. Like I think, you know, if we can get OLED in a switch, I feel like at some point they could be like, actually the iPad mini is amazing.
Jason Aten:Here's an OLED version because we know that people use them to read a lot. Like, I don't know. Like, so I do think it's a good idea, but the whole reason that they did this is just because they need everything to be on Apple intelligence. And it's a weird story for them to be telling. I don't know about the base iPad.
Jason Aten:I think it's just about pretty likely that that's gonna just not ever gonna get, you know, I mean, eventually it'll get a processor capable of it. At this point, they sell so many of them to schools and I don't think they would wanna keep making that many a 17 pros. But maybe next year when the a 18 is available as a processor that they could stick in the base iPad, that wouldn't surprise me. But I also wouldn't be terribly surprised if they don't because I think that the base iPad at this point is the only thing that doesn't natively remote run other than your watch, which whatever in your home pods, which again, whatever.
Stephen Robles:Although the voice assistant on the home pods, it would be nice if I could, like, ask my HomePod things and if it, like, fell back to chat GPT, like, it could do that, that would be nice. That'd be kinda cool.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I think that the HomePods, I feel like that the they, they don't need apple intelligence. They just need the better version of Siri. Right. And I think that they can, what I put in my review is that I think that they can accomplish that in the future without having to stick an M series equivalent processor into them because they're never gonna put an m series processor in an I in an I or a HomePod mini.
Jason Aten:Like, you know, one's gonna pay $600 for a HomePod mini.
Stephen Robles:Those m ones, though, there there still gotta be a lot of m ones lying around. Put an m one in there.
Jason Aten:I mean, they are putting them in a MacBook Air that they're selling at Walmart That's
Stephen Robles:what I'm saying.
Jason Aten:Which I I would not be surprised if the m one MacBook Air is still the best selling MacBook Air because they're selling it at Walmart for $749. Yeah. Man, if those things go on sale, I would just by the way, I will say for anyone who is thinking of buying the new, iPad mini or has an iPad Air, one of the m twos or an m 4, I did this I had to buy a new pencil pro because did I tell you I ran over mine? No. I couldn't find it.
Jason Aten:I couldn't find it for a phone. The wheels better now, but it did. Anyway, I couldn't find it for like 3 days. And then I pulled back somewhere and I looked down on the ground and it was just laying there on the ground. Like it had been there for like 4 days.
Jason Aten:And, it worked for a few days and then it will, it will attach in pair and charge, but it the squeeze doesn't work and neither does, like, any of the interaction. I had to buy, but the reason I'm saying that is at Walmart, the pencil pro right now, $94.
Stephen Robles:Okay. Wait. Wait. Wait a minute. So it was an Apple pencil pro that you ran over?
Jason Aten:Yeah.
Stephen Robles:In what scenario were you walking to your car that the pencil pro could have just fallen off?
Jason Aten:I have absolutely no idea. Were you
Stephen Robles:just carrying your iPad, like, naked with the pencil on?
Jason Aten:I walk out to the car with it like this.
Stephen Robles:In your ear?
Jason Aten:No. I'm kidding. Okay. I've never done that.
Stephen Robles:Next level. Okay.
Jason Aten:I have no idea how it ended up on the ground. I have no idea if, like, I was carrying I don't remember obviously dropping it, but whatever. It it my only reason for saying that was not for you to make fun of me. It was to say for our listeners, you can get the pencil pro right now for $94 at Walmart.
Stephen Robles:That's pretty good. That's a good deal. I think Amazon has an m 2 MacBook Air for, like, cheap too right now, like, $700 or something.
Jason Aten:That's a great deal.
Stephen Robles:Great deal.
Jason Aten:Oh, $700. That's even better than the m one is at Walmart right now.
Stephen Robles:Hold on. Let me put an affiliate link in the show notes if I could find it. I think I saw somewhere that it was, like, crazy crazy cheap M2 MacBook Air which is like, you know, the redesigned MacBook Air. Oh no. 8 no.
Stephen Robles:$700. 700.
Jason Aten:That is actually amazing.
Stephen Robles:$700. You can get the M2 which was the redesigned one. It's the 256 SSD version, 8 gigs unified memory, but $700.
Jason Aten:Also it's also only the the Midnight. Oh, no. The Silver is too. Okay. But the apparently, if you buy oh, the space gray, you cannot get it's it's for some reason $200.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Space space gray is more expensive. Oh, no. You can apply a coupon. There's a coupon I can apply, and that also goes down to okay.
Stephen Robles:Listen. If you were if you were looking if you were in the market for an M2 MacBook Air, let me just tell you. There's gonna be a link in the show notes. It's an affiliate link. I'm gonna be real.
Stephen Robles:Use that link. That is a great deal. Great deal.
Jason Aten:For 200 yeah. And I mean, if you get the 512 version, it's full price.
