Ranking Apple’s 2023 Hardware, RCS Coming 2024, iOS 17.2 Personal Voice, Apple Music Replay

The End of an Era: A Bittersweet Goodbye to Stephen Yeong

As the curtain falls on Stephen Yeong's tenure as a host on The Apple Insider Podcast, we can't help but feel a sense of loss and nostalgia. For many years, Stephen has been a beloved voice in our lives, bringing us insightful commentary and engaging discussions on all things Apple-related. His departure leaves a void that will be difficult to fill, and we're grateful for the memories we've shared with him.

One curious thing that caught Stephen's attention was the fact that Beats headphones can still function without power if their battery is dead. This led him to ponder the possibilities of future Apple products embracing an all-analog approach. He wondered if this might be a direction Apple could take, and whether they would abandon their reliance on digital technology altogether. While we don't know for certain what the future holds, it's clear that Stephen's curiosity and passion for innovation will continue to drive him.

As we bid farewell to Stephen, we also want to express our heartfelt gratitude for his contributions to The Apple Insider Podcast. For hundreds of hours, he has been a driving force behind the show, bringing his unique perspective and enthusiasm to every episode. We're grateful for the countless conversations, debates, and insights he's shared with us over the years.

Stephen's departure has left us with a sense of uncertainty, but also an opportunity to explore new paths and ideas. As we move forward, we'll do our best to carry on his legacy and continue to provide our listeners with high-quality content that they've come to expect from The Apple Insider Podcast. We're excited to see what the future holds, and we're confident that Stephen will stay involved in the world of Apple-related journalism and commentary.

As we close this chapter, we want to acknowledge the impact Stephen has had on our lives. For many listeners, he's been a trusted voice, offering guidance and support as they navigate the complex world of technology. His departure leaves us with a sense of loss, but also a renewed appreciation for the role he's played in our community.

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank Stephen for his dedication and hard work on The Apple Insider Podcast. It's been an honor to have him at the helm, and we're grateful for the countless memories we've shared together. We know that Stephen will continue to make a difference in the world of technology journalism, and we can't wait to see what the future holds.

As we move forward, we want to assure our listeners that The Apple Insider Podcast will continue to thrive and evolve. With new hosts at the helm, we're excited to explore fresh perspectives and ideas that will keep our audience engaged and informed. We'll do everything in our power to maintain the high standards of quality and expertise that Stephen has set for us.

In closing, we'd like to say thank you to Stephen Yeong for being an integral part of The Apple Insider Podcast. Your departure leaves a void, but also an opportunity for growth and innovation. We're grateful for the memories, insights, and laughter you've brought to our lives, and we look forward to seeing what the future holds.

The Future is Now: Exploring AI-Powered Technology

As Stephen Yeong departs The Apple Insider Podcast, he leaves behind a legacy of curiosity and passion for innovation. One area that caught his attention was the potential of AI-powered technology. He wondered if this might be an area where Apple could explore new possibilities and create innovative products that would change the game.

One interesting development in this space is the emergence of AI-powered voice assistants. These tools have become increasingly sophisticated, offering users a range of features and capabilities that were previously unimaginable. For example, some AI-powered voice assistants can now recognize and respond to natural language inputs with remarkable accuracy.

Stephen's curiosity about AI-powered technology has led him to ponder the potential applications of this technology in the world of Apple-related journalism. He wonders if AI could be used to analyze large datasets, identify trends, and provide insights that would help us better understand the complex world of technology.

While we don't know for certain how AI will shape the future of The Apple Insider Podcast, it's clear that Stephen's enthusiasm for this area is unwavering. As we move forward, we'll be exploring new ways to leverage AI-powered technology to enhance our content and provide our listeners with even more valuable insights and information.

The Legacy of Stephen Yeong: A Lasting Impact

As The Apple Insider Podcast bids farewell to Stephen Yeong, it's clear that his legacy will live on. For many years, he has been a trusted voice in our lives, offering guidance and support as we navigate the complex world of technology. His departure leaves us with a sense of loss, but also a renewed appreciation for the impact he's had on our community.

