All right, today is September 22nd, 2024. I think we have autumn. There's a very autumn like over there. No, not especially. It's about 90 degrees out. So not really. But hey, you know, what do you want? That is pretty warm. I'm Todd Gossard. We're a good friend of good Dr. John Westvall. And I want to thank our friends, Swenya Hansen and Steve Hughes for joining us last week to talk about Apple-y things. We've still got Apple-y things to talk about. And the first thing I wanted to mention is that-- so iOS, iOS and iPad, iOS 18.1 beta is available on the public beta channel. It's been available on the developer channel for a while now. And this is the one that adds a few Apple intelligence features, though none of the ones I'm interested in. I guess I have to wait for 18.2 or beyond for that. I'm going to say, where's the AI jack? Yeah, I think that's fair enough. I mean, I think it's coming. I don't think Apple is going to be a vaporware on this. But I have seen a lot of youtubers and such that make their money off of saying, do not ever assume that something's coming if you've not actually seen it coming. And so that's not a bad way to think about it. But yeah, I think it would be very strange if, in this case, Apple just says, yeah, we're not going to bring it out. But it is never a great plan to buy something on the promise of something coming later. But Apple's been doing this more and more. We've seen a lot of things slip to .1 releases of iOS in the last few years. So I think we're at least used to it. Well, even as a former software developer, I have to say it's pretty rough to stay on a year to year schedule where you have a hard date set for September or sometimes October release. And they've stuck to that schedule for a long time now. So one thing I haven't checked to see if our buddy Siri has gotten any smarter. Have you checked Siri? But we can-- Not necessarily. I mean, I'm waiting to see no more than usual. Although my wife did ask her a question today that she got right. It was how fast can a mosquito fly? Because this morning, I had a series of mosquitoes that were getting very annoying to me. Oh, no. But yeah, some mornings, they just come get you. Yeah, they try to eat up. But you're probing and you're wearing a kind of a navy blue or black t-shirt, I think, isn't why. They tend to attract mosquitoes is what I'm told. But let's ask Siri. Hey, Siri, are you smarter now that you're on iOS 18? No. Siri has no comment. It says, I have a lot of information. I'm always seeking more intelligence ways to use it. So I'm going to take that as a note. The two features I'm kind of looking forward to-- there's a generative AI feature that's going to be available in messages that lets you create custom emojis from the text. I'm kind of looking-- I mean, it's not that I do it much. I don't want. But it sounds fun. And the other one I'm looking forward to is not-- I'm not sure why they call it AI. I guess it's apple intelligence, not artificial intelligence. But the ability to record and transcribe phone calls. And I think that's coming out 18.2 or 18.3. We should try a mini podcast using that feature to record and transcribe a mini podcast or something to see how it works. It would be interesting to see if that works as advertised or not. Right. Right. Especially the transcription part, which apparently my speech is not up to par. When I look at transcriptions of what I say, it's like, what? Did I say that? No, I did not say that. Anyhow. OK. The other thing I wanted to mention before we get to a couple of my mini rants and your impressions is I got a new thing to review. It's called a-- is either a Bob Love or Bob Love, Bob Love, D-O-B-L-O-V, a mini camera. And it takes both video and the snapshots. Although it does the snapshots while you're taking a video. And it can do audio only, too, but not snapshot only. So it's got some controls here on the side, which you can see, I think, to switch between modes and to snap a photo and there's a little reset button. And on this side, it's got-- let's see, pointed at the camera. On this side, it's got the on/off switch. And when you're on, you're recording. Yeah. It's like a dash cam. Once it's on, it's on. And it doesn't go off until you physically power it off. And it's got a little USB-C port. Wait, is that a USB-C? No, it's a micro-USB. It's an old-school micro-USB port to get the data off and to charge it. And they provide the cable, fortunately. And finally, it comes with a little TF/SD card slot on the-- I guess that's on your left, or at least it's on my left. And it comes with a 120 gigabyte card. So I think it's-- let's see, what is it? It's a 2 megapixel sensor. So I think it's only recording, like, 1k, maybe 2k. Yeah, it was a 2 megapixel sensor. So maybe a 2k file. And it's not bad, but what I wanted to ask you is one of the things-- the reason I wanted to try this is I'm not ready to buy those Raybann Metas glasses, because I have a prescription, and I have to get a prescription lens and all that kind of fun