iOS 17 Accessibility Features with Personal Voice, AI and Siri at WWDC, iCloud Wishlist

The iCloud Photo Library: A Storage Solution for Mac and iPad Users

iCloud photo library is one of the storage solutions offered by Apple, allowing users to store their photos and videos across multiple devices. The feature allows users to download their photos to any device that has enough storage capacity, ensuring that they are always accessible. In this article, we will explore how iCloud photo library works and its benefits for Mac and iPad users.

One of the advantages of using iCloud photo library is the ability to store photos on a variety of devices without running out of space. For example, one user mentioned that their 500 gig MacBook Pro was sufficient, but they also had an iPad Pro with a terabyte of storage. The iPad Pro became the primary device for this user due to its robust operating system and the fact that it was used for both work and hobbyist purposes.

Another benefit of using iCloud photo library is the ability to manage passwords across multiple devices. However, not all apps are compatible with the Keychain feature that allows users to access their passwords securely. One user mentioned that they had encountered issues with certain apps not allowing them to sync their passwords through Keychain, and that sometimes required workarounds or manual input to gain control of their password management.

In contrast, some users prefer a more straightforward approach to managing their devices, such as one Mac user who stated that they were "very vanilla" on their device, meaning that they only used stock Apple apps. For these users, having a seamless and streamlined experience is essential for productivity and convenience.

The Future of Storage: Apple's Approach

When it comes to storage solutions, Apple has traditionally taken an integrated approach, where the company offers multiple options across its products. This includes iCloud, which allows users to store their files and photos in the cloud, as well as the ability to access them on any device with a compatible operating system.

The Apple TV+ Trailer: A Sneak Peek at Killers of the Flower Moon

Recently, Apple released a trailer for an upcoming original movie called Killers of the Flower Moon, directed by Martin Scorsese. The film is based on a true story and stars Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio, Brendan Fraser, and others. The trailer promises to be intense and dark, with themes that explore the mysterious murders of members of the Osage tribe in the United States.

The Apple TV+ trailer has generated excitement among fans of Martin Scorsese's work and those interested in true stories told on screen. With its talented cast and promising storyline, it is likely that Killers of the Flower Moon will be a hit with audiences worldwide. By releasing the trailer in theaters, Apple is signaling its commitment to bringing high-quality content to screens both online and offline.

WWDC and Beyond: What's Next for Apple

As WWDC approaches, rumors are circulating about potential new features and technologies from Apple. While details remain scarce, it is clear that the company is committed to innovation and pushing the boundaries of what is possible with technology. From machine learning capabilities to virtual reality experiences, there are many exciting developments on the horizon.

For those eager to learn more about Apple's future plans, there are several ways to stay informed. The Apple Podcast Network offers a wealth of content, including interviews with experts, behind-the-scenes insights into product development, and analysis of upcoming features. By tuning in to podcasts like this one, listeners can stay up-to-date on the latest news and developments from Apple.

Contacting Us

If you have questions or topics you'd like to discuss, feel free to reach out to us on Twitter or Mastodon. We are always happy to engage with our audience and share knowledge about all things Apple-related. By visiting our website and following our social media channels, listeners can stay informed about the latest news and developments from Apple.