Stephen Robles:Right. Yeah. It's it's only for the base base model, but anyway, Christmas somebody somebody would love that as a Christmas present. Just saying. Our last Apple Intelligence thing.
Stephen Robles:Craig Federighi did an interview with Joanna Stern from the Wall Street Journal all about Apple Intelligence. The, one question that I would have asked Craig as a follow-up, he said that he asks the voice assistant to open his garage. I just gotta know, what HomeKit garage door opener does he use? I just wanna know. Is it the Maris?
Stephen Robles:Is it something different? I gotta know. So anyway, that's what I wanna know.
Jason Aten:It's a Raspberry Pi.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. Craig Federico might do that, you know, he's he's
Jason Aten:I'm saying, he's got a custom boutique, you know. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:He can do that. He does that kind of stuff. But I mean, it was all about Apple Intelligence and Joanna Stern how it talks about how like they're late to the game or whatever and the look on Craig's face was like hilarious. She's like Apple Intelligence, you know, it's way it's behind all the other ones. And he kind of gives this look of like, you know, but anyway.
Stephen Robles:It was a interesting interview basically talking about the reason why Apple was later to all this stuff is because they want it to be private and secure and they're trying to make it the most useful that it can be, rather than other companies just kind of, like, running with it. You didn't really say anything, like, newsworthy, but I don't know. Anything stand out to you?
Jason Aten:Well, and about the late thing, I think Federighi's point was they could've just rolled out a chatbot. Right. Which is essentially what he's saying Gemini is and Chad GPT is, which I don't especially in the case of Gemini, I'm not sure that's entirely fair. But his point was what we want we didn't wanna do I think his quote was something like, we didn't just wanna bolt it onto the side of our existing experience, which is funny because they literally just bolted on chat GPT to the existing experience. Like That is true.
Jason Aten:We didn't wanna bolt our own thing on. So we just went out and bought one off the shelf and we just bolted that on.
Stephen Robles:There's the there's the face by the way, when she said you guys are late,
Jason Aten:that's the face. But I do think that I I think there's some validity in the argument that if we would have wanted to just create a chatbot, we could have done that. Right. And that's fine. But what we wanted to do is figure out how to deep, you know, into deep integration with your information, context aware, that sort of thing.
Jason Aten:And considering how far behind their voice assistant is, it's not super surprising that this is going to take some time to, to, to bring it up to that level. So I don't know. I feel like apple is doing the right thing in terms of their, their privacy focus. They're trying to protect your information while also using it to inform the responses that you get. But again, they have a lot of money.
Jason Aten:They could have just like, why didn't they just buy and Tropic, like, you just take that and build it in or something like that. Like they can't buy, I mean, they could technically, but they can't buy open AI at this point. It's just too right. It's worth $157,000,000,000 Apple's not spending that kind of money on anything. Right.
Jason Aten:And so, but some of the other some of the other op options that are out there, like and a lot of people think that sauna is better Right. At this point than TIGPT. So, like, I feel like you could have gotten there if it had been a high enough priority.
Stephen Robles:Mhmm.
Jason Aten:It just wasn't enough of a priority until too late.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. He did say, like, this is a decades long process, which I was like
Jason Aten:Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Shoot. We might like an advanced theory for another 10 years, but, it's he'll come.
Jason Aten:Maybe what he meant is they, you know, they've known the series been bad for 10 years.
Stephen Robles:Anyway, what is okay. That's that's Apple Intelligence. I think we did 15 minutes on Apple Intelligence. I wanna talk about the AirPods Pro 2 hearing thing, because with the 18 dot one release candidate, which everyone will be able to do on Monday, it's coming out to to everyone. You can do the hearing test, and so I did the hearing test with my AirPods Pro 2, and this was actually my results.
Stephen Robles:I have not done a hearing test, I don't even know, for the last time, year decades probably. And so being a musician and someone who, like, sometimes reviews audio stuff like Sonos and HomePods, I was like, I really hope my hearing is is still good so I can continue to trust my ears. It turns out, I'm alright. It, you know, it tells you gives you this little graph for your left and your right ear, it tells you whether you have little to no loss or more loss, and doing alright I will say the test, like, I started taking the test at one point, and there were, like, people in the house, like, my kids were around, and, like, I heard their voices in the distance, and I was immediately, like, immediately, like, nope, I'm not doing it. I want I'm taking this test in complete silence with zero interruptions, because I want to know I wanna know beyond the shadow of a doubt what my hearing is.
Stephen Robles:And so I waited till everybody was out of the house, and then you take this test, so, you know, it checks the fit of your AirPods, and it plays some, like, beeps, And the beeps are random. They're at different frequencies, so you can can't really, like, game the system. And basically, they get very, very quiet. And I I don't know about you. Tell me what your experience was like.