stuff. I'm really interested in kind of life recording. So this has a clip on it. Actually, it has a clip on both sides. So you can clip it to your pocket if you have one or a shirt. It's not quite wide enough to clip to a belt loop, unfortunately. But it's kind of interesting, but one of the things I notice-- and this is under $100. So it's very low costing. It's very affordable. So instead of the Raybann Metaglasses, I thought, oh, this might be interesting for life recording when you go walking or whatever. But because of its low cost, it doesn't have image stabilization. So it's a very Blair, which shaky cam video, which I can fix in post-production, fortunately. I think your resolve can fix a lot of its stability. Do the Raybans when you do video? Does it have image stabilization or is it pretty sticky? I think it does. It has pretty good image stabilization. It's not perfect, but I've taken videos while walking and while biking with it. And they tend to come up pretty good. But yeah, you do have to think about them in terms of making sure you're not jumping up and down in a sense. I try to minimize my movements when I am using them. So you do kind of a ninja walk. Yeah, for maximum stability. I should also know it has a microphone, which is actually pretty decent. It's this tiny little hole right there. It's a little microphone. And I need to do some audio tests. I haven't done some real good audio tests yet. I'll do some audio tests later to see what the quality is if I can do a walk-and-talk with it, which might be interesting. I'm going to have lunch with some friends tomorrow, so I might test it for that or during that time. OK, so that's this W1 mini camera, which is really, really affordable, except for the micro USB, which is very old school, and the clips. I wish the clips-- I think maybe if I put it in a lanyard, but then it might bounce more. I have to think about this. OK, I have a couple of mini rants before we get to your more interesting topics. And the first is I bought a Surface Pro 11 because I was really interested in the Copilot Plus PC concept this past spring. And I really like it, actually. It's a really nice computer, except for the fact I still can't run the Insta360 video solver for 360 videos. It won't install on it. But yeah, I can print out it now and all of that, so that's getting better. But the problem is I bought the Surface Pro Flex keyboard with the slim pen. This is the aforementioned slim pen. And that's pretty decent, by the way. It's a pretty decent, decent stylus for drawing and writing and so forth. And the keyboard is-- it's a chocolate keyboard, and it's OK for typing. I'm kind of spoiling the mechanical keyboards. The problem is it has-- so Swen bought the more expensive Bluetooth keyboard. And he has the higher-end Surface Pro 11. This keyboard has a magnetic connector at the bottom of the Surface. And I'm going to say 80% to 90% of the time when I open up the Surface Pro 11, the keyboard is not functioning. And I have to kind of pull it off the connector and put it back on. It's super irritating. In fact, it's so irritating that I'm starting to use it more with an actual third-party Bluetooth keyboard instead of this thing. But that's really irritating. Are the irritating thing I can't figure out is-- so I have this plugged into a USB-C dock, as many laptop users do. I'm using it right now to report this podcast. And I'm going to say, again, 80% to 90% of the time, HDMI doesn't work on first plug-in. And what I got to do is I got to unplug the cables and plug it back in. It's not a physical connection problem. It's not a connection problem. And I'm pretty confident of that, because if I use something other than the Surface Pro 11, like an iPad or a Chromebook, it works 100% of the time. So there's something funky going on. And in fact, it turns out there are two USB-C ports on the Surface Pro 11 on the left side of the computer, the display. And it seems to favor the lower port. I don't know why. It shouldn't make a difference. If I plug into the top port, it's even flakier. But the lower port, it's sort of happy. So there's that. Also, sometimes when it detects the HDMI, it's got like a VGA resolution, which is ridiculous. For those who don't remember, VGA was 640 pixels by 480, 640 by 480, which on today's monitors is like a postage stamp image blown up to any rate's ridiculous looking. The other thing, and I'm looking forward to your thoughts on the iPad Pro M4. My iPad Pro M4 11-inch device and the new Apple Pencil Pro drains batteries like MAD when they're kind of in idle mode. Because I have a couple of different iPads and Android tablets, and I don't use it all the time. But when I do, in the past, my other iPads and other tablets, if I don't use them for, say, a day, I pull it out, and it's still 100% battery, 98%. And the same for the previous versions of the Apple Pencil and Apple Pencil, yeah, Apple Pencil first and second generation. You know, it takes weeks or months for it to drain its battery. This thing will