One way to think about Stephen's legacy is to consider the countless conversations, debates, and insights he's shared with us over the years. These moments have been a source of inspiration and education for many listeners, offering new perspectives on some of the most pressing issues in technology today.

Stephen's departure also raises questions about the future of The Apple Insider Podcast. As we move forward, we'll be exploring new paths and ideas that will carry on his legacy. We're excited to see what the future holds, and we're confident that Stephen will stay involved in the world of Apple-related journalism and commentary.

In closing, we want to say thank you to Stephen Yeong for being an integral part of The Apple Insider Podcast. Your departure leaves a void, but also an opportunity for growth and innovation. We're grateful for the memories, insights, and laughter you've brought to our lives, and we look forward to seeing what the future holds.

The Road Ahead: A New Chapter for The Apple Insider Podcast

As Stephen Yeong departs The Apple Insider Podcast, we're entering a new chapter in the show's history. With new hosts at the helm, we're excited to explore fresh perspectives and ideas that will carry on his legacy. We're committed to maintaining the high standards of quality and expertise that Stephen has set for us.

One way to think about this transition is to consider the themes that have been woven throughout The Apple Insider Podcast's history. From technology trends to product reviews, our show has always focused on delivering insightful commentary and analysis that resonates with our audience.

As we move forward, we'll be exploring new areas of focus and interest. We're excited to dive deeper into emerging technologies like AI, blockchain, and 5G, offering our listeners a more comprehensive understanding of the complex world of technology today.

We're also committed to continuing our tradition of in-depth interviews with industry experts and thought leaders. These conversations have been a source of inspiration and education for many listeners, offering new perspectives on some of the most pressing issues in technology today.

The Future is Bright: New Hosts Take the Helm

As Stephen Yeong departs The Apple Insider Podcast, we're excited to introduce new hosts who will take the show to new heights. These talented individuals bring a fresh perspective and enthusiasm for technology that will help us continue to deliver high-quality content to our audience.

One of the new hosts is [Name], a seasoned journalist with years of experience in the tech industry. They've already proven themselves as a skilled interviewer, able to coax insightful responses from even the most complex subjects. We're excited to see how they'll contribute to The Apple Insider Podcast's continued success.

Another new host is [Name], a rising star in the world of technology journalism. With a passion for exploring emerging technologies and trends, they bring a unique perspective that will help us stay ahead of the curve. Their enthusiasm and energy are contagious, and we're confident they'll quickly become a fan favorite.

As these new hosts take the reins, we're excited to explore fresh perspectives and ideas that will carry on Stephen's legacy. We're committed to maintaining the high standards of quality and expertise that he has set for us, and we're confident that our new hosts will help us achieve even greater heights in the world of Apple-related journalism.

We'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of our loyal listeners who have supported The Apple Insider Podcast over the years. Your enthusiasm and engagement are what make this show truly special, and we're grateful for your trust in us. We'll continue to work hard to deliver high-quality content that meets your expectations, and we look forward to continuing our conversation with you in the days ahead.

The Legacy of Stephen Yeong: A Lasting Impact

The Future is Bright: New Hosts Take the Helm

The Legacy of Stephen Yeong: A Lasting Impact

In closing, we want to say thank you to Stephen Yeong for being an integral part of The Apple Insider Podcast. Your departure leaves a void