Stephen Robles:But for me, I held my breath, like, 90% of the time, because I found even my breathing was like I hear my breathing and I don't want that to throw off whether I can hear the beeps, and so I was like just and it's a lot, like, it's a 5 minute process, because it tests both ear it tests the left ear and then the right ear separately, all kinds of beeps. And so I was, like, holding my breath, but I did okay. Did it was that nerve wracking for you?
Jason Aten:I don't think it was nerve wracking, but, again, I already knew that I have hearing loss in my left ear. So I wasn't, like, I wasn't gonna be surprised by whether or not, like, it was going to, like, I don't feel like that's a one. It's not like I got some kind of a fatal diagnosis, but also 2, there's no surprise. And 3, like hearing loss of some degree is normal. It is not like an infant.
Jason Aten:It doesn't make a person broken or inferior just because they have some kind of, and for me, like knowing that in the past, like the re the way we discovered I have hearing loss in my left ear is that I would most of the time sleep with my right ear against the pillow and our kids would frequently, especially when they were younger, they would like cry or whatever. And I would never hear anything. And my wife would get so mad because she's like, why don't you ever get up? And I would, I just literally wouldn't hear anything. And so I finally I'm like, I wonder what happens if I sleep on the, I hear everything.
Jason Aten:I'm going back to the other side. Forget this. I couldn't, I need my sleep.
Stephen Robles:I always roll out that side. I don't know what to tell you.
Jason Aten:So I, it was not, it didn't come as a surprise to me at all, but it was actually when I first, I first took a hearing test on my, iPhone back in January with a third party Mimi, I think is the app that I used. And because I wanted to know I wanted to, like, quantify and know, like, how bad is it. And according to Apple's test and according to that one, I have what's called mild hearing loss in my left ear.
Stephen Robles:Okay. So and this was your graph. And so that is considered mild. Right? If it's, like, more than 25 decibel loss, I think, if they call it mild.
Jason Aten:And it's from, like, 20 to 50 or something like that.
Stephen Robles:So it's
Jason Aten:not like a percentage. It doesn't mean I've lost 27% in my Right. My ear. And so, and so I set up the hearing aid thing. I, what I don't know about the hearing aid, I need to test it a little bit more is, and again, with mild hearing loss, it's not going to give me a dramatic difference.
Jason Aten:Right.
Stephen Robles:Like it's
Jason Aten:not going to be huge change, but I don't know for sure. Do I have to wear them both in order for it to even work? You know, if I'm only wearing the left one, is it going to do anything? Because there are some, there are some modes on the eye, like, you know, obviously noise cancellation doesn't work unless you have them both in. Right?
Jason Aten:Unless have you ever had that thing where they they glitch and you've only got one in and then something goes into the noise canceling and you're like, what's happened to me?
Stephen Robles:Like, it is super weird, but I've also done that on purpose sometimes because you can, like, just put 1 AirPod. You have to actually enable this in settings. You can enable noise cancellation just individually. And sometimes, like, if I'm listening to a podcast and I don't wanna listen to it loud because hearing and everything, I will enable noise canceling on that one AirPod, but still have this ear open, and I can still hear what they're saying because it's canceling the one ear, but I can still hear more of the world out there. So, anyway.
Jason Aten:Well, I was the the the experience that I had, though, was that when you when I have them both in and I have basically transparency mode on
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:It's it seems to be exponentially better than transparency mode was even a couple weeks ago because it doesn't feel like you have a mode happening.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:It feels more natural. Like it used to be that if you went from noise canceling to transparency, all of a sudden it was like, it felt like you were listening to the world through like a tin can ish. Like, it was just you could tell. You could tell that it was artificial. Feels a lot more natural, and it might just be because now it's applying that hearing aid setting.
Jason Aten:Right. Like, or the whatever the profile is.
Stephen Robles:Right. The
Jason Aten:profile. Boosting the right frequencies. So
Stephen Robles:And it is true. Yeah. I'll be curious if it works with just one end. But, mean, it's great that you have these features and especially, like this sounds strange, but I go when I go to clean my car, the vacuums that they have and, like, the the thing, like, they're very loud vacuums. Yep.
Stephen Robles:And, like, especially if you when you get it close to the carpet and it has, like, the it just breaks that seal or whatever. It's very loud and high pitched. And so I I wear my AirPods Pro to, like, just cancel that out, because because hearing. You only get 1, one hearing, you know? So that's not good grammar, but anyway
Jason Aten:You only get one hearing. You only
Stephen Robles:get one hearing. See, but that's a test everybody could take with 18 dot 1, which comes out next week. I also wanna mention, this was interesting, the Vimeo app, which is coming to Apple Vision Pro before the YouTube app, just throwing that out there. The Vimeo app is coming first and you will be able to publish as a creator spatial videos to the platform, and then other people can watch the spatial videos in the Vimeo app. And so as far as I can tell, this seems like the first time when there's kind of a full ecosystem where someone can create spatial videos and someone else can watch those spatial videos all in the Apple Vision Pro.