Additionally, listeners who would like an ad-free version of the podcast or early access to new episodes can sign up directly on the Apple Podcasts platform or at our website.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is your host Steven Roes and today we're going to talk about some new accessibility features that Apple pre-announced coming to iOS 17 Apple VR versus Apple AI features what can we see at WWDC have a story about wiping my MacBook Pro and some other news this episode is brought to you by our friends at Zach do finding book a top R doctor today and our friends at Collide and joining me once again my good friend Wes hilard how's it going Wes I'm just thinking about Zelda tears of the Kingdom I don't know if I'm going to be involved in this podcast today listen I've seen every other Tik Tok is a Zelda tears of the Kingdom there's people like weeping playing this game and honestly like I'm about it like I'm excited and I'm not even playing it but I want to makes me want no it is whatever they're doing over there they're doing it right it's like the perfect sequel of a video game I've ever seen considering that they didn't have to rebuild the map from scratch I think they had a lot more time to focus on physics engines and gameplay and W it's good and the story my gosh yeah anyway moving on so good that's excting it looks exciting it looks very exciting all right a couple quick festar reviews Chris from Australia PGH Phil from the USA and Kevin from sgo Ireland said he listens at 1.75 speed but we'll forgive that thanks anyway for the five star review appreciate it and I'll be honest when it comes to listening speed I still listen to podcast at 1X I do listen to the talk show at 1 and a half to 1. 75x cuz I do feel like it's a little more normal talking speed but I have trained myself now to edit everything both video and podcast at 2x so when I bring like this podcast into frite one of the wonderful features of the latest version of fite is editing at 2x speed that is how I edit this show I edit in Final Cut now at 2x speed which I had to look up how to do it's not very obvious how to like actually play back at 2xp and Final Cut if you press space bar and it starts playing through the timeline press L and L will speed it up playback and then just like J will slow down playback so that jkl controls its keyboard shortcut there's not really a UI method as far as I could tell to set 2X playback as the default but just hit the letter L you can edit in 2X and Final Cut and that's how I edit it's pretty nice some apple had some announcements actually it's incredible that they keep announcing new features and kind of software updates pre WWDC I want to talk a little bit about what that might mean for WWDC but they that Apple music now has concert discovery that means in maps there will be new guides or there are 40 new guides curated by Apple music editors and those guides and Apple Maps they'll show ideal venues to experience live music around you which is pretty cool and in apple music there's a new set list space you can actually see the set list for major tours you then if you're a fan of a certain band you can just listen to this playlist and it's their concert set list which I don't know does that kind of remove some of the Allure of wondering what they're going to play at the show if you see this concert set list I I'm not much of a concert goer but my is is that people know what the set list is I think it's a thing that people go out of their way to Hype thems up for the concert to listen to the music ahead of time but again the live production will always be different and every live production is different in its own way so I think it's just a different way of interacting with this kind of event I was curious because it's in Apple Maps they have the new guides that have these music venues and I'm curious listeners and for you Wes how much you use guides I actually use guides all the time in Apple Maps if you raise that drawer at the bottom and you scroll down you have the my guide section which you can create a guide as many guides as you want and then you can edit certain ones but you basically add places of interest and you can label a guide like your hometown or maybe I have guides for Asheville North Carolina because we usually go near there if we're going to Vacation sometimes up the mountains and I save favorite spot spots either that I want to try someday or spots that we discovered that we really like and so I can always return to that guide and even just local places if I see a place you're going to have to share that Asheville guide with me cuz I'm an hour from there and we go there a lot it's fun yeah I will do that I even have a guide for North Carolina traveling is the name of my guide because we drive up to North Carolina usually and there's hotels we've stayed at that we really liked and there's some food places that are like set stopping points on our road trip cuz we've done it many times and so I have that guide where I can just quickly I have several hotels the restaurants just jump to those places while we're on the road trip and they're all saved and it's some of our favorite places so I love guides so you do you can share a guide I have not done that a lot but you can share a guide and save places to it this is one of those Apple Maps things that it feels like they're laying groundwork for a larger feature set rather than who who uses guides and how many people actually know they even exist about yeah there's a lot of stuff in here there's even Apple produce produced guides there's a lot from magazines and different newspapers and local venues different guid on guides when we visit Nashville I love using the guides to find like restaurants to eat at stuff like that like they're very useful especially when you're anywhere near just a larger City it doesn't have to be this huge kind of touristy town like even Asheville probably has a couple of like local newspaper guides so definitely something to dive into I like making my own just of like places I've eaten and like when I go to Gatlinburg I have my own guide of restaurants that I like and places I want to go back to just another one of those things that Apple could probably do better at surfacing and giving users a little bit gamify it a little bit because right now it's just like making a reminders list and it's boring yeah again it's just I've been thinking a lot I don't know if anyone pays attention to my social media but I've been thinking a lot about Apple and how they approach a lot of their social interactions and their devices and I feel like it's all disperate spread out hidden and if they ever just took the time to connect the dots and make it more surface level I'm not talking about the social network here I'm talking about just make it more visible gamify it a little bit give people incentive to use these features and I think we would all benefit from that because these features only really work when everyone's using them like for you shared with you the Apple Maps guides right like planning like you can use Apple Maps guides to plan an itinerary for a trip there's so much cool stuff here it's just hidden away it would be cool if Apple gave you a public like bio page basically where you can highlight some of your favorite guides you if there's podcast that you create on Apple podcast you can include links to that I actually recently discovered thanks to Micah Sergent in his social media bios he has something called a Bento Box and so there's a website it's called bent. me it's free to sign up it's free to use right now these things are everywhere there's aund whatever reason the last year like these yes me Pages the link do here's everything I've ever done on a on the internet just link Pages yeah I've tried many of them I've tried like bio. site I've done a link tree typically I actually because I have a personal website I made a page specifically that I can use in my social media profile links because if you're going to send somebody anywhere and possibly have any kind of web traffic hopefully it would benefit your website rather than a third third party like link tree or whatever so I typically use my own website page that I created in my social media bios but I really love of all the designs of these Pages Bento me is one of the nicest looking that I have seen adding your links to podcasts and social media like visually it almost feels like an apple designed product and it would be really cool if there was a way where Apple could say put your Maps guides put your podcast your Apple music playlist whatever points of interest if you do want to have a one page that's like your iCloud profile or whatever it would be cool you could highlight things like your Maps again we're really close to this and all roads point to it being possible and it existing as long as the data isn't user addressable unless Apple gives us a kind of status page or wall to post to they're not going to have to regulate anything it'll just be Apple related here's links to things I've done kind of social profile and and I would say no posting like no posting yeah I'm that takes away the the work that Apple cont moderation yeah cuz that would turn it into a social network and again this could lead to social networks it would be fun to post links to your social so this brings me back and we don't need to dive into it because it's fully my imagination but I've been imagining what Apple like an apple social platform could look like in this sense of just combining all of Apple's things into one platform and Joe rosenal he was posting about the accessibility features we get into this is where it comes from one of the features you can toggle combines the I believe the phone app and the FaceTime app into one interface to make it less confusing for certain people because that is a confusing concept that there's these different apps that kind of do the same thing and he questioned why not does is this a sign that Apple could be combining these apps in the future or give users the option outside of accessibility it would be interesting to me if I message the phone app FaceTime and cont taxs were all to basically merge back into one more or less social platform and instead of imagine the messages app where you have a tree of people at the top your pinned conversations and then a list of conversations below that just switch it in your head to pin profiles and you click on someone's face and then you see access to a FaceTime call an iMessage thread and this is where what we were discussing would come in it would be amazing if that also was just basically an interactive Apple ID profile showing what are they playing on Apple arcade what was their latest Apple music playlist and just surface it all underneath this new contact profile and my argument for Apple doing this and why this would exist is this is now if Apple ecosystem contacts like they have iMessage and other things basically if you're on Apple your contact profile explodes into this useful mechanism right now we can introduce RCS and shove it under uh a rug over here you can RCS someone if you're with apple your profile is this living breathing thing that lets friends interact with you see all of your shared stuff and it just becomes again this gamification of iMessaging contacts and FaceTime in a way that Apple kind of is a little bit boring with now they bring it all up front and just present it in this colorful fun way and I think that that would be a very powerful way for Apple to move its ecosystem forward make people more interested in it just make it visible and then say and there's this RCS junk over here that if you really need it and it would be cool if you had that kind of page let's say your profile page and it was let's say just visible to you for right now or at least part of it is just visible to you yeah you could click a toggle say which ones are public which ones aren't right but also like shared with you feature which I think is really great there's been times when someone has texted me a show or texted me a link and then when I go into Safari that shared with you line is great because now I don't have to think about who sent it to me or what text conversation it's in I'm already in Safari now if I'm in a place where I can browse it I can just click it but it would be nice to see all of the things people have shared with you and in one place and I think apple is just like you're saying a couple steps away from doing it because it Aggregates it in each app it would be nice to go to one place icloud.com your username or whatever and just see here's all the things people have sent you via text via email would be nice to email will get really messy because you probably get a ton of links but it would be nice to add things to that shared with you as you're browsing around or someone sends something to you I don't know it'd be cool maybe it'll see some in WWDC because it still remains to be seen with all the rumors flying around and everything they're pre-announcing let's get to some of the accessibility features they pre-announced and then we can brainstorm more in WWDC but this is something Apple's been doing year after year where they pre-announced some of the accessibility forward features so they can be highlighted and have their own moment before we get to WWDC and all the big Iowa 17 and announcements there's three key features here that I wanted to mention and what it means but assistive access which means that someone that possibly has cognitive disabilities it'll be easier for them to interact with the displays on their devices there's large high contrast buttons and large text with labels that's assist of access it looks pretty slick there's a screenshots on it you can check out the article in the show notes also just side note there's for users who prefer to communicate visually there's an emoji only keyboard and I so wish I could figure out how to hack William Gallagher iPhone where it will only show the Emoji only keyboard I think that would be hilarious but anyway point and speak which is an improvement on something Apple has had an accessibility where those who are visually impaired can hold their iPhone up and the camera depending on what it sees will speak what it sees like door in front or this door says that and now it will actually speak text that the camera sees as someone is holding the iPhone up and seeing something like this way for restrooms or whatever it may be so that's point and speak but this last one I find particular particularly interesting it's live speech and personal Voice live speech means you can either pre-program different spoken tidbits or strings of text and whether someone's on a FaceTime call they can choose these different pieces of text and it will be spoken to the other person or you can have these pieces of text ready made on your phone and you can just play them while you're in person a speech to text kind of feature and one of the powerful features they're adding into this is those who might be on road to losing their ability to speak if it's something like ALS and the person you know is not going to be able to speak out loud in the future this personal voice feature basically the user will read aloud a random set of text prompts and create 15 minutes of audio on device and using here it is machine learning the device will use that data to create a personal voice meaning that those live speech text Snippets that the person has programmed into their phone can be spoken in a voice that sounds like them now this is by all accounts of anyone else on the internet any other company would say this is an AI powered or AI generated personal voice Apple did not say AI anywhere in this announcement doesn't call it an AI feature they said they use on device machine learning yeah there's no mention of even the abbreviation or artificial intelligence at all in the piece nothing and I think this is very indicative and I think this is what it looks like when Apple uses quote unquote AI features which shout out to Jason Aton because he actually