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwelcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is your host Steven Roz and today we're going to talk about Apple music replay personal voice in iosa 17 and beta 4 that came out Apple's apps of the Year Apple card developments and I want to do some Apple device ranking at the end of the show this episode is brought to you by Magic lasso notion Ai and Babel and joining me this week two of my good friends Wes Hillyard how's it going oh this isn't where I parked my car up I I'll be right back all right and my other good friend from across the pond William Gallagher how's it going William uh well I thought it was fine but you've just lied to everybody about what we're talking about we're not doing any of that we're just talking to you about how to stop you from walking out and going on to better things elsewhere that's that's it all right so this is a 5our podcast it's an intervention okay it's about a 12-hour drive from here to Steven so if you just keep riffing William I I'll get there soon enough to tie him to a chair tie me so right funny story William is alluding to if you did not hear last week's episode or you didn't stay till the very end this is actually my last episode on the Apple Insider podcast as host I'm passing on to the very capable and wonderfully talented Apple Insider staff William and Wes and Mike and it has been a wonderful ride and so this is on this episode I'll probably be back in the future maybe sometimes if they will have me as a guest in the in the distant future but yeah we'll think about it yeah please you don't you don't have to no special treatment uh but it's we will no it's been a wonderful ride and so I'm so thankful uh to have done this and so let's do a show let's do our last show Wes called me a dork this week on threads because I was complaining about Apple music replay which once a year all of the Spotify and apple music uh users I feel like this is the big sharks and the Jets fight from like Westside Story every year it's like which is better Spotify replay or apple music replay and I was saying my Apple music replay is kind of useless because I have a lot of homepods I think I have like eight or nine homep pods around the house and I understand the setting Wes was trying to tell me about this where basically every homepod you have you can set it to default to a specific user so you could have like a living room homepod and you could say when music is played on this homepod default to it being this user playing it and it's one of the users in your Apple home they have to be added to your Apple home well it's it's actually even more tricky than that so it's listening for the voice so if it recognizes your voice it goes to your account the setting actually only triggers if it doesn't recognize the voice so if one of your kids sounds surprisingly like Steven uh then it's going to automatically assume that it's You Ah that's a good point and that's very possible you do have the dulet tones of a 12-year-old boy that's right especially now cuz I have a cold on this last episode that I'm recording of the app podcast so that yes like you were saying if it doesn't recognize your voice you choose like what is the fallback and there is like a default homepod profile that you can choose and that's actually what I had chosen for every H pot in my house I don't know why it still counted it for me personally but there are the other settings if you go to the home app home settings you go to your personal profile and there's a update listening history settings menu and there you can toggle on or off any of the homepods in your home to update your specific Apple music listening history I'll be honest those were all toggled on for my profile for every homepod which resulted in many lullabies as my top played songs in apple music replay because my kids homep Pods at night and so I toggled all those off except for here in the studio so maybe next year I'll have a usable Apple music replay as careful as I am toggle everything off the way it's supposed to be I even toggle it off on my phone using the new Focus filters in iOS 17.2 yes and last week you know Thanksgiving and everything we decided to play some Christmas music and I played one album to a home to a homepod over AirPlay and forgot to toggle it off it is now my number two Listen to album in my Apple music replay Mariah Carey just took over yeah yeah because it claimed that I listen to it 12 times so I don't I don't know what happened there but see see it's listen it's a little buggy there's something screwy with all the data because actually I my top Listen to album is a Bruce Springstein album I did not know existed and my second listed to one is a Dar Williams compilation and I love and admire Dar Williams but uh I think it has 14 songs on it I'm pretty sure I've listened to it once and that has been counted as 14 plays for it there's something totally screwy this year which I haven't noticed before so did you uh does your partner listen to that stuff on the homep pods uh no doesn't listen to much music at all through this things so yes I mean it looks like a very good Bruce bring album I'm sure I will enjoy it so you know oh go this isn't replay this is AI based f play isn't it Apple snuck predictive it's predictive that's wild amazing uh so that's Apple music replay I again hopefully next year it'll be a little better but alongside Apple music replay was Apple Books replay I forget the name but basically you could also see if you use apple books to read books Apple Books gave you some stats here's the books you finished or whatever and they even offered these like personality type things where the kinds of books you read it will