Stephen Robles:And I I mean, I feel like I don't know where YouTube is on that because YouTube has already had, like, 3 60 videos and 3 d type things. I don't know why it's taking them so long or so resistant to it, but cool on Vimeo for doing that, and I kinda wanna try it to see you know, you can film it on your phone, and then just publish it to Vimeo or whatever. So I have to see what the whole process is like, but cool. That's cool.
Jason Aten:Yep.
Stephen Robles:Another reason to to to put it on. Do you still wear it every day?
Jason Aten:Every day.
Stephen Robles:Every day. Amazing.
Jason Aten:We've already rehashed this, so I won't go too far over it. But, like, I was using Juno the other day, and, like, this is, like, the best discontinued app. Oh,
Stephen Robles:I know.
Jason Aten:That is, I mean, I guess, I guess he has a history of making very good discontinued apps. No, none of them are his fault. Like he's not like Google who just kills things that people actually like, like Google reader or whatever. But, but I do think like it is a, it's a great experience for using YouTube far better. I promise you it's better than whatever YouTube will make.
Stephen Robles:I pro yes. Yes. Probably.
Jason Aten:And I'm just so glad that even though you can't get it, that it's still on my
Stephen Robles:It's still on mine too. That was just a great yeah. I did watch Submerged, which is Apple's Finally. Yeah. Finally.
Stephen Robles:I watched it, Apple's first scripted immersive short film. It's like 15 minutes. And it's a fictional story about this submarine crew, basically, and they get hit by a torpedo and, you know, all the chaos ensues and the whole Spoilers. Spoiler alert. I mean, you can look at the the picture in the thing and you could tell, like, okay, water is rushing in, you know, but, so I watched it.
Stephen Robles:You watched it too. Mhmm. I don't know. What do you what do you think about it? What do you think?
Jason Aten:I so if okay. I think it was very well done.
Stephen Robles:Yeah.
Jason Aten:I think it's really, I kind of had the same sort of thought originally as I did with like the Gucci thing where it's like, this is a thing you could only do with this sort of a pop. I mean, you could do it with like a Oculus or something like that too, but like with this sort of, experience. Exactly. And so I really liked that it did feel a little bit like what's the most obvious thing you would do if you had someone in a headset and wanted them to be immersive, that put them in a submarine that's filling up with water.
Stephen Robles:It
Jason Aten:did feel a little bit like that's the environment that would be best impactful, you know, as opposed to like put them in a butterfly garden. I mean, that would be cool. But anyway, they're trying to make a movie that people, I, I it's only 17 minutes long. So I don't know if that's the length of maximum, like it's so much work to make this thing. Like, I mean, it is a, there's like some kind of a ratio to how much work does it, you know, the, if you spend for an hour of video, 10 hours of editing, right?
Jason Aten:Like, is it for a vision pro immersive experience, 60 hours of editing? And so like, you have to like, I don't know. Like, it just seems very complicated, but I thought it was cool. I thought the story was like, it was good. It seemed well done.
Jason Aten:I didn't like the fact that even though it was immersive and you could look around the depth of field still felt cinematic. Right. Which is not the way it would feel if you were standing there.
Stephen Robles:That's a good point. Yeah.
Jason Aten:If I'm just looking at the guy who's super close to me and I look over there, I should be able to see what's over there. And if I'm looking at something that's really close to me, everything else is gonna be blurry, but not that blurry. It's not Right. Like, my eyes are not seeing the world at
Stephen Robles:f 1.4.
Jason Aten:That is
Stephen Robles:like That is interesting. Yeah. There were moments where I was, like, you know, being immersive, you can choose where to look, and so you can look at not the main character or you can look at a side character. And there were times where I was, like, at the beginning, they're all in their bunks, and I was kinda looking, and I was, like, I wanna see more of what that guy is doing, and and it is, like, kinda blurry. It did feel super short.
Stephen Robles:When it ended, I was like, for real? Like, it did feel like, wow, that's yeah. If you're gonna like, if I'm gonna sit and watch a movie, you expect it to be longer. But I will say, I think it is a great proof of concept, because if you made a movie with, like, well known actors and actresses that people really wanna see, like if you made a movie with Brad Pitt or whatever or I don't know. I can't think of famous actresses right now for some reason.
Stephen Robles:But
Jason Aten:Scarlett Johansson.
Stephen Robles:Scarlett Johansson. Yeah.
Jason Aten:Let me hand help you out here.
Stephen Robles:Or like a yeah. Like a Marvel movie. Like, if you made something like that in an immersive way where it felt like you're really in the room with some of these people, I think that would be super compelling, and I think people would wanna see it. One other thing that I actually, let my father-in-law try the Apple Vision Pro for the first time. He's super sports into sports, all the sports.
Stephen Robles:And so with the basketball all star thing, that's one of the immersive videos you can watch. Now I had him try it, and it was, you know, fun to see him experience it for the first time. Like, he thought a basketball was, like, gonna hit him, and so he, like, dodged, you know? And he was, like, woah, that feels real. And And so that was a cool experience.