wrote an article saying everybody stop calling it AI it's just computers doing things and so kudos to be like that's kind of what we were talking about even last week and so this is a more accurate description it's machine learning but this is 100% Apple what again you're seeing all these other companies do that they are calling AI features AI powered AI generated this is Apple using that technology here it's for an accessibility reason which I think is incredible I'm very curious how this would carry over year to year if someone has an iPhone they do the 15 minutes of audio it creates a personal voice is that sync to iCloud is that saved to their iCloud account in some way so as they upgrade their device could it be carried over or transferred so I'd be curious about that side of the feature but I think this is a glimpse of what we're going to see apple talk about at WWDC we're not going to hear them say AI even once I not can say I'll shave my eyebrows if they say it but I would feel confident even saying that because this is again I think just clear that Apple understands the power of these kinds of features and machine learning technology they are using it this is proof and they are not going to call it Ai and we're going to see that a ton at WWDC machine learning has been a subset of Apple since the iPhone 7 and they've said it in Keynotes many times yeah it that again it's the more accurate term I mean we it goes all the way back to portrait mode when we had we got what our first dual camera photography system Apple was dabbling in machine learning algorithms obviously with Siri and voice translation like it's been there for more than a decade but like the first time we really saw on the consumer end front facing was when they created portrait mode for the camera and then it's just evolved from there like Apple's been involved in this for a very long time and it's always hilarious to me when I see people say is Apple behind and AI or whatever and it's your use of the word is impossible to decide CER because it doesn't have any meaning but no apple is not behind if anything they're at the Forefront of all of this and yes while Siri might be a little silly sometimes and misunderstand or at the surface appears less complex than other voice assistants I assure you it's as complex and as powerful as things like Google Assistant if the problem is there's a learning curve and these things shouldn't have learning curves they should have they should just work in Apple's parlament and Siri has a just work problem where takes the same it can take the same things out of syntax and do different things with the same phrase sometimes like there's definitely issues with Siri but I don't think it's as dire as people make it out to be and I think it'll be interesting to see the further advancements that Apple has here and accessibility features always are a sign of the future whether we're we're we as humans are going to grow into needing these accessibility features it's amazing that they're there don't worry you're not going to have your perfect 20-year-old vision for your entire life you could your voice could be lost in an accident at any time there's you don't think about very often but it's reality where we can fall apart at any moment we could we can lose access to the things that we take for granted at any time and here these tools give us the ability to basically get through these issues yeah one thing I wanted to say is I wonder what this technology looks like moving forward because as we've seen with other accessibility features they usually move over into non-accessibility as standard features so we saw like the iPad cursor exists because of an accessibility feature and I wonder if personal voice is a way we're going to be able to program personal Siri voices in the future that exactly and like I would with intercom they added these shortcut steps where I can have any of my intercom homepods say a message that either I type in or pre-program which is similar to what this live speech feature is pre-program some text Snippets and then Siri will speak it out of your device will speak it out and if I could program my voice where when I send an intercom command to my homepod and it sounds like me instead of just the stock Siri voice 100% I would do that and I'll even put this link in show notes I might have put it in here a few weeks ago but 11 Labs it's beta. 11lbs doio they call it primo Ai and it is exactly this feature where you can record or submit recordings of your voice to this website it will create a profile for your your voice and then you can have any amount of typing type whatever text you want and it will create an audio file of quote unquote your voice speaking that text and you think longterm you know the use cases of something like this for audio books if an author wants to have their voice as the audiobook narrator and AI gets good enough where it doesn't sound robotic and it actually sounds natural huge ramifications like in a good way for voice actors maybe not so there's going to have to be a different kind of hopefully Market or the hill AI Revolution is I think going to ffect that market specifically but I think this feature is great and I'm curious how Apple's going to expand it throughout its lineup it just reminds me a little bit and it's a little it's a little different cuz they didn't use this technology but in in extrapolations an Apple TV Plus show about the Future How It climate change is affecting our planet there's a lot of technology in the show and it's just really interesting to see how they've used it and evolved it because it goes all the way up to 2070 something and it's funny cuz Apple isn't in the show Apple's in all of their modern Apple TV play shows except for the ones that are too sci-fi to have it or just in alternate universes this one is set in our Earth and I don't know if you've watched it yet but I definitely recommend it it is such a disturbing and Powerful show I love it the reason I'm bring it up in the second episode Merill stre plays someone's mother who before she passes because she's diagnosed with I can't remember I think it's a kind of cancer she knows that she's never going to get to meet her grandchildren so she records videos of her reading bedtime stories so the kid can go back and watch them and there's some narrative around this in the show but I just thought it was clever is we can do this now there's nothing preventing us from having our family sit in front of a camera and read a bedtime story and I thought that was really interesting and that took place in like 2046 but now we're talking about today we could have a loved one record their voice and we could synthesize it to read any story that we want I'm just I thought it was just an interesting thought technology but synthesis versus reality one of the things that so this again goes back to the show the second episode is about the extinction of whales and this woman she has collected a lot of voice data of her family for reasons and when she they they figured out at this point how to communicate with animals by synthesizing animal noises and they know what the animal is trying to say it's again very sci-fi she actually uses her recorded family voices in of the animal so she can feel a closer connection to it and the whale she's talking to she uses her mother's voice Merl Streep's voice to be the whale and it's just such such an interesting concept and of course it brings up a lot of moral and ethical issues you're supposed to be getting data from this whale but it's your mother and it's interesting it's it's a good thought a way to think about technology and how it affects our future I'm going to put a link to to Joanna Stern's Wall Street Journal video essay it was called Eternal a tech quest to live forever how Tech can bring our loved ones to life after they die and this is a part of it was really good it was an incredible watch really fascinating even then this was December 2020 so we're talking almost 3 years ago and even the technology then with taking recordings from loved ones generating the voice saying other things even interacting with that Voice through something like an Amazon assistant and now with all the AI Revolution now 3 years later I feel like this is even more appropo so I'll put that link in the show if you're curious about it but great new accessibility features from Apple and this will be coming with iOS 17 and I'm sure we'll hear plenty of it at WWDC which we should talk about next but again I just want to reiterate happening on device with Apple's neural engine the stff isn't right getting sent off to a cloud to get processed and that's the thing with these large language models they're interesting they're a new step in the tool set I I again I just wouldn't count Apple out of the equation here yet and I'm very interested in seeing if they do anything similar to a large Lang model at WWDC this episode is brought to you by Zach do listen you're trying to find a cause for your symptoms maybe you're not feeling very good but if you search online you're going to stumble down a rabbit hole don't do that download the free Zach talk app today and then you can book and find a top rated doctor near you and here's the important part that takes your insurance I've used zacho multiple times in the past and it's always a great experience when I moved I actually found a new primary care doctor so I can do an annual physical and I found them in the zacho app you put in your insurance card C you can even just take a picture and it'll find all the information that way and then it will just show you the doctors that you know can take your insurance and it will just show you the doctors that take your insurance and you can sort by top rated so you can make sure you're going to 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Zach do.com Ider to download it then you can find and book a toprated doctor today many are available within 24 hours that's Z do.com appleinsider zocdoc.com apppp Insider our thanks to Zach do for sponsoring this episode and our friends at Collide they have big news if you're an OCTA user which I know what that is now thanks to several of you listeners letting me know that OCTA is a single sign on protocol they can get your entire fleet to 100% compliance how do they do it if a device isn't compliant the user can't log into your Cloud apps until they fixed the problem it's that simple Collide patches one of the major holes in zero trust architecture which is device compliance without Collide it struggles to solve basic problems like keeping everyone's OS and browser up to date unsecured devices are logging into your company's apps because there's nothing there to stop them Collide is the only device trust solution that enforces compliance as part of authentication and it's built to work seamlessly with OCTA the moment collides agent detects a problem it alerts the user and gives them instructions to fix it if they don't fix the problem within a set time they're blocked collides method means fewer support tickets less frustration and most importantly 100% Fleet compliance so visit collide.com apppp inssider to learn more or book a demo that's k l d.com slapple Insider our thanks to collide for sponsoring this episode so looking to WDC we're just a little over 2 weeks away from the key note on June 5th and I've really been thinking a lot about machine learning and AI in relation to what apple is going to announce because really all the talk about WWDC has been maybe watch OS gets a huge update we could see 15-inch MacBook Air but the VR headset has really taken the Limelight as what we are all looking forward to for WWDC heard from other podcast like ATP and others that there's something really big something exciting coming and everyone's thinking it's the VR headset there was XR which has supposedly been the operating system that Apple's headset will run that term XR has been trademarked by Apple in New Zealand but this one was not Apple this was deep dive LC a shell company that is supposedly owned by Apple okay okay we'll see yeah so it's one of those we you know you can search these regulatory databases and find things and XR in the same couple of days was trademarked and what gave it away and what people are assuming here is this was a word Mark trademark so it's like a watermark of the word XR oos stylized in different ways but it uses Apple's SF Pro font in the stylization it's a giveaway like they didn't trademark this in Times New Roman and so this was actually a trademark filed in Singapore and New Zealand by the same Deep dive LLC so I okay so that's there we're hearing from there was a tweet from a person named Hudson that on the WWDC schedule there's been like partial schedules supposedly with a special evening Activity one of the nights of WWDC Apple said you won't want to miss it at least for those who are attending I have a feel it's a full schedule we just can't find there's people are scared of sharing it right they cropped out the bottom half that has the special activity which I'm sure just says special activity you won't want to miss it but and you can register your interest in attending and like that it's just this internal page if you have been invited you log in with your Apple ID and you can see this page that shows your schedule for WWDC we see these every year it just says when you're having lunch when you're going on a tour there's nothing revelatory here and there's always some kind of evening event it's just people are highly speculative about the special events is it everyone to try on AR headsets I don't know I have a feeling it's the talk show with John grber because I feel like last year Don grber held the talk show on site it was actually held at the developer Center that apple had just opened so I feel like they would probably put that on the schedule it's more likely I I to guess the the WWDC what is it bash some sort of like beer bash thing that they do yeah they do some kind of party whatever it's a concert with a live they have Shakira Come To Come and sing for them and it's like this weird nerd party okay I hope to one day I'll see this nerd party but yeah so that's a special activity but coming very soon I wanted to poll on Twitter and Maston so I submitted this poll and I was curious if people who listen and this wasn't hugely voted on so this is a small subset but I asked are people more excited for WWDC to see apple release AI or machine learning features across their os's or are people excited about the VR headset because I will say after watching Google's IO keynote and seeing all the different AI everything whether or not that's a good term to call it or not but just seeing the Technologies being built into things like Google Sheets and Google and Gmail and Google search I I really got excited thinking if Apple could do this they would be I think uniquely positioned across apps to really help people use machine learning tools in an effective way for instance if you're writing in a Pages document and you want to generate text or select some bullet points and tell Siri or whatever other assistant Apple wants to call it make these bullet points into a keynote slide it tells you to pick a photo from your iCloud photo library and automatically you have a keynote presentation nicely designed I feel like apple is uniquely positioned to walk people through how to utilize these kinds of machine learning features how to help people be more be more productive with them across all their applications I think these accessibility features that Apple's released this week is a glimpse into that and I am more excited to see what they do with that in iOS and iPad OS maybe they just build it into CI and Siri really becomes that AI assistant although they're not going to say AI I don't know what they would call it but are they excited for that I'm more excited for that than even the VR headset and I know that might like ruffle people's feathers like everyone's excited about this VR headset but I just don't think that is going to have the