drain in like, you know, if I don't use it, if I pull it out today and I charge it up all the way, and then I pull it out the same time tomorrow morning, the Apple Pencil will be probably down 20%. - That is kind of interesting. I have not seen that, but of course, my Apple Pencil stays pretty much connected all the time. I don't use it as often, but I'm gonna have to start taking a look. I do know that my iPad Pro, the M4 will drain over the weekend from about 50% to maybe 13, 14%, just sitting in my bag doing nothing. In fact, I last used it on Friday mornings, and it's now been about two days that I haven't used it at all. And looking at it, it's at 35% right now. So by tomorrow morning, when I need it for work, it'll probably be, I'll need to top it off before I go teach classes with it. - Yeah. - Which can be a little bit frustrating, but otherwise, if I'm using it every day, it doesn't seem to drain that badly. - Yeah, yeah. And I think it's, you know, but it's interesting because previous iPads pros and pencils just didn't have that problem. Now, the pencil I can understand, because it has fine me now, I think it's always in a beacon mode, and it's always signaling out, like, I'm here, I'm here, I'm here, draining the battery. And in fact, for previous iPads, and I put my iPads to sleep, right? I turn, I put in airplane mode. I shouldn't say sleep. I put in airplane mode if I'm not gonna use it for, you know, a day or two. And so in previous models of the iPad Pro, and or the iPad mini for that matter, when I turn it, when I move it from airplane mode to normal mode, and it goes on, I have to physically attach the pencil to the iPad, either via the lightning port for the first version of the pencil or magnetically for the second and pro versions. And then, you know, it's paired. For the iPad Pro, M4 iPad Pro and the new Apple Pencil Pro, and I think it's part of the beaconing, as soon as I turn on the iPad Pro or move it from airplane mode to not, it sees the Apple Pencil, and it's paired, which is nice in a way, right? You don't have to go through that extra step. But I think that beaconing is what's causing the battery to drain relatively fast, like within 24 hours, I have, you know, double digit battery drop. I do have my iPad Pro set to max top off its charge at 80%. I have adaptive, you're not. - I do the same, yeah. - Yeah. So that's that rant. And then the other rant is, okay, the doctor sucing me. I do not like that you photos app. (laughing) I do not like it when I'm awake or when I nap. (laughing) - Yeah, so I looked at it and like I said, the one thing that I think is nice about the new photos app and some of the other apps, including fitness, is the edit summary or edit customization at the bottom where you can actually tell it, hey, I want you to do these things. I don't want these other things. - Right. - And I think that's what they were going for with the photos app, and the problem with the photos app is I think we've gotten so used to it over time. And they change it every few years. And so every time they change it, you go through this learning stage with it to figure it out again. And that does get frustrating from time to time. But I do like to customize and reorder at the very, very bottom, where I can say, I want these things first, then these things. So I'd like to see more interfaces like that, but of course, every time they redo an interface to have that, we're gonna have the same frustration over a new interface that we have to learn. - I would prefer they don't have all that extra cruft at the bottom, the recent days and people in pets and pen collections, and I'd prefer they not have that on the main photos page. And I would also prefer that they not have those tiny, tiny sub-microscopic thumbnails by default, which I know you can increase. And every time I open it, I do. So the way to do it for folks that haven't tried to get, instead of those tiny little thumbnails that you can barely see, or at least I can barely see, if you scroll your photos, so you don't see all the other cruft, you can use pinch and zoom to increase or decrease the thumbnail size. So I can set it to a thumbnail size that basically it used to have. But then I think I have to do it all the time. And it's kind of irritating for me. So what the heck? Anyway, so those are my mini rants. But otherwise I like Apple's new iPad OS and iOS 18. I just wish some of the more interesting features were already available for it. - Yeah, yeah, I definitely am waiting for those new interesting features. And I did get my 16 pro on Friday. So I had an interesting experience setting it up. So I'm interested in things I hadn't quite expected. So are you ranting? - I'm done ranting now. - All right. So as I mentioned down the podcast last weekend, I like to set up new devices by kind of just clean setup. I don't know why it's an old school habit of you know, - For sure. - Yeah, the other stuff. And I really enjoyed my iPad M4 while I got that earlier this year doing that, not restoring