Stephen Robles:But when he when he was done, he was, like, so what else is there? And I was, like, well, this looks kind of it. Like, you can watch some Super Bowl highlights and, that's about it. Looks like, can I watch, like, the World Series, or can I watch, like, is can I watch anything live? And I was, like, no.
Stephen Robles:There's nothing live. And so so there is, like, that disconnect of, like, okay, well, that was a cool demo. If I'm going to actually put this on my face more often, people want regular content like that. And I think if and when we get to that day, which one of the articles that I saw recently was The Verge reported that Apple was, like, slowing production on Apple Vision Pros. You know, I think it has to have that regularity where, like, you know, the World Series, Yankees, Dodgers, sportsball, like, I'm kind of interested in that because I'm from New York, and I think it's a big rivalry.
Stephen Robles:Like, that would be amazing, and I was I explained to my father-in-law, like, imagine if you could, like, be behind the catcher, and it feel like it just felt in that all star basketball highlight, and then you feel like you're there, and you could feel like you're at first base, and you feel like you're right in front of these people, like, I think that would be an awesome experience, but we're just so far from that kind of, like, live event, multi angle, even maybe even, like, choose your own adventure kind of thing, like, choose where you wanna sit, and there'd be different I don't know. I don't know if it's a money thing, time, effort thing, but that that would be really cool. I just I don't know how far away that is.
Jason Aten:Yeah. And I don't I I I know people talk about the sports thing. I think it would be kinda cool to be like, oh, I'm sitting along the 1st base line at whatever Yankee Stadium or something like that. I don't know. Like, we're so used to seeing baseball, for example, from a certain perspective on television.
Jason Aten:Like, I actually feel like that might feel less real than what we're used to. I don't know that it'll feel like being there. What we need is like event horizon in this. Can you imagine how terrifying that movie would be? Or like or like passengers, you know, like the Jennifer or something.
Jason Aten:Well, but like, I was thinking like, because if yeah. So apparently anything in space gravity, like, let's just give me a movie. But I think that the challenge is when they made event horizon, they made it for a large flat screen. How do you you can't do like, you can't watch, submerged just in the Apple TV app on your computer. Like, you can only watch it in the vision prop because they made it, like with that immersive type of, not just with that intent, but like with that technology, you can't just flatten that out into a 2 d thing.
Jason Aten:And so it's gonna be, I don't, I don't know. Like, will we ever get there? One, we're only gonna get there. If like, if apple puts the apple TV app on the Oculus, for example, and you can start watching stuff like that on those other platforms, because there just is not enough money behind making feature films or those feature experiences for such a small audience of people. Yeah.
Jason Aten:But you're never gonna grow that audience if you don't have that kind of stuff. And so I feel like Yeah. At some point, they they just put the TV up in Amazon Prime. Like, put it on the Oculus. Like, is it on the I I
Stephen Robles:don't think so.
Jason Aten:Seems like a no brainer that why isn't it on the Oculus?
Stephen Robles:Right. And I know it's like original content and they're trying to gear for their Vision Pro, but I feel like yeah. Yeah. I think you're right. I mean, I'm just
Jason Aten:But put it in the TV app. You have you
Stephen Robles:you get more subscribers. That is true. Yeah. Because the TV app, you can get it on, like, whatever smart TVs now. You can get it anywhere.
Jason Aten:You can literally subscribe to it in Amazon Prime now.
Stephen Robles:Like, come on. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No.
Stephen Robles:That's that's fair enough. A couple quick things. I wanna talk about passkeys just for a minute. Anthropic announced their latest version of Claude now has the ability to control computers. So this is kind of, like, the Rabbit r one promise.
Jason Aten:Like a specific computer, not like it can control all of the computers. I just wanna clarify for our audience.
Stephen Robles:The Anthropic announced the end of the world.
Jason Aten:No. The Skynet is here.
Stephen Robles:Yes. It is an API where you can build in and Claude can then take actions on a, like, computer like virtual machine. So basically, you could build something that uses the DoorDash website or uses Amazon maybe, and then build this kind of AI that does these things. And it literally was, like, kind of the promise of the Rabbit r one's large action model because that what that's what rabbit was doing. Like it was using the DoorDash website on your behalf and just taking your commands and transposing them to that.
Stephen Robles:But this is now Anthropic doing it, making it open so developers could actually, like, use it, And, you know, who knows? Maybe this will actually, you know, start using as this is like the agent type thing where you could almost have like a virtual travel agent that if they can use the Delta website and the Hilton website, they could book stuff for you. You know, maybe. That's kind of the future of it, but it it's here. Anthropic has done it.
Stephen Robles:There.
Jason Aten:Yeah. I don't think this is gonna happen.
Stephen Robles:Oh, okay. Well, there you go.