same practical use cases for a majority of people as small little AI features that are built into the operating system across apps that people already use Stephen I hate to burst your bubble but none of that's happening there none of the AI like whatever stuff is happening there's no way WWDC is based on software operating systems right that are developed across the previous year so in parallel with everything announced last year things were in the early Alpha phases and they enter a Final lockin Phase by December of 2022 and then these first 6 months is basically get it ready for prime time enough that we can enter beta 1 successfully and not break everyone's computers cuz everyone's going to install this whether developer or not this last 6 months that's when this a AI whatever large language model Revolution was occurring it wasn't it's not it wasn't on Apple's radar when they were developing these operating systems it's not going to be a part of it there's no way unless they have a separate team specifically working on these features and they were like we have to get into this Zeitgeist but the thing is Apple's never been one to get into the Zeitgeist they don't care they don't need to I understand that but again features in like Final Cut Pro on iPad like the autoc crop that's the kind of feature and even last year at WWDC you think about iCloud shared photo library the ability to when you're with your iCloud family if you're at like a theme park or on vacation the fact that you're all taking pictures in a close proximity it's using the geolocation and then automatically suggest that those photos be shared across a shared I photo library that's not what I mean though those cuz those are just features right that's where everyone's getting so confused this is where the use of AI for everything breaks everyone's brains because it no longer has any meaning what Google announced at IO was a lot of features for their operating systems and their software and some of them not all of them some of them were powered by large language models some larger than others because of their different size systems that they've been implementing but they are still that specific technology but the problem is they've used a blanket term to discuss all of the technology Apple last year introduced a lot of great features that use a lot of machine learning capabilities that use a lot of on device intelligence the neural engine to perform tasks those will still be present this year that's not what I'm saying Apple will still have features for their products using machine learning models and the neural engine and improve upon photo editing and sharing and device based location and all of that stuff will still be there what I'm talking about specifically again is large language models so everyone expecting yeah so everyone's expecting Apple to come out at WWDC and say here is code co-pilot and it's going to help you write code and while something like that might have been in development because we have seen Apple slowly improve xcode's ability to correct your code and give you autogenerated Snippets and stuff like that based on what you're trying to do because of Swift UI and it's more natural language model that is all true and if we see something similar to that it's not because of the llm boom it's because Apple's been working on this for years and it just happened to make an xcode this year I don't don't foresee us seeing an all powerful new Siri that you can communicate with natural language unless again there's just been a specific team since January running through these large language systems and saying we can do that and just slowly implementing it into Siri last minute but Apple doesn't operate at the last minute I'm curious because you have been a proponent saying like apple is really leaning on to the reality of things like photos not wanting to offer so many adjustments to a photo where what is a photo I am curious if the magic editor that we saw with Google where you can move something a little more in frame and then AI will automatically generate it Apple already does background removal and that's built into the photos app like you could just tap and hold on a subject and drag it over and remove the background I do wonder if we will see those kinds of quote unquote generative features and things like photos but I also will say while I agree where we won't see large language models from Apple where you basically chat with Siri and Siri will generate an essay about the Revolutionary War or whatever I could see more features in things like Spotlight which Spotlight actually was improved last year even on the Mac and on iOS but in things like Spotlight on the iPhone where when you search for something and you have the suggested results at the top like if you search for a movie if you search for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 it'll jump you to Fandango or IMDb doing everything it can to have you just skip the search engine entirely and it offers all of that right there in kind of the the series search window I could see that being improved where any other company would call it AI results or whatever I think Apple could increase the offerings of that the have you be able to follow up cuz that's something where you type in Guardians of the Galaxy 3 it gives you a bunch of answers but there's not like a followup you can't say actually I was looking for movie times or actually I just wanted to know the cast of the movie you can add that kind of in the spotlight search box but that's a little clunky cuz if you scroll down or whatever so I could see apple improving that kind of stuff which I which would show me that they are doing those kinds of machine learning features they're not going to call it AI but that's the kind of stuff they could build into Siri and Spotlight and search across the all the os's and it would feel like this kind of AI stuff sure but I still think that's just an evolution of what they've already been working on and has nothing to do with the World At Large and that's what's that's what I just want to distinguish here is like I because I can see the headlines already is Apple playing catch up with Google bard or whatever Apple they're not doing any of that because it's not it wasn't on their radar when they were designing these systems these systems are also new that the stuff that we're getting in June predates all of this stuff that Google and being in all of that has been working on in these last like six months or so it it just I I don't know I just think language is important and Google is doing everything it can to destroy language with its use of the term Ai and everyone's just jumping onto the hype train and they're forgetting that that Apple has been in this arms race for years there's something called Siri intelligence that runs on all of our devices and I know kind of an oxymoron because everyone really dislikes Siri but at least a lot of people do but Siri intelligence is this thing that you're talking about it's what makes Spotlight work the you there's a setting menu in settings that says everything that Siri intelligence has access to you toggle on and off and that's what surfaces in Spotlight that's what Siri can pull up when you give it commands that's what so if you have the dictionary app like a what's that if you have wolf from alpha installed on your iPhone that can be a Siri intelligence Target you can actually improve series search results by having different apps installed because it'll provide results from different apps using deep app search which is something Apple introduced years ago all of this is here and we'll see evolutions of it and improvements on it in during WWDC I just hope people don't get confused and think oh like this is a response to Google oh this is a response to Bing because now suddenly Apple needs to play catchup I just personally I don't think they need to play catchup I think they just need to keep doing what they've been doing yeah we should move on but I do want to say last year the 2022 WWDC keynote they said machine learning four to five times I actually know because I downloaded the video put it into a transcription engine and searched for the words so it was like single digits four to five times because each piece of technology has has its own name because they need different names to describe them but I'm just going to say I think this year they're going to say machine learning a lot more probably neural engine like there will be more buzzwords I'm I'm Apple isn't afraid of marketing terms all right one quick news and then I want to talk about wiping my MacBook Pro cuz that was an experience but Georgia has now brought the iPhone driver's license into the wallet so if you're a Georgia resident you can now have your digital driver's license or ID in the Apple wallet app and Georgia joins three other states Arizona Colorado and Maryland so those four states you can use your digital ID in the wallet app all that to say Florida supposedly has a digital ID program not yet a part of this thing and what has it been like four years since digital I don't know 2020 maybe yeah it's it's it's one of those weird things where again I hate this but it's only useful for one thing and at certain airports it's exciting that it's coming but until it I don't I honestly even if Tennessee today said here's your driver's license I would do the thing and add it to my phone cool sure sure but it's useless like I can't go buy a beer with it yeah so we'll see okay I want to tell a quick anecdote and then go into some details about wiping my 14-inch MacBook Pro because when I got that which is about over a year and a half ago I got the 1 tbte SD which when it comes to what you upgrade on a KAC when you buy it the more storage you can afford the better I I went with one terabyte because I knew I was going to be getting a desktop later I have my Mac Studio I got two terabytes on that 2 terabytes have been a good amount but the 1 tbyte drive on my 14-inch MacBook Pro was filling up and I only had 60 gigs of free space I don't like being that close to the line I like having at least 100 gigs free or more and a large majority of that storage was being taken up by iCloud drive files I produce a lot of podcasts and I save both the raw wave files and the MP3 finished files into iCloud drive and being saved there it takes up a lot of space I had 600 gigabyt of my MacBook Pro was being taken up by iCloud drive files now I know that with iCloud drive you can remove downloads from files that have been downloaded to your computer and say don't keep this locally on my device just keep it in my iCloud drive because I have room there in my iCloud Drive I just don't want it to take up space on my Mac and there is a checkbox in system settings where you could say optimize Mac storage and your Mac will automatically offload files as you begin to run out of space the threshold I wish was granular I wish I could say offload files once iCloud Drive takes up 100 gigs but you can't do that like you just have to let the Mac do it by itself so I wanted to offload some files and I couldn't figure out how to do it right away I know that if you rightclick an individual file in iCloud Drive there's an option to remove download but if you select a folder or in my case I have many nested folders cuz I really like to organize all my files you can't select multiple folders and remove them but you almost is can because I had a couple listeners reach out and if you select let's say just a bunch of MP3s you know I have a folder with a bunch of MP3s half of them are downloaded to the Mac half of them are not you can tell because if there's a little Cloud symbol with a down arrow it means it's not safe save to the computer where if there's no symbol next to the file then it is downloaded if you select all those files and right click you might see the download now button and I thought maybe you have to click download now and once they're all downloaded you can remove the downloads but if you select all those files click them so the contextual menu pops up and then hold the option key on your keyboard it will change or add the option to remove the downloads amongst all those selected files so you don't have to download them all just to remove them so I did that for a few ways and it would work sometimes with multiple folders there were sometimes where I could select multiple folders tell it to remove downloads and it would do it but it didn't work consistently and I could not do it from the top level like I could not rightclick my documents folder which is where all my files are saved I don't really keep anything on the desktop I organize everything in the documents I wish I could just right click that whole documents folder and say remove all the downloads in here and just let it be and because I couldn't do do that I chose the sane option as I thought and I'm like I'm just going to start from scratch so I just wiped my Mac which is now easier because you can go to system settings and just do erase all content and settings like you can on iOS devices so the process of wiping everything is fairly straightforward so I did that started from scratch chose not to sync iCloud Drive I said don't download anything in the desktop and documents folder just stop it I'll figure out how I'll go to icloud.com if I need to or something cuz I really don't do a lot on the laptop that I need all those files for so I wiped it and I don't have plenty of space now don't have to worry about it all that to say I would love to see some iCloud Drive updates at WWDC so those kinds of things are a little more manageable but as I started from scratch on my MacBook Pro I thought I have an opportunity here let me try and go as stock as possible and only install the apps that I really need one of the biggest things I thought to try was iCloud keychain and not install one password at all now doing this I actually find that iCloud keychain when it's not having to fight one password for autofill and Safari works really well on my Mac Studio where I have both installed I know I can turn off the autofill but whenever I click in a login window or a login box iCloud keychain and one password are like fighting each other and the windows overlap and it's a mess so just having iCloud keychain for those kind of web autofills is working really well what I immediately missed from just using iCloud keychain was menu bar access where I could just click something in the menu bar and search for a login right there in a contextual menu in the menu bar and then copy the password I would love for there to be some kind of menu bar access maybe Spotlight maybe it could be there one of the biggest challenges I found was in system settings when you need to add Internet accounts like you're trying to sync a Microsoft account and mail calendars and contacts from things like Google if you want to sync your Google account it is n imp possible to get your iCloud keychain password when you're in the middle of that process if you wanted to add a Google account in system settings under internet accounts it'll pull up the login window for Google and sometimes the iCloud keychain popup would not appear for me to just autocomplete and I would have to close out of that whole process to go copy the password password from the passwords menu in system settings this would be solved if there was either a menu bar or a standalone app that I could have open alongside system settings to be able to copy and paste passwords so that was one of the bigger frustrations and not having it in the menu bar was annoying other than that I love the usability of iCloud keychain when you're just browsing Safari or whatever but would really love that menu bar and Standalone app so that's what I discovered there I also found I wanted to try and just use the stock calendar app because I have six different calendar accounts I it's a little crazy I know don't add me but trying to add all those accounts to Fantastical is a bit of a chore because I need to get app specific passwords for each