a pack. Of course I had six years on the previous image from the iPad. So three years on my iPhone 13 Pro, I did an application inventory. I had over 200 installed third party apps. And I thought I really do not need 200. But you know, you set one up and then you just leave it there and you don't really think too much about it. So when I set up the M4 iPad, it really taught me less as best, especially in terms of notification overload. And notifications have been pretty useless for me for a while. Now just because everything's sending me notifications. - Yeah, yeah. - What am I gonna do? I don't have two hours of my day just devoted to going through notifications. So I pared down, I realized I only needed about 50 apps. I thought I'll just install those manually. So I got the iPhone 16 Pro on Friday night. It arrived around five o'clock. And I didn't get a chance to start setting it up until around seven. And of course, when you set up a new iPhone and you have an Apple Watch, you end up setting up a new Apple Watch all brand new again. And the first thing that sort of concerned me was iCloud presumably has all my data. It has my fitness data, my health data, it has my photos, it has all that stuff in it. And when you tell it to restore from iCloud, it knows to bring all that down. But when you are setting up a new device, you have to turn on some of those iCloud syncs. You have to turn on messages sync. You have to turn on photos sync is turned on by default. And it took probably about an hour and a half for my iPhone to get my fitness data from the day. Up until then, my fitness data was just showing zero of everything. So that was a little disturbing 'cause I closed my rings that day. I wanted to make sure I got credit for Friday. And so it took about an hour and a half for that. And messages, despite me turning on the sync, it never synced up my messages Friday. I had to actually turn sync for messages off and then back on Saturday morning before it finally started syncing that. Had a very strange bug where I'd go into the messages sync setting and hit sync and it would just rapidly say cannot sync or finished syncing, something like that. So it was just a bug that I had to turn off and on. And then really it took until today for me to be able to open the fitness app and not have the little thing at the bottom saying syncing your activity data, even though I've been using the phone for almost 48 hours now. My pictures finally all synced up and my conversations finally all synced up. But it took quite a while which you wouldn't necessarily think it should. But then again, I do have 30 gigabytes of messages that need to sync. And I have about three or four gigabytes of fitness data and health data. So that was a little frustrating. And you don't see that if you do an iCloud restore of a device because the iCloud restore will naturally sort of hide that from you. It knows to have that in the device. And I also found that the optimization that happened takes a little bit of time too. The optimization of all of your data, especially the picture data. So I think even right now, if I try to add a lock screen that uses the smart photo features where you can have a tick, you know, your favorite people and pets and things like that for your lock screen, I'm pretty sure even now that will tell me it's unavailable that I still need to give it some more time to be able to do photo shuffle. Or nope, now today it's available. Yesterday it was not available. So it took kind of two nights for it to be sitting on the charger before it was able to do the photo shuffle if I wanted it to. - Well, you know, it's funny you mention that because in general, I've noticed that iCloud syncing is really laggy for lack of a better word. There's a lot of latent, like a giant latency gap that you notice, but it's for everything. Photo syncing, you know, if you take a bunch of photos on your phone and then you go to your iPad and you look at a photos app and there's nothing there. And sometimes I have to go back to the phone and I have to force it to sync to the cloud, you know, before anything happens. And I'm sitting in a Wi-Fi area. So it's not that, you know, I'm in a remote location and I'm, you know, it doesn't want to use cellular data. But I did notice that and also yesterday I took a kind of a nice little walk and I was looking at my health app. And as you know, the iPad doesn't have the rings app, but an activity app, it doesn't have the health app. Where you can see the rings and it's, in fact, I just noticed it says right now downloading, I'm looking at my iPad mini. And I don't even know if it has yesterday's data for, yeah, it does. In fact, it only has yesterday's data, I'm thinking that's today. So anyway, any, it's a lot of lag for photos and for the health app and, you know, whatever and messages, like you said. And I think that even goes, that's even true for, than you Mac OS. What's the new one, Sonoma? - Sequoia. - Sequoia, thank you. After upgrading to Sequoia the other day, or