Jason Aten:Now let me explain. So they say, like, Asana, Canva, Cognition, I don't know what that is. DoorDash. Yeah. Browser company.
Jason Aten:Yeah. Have already started to explore these possibilities. Okay, fine. Here's the thing. DoorDash doesn't want to just become a commodity provider of a service.
Jason Aten:Right. They want to have a customer relationship. And essentially what this is doing is, is like abstracting away those customer relationships, because now you just become like an API service and none of the, like, none of those companies want to be that right. Like they, they want to have a customer relationship because that's how you like, otherwise you're not going to care if the food shows up at your house right now. Like right now you might use Grubhub or Uber eats or DoorDash.
Jason Aten:Maybe you use all 3 of them at different times. Right. But you do that for different purposes, but you like you, there's a brand recognition. And if all you have to do is tell Claude, you know, send me a burger or whatever like that, then I, and I think that's part of the reason that rabbit has had such a hard time is that there's like, Spotify doesn't have an API that they can use to do this. And so they had to try to hack their way to doing whatever it was that they were trying to do.
Jason Aten:But the computer, like, Spotify can make that, like, impossible. They just could literally subtly change the interface every day. They
Stephen Robles:can move a button 10 pixels and it ruined.
Jason Aten:Every day. They could just do that, and this just doesn't work.
Stephen Robles:Right. So it would it would be a major cat and mouse game. I imagine maybe website in the code you can block certain crawlers or like I don't know how this appears as like a user to the actual company's website. But, yeah, it is gonna be a a cat and mouse thing. But
Jason Aten:I mean, I think it's as a user, the thing we want, a 100%. Right. It's the thing that we want. I'm just saying that there's little incentive for any of these companies. Someone has to be able to make the case.
Jason Aten:And I think Apple with Apple intelligence might be the type of company that can make the case because the distribution, like there's a 2,000,000,000 iPhones or whatever in the world. And then most of them can't run Apple intelligence. But the point is that they're eventually those people will upgrade. So you're, you're looking at a huge user base because it's like, if you're the DoorDash or if you're the delivery service that's built into apple intelligence, you get all of that business. Right.
Jason Aten:And you might be willing to say, I don't care about the customer relationships. Just send me, send me burger orders. And that's fine. But you wouldn't do that for like anthropic because the user base is so small.
Stephen Robles:Right. Right. We'll see. I have not had do you have used, like, Claude and stuff instead of chat g p t?
Jason Aten:Like Yeah. It's definitely better. But most of the time, I just use chat g p t because it's the because it's the app I have on my computer. Like it's just there. I mean, I like, I have the chat GPT app that I think the model is generally better.
Jason Aten:I think as a product, it's not as good because I think Chad GPT has nailed the product part of it. Like I have, like I have an app. I can just open the app and it has all my previous things. I can go back into one of my previous things and I can ask it a question and it just goes back and sends all those tokens again. So, and I can, so, yeah, I don't know.
Jason Aten:I just, does
Stephen Robles:it have, do you know if it has shortcuts actions, Claude? Claude is the Well, I
Jason Aten:don't think it's an app.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. You can
Jason Aten:download Yeah. You can download an app.
Stephen Robles:I'm downloading it right now.
Jason Aten:Claude Bambi. You know, maybe I do have an iPhone app for it. You're right. I think I I've downloaded it.
Stephen Robles:Claude by Anthropic is the app. I'm opening the app here on my phone. I like their font and stuff.
Jason Aten:I do have it.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. I think you have to probably, have to sign up to see if there's actually shortcuts actions, but you know because that again that's a majority of my HttpT usage is just shortcuts actions. Let me see. No shortcuts actions that I could see yet. Well, never mind.
Stephen Robles:Alright, real quick. You're dead to me. You're dead to me. Severance season 2. They released this trailer.
Stephen Robles:I just have to say this is like one of the craziest trailers and it's amazing. Terrifying. I'm both excited and hesitant. The camerawork on this trailer is wild. I mean, if they did this in, like, an immersive type way, that'd be well, you'd be safe.
Stephen Robles:You'd
Jason Aten:be safe.
Stephen Robles:Yeah. You'd be safe. But, oh my goodness, like, I yeah. Did you watch you watched the 1st season. Right?
Jason Aten:I have not yet
Stephen Robles:seen it. What?
Jason Aten:Steven, I don't have time to watch it.
Stephen Robles:Don't tell me that. You say you watch a Friends every night. Don't tell me
Jason Aten:20 minutes. That's it. 20 minutes.
Stephen Robles:So what? You can watch an episode over 2 days. You can pause it. Do you think I'm gonna watch Severin's before I fall asleep? Yeah.
Stephen Robles:Well, I think so. I think it's pretty good.
Jason Aten:No. I think you should watch it. I'm not watching I wanna I don't wanna watch anything that requires me to think or feel. Well Laugh is fine, but that's it.