of those accounts because they're all two- Factor like Microsoft or Google accounts and they don't and an iCloud Calendar I use as well and you can't just log into your iCloud account or log into your Microsoft account like you have to get an app specific password to use with Fantastical and that's cumbersome especially if you ever have to change that password for any reason so I was like let me just try to use the stock calendar app because that will pull from the internet accounts that I have in system settings when you do that I also missed the menu bar Fantastical icon because I very often go up to the menu bar click the little calendar symbol to see my events for the day to see the month view just to view it sometimes I add events in there but at least just viewing it from the menu bar was really useful and I missed that not having Fantastical which again is amazing I'm still using Fantastical on my iPhone iPad my Mac Studio I just want to see what it was like one app I found to help alleviate this it's called itsy Cal it y Cal I'll put a link in the show notes it's from mg.com like m o WGI and it is a free little utility you don't have to pay for it you just download it it accesses your calendars on the Mac and it puts something in the menu bar so you can just see your calendars for that day you can customize which calendars are viewable when you click it you can have the week start on Monday as you're supposed to and you can have a calendar icon that accesses your stock calendar accounts without using fantastic so that was an answer for that and then I downloaded a bunch of other apps that were just I needed these apps on my Mac I tried to go as stock as possible but I needed my clipboard manager pbot I needed text expander I use it so much via muscle memory bear for notes audio hijack for recording audio things for to-dos reader for RSS pixel mat Pro definitely need that pastel which is a great if you use a lot of different color and brand color things and hex codes pastel is great for accessing that and Mona my Mastadon client for Mac I downloaded that cuz I really wanted that and so it's been nice using my MacBook Pro just a Bare Bones just the apps I really need and the iCloud Drive syncing has not been too much of a pain at this point but I do all that to say I do wish Apple gives more options for iCloud Drive deciding how much space those files can take up and all that so I don't have to literally wipe my Mac to feel like I got space and storage back but what is your experience with iCloud drive and big files do you ever run into this kind of issue my MacBook Pro is at 300 gigs of 500 used that's and that's the whole story is wait so you have 200 gigs free yeah okay okay did I not dealing with large files um I generally my hobbies are photography related and even if I'm capturing full Raw photos at 50 megab each once I've edited those photos if I want to keep them I move them to this little One tbte external SD that I have so I just have a very clean system for managing this stuff the stuff that goes into iCloud are active use items so I have a entire database of all of the images I use for Apple Insider so I can quick search for keywords or go to different specific folders if I need an iPad or a Mac image or this specific image of software or whatever I have all that categorized and I Cloud Drive images don't take up that much space especially since we're using web- sized images jpegs I size up to 4K which are production reduces when I upload but I like to save them at that density but yeah like it's just not that much space for that I have a full library of all the text I've ever written for drafts and all the and then I have IIA writer which is where I save completed text for so drafts is where I write text and I literally have everything I've ever written just that I I never go back and look at it but it's just there if I for an emergency or need access to something I just create a new document every time I might go and Purge that eventually because again it's just not something I go look at and then completed finalized text that's been published on the website if I need to do SEO stats or find out different keyword densities or something like that I take that completed document put it in IIA writer and then use those tools there and so I writer has a more organized completed document list of the inside pages and stuff that I've written so I have complete complete text of those in case anything catches on fire but that's basically my cloud system I don't have a lot of personal stuff in there obviously iCloud photo library and I set that to download on whatever devices have enough storage for that as far as yeah I just haven't run out of space on anything really my 500 gig MacBook Pro is fine I actually have more storage I have one terab on my iPad Pro just because generally speaking that was my primary device and still will be my primary device once a few kinks are worked out in the operating system yeah I don't know the Mac is just less complicated in that way I just have what I need to run I'm it's a work machine I'm not using it for anything outside of work anything I do hobbyist wise is done on my iPad so it's interesting hearing you having all these problems but you're also running video you're doing a lot more podcast stuff I have all the audio that we've ever recorded is in iCloud so like again I but these files just aren't big enough to overload my systems to make me need to go through and wipe out something to gain control of it or whatever that's just my hope part of my wish list for DC but that was my experience and finally just before we oh go ahead could you have summoned your passwords with Siri instead of going into the settings app every time cuz Siri will fetch your passwords for you like with Spotlight or Siri Siri the this thei I don't have Siri enabled on my Mac oh there you go um I know I know on your iPhone if you let me see let me test this real quick show me my Apple password oh it opened the passwords app so see I thought it returned in one of those little what like a compact results but I guess not but anyway yeah that's keychain isn't perfect and sadly password fields and apps and websites need to specifically be written in a way that keychain can identify or won't and some apps just don't let keychain in so yeah it can be frustrating getting a lot of that done I think one password does some trickery in the system to get around that and just knows to look for password fields in a different way than what keychain is doing so it's going to have appear in more places and have more options cuz Apple isn't doing those workarounds so there's definitely weirdness there me I'm using mostly stock Apple apps I don't really go outside of that so even if I wiped my system today I wouldn't install much I'm very vanilla on my Mac the only things that I have installed are from set app I subscrib to set app and they have some really good tools like bartender and clean shot X and stuff like that and then of course I have pixel Mater Pro for editing that's myone Pho creation tool for work and stuff but yeah outside of that I'm looking here and I can't identify any sure apps that jump out and say hey it's pretty much set app and apple that's pretty much it right all right finally before we wrap up I do want to mention there's a new trailer for an Apple TV plus original movie directed by Martin scorsi called killers of the flower Moon a Wes and I watched it right before we started recording and it is an intense trailer and it features Robert dairo he it stars Robert dairo Leonardo DiCaprio I saw Brendan Fraser is in this movie so I'm very excited about that but this is about the members of the osaji tribe in the United States who were murdered under mysterious circumstances in the 1920s So based on a true story but it looks intense like it looks like maybe Oscar winning movie on Apple TV plus here so yeah this trailer looks pretty intense based on a book by David grah and I've not read it but I don't really care about any of that it's Martin scorsi that's all I need to know the cast is excellent the trailer looks dark it looks brooding just like the other films I'm a big fan of Square's work and just excited to finally see some moving pictures I think all we've had since about 2019 is a screenshot of Leonardo DiCaprio sitting angrily at a table in a cabin and now we finally have this story this trailer just showing us a little bit of the story around these horrible murders and just a good trailer overall go give it a watch and let us know if this is something you're going to go see in theaters because Apple's now very serious about getting its films in theater so I will probably see it in theaters this looks like a good theater movie it yeah really does listeners let us know what are you excited about are you really excited about Apple's VR headset or you looking for Apple's machine learning features at WWDC you can contact Wes and myself on Twitter or Mastadon all those links are in the show notes and you can support the show get an adree version and early access directly on Apple podcast or atwelcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is your host Steven Roes and today we're going to talk about some new accessibility features that Apple pre-announced coming to iOS 17 Apple VR versus Apple AI features what can we see at WWDC have a story about wiping my MacBook Pro and some other news this episode is brought to you by our friends at Zach do finding book a top R doctor today and our friends at Collide and joining me once again my good friend Wes hilard how's it going Wes I'm just thinking about Zelda tears of the Kingdom I don't know if I'm going to be involved in this podcast today listen I've seen every other Tik Tok is a Zelda tears of the Kingdom there's people like weeping playing this game and honestly like I'm about it like I'm excited and I'm not even playing it but I want to makes me want no it is whatever they're doing over there they're doing it right it's like the perfect sequel of a video game I've ever seen considering that they didn't have to rebuild the map from scratch I think they had a lot more time to focus on physics engines and gameplay and W it's good and the story my gosh yeah anyway moving on so good that's excting it looks exciting it looks very exciting all right a couple quick festar reviews Chris from Australia PGH Phil from the USA and Kevin from sgo Ireland said he listens at 1.75 speed but we'll forgive that thanks anyway for the five star review appreciate it and I'll be honest when it comes to listening speed I still listen to podcast at 1X I do listen to the talk show at 1 and a half to 1. 75x cuz I do feel like it's a little more normal talking speed but I have trained myself now to edit everything both video and podcast at 2x so when I bring like this podcast into frite one of the wonderful features of the latest version of fite is editing at 2x speed that is how I edit this show I edit in Final Cut now at 2x speed which I had to look up how to do it's not very obvious how to like actually play back at 2xp and Final Cut if you press space bar and it starts playing through the timeline press L and L will speed it up playback and then just like J will slow down playback so that jkl controls its keyboard shortcut there's not really a UI method as far as I could tell to set 2X playback as the default but just hit the letter L you can edit in 2X and Final Cut and that's how I edit it's pretty nice some apple had some announcements actually it's incredible that they keep announcing new features and kind of software updates pre WWDC I want to talk a little bit about what that might mean for WWDC but they that Apple music now has concert discovery that means in maps there will be new guides or there are 40 new guides curated by Apple music editors and those guides and Apple Maps they'll show ideal venues to experience live music around you which is pretty cool and in apple music there's a new set list space you can actually see the set list for major tours you then if you're a fan of a certain band you can just listen to this playlist and it's their concert set list which I don't know does that kind of remove some of the Allure of wondering what they're going to play at the show if you see this concert set list I I'm not much of a concert goer but my is is that people know what the set list is I think it's a thing that people go out of their way to Hype thems up for the concert to listen to the music ahead of time but again the live production will always be different and every live production is different in its own way so I think it's just a different way of interacting with this kind of event I was curious because it's in Apple Maps they have the new guides that have these music venues and I'm curious listeners and for you Wes how much you use guides I actually use guides all the time in Apple Maps if you raise that drawer at the bottom and you scroll down you have the my guide section which you can create a guide as many guides as you want and then you can edit certain ones but you basically add places of interest and you can label a guide like your hometown or maybe I have guides for Asheville North Carolina because we usually go near there if we're going to Vacation sometimes up the mountains and I save favorite spot spots either that I want to try someday or spots that we discovered that we really like and so I can always return to that guide and even just local places if I see a place you're going to have to share that Asheville guide with me cuz I'm an hour from there and we go there a lot it's fun yeah I will do that I even have a guide for North Carolina traveling is the name of my guide because we drive up to North Carolina usually and there's hotels we've stayed at that we really liked and there's some food places that are like set stopping points on our road trip cuz we've done it many times and so I have that guide where I can just quickly I have several hotels the restaurants just jump to those places while we're on the road trip and they're all saved and it's some of our favorite places so I love guides so you do you can share a guide I have not done that a lot but you can share a guide and save places to it this is one of those Apple Maps things that it feels like they're laying groundwork for a larger feature set rather than who who uses guides and how many people actually know they even exist about yeah there's a lot of stuff in here there's even Apple produce produced guides there's a lot from magazines and different newspapers and local venues different guid on guides when we visit Nashville I love using the guides to find like restaurants to eat at stuff like that like they're very useful especially when you're anywhere near just a larger City it doesn't have to be this huge kind of touristy town like even Asheville probably has a couple of like local newspaper guides so definitely something to dive into I like making my own just of like places I've eaten and like when I go to Gatlinburg I have my own guide of restaurants that I like and places I want to go back to just another one of those things that Apple could probably do better at surfacing and giving users a little bit gamify it a little bit because right now it's just like making a reminders list and it's boring yeah again it's just I've been thinking a lot I don't know if anyone pays attention to my social media but I've been thinking a lot about Apple and how they approach a lot of their social interactions and their devices and I feel like it's all disperate spread out hidden and if they ever just took the time to connect the dots and make it more surface level I'm not talking about the social network here I'm talking about just make it more visible gamify it a little bit give people incentive to use these features and I think we would all benefit from that because these features only really work when everyone's using them like for you shared with you the Apple Maps guides right like planning like you can use Apple Maps guides to plan an itinerary for a trip