like a day after I did my iPad and iOS updates, I remember to update my Mac. And I noticed that the syncing there was a little laggy too. So I'm not sure if this is like a battery drain, fix, or you know, there's some, there's some res rationale behind this lagginess, but after you hear it, I'm not having it, I'm irritated. - It wouldn't be as bad if Apple let you actually control the sync, if off a manual resync, but very few places enable that in iOS. Messages is one of them that does allow it. If you go into iCloud settings and go to Messages, you can click a sync button. But I suspect, oddly enough, when you do that for messages, it does trigger syncs on some of the other iCloud services as well. So if you are finding some lagginess, might go into iCloud message, think of use that, and choose sync now and see if it grabs some of your other things that you hadn't been seeing. - Yeah. And in photos, if you click your little profile circle photo on the top right corner, I think there's a, it tells you when it just synced, when it synced. And I think, right now it's a finished, completed synchronization, but I think there's a little button that lets you sync now, if it's not synced. So there's that. There is that. Okay, okay, well, I wonder if my blood pressure went up, because, oh well, that might be the brands. - It definitely is easy, too, to have your blood pressure go up trying to get these things up and running. But as far as my impressions of the 16 Pro. - Yeah. - I've been happy with the camera. Camera is really a nice upgrade. I like the always on display that I didn't have with the 13 Pro. Now my phone has now become my nightstand table in a sense. I can use that all night and have it show me the clock and all of that. I did buy a projector stand that I was telling Todd about before the podcast. So my bed has drawers, built underneath it, that we don't use that often. But if I use a traditional nightstand, it basically blocks the drawers. You can't pull out the drawer, 'cause there's a stand in the way. - Right, great. - So then I was looking for something else, and sometimes you find these nice thin stands that are just a table without drawers of their own. The problem then is you still have four legs that still block. And so I've been thinking about all these crazy solutions, things like kind of mount something to the wall, like a shelf or mount something to the bed or whatever. And finally, a couple of weeks ago, I was on Amazon just sort of looking around and I realized that if I had something that had a tripod at the bottom of it, then I could use it for a stand. And I don't have a lot I need to put on this stand, just a light and a, my iPad mini and my phone charging stand. And a projector stand turns out to be the exact right thing I was looking for. So I bought a less than $30 projector stand off of Amazon that has something like a 20 pound weight limit. So fine enough for everything I want to put on it. And it's also got all these levels of height adjustment, which I don't need, 'cause I basically just have it at the regular height that it needs to be at with the gestures all the way down. - And I've been pretty happy with it. And as a plus, my cats have also been really happy with it 'cause they had a foam pad on it when I got it. They've ripped that to shreds and so I'm taking the foam pad off of it. And they're, I think, very annoyed now because without the foam pad on it, it is, well, it's metal. And that means that my iPad and my AirPods, they suddenly stick to it. 'Cause they have the magnetic chargers on them. So now the cats can't really easily knock off anything either because they're fighting against magnetisms. So if you're looking for something small and portable and just a little stand that can fit into a tight space with a tripod, mount on it instead of a four leg base, that's an option you might not have considered. Even if you don't have a projector, you might find that a projector stand is useful in those scenarios. - Yeah, it's funny how we can repurpose things. I use an external LCD monitor, a portable LCD monitor. It's, I don't know, 13 inches, I think. No, it's bigger than my iPads, my Surface Pro, which is 13. So I guess it's 15 inch external portable monitor. So it's super flat, USB-C powered and a mini HDMI. And it doesn't have a little stand for itself 'cause it assumes you're going to be using it on to go. I think there's a kickstand in back if you're just setting it up temporarily. But I wanted it a little bit higher and this and that and other thing. So I bought a music stand for it. It's hard to put cheap music on and it fits perfectly and it's stable. In fact, my camera's mounted on the music stand too. I wanted it right now. So yeah, repurpose things. I do notice you posted a photo of it in our show notes and it's got three adjustments under or on the leg. - Yeah. - We need a poll. Is that, are they all for height or is there like angles you can? - The bottom two are for height. The top one is for angle. - Ah, interesting. - Yeah, and