Stephen Robles:I think you should watch Severance. We can have a waffle party. Only Severance watchers will get that. That is that was terrible.
Jason Aten:Didn't know the waffles get recalled because of, like, e coli or something. Like, egg That's a real thing that's happening right now. Like, all the frozen waffles.
Stephen Robles:Oh, I think so. Yeah. I think I did see that. Yeah. Yeah.
Stephen Robles:We're breaking waffle news here on a primary tech. Okay. Last thing, personal tech. I wanna talk about passkeys and passwords. David Hanemeyer Hansen, who's Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, actually interviewed him on the Apple Insider podcast several years ago.
Stephen Robles:He talked about passkeys and the issue with passkeys, which they're supposed to kind of be a universal simplifying and bettering security for everyone's logins. And Jon Gruber then reshared David Hennemeyer Hansen's article saying, like, yeah, passkeys may be not great. And I was just curious your experience with passkeys, Jason. Once they were announced, Apple announced this, like, www.dc 3 2 or 3 years ago. And I was, like, this is amazing.
Stephen Robles:Just bio authentication for everything. I want a passkey everywhere. And there are a lot of websites that support it. I mean, Google supports passkeys. Obviously, Apple does.
Stephen Robles:Things like Best Buy supposedly support passkeys. I love the PlayStation app when I approved time for my son playing. And, you know, the promise is scan your face and you're good to go. There have been times when passkeys fail for whatever reason for me, whether it's, like, the beta on my phone causing the passkey to fail, or Best Buy, like, I'm trying to log in on my Mac, and the passkey, like, doesn't work sometimes. It's rare, but then I do find it becomes pretty cumbersome to try and log in.
Stephen Robles:A lot of times, there's still the username, password, 2 factor authentication method you can use alongside with the passkeys, and I do knowing I do like knowing I have that option for whatever it is that I need to log in with. But I do think it is kind of confusing, and I'm also big on redundancy. And so for all my two factor authentication codes, I used to always set them up in Icloud passwords and 1 password. More so I've just been setting up in Icloud passwords. But even the 2 factor authentication code, you can, like, back that up to, like, a text file, print that out, and put it in a safe, because it's really just like a the token is just a string of text, and you can always, like, manually add that back as the 2 factor code for a login.
Stephen Robles:Passkey is not like that. It's literally bio authentication. It does sync. Like, if you put a passkey in your Icloud passwords, it will sync across your devices, but it's not as, like, backupable, I think, as as 2 factor authentication code. So I don't know.
Stephen Robles:What what has been your experience? Do you try to lean into the passkeys, or are you kinda like, you know what?
Jason Aten:Yeah. Whatever. I I like past keys. I think past keys are sort of the self driving car of security. Here's why.
Jason Aten:Okay. If everyone was in a self driving car everywhere, they'd be exponentially safer probably than human drivers. Right. That's like the argument, like once we get there and if every car is self dry, I don't know that we'll ever get there, but if every car was self driving, they could like communicate with each other and they could not run into each other and they never not be paying attention to that would be great. But the truth is like, that's just not the way the world works.
Jason Aten:If when passkeys work really well, they're seamless to the, and it's just, it's almost like, wait, how come I can see my email? I don't think I signed in. Like, could anyone see my email? It's like, it's, it's just transparent, but when they don't work, like for example, have you ever tried to use a passkey on the vision pro doesn't work? Nope.
Jason Aten:Can't log into Google with passkey on my vision pro because the vision pro doesn't have a passkey saved for, like, Google, for example. And there's no way to scan a QR code with my phone in the vision pro interface. Like, it's just explain how the physics would work. Do I stick the phone up into the the goggles, like, to take the pen? Right.
Jason Aten:So when they don't work, they're, they're a huge, like bad experience for users. But when they do work, I think that they're great. I think, I don't necessarily, well, look, I think D HH has a perspective of someone who's trying to use passkeys as a service provider.
Stephen Robles:Right.
Jason Aten:And there are a lot of work, I guess, for service providers. And his argument was like that. They're like that. They're not, as useful to end users. I think right now the biggest argument against passkeys is they are not portable in the way that passwords are that you just described.
Jason Aten:So if I have all of my passkeys set up in the passwords app on my iPhone, and then my work gives me an Android device, I I no longer have any of my passkeys, and I do have to go through and set them all upwards. If I had a password, even like I could either, even if they were in the passwords app, I could just export those all like you described and put them in 1 password or sponsor, for example. And so that type of a thing, I I understand that argument. My thing is, 1, I don't think that that happens that often for that to be the argument for not doing this. Right?
Jason Aten:I also think that using my phone, which I'm gonna just, you know, bio authenticate as my my authentication device is that's the best case scenario in my mind. So I, I think passkeys are great. Most people are terrible at managing passwords, like super mad. You cannot, the, the best argument for passkeys is you cannot get phished. Right?