there's so much cool stuff here it's just hidden away it would be cool if Apple gave you a public like bio page basically where you can highlight some of your favorite guides you if there's podcast that you create on Apple podcast you can include links to that I actually recently discovered thanks to Micah Sergent in his social media bios he has something called a Bento Box and so there's a website it's called bent. me it's free to sign up it's free to use right now these things are everywhere there's aund whatever reason the last year like these yes me Pages the link do here's everything I've ever done on a on the internet just link Pages yeah I've tried many of them I've tried like bio. site I've done a link tree typically I actually because I have a personal website I made a page specifically that I can use in my social media profile links because if you're going to send somebody anywhere and possibly have any kind of web traffic hopefully it would benefit your website rather than a third third party like link tree or whatever so I typically use my own website page that I created in my social media bios but I really love of all the designs of these Pages Bento me is one of the nicest looking that I have seen adding your links to podcasts and social media like visually it almost feels like an apple designed product and it would be really cool if there was a way where Apple could say put your Maps guides put your podcast your Apple music playlist whatever points of interest if you do want to have a one page that's like your iCloud profile or whatever it would be cool you could highlight things like your Maps again we're really close to this and all roads point to it being possible and it existing as long as the data isn't user addressable unless Apple gives us a kind of status page or wall to post to they're not going to have to regulate anything it'll just be Apple related here's links to things I've done kind of social profile and and I would say no posting like no posting yeah I'm that takes away the the work that Apple cont moderation yeah cuz that would turn it into a social network and again this could lead to social networks it would be fun to post links to your social so this brings me back and we don't need to dive into it because it's fully my imagination but I've been imagining what Apple like an apple social platform could look like in this sense of just combining all of Apple's things into one platform and Joe rosenal he was posting about the accessibility features we get into this is where it comes from one of the features you can toggle combines the I believe the phone app and the FaceTime app into one interface to make it less confusing for certain people because that is a confusing concept that there's these different apps that kind of do the same thing and he questioned why not does is this a sign that Apple could be combining these apps in the future or give users the option outside of accessibility it would be interesting to me if I message the phone app FaceTime and cont taxs were all to basically merge back into one more or less social platform and instead of imagine the messages app where you have a tree of people at the top your pinned conversations and then a list of conversations below that just switch it in your head to pin profiles and you click on someone's face and then you see access to a FaceTime call an iMessage thread and this is where what we were discussing would come in it would be amazing if that also was just basically an interactive Apple ID profile showing what are they playing on Apple arcade what was their latest Apple music playlist and just surface it all underneath this new contact profile and my argument for Apple doing this and why this would exist is this is now if Apple ecosystem contacts like they have iMessage and other things basically if you're on Apple your contact profile explodes into this useful mechanism right now we can introduce RCS and shove it under uh a rug over here you can RCS someone if you're with apple your profile is this living breathing thing that lets friends interact with you see all of your shared stuff and it just becomes again this gamification of iMessaging contacts and FaceTime in a way that Apple kind of is a little bit boring with now they bring it all up front and just present it in this colorful fun way and I think that that would be a very powerful way for Apple to move its ecosystem forward make people more interested in it just make it visible and then say and there's this RCS junk over here that if you really need it and it would be cool if you had that kind of page let's say your profile page and it was let's say just visible to you for right now or at least part of it is just visible to you yeah you could click a toggle say which ones are public which ones aren't right but also like shared with you feature which I think is really great there's been times when someone has texted me a show or texted me a link and then when I go into Safari that shared with you line is great because now I don't have to think about who sent it to me or what text conversation it's in I'm already in Safari now if I'm in a place where I can browse it I can just click it but it would be nice to see all of the things people have shared with you and in one place and I think apple is just like you're saying a couple steps away from doing it because it Aggregates it in each app it would be nice to go to one place icloud.com your username or whatever and just see here's all the things people have sent you via text via email would be nice to email will get really messy because you probably get a ton of links but it would be nice to add things to that shared with you as you're browsing around or someone sends something to you I don't know it'd be cool maybe it'll see some in WWDC because it still remains to be seen with all the rumors flying around and everything they're pre-announcing let's get to some of the accessibility features they pre-announced and then we can brainstorm more in WWDC but this is something Apple's been doing year after year where they pre-announced some of the accessibility forward features so they can be highlighted and have their own moment before we get to WWDC and all the big Iowa 17 and announcements there's three key features here that I wanted to mention and what it means but assistive access which means that someone that possibly has cognitive disabilities it'll be easier for them to interact with the displays on their devices there's large high contrast buttons and large text with labels that's assist of access it looks pretty slick there's a screenshots on it you can check out the article in the show notes also just side note there's for users who prefer to communicate visually there's an emoji only keyboard and I so wish I could figure out how to hack William Gallagher iPhone where it will only show the Emoji only keyboard I think that would be hilarious but anyway point and speak which is an improvement on something Apple has had an accessibility where those who are visually impaired can hold their iPhone up and the camera depending on what it sees will speak what it sees like door in front or this door says that and now it will actually speak text that the camera sees as someone is holding the iPhone up and seeing something like this way for restrooms or whatever it may be so that's point and speak but this last one I find particular particularly interesting it's live speech and personal Voice live speech means you can either pre-program different spoken tidbits or strings of text and whether someone's on a FaceTime call they can choose these different pieces of text and it will be spoken to the other person or you can have these pieces of text ready made on your phone and you can just play them while you're in person a speech to text kind of feature and one of the powerful features they're adding into this is those who might be on road to losing their ability to speak if it's something like ALS and the person you know is not going to be able to speak out loud in the future this personal voice feature basically the user will read aloud a random set of text prompts and create 15 minutes of audio on device and using here it is machine learning the device will use that data to create a personal voice meaning that those live speech text Snippets that the person has programmed into their phone can be spoken in a voice that sounds like them now this is by all accounts of anyone else on the internet any other company would say this is an AI powered or AI generated personal voice Apple did not say AI anywhere in this announcement doesn't call it an AI feature they said they use on device machine learning yeah there's no mention of even the abbreviation or artificial intelligence at all in the piece nothing and I think this is very indicative and I think this is what it looks like when Apple uses quote unquote AI features which shout out to Jason Aton because he actually wrote an article saying everybody stop calling it AI it's just computers doing things and so kudos to be like that's kind of what we were talking about even last week and so this is a more accurate description it's machine learning but this is 100% Apple what again you're seeing all these other companies do that they are calling AI features AI powered AI generated this is Apple using that technology here it's for an accessibility reason which I think is incredible I'm very curious how this would carry over year to year if someone has an iPhone they do the 15 minutes of audio it creates a personal voice is that sync to iCloud is that saved to their iCloud account in some way so as they upgrade their device could it be carried over or transferred so I'd be curious about that side of the feature but I think this is a glimpse of what we're going to see apple talk about at WWDC we're not going to hear them say AI even once I not can say I'll shave my eyebrows if they say it but I would feel confident even saying that because this is again I think just clear that Apple understands the power of these kinds of features and machine learning technology they are using it this is proof and they are not going to call it Ai and we're going to see that a ton at WWDC machine learning has been a subset of Apple since the iPhone 7 and they've said it in Keynotes many times yeah it that again it's the more accurate term I mean we it goes all the way back to portrait mode when we had we got what our first dual camera photography system Apple was dabbling in machine learning algorithms obviously with Siri and voice translation like it's been there for more than a decade but like the first time we really saw on the consumer end front facing was when they created portrait mode for the camera and then it's just evolved from there like Apple's been involved in this for a very long time and it's always hilarious to me when I see people say is Apple behind and AI or whatever and it's your use of the word is impossible to decide CER because it doesn't have any meaning but no apple is not behind if anything they're at the Forefront of all of this and yes while Siri might be a little silly sometimes and misunderstand or at the surface appears less complex than other voice assistants I assure you it's as complex and as powerful as things like Google Assistant if the problem is there's a learning curve and these things shouldn't have learning curves they should have they should just work in Apple's parlament and Siri has a just work problem where takes the same it can take the same things out of syntax and do different things with the same phrase sometimes like there's definitely issues with Siri but I don't think it's as dire as people make it out to be and I think it'll be interesting to see the further advancements that Apple has here and accessibility features always are a sign of the future whether we're we're we as humans are going to grow into needing these accessibility features it's amazing that they're there don't worry you're not going to have your perfect 20-year-old vision for your entire life you could your voice could be lost in an accident at any time there's you don't think about very often but it's reality where we can fall apart at any moment we could we can lose access to the things that we take for granted at any time and here these tools give us the ability to basically get through these issues yeah one thing I wanted to say is I wonder what this technology looks like moving forward because as we've seen with other accessibility features they usually move over into non-accessibility as standard features so we saw like the iPad cursor exists because of an accessibility feature and I wonder if personal voice is a way we're going to be able to program personal Siri voices in the future that exactly and like I would with intercom they added these shortcut steps where I can have any of my intercom homepods say a message that either I type in or pre-program which is similar to what this live speech feature is pre-program some text Snippets and then Siri will speak it out of your device will speak it out and if I could program my voice where when I send an intercom command to my homepod and it sounds like me instead of just the stock Siri voice 100% I would do that and I'll even put this link in show notes I might have put it in here a few weeks ago but 11 Labs it's beta. 11lbs doio they call it primo Ai and it is exactly this feature where you can record or submit recordings of your voice to this website it will create a profile for your your voice and then you can have any amount of typing type whatever text you want and it will create an audio file of quote unquote your voice speaking that text and you think longterm you know the use cases of something like this for audio books if an author wants to have their voice as the audiobook narrator and AI gets good enough where it doesn't sound robotic and it actually sounds natural huge ramifications like in a good way for voice actors maybe not so there's going to have to be a different kind of hopefully Market or the hill AI Revolution is I think going to ffect that market specifically but I think this feature is great and I'm curious how Apple's going to expand it throughout its lineup it just reminds me a little bit and it's a little it's a little different cuz they didn't use this technology but in in extrapolations an Apple TV Plus show about the Future How It climate change is affecting our planet there's a lot of technology in the show and it's just really interesting to see how they've used it and evolved it because it goes all the way up to 2070 something and it's funny cuz Apple isn't in the show Apple's in all of their modern Apple TV play shows except for the ones that are too sci-fi to have it or just in alternate universes this one is set in our Earth and I don't know if you've watched it yet but I definitely recommend it it is such a disturbing and Powerful show I love it the reason I'm bring it up in the second episode Merill stre plays someone's mother who before she passes because she's diagnosed with I can't remember I think it's a kind of cancer she knows that she's never going to get to meet her grandchildren so she records videos of her reading bedtime stories so the kid can go back and watch them and there's some narrative around this in the show but I just thought it was clever is we can do this now there's nothing preventing us from having our family sit in front of a camera and read a bedtime story and I thought that was really interesting and that took place in like 2046 but now we're talking about today we could have a loved one record their voice and we could synthesize it to read any story that we want I'm just I thought it was just an interesting thought technology but synthesis versus reality one of the things that so this again goes back to the show the second episode is about the extinction of whales and this woman she has collected a lot of voice data of her family for reasons and when she they they figured out at this point how to communicate with animals by synthesizing animal noises and they know