then there's even another little adjuster to lock in another angle adjustment on it. So it's pretty adjustable for what it can actually, for $30 and it came with plenty of adjustability to it. - Yeah, yeah, that is nice. I like it. I was gonna ask you about your other impressions about your iPhone 16 Pro since I am not updating my phone this year, I've got a 15 Pro and I'm pretty happy with. I'll wait to see what the 17 is like next year and if it's not anything really different, I'll probably wait for the 18. But I am anxiously awaiting for Apple's alleged or rumored October event for the M4 Mac, especially a Mac Mini and the rumor of whatever is inside of a iPad Mini 7. So that's-- - Yeah, I agree. I'm thinking that I might get a new MacBook at that time since I'm on a 2020 Intel MacBook as my primary computer and it will kind of give me up-to-date generation on everything except the iPad Mini. I don't plan on upgrading the iPad Mini unless something really crazy happens with the iPad Mini. - Like it folds. - Yeah, if it folds or, you know, there's just some really cool feature on it. I think I'll probably stick with my current gen iPad Mini but I do think I want to think about a MacBook just so that I can try all the Apple intelligence stuff on all the platforms. And I told my wife it's a good thing she's still on a 14 Pro because if she was on the 15 Pro and had a USB-C instead of a lightning connector, I would probably get a new AirPods Pro case with USB-C 'cause right now the only thing left in my daily driving arsenal with the lightning connector is the AirPods Pro. But I charge them wirelessly most of the time anyway, so it doesn't really matter much. I have enough charging stands that they just charge off of that. - Yeah, I was really tempted. You know, I've got the AirPods, the first generation AirPods Pro and I mentioned to you and Steve, I think the other week that it's getting a little, there's something going on and I cleaned the microphone and that helped a lot but there's still a little bit of like scratchiness and stuff. It's not a warranty. So, you know, it's not something I can do about warranty. But anyway, although I think Steve pointed out a link to me that covers post-war, you know, after warranty, fixes like that again, but anyway, I was tempted to buy the new AirPods 4 AirPods temperature with the wireless charging case, which is USB-C. But then I realized, you know, the AirPods Pro has the little silicone tips and they still fall from the ears. And the AirPods Amateur is just like naked. - Yeah. - It's plastic. So I said, well then odds of that sticking the air is zero. So. - Well, you know, the funny thing I always had with AirPods and earbuds was previous to AirPods. I had a few pairs of any ear earbuds. I had some other things and nothing ever fit in my ears, right? It never felt right. And then oddly enough, AirPods and AirPods Pro fit in my ears fine. - Even the AirPods? - Yeah, I feel bad for everyone, but I find it kind of odd that I was always the one for many years that couldn't use these things. So there must be some shape that my ears have that, you know, everyone in Apple and Cupertino has and that everyone else outside the world does not have. - Yeah, well they aren't favoring my ear shape yet, but fortunately there are other earbud designs like I got a clip-on one that I clipped on. I think it's called a pinion or something. And clips onto that and it's got air conduction. So it's an open ear design, but it works great. Great battery life. I think the sound is decent. So there's other designs that seems to work with me that either has a hook over the ear or some kind of clip to the ear that doesn't hurt, by the way, it's very comfortable. So I'm not getting in your AirPods 4 amateur. I, as much as I'm tempted to, just cause. All righty. Oh, that reminds me. So you have the AirPods Pro or Pro 2. - Out of the Pro 2. - Oh, you have the Pro. So you're gonna get the head gesture and all that other good stuff. - And it does work. I did the head gesture this week. And so it works and it plays a little dinging in your ear as you're doing it. So you know that it's registering the gesture. So that's kind of nice. - Okay, so now, you know, so over the years we've gotten used to people talking to themselves. And most of the time they're talking to someone else, which is fine, someone still just talking to themselves has actually just started to walk down Honolulu with his hand to his ear. And I thought he was talking to somebody because he was talking that I realized his hand is empty and he was just in the sort of the finger formation of holding a phone, an imaginary phone. Anyway, the follow up to that is from now, when we see people making little head nods and things, they're not having a seizure, they're probably okay. And we should not go up to ask them if they need assistance. All righty. That's about all I got for today. I guess it's a short, short, short, more than usual podcasts, which is fine. We will talk to you next time.