Jason Aten:You'll never be asked to enter a passkey because you don't enter anything. But I feel like But you'll never
Stephen Robles:if a login what? Like Best Buy, I have my passkey set up, but I can also just log in with my password and 2 factor authentication. I mean, I feel like you would have to remove that other method in order for it to be totally unphishable. Right?
Jason Aten:So if you're using the Best Buy app and you have a passkey setup, I mean, theoretically, if you have a passkey set up, that company should no long you should not have a password authentication as well.
Stephen Robles:Oh, it does.
Jason Aten:It's one thing to have a backup. So, like, I'm trying to think of there was an example recently. Well, actually, Google does this where you, if your passkey fails, you can be like, send me a 2 factor authentication to my phone. That's different though, than also like, and I actually, I think in a lot of Google accounts, you can still enter your password. That that's great.
Jason Aten:But I think eventually that would go away. Right. I think that's like a necessary transition point at this point. So I don't know. I, I don't, I'm not, I'm not against them the way that D HH is, you know, Gruber wrote about it and he had some perspective on it and, and both he and Ben Thompson were talking to secretary and neither of them are like huge fans.
Jason Aten:But like, again, they also think of like, they think about them from the, like Ben Thompson has passport, which is his whole like backend that manages all of his secretary empire or whatever. And the login flow for that is literally you just type in your email and it sends you the code. Right. So it uses that email flow. So there's no password.
Jason Aten:Like there's no password for that account. They just send you a link in your email and they're essentially outsourcing the security to Gmail or to whatever, which is fine, but what if somebody has your your email
Stephen Robles:password now? That was the other thing I just wanted to say lastly. I despise services and websites that
Jason Aten:Login links.
Stephen Robles:The login links and that and they force you to being the only way to access your account. One is OpusClip. Someone like, you cannot set a password. It is there's no way to set up a password to log in. I find that to be egregious.
Stephen Robles:I do not like the magic links. Sometimes the email doesn't come for a long time. I it it takes longer no matter what. Like, touch ID or face ID to log in with a password and even 2 factor authentication is always gonna be faster than waiting for an email with a login link, and then I don't have to go to my email app and click it. Any service that makes you use the login link via email, thumbs down.
Jason Aten:I mean but you just made the the argument that represents the tension of all security, which is convenience versus, like the security aspect of it. You don't like that, even though it is exponentially more secure than a password, because it's inconvenient for you because that email link doesn't always come, but it is a way, way, way more secure system. And the reason is because it is protected by your email, which is probably Google, which has way better, which you probably have a passkey and a 2 factor set up on. And so you are like way more protected than just some right now again, for like my tech resubscription. If somebody else gets into that, I don't care.
Jason Aten:Like you want to read Ben's articles, Fine. Hack my account. There's nothing important attached to that. Right. So like that, in that case, the security versus inconvenience trade off might not be worth it.
Jason Aten:But if this is your bank or if it's that other time, you know, something like that, best buy maybe because if you have stored payment information, right, you don't want it, want somebody to go in there and order 4 pairs of AirPods max. And I mean, not only do you not want to spend the money, you don't want that on your, I
Stephen Robles:don't want it. My history,
Jason Aten:I'm gonna just spend 4. Yeah. You know what's funny about that? That one of the things I received when I got the review unit of this was something, something, something, and they match your AirPods max. And I was like, is that why these are this color?
Jason Aten:Because it matches the AirPods max colors.
Stephen Robles:Do they match?
Jason Aten:I don't even but there's, like, 2 there's, like, 3 colors of the or I guess there's 4 colors of the, iPad mini anyway.
Stephen Robles:I thought the AirPods Max were slightly more saturated in color than the iPad mini, but who knows? Anyway, well let us know. Passkeys, you can tell you can leave us a 5 star rating and review this week in Apple Podcasts and when you do, just say passkeys, thumbs up, thumbs down, or no. No. Not the passkeys because I feel like there is something good there.
Stephen Robles:The, the login link, like the email magic links, thumbs down. So just thumbs down. You can leave that in the 5 star rating review. Anyway, we're gonna go record a bonus episode. Jason's gonna interview me about reaching a 100 k subscribers on YouTube.
Stephen Robles:So if you want to listen to that bonus episode or just get ad free versions, I have to say I've it's very exciting. We have sponsors, like, every week for the next, like, several months, which is amazing to be there in less than a year. Thank you. Thank you for listening and watching and downloading, and thanks to you. And so we so appreciate that.
Stephen Robles:But if you do wanna add free version of the show and get every bonus episode, including the one we're about to do, you can support the show directly in Apple Podcasts, or you can go to primary tech dot f m and click bonus episodes and sign up through Memberful. Then you get an RSS link you can use in any app that you would like. And we appreciate you watching. You can subscribe at youtube.com/atprimarytechshow. That link is in the show notes as well.
Stephen Robles:Join the community, social.primary tech.ofam, and discuss the episodes and anything else you would like. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. We'll catch you next time. Next time.
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