what the animal is trying to say it's again very sci-fi she actually uses her recorded family voices in of the animal so she can feel a closer connection to it and the whale she's talking to she uses her mother's voice Merl Streep's voice to be the whale and it's just such such an interesting concept and of course it brings up a lot of moral and ethical issues you're supposed to be getting data from this whale but it's your mother and it's interesting it's it's a good thought a way to think about technology and how it affects our future I'm going to put a link to to Joanna Stern's Wall Street Journal video essay it was called Eternal a tech quest to live forever how Tech can bring our loved ones to life after they die and this is a part of it was really good it was an incredible watch really fascinating even then this was December 2020 so we're talking almost 3 years ago and even the technology then with taking recordings from loved ones generating the voice saying other things even interacting with that Voice through something like an Amazon assistant and now with all the AI Revolution now 3 years later I feel like this is even more appropo so I'll put that link in the show if you're curious about it but great new accessibility features from Apple and this will be coming with iOS 17 and I'm sure we'll hear plenty of it at WWDC which we should talk about next but again I just want to reiterate happening on device with Apple's neural engine the stff isn't right getting sent off to a cloud to get processed and that's the thing with these large language models they're interesting they're a new step in the tool set I I again I just wouldn't count Apple out of the equation here yet and I'm very interested in seeing if they do anything similar to a large Lang model at WWDC this episode is brought to you by Zach do listen you're trying to find a cause for your symptoms maybe you're not feeling very good but if you search online you're going to 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compliance so visit collide.com apppp inssider to learn more or book a demo that's k l d.com slapple Insider our thanks to collide for sponsoring this episode so looking to WDC we're just a little over 2 weeks away from the key note on June 5th and I've really been thinking a lot about machine learning and AI in relation to what apple is going to announce because really all the talk about WWDC has been maybe watch OS gets a huge update we could see 15-inch MacBook Air but the VR headset has really taken the Limelight as what we are all looking forward to for WWDC heard from other podcast like ATP and others that there's something really big something exciting coming and everyone's thinking it's the VR headset there was XR which has supposedly been the operating system that Apple's headset will run that term XR has been trademarked by Apple in New Zealand but this one was not Apple this was deep dive LC a shell company that is supposedly owned by Apple okay okay we'll see yeah so it's one of those we you know you can search these regulatory databases and find things and XR in the same couple of days was trademarked and what gave it away and what people are assuming here is this was a word Mark trademark so it's like a watermark of the word XR oos stylized in different ways but it uses Apple's SF Pro font in the stylization it's a giveaway like they didn't trademark this in Times New Roman and so this was actually a trademark filed in Singapore and New Zealand by the same Deep dive LLC so I okay so that's there we're hearing from there was a tweet from a person named Hudson that on the WWDC schedule there's been like partial schedules supposedly with a special evening Activity one of the nights of WWDC Apple said you won't want to miss it at least for those who are attending I have a feel it's a full schedule we just can't find there's people are scared of sharing it right they cropped out the bottom half that has the special activity which I'm sure just says special activity you won't want to miss it but and you can register your interest in attending and like that it's just this internal page if you have been invited you log in with your Apple ID and you can see this page that shows your schedule for WWDC we see these every year it just says when you're having lunch when you're going on a tour there's nothing revelatory here and there's always some kind of evening event it's just people are highly speculative about the special events is it everyone to try on AR headsets I don't know I have a feeling it's the talk show with John grber because I feel like last year Don grber held the talk show on site it was actually held at the developer Center that apple had just opened so I feel like they would probably put that on the schedule it's more likely I I to guess the the WWDC what is it bash some sort of like beer bash thing that they do yeah they do some kind of party whatever it's a concert with a live they have Shakira Come To Come and sing for them and it's like this weird nerd party okay I hope to one day I'll see this nerd party but yeah so that's a special activity but coming very soon I wanted to poll on Twitter and Maston so I submitted this poll and I was curious if people who listen and this wasn't hugely voted on so this is a small subset but I asked are people more excited for WWDC to see apple release AI or machine learning features across their os's or are people excited about the VR headset because I will say after watching Google's IO keynote and seeing all the different AI everything whether or not that's a good term to call it or not but just seeing the Technologies being built into things like Google Sheets and Google and Gmail and Google search I I really got excited thinking if Apple could do this they would be I think uniquely positioned across apps to really help people use machine learning tools in an effective way for instance if you're writing in a Pages document and you want to generate text or select some bullet points and tell Siri or whatever other assistant Apple wants to call it make these bullet points into a keynote slide it tells you to pick a photo from your iCloud photo library and automatically you have a keynote presentation nicely designed I feel like apple is uniquely positioned to walk people through how to utilize these kinds of machine learning features how to help people be more be more productive with them across all their applications I think these accessibility features that Apple's released this week is a glimpse into that and I am more excited to see what they do with that in iOS and iPad OS maybe they just build it into CI and Siri really becomes that AI assistant although they're not going to say AI I don't know what they would call it but are they excited for that I'm more excited for that than even the VR headset and I know that might like ruffle people's feathers like everyone's excited about this VR headset but I just don't think that is going to have the same practical use cases for a majority of people as small little AI features that are built into the operating system across apps that people already use Stephen I hate to burst your bubble but none of that's happening there none of the AI like whatever stuff is happening there's no way WWDC is based on software operating systems right that are developed across the previous year so in parallel with everything announced last year things were in the early Alpha phases and they enter a Final lockin Phase by December of 2022 and then these first 6 months is basically get it ready for prime time enough that we can enter beta 1 successfully and not break everyone's computers cuz everyone's going to install this whether developer or not this last 6 months that's when this a AI whatever large language model Revolution was occurring it wasn't it's not it wasn't on Apple's radar when they were developing these operating systems it's not going to be a part of it there's no way unless they have a separate team specifically working on these features and they were like we have to get into this Zeitgeist but the thing is Apple's never been one to get into the Zeitgeist they don't care they don't need to I understand that but again features in like Final Cut Pro on iPad like the autoc crop that's the kind of feature and even last year at WWDC you think about iCloud shared photo library the ability to when you're with your iCloud family if you're at like a theme park or on vacation the fact that you're all taking pictures in a close proximity it's using the geolocation and then automatically suggest that those photos be shared across a shared I photo library that's not what I mean though those cuz those are just features right that's where everyone's getting so confused this is where the use of AI for everything breaks everyone's brains because it no longer has any meaning what Google announced at IO was a lot of features for their operating systems and their software and some of them not all of them some of them were powered by large language models some larger than others because of their different size systems that they've been implementing but they are still that specific technology but the problem is they've used a blanket term to discuss all of the technology Apple last year introduced a lot of great features that use a lot of machine learning capabilities that use a lot of on device intelligence the neural engine to perform tasks those will still be present this year that's not what I'm saying Apple will still have features for their products using machine learning models and the neural engine and improve upon photo editing and sharing and device based location and all of that stuff will still be there what I'm talking about specifically again is large language models so everyone expecting yeah so everyone's expecting Apple to come out at WWDC and say here is code co-pilot and it's going to help you write code and while something like that might have been in development because we have seen Apple slowly improve xcode's ability to correct your code and give you autogenerated Snippets and stuff like that based on what you're trying to do because of Swift UI and it's more natural language model that is all true and if we see something similar to that it's not because of the llm boom it's because Apple's been working on this for years and it just happened to make an xcode this year I don't don't foresee us seeing an all powerful new Siri that you can communicate with natural language unless again there's just been a specific team since January running through these large language systems and saying we can do that and just slowly implementing it into Siri last minute but Apple doesn't operate at the last minute I'm curious because you have been a proponent saying like apple is really leaning on to the reality of things like photos not wanting to offer so many adjustments to a photo where what is a photo I am curious if the magic editor that we saw with Google where you can move something a little more in frame and then AI will automatically generate it Apple already does background removal and that's built into the photos app like you could just tap and hold on a subject and drag it over and remove the background I do wonder if we will see those kinds of quote unquote generative features and things like photos but I also will say while I agree where we won't see large language models from Apple where you basically chat with Siri and Siri will generate an essay about the Revolutionary War or whatever I could see more features in things like Spotlight which Spotlight actually was improved last year even on the Mac and on iOS but in things like Spotlight on the iPhone where when you search for something and you have the suggested results at the top like if you search for a movie if you search for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 it'll jump you to Fandango or IMDb doing everything it can to have you just skip the search engine entirely and it offers all of that right there in kind of the the series search window I could see that being improved where any other company would call it AI results or whatever I think Apple could increase the offerings of that the have you be able to follow up cuz that's something where you type in Guardians of the Galaxy 3 it gives you a bunch of answers but there's not like a followup you can't say actually I was looking for movie times or actually I just wanted to know the cast of the movie you can add that kind of in the spotlight search box but that's a little clunky cuz if you scroll down or whatever so I could see apple improving that kind of stuff which I which would show me that they are doing those kinds of machine learning features they're not going to call it AI but that's the kind of stuff they could build into Siri and Spotlight and search across the all the os's and it would feel like this kind of AI stuff sure but I still think that's just an evolution of what they've already been working on and has nothing to do with the World At Large and that's what's that's what I just want to distinguish here is like I because I can see the headlines already is Apple playing catch up with Google bard or whatever Apple they're not doing any of that because it's not it wasn't on their radar when they were designing these systems these systems are also new that the stuff that we're getting in June predates all of this stuff that Google and being in all of that has been working on in these last like six months or so it it just I I don't know I just think language is important and Google is doing everything it can to destroy language with its use of the term Ai and everyone's just jumping onto the hype train and they're forgetting that that Apple has been in this arms race for years there's something called Siri intelligence that runs on all of our devices and I know kind of an oxymoron because everyone really dislikes Siri but at least a lot of people do but Siri intelligence is this thing that you're talking about it's what makes Spotlight work the you there's a setting menu in settings that says everything that Siri intelligence has access to you toggle on and off and that's what surfaces in Spotlight that's what Siri can pull up when you give it commands that's what so if you have the dictionary app like a what's that if you have wolf from alpha installed on your iPhone that can be a Siri intelligence Target you can actually improve series search results by having different apps installed because it'll provide results from different apps using deep app search which is something Apple introduced years ago all of this is here and we'll see evolutions of it and improvements on it in during WWDC I just hope people don't get confused and think oh like this is a response to Google oh this is a response to Bing because now suddenly Apple needs to play catchup I just personally I don't think they need to play catchup I think they just need to keep doing what they've been doing yeah we should move on but I do want to say last year the 2022 WWDC keynote they said machine learning four to five times I actually know because I downloaded the video put it into a transcription engine and searched for the words so it was like single digits four to five times because each piece of technology has has its own name because they need different names to describe them but I'm just going to say I think this year they're going to say machine learning a lot more probably neural engine like there will be more buzzwords I'm I'm Apple isn't afraid of marketing terms all right one quick news and then I want to talk about wiping my MacBook Pro cuz that was an experience but Georgia has now brought the iPhone driver's license into the wallet so if you're a Georgia resident you can now have your digital driver's license or ID in the Apple wallet app and Georgia joins three other states Arizona Colorado and Maryland so those four states you can use your digital ID in the wallet app all that to say Florida supposedly has a digital ID program not yet a part of this thing and what has it been like four years since digital I don't know 2020 maybe yeah it's it's it's one of those weird things where again I hate this but it's only useful for one thing and at certain airports it's exciting that it's coming but until it I don't I honestly even if Tennessee today said here's your driver's license I would do the thing and add it to my phone cool sure sure but it's useless like I can't go buy a beer with it yeah so we'll see okay I want to tell a quick anecdote and then go into some details about wiping my 14-inch MacBook Pro because when I got that which is about over a year and a half ago I got the 1 tbte SD which when it comes to what you upgrade on a KAC when you buy it the more storage you can afford the better I I went with one terabyte because I knew I was going to be getting a desktop later I have my Mac Studio I got two terabytes on that 2 terabytes have been a good amount but the 1 tbyte drive on my 14-inch MacBook Pro was filling up and I only had 60 gigs of free space I don't like being that close to the line I like having at least 100 gigs free or more and a large majority of that storage was being taken up by iCloud drive files I produce a lot of podcasts and I save both the raw wave files and the MP3 finished files into iCloud drive and being saved there it takes up a lot of space I had 600 gigabyt of my MacBook Pro was being taken up by iCloud drive files now I know that with iCloud drive you can remove downloads from files that have been downloaded to your computer and say don't keep this locally on my device just keep it in my iCloud drive because I have room there in my iCloud Drive I just don't want it to take up space on my Mac and there is a checkbox in system settings where you could say optimize Mac storage and your Mac will automatically offload files as you begin to run out of space the threshold I wish was granular I wish I could say offload files once iCloud Drive takes up 100 gigs but you can't do that like you just have to let the Mac do it by itself so I wanted to offload some files and I couldn't figure out how to do it right away I know that if you rightclick an individual file in iCloud Drive there's an option to remove download but if you select a folder or in my case I have many nested folders cuz I really like to organize all my files you can't select multiple folders and remove them but you almost is can because I had a couple listeners reach out and if you select let's say just a bunch of MP3s you know I have a folder with a bunch of MP3s half of them are downloaded to the Mac half of them are not you can tell because if there's a little Cloud symbol with a down arrow it means it's not safe save to the computer where if there's no symbol next to the file then it is downloaded if you select all those files and right click you might see the download now button and I thought maybe you have to click download now and once they're all downloaded you can remove the downloads but if you select all those files click them so the contextual menu pops up and then hold the option key on your keyboard it will change or add the option to remove the downloads amongst all those selected files so you don't have to download them all just to remove them so I did that for a few ways and it would work sometimes with multiple folders there were sometimes where I could select multiple folders tell it to remove downloads and it would do it but it didn't work consistently and I could not do it from the top level like I could not rightclick my documents folder which is where all my files are saved I don't really keep anything on the desktop I organize everything in the documents I wish I could just right click that whole documents folder and say remove all the downloads in here and just let it be and because I couldn't do do that I chose the sane option as I thought and I'm like I'm just going to start from scratch so I just wiped my Mac which is now easier because you can go to system settings and just do erase all content and settings like you can on iOS devices so the process of wiping everything is fairly straightforward so I did that started from scratch chose not to sync iCloud Drive I said don't download anything in the desktop and documents folder just stop it I'll figure out how I'll go to icloud.com if I need to or something cuz I really don't do a lot on the laptop that I need all those files for so I wiped it and I don't have plenty of space now don't have to worry about it all that to say I would love to see some iCloud Drive updates at WWDC so those kinds of things are a little more manageable but as I started from scratch on my MacBook Pro I thought I have an opportunity here let me try and go as stock as possible and only install the apps that I really need one of the biggest things I thought to try was iCloud keychain and not install one password at all now doing this I actually find that iCloud keychain when it's not having to fight one password for autofill and Safari works really well on my Mac Studio where I have both installed I know I can turn off the autofill but whenever I click in a login window or a login box iCloud keychain and one password are like fighting each other and the windows overlap and it's a mess so just having iCloud keychain for those kind of web autofills is working really well what I immediately missed from just using iCloud keychain was menu bar access where I could just click something in the menu bar and search for a login right there in a contextual menu in the menu bar and then copy the password I would love for there to be some kind of menu bar access maybe Spotlight maybe it could be there one of the biggest challenges I found was in system settings when you need to add Internet accounts like you're trying to sync a Microsoft account and mail calendars and contacts from things like Google if you want to sync your Google account it is n imp possible to get your iCloud keychain password when you're in the middle of that process if you wanted to add a Google account in system settings under internet accounts it'll pull up the login window for Google and sometimes the iCloud keychain popup would not appear for me to just autocomplete and I would have to close out of that whole process to go copy the password password from the passwords menu in system settings this would be solved if there was either a menu bar or a standalone app that I could have open alongside system settings to be able to copy and paste passwords so that was one of the bigger frustrations and not having it in the menu bar was annoying other than that I love the usability of iCloud keychain when you're just browsing Safari or whatever but would really love that menu bar and Standalone app so that's what I discovered there I also found I wanted to try and just use the stock calendar app because I have six different calendar accounts I it's a little crazy I know don't add me but trying to add all those accounts to Fantastical is a bit of a chore because I need to get app specific passwords for each of those accounts because they're all two- Factor like Microsoft or Google accounts and they don't and an iCloud Calendar I use as well and you can't just log into your iCloud account or log into your Microsoft account like you have to get an app specific password to use with Fantastical and that's cumbersome especially if you ever have to change that password for any reason so I was like let me just try to use the stock calendar app because that will pull from the internet accounts that I have in system settings when you do that I also missed the menu bar Fantastical icon because I very often go up to the menu bar click the little calendar symbol to see my events for the day to see the month view just to view it sometimes I add events in there but at least just viewing it from the menu bar was really useful and I missed that not having Fantastical which again is amazing I'm still using Fantastical on my iPhone iPad my Mac Studio I just want to see what it was like one app I found to help alleviate this it's called itsy Cal it y Cal I'll put a link in the show notes it's from mg.com like m o WGI and it is a free little utility you don't have to pay for it you just download it it accesses your calendars on the Mac and it puts something in the menu bar so you can just see your calendars for that day you can customize which calendars are viewable when you click it you can have the week start on Monday as you're supposed to and you can have a calendar icon that accesses your stock calendar accounts without using fantastic so that was an answer for that and then I downloaded a bunch of other apps that were just I needed these apps on my Mac I tried to go as stock as possible but I needed my clipboard manager pbot I needed text expander I use it so much via muscle memory bear for notes audio hijack for recording audio things for to-dos reader for RSS pixel mat Pro definitely need that pastel which is a great if you use a lot of different color and brand color things and hex codes pastel is great for accessing that and Mona my Mastadon client for Mac I downloaded that cuz I really wanted that and so it's been nice using my MacBook Pro just a Bare Bones just the apps I really need and the iCloud Drive syncing has not been too much of a pain at this point but I do all that to say I do wish Apple gives more options for iCloud Drive deciding how much space those files can take up and all that so I don't have to literally wipe my Mac to feel like I got space and storage back but what is your experience with iCloud drive and big files do you ever run into this kind of issue my MacBook Pro is at 300 gigs of 500 used that's and that's the whole story is wait so you have 200 gigs free yeah okay okay did I not dealing with large files um I generally my hobbies are photography related and even if I'm capturing full Raw photos at 50 megab each once I've edited those photos if I want to keep them I move them to this little One tbte external SD that I have so I just have a very clean system for managing this stuff the stuff that goes into iCloud are active use items so I have a entire database of all of the images I use for Apple Insider so I can quick search for keywords or go to different specific folders if I need an iPad or a Mac image or this specific image of software or whatever I have all that categorized and I Cloud Drive images don't take up that much space especially since we're using web- sized images jpegs I size up to 4K which are production reduces when I upload but I like to save them at that density but yeah like it's just not that much space for that I have a full library of all the text I've ever written for drafts and all the and then I have IIA writer which is where I save completed text for so drafts is where I write text and I literally have everything I've ever written just that I I never go back and look at it but it's just there if I for an emergency or need access to something I just create a new document every time I might go and Purge that eventually because again it's just not something I go look at and then completed finalized text that's been published on the website if I need to do SEO stats or find out different keyword densities or something like that I take that completed document put it in IIA writer and then use those tools there and so I writer has a more organized completed document list of the inside pages and stuff that I've written so I have complete complete text of those in case anything catches on fire but that's basically my cloud system I don't have a lot of personal stuff in there obviously iCloud photo library and I set that to download on whatever devices have enough storage for that as far as yeah I just haven't run out of space on anything really my 500 gig MacBook Pro is fine I actually have more storage I have one terab on my iPad Pro just because generally speaking that was my primary device and still will be my primary device once a few kinks are worked out in the operating system yeah I don't know the Mac is just less complicated in that way I just have what I need to run I'm it's a work machine I'm not using it for anything outside of work anything I do hobbyist wise is done on my iPad so it's interesting hearing you having all these problems but you're also running video you're doing a lot more podcast stuff I have all the audio that we've ever recorded is in iCloud so like again I but these files just aren't big enough to overload my systems to make me need to go through and wipe out something to gain control of it or whatever that's just my hope part of my wish list for DC but that was my experience and finally just before we oh go ahead could you have summoned your passwords with Siri instead of going into the settings app every time cuz Siri will fetch your passwords for you like with Spotlight or Siri Siri the this thei I don't have Siri enabled on my Mac oh there you go um I know I know on your iPhone if you let me see let me test this real quick show me my Apple password oh it opened the passwords app so see I thought it returned in one of those little what like a compact results but I guess not but anyway yeah that's keychain isn't perfect and sadly password fields and apps and websites need to specifically be written in a way that keychain can identify or won't and some apps just don't let keychain in so yeah it can be frustrating getting a lot of that done I think one password does some trickery in the system to get around that and just knows to look for password fields in a different way than what keychain is doing so it's going to have appear in more places and have more options cuz Apple isn't doing those workarounds so there's definitely weirdness there me I'm using mostly stock Apple apps I don't really go outside of that so even if I wiped my system today I wouldn't install much I'm very vanilla on my Mac the only things that I have installed are from set app I subscrib to set app and they have some really good tools like bartender and clean shot X and stuff like that and then of course I have pixel Mater Pro for editing that's myone Pho creation tool for work and stuff but yeah outside of that I'm looking here and I can't identify any sure apps that jump out and say hey it's pretty much set app and apple that's pretty much it right all right finally before we wrap up I do want to mention there's a new trailer for an Apple TV plus original movie directed by Martin scorsi called killers of the flower Moon a Wes and I watched it right before we started recording and it is an intense trailer and it features Robert dairo he it stars Robert dairo Leonardo DiCaprio I saw Brendan Fraser is in this movie so I'm very excited about that but this is about the members of the osaji tribe in the United States who were murdered under mysterious circumstances in the 1920s So based on a true story but it looks intense like it looks like maybe Oscar winning movie on Apple TV plus here so yeah this trailer looks pretty intense based on a book by David grah and I've not read it but I don't really care about any of that it's Martin scorsi that's all I need to know the cast is excellent the trailer looks dark it looks brooding just like the other films I'm a big fan of Square's work and just excited to finally see some moving pictures I think all we've had since about 2019 is a screenshot of Leonardo DiCaprio sitting angrily at a table in a cabin and now we finally have this story this trailer just showing us a little bit of the story around these horrible murders and just a good trailer overall go give it a watch and let us know if this is something you're going to go see in theaters because Apple's now very serious about getting its films in theater so I will probably see it in theaters this looks like a good theater movie it yeah really does listeners let us know what are you excited about are you really excited about Apple's VR headset or you looking for Apple's machine learning features at WWDC you can contact Wes and myself on Twitter or Mastadon all those links are in the show notes and you can support the show get an adree version and early access directly on Apple podcast or at\n"