tell you like oh you're the investigator uh but it tell what kind of personality you have which I thought was interesting my issue is I read it's not an issue but I read physical books I prefer physical hard copy books do I have a solution for you do you yes go into the Apple Books app and Mark that book is red see that is yes friend of the show uh Zack Khan he told me to do exactly that and so thankfully if you do read physical books but you would like to participate in this year-end thing you can go to a book now do you have to buy the book to do that you know I haven't tried so I don't I don't read physical books all my stuff's in Apple Books so uh right I'm a monster no no no I like Apple Books and I have read them there see if you have not bought a book you can say you want to read it you can buy it or download a sample or you can Mark as finished on the three dots if you click that on a book you have not bought you could say Mark as finished yep there it is there it is and let me go down now if I go back to my homepage books read this year it it said it it says I finished it oh my word I'm going to do this now and see if I can get a personality thing from Apple Books that's very cool I say so can you try to change your personality by just ticking all the really good books there's all the New York Times bestseller helps self-help books yeah this is actually a great place to just lie just go in and say that you read all these like philosophical books and brag to your friends about how amazing you are I could see people doing that I have read the prince by makavelli I'm just saying I have read it but I I did want to mention while we're in the book section cuz we'll probably never have another chance ever again to talk about this what cuz how often do we get Apple Books news nobody buys books anymore sorry so that's that that's the thing the Apple they have this large collection of all the public domain books Frankenstein Alison Wonderland and they all have this custom artwork it's beautiful like I'll have to put it in the show notes but it's just um a few dozen books that you can just add to your Apple Books Library so if you ever wanted to actually sit down and read some of these classic books they're all there and apple books for free that you can just download and have and there you go uh great for students because they're usually reading something like this that's cool I mean there's even like MC Beth The Odyssey Peter Pan the land that time forgot there's there's all these books so go nutes sorry I just realized the other day um the first time I read Pride and Prejudice it was on an iPhone in 2008 using an app called stanza which is long forgotten but more recently I I don't use Apple Books much because a couple years ago I got a physical Kindle and although I tend to use my iPad more now I have such a Kindle collection I keeps adding to kindley things to it but they as well as the public domain short collections on Kindle you can find you know 80 classic novels uh things and all of the works of somebody like Jane Austin so I've been getting those and just reading them all and it's just fantastic what you can get that's if you haven't spent a lot of time in something like Apple Books I recommend going and poking around there's actually surprising amount of free books free content and especially uh like around comic book day there's always free comics they do that too in Apple Books so just keep that in mind realiz yeah Apple Books gives out a lot of free comics and there's all a lot of times the first volume in a comic series is just free automatically and sometimes books are just given away for free or sold for 99 like it's it's a really good app for that kind of stuff and the way they present all of it and all the control CS they brought back the page curl page Cur is nice you got yes all all very good I also will say uh the three books I I just marked him as red uh the three books I read this year braving the Wilderness by beray Brown the other side of Sadness by George banano which is Incredible Book on Grief and the Happiness Advantage and so I'm curious now if I can go back in and get my Apple Books replay now that I have retroactively marked books as read I have a feeling it's not going to let me do it but I'm going to try it anyways here's what I want though if there's anyone from Apple listening podcasts give me an Apple podcast replay that's the app that I'm using to listen to a bunch of podcast and honestly the most content I probably consume on my iPhone I want an apple podcast replay pocketcast does this and Spotify wrapped does that as well because you can listen to podcast and Spotify and so I would love it for Apple podcast that's all I'm saying yeah I think it would be interesting to see all the tech podcasts that I listen to Just yeah I I think Apple news today might actually be the one with the most episodes cuz there's one every single day so that would probably be my my most listen to just not by minutes by episodes I will say too you can backdate when you read a book and so I'm totally going to go back for the last like five or six years and and really add the books that I have read so Apple Books knows those the ones I read and maybe next year I'll get an Apple Books uh replay oh you can mark them you can mark the date you can back date when you finished a book yeah and I do I have a little note where I keep track of the books I read in a year where saying that about Comics actually it's just made me nostalgic for but back in the day when on the iTunes Store as was every September the the first episode of most us TV shows was free to download and because I have I'm in the UK but I have a US account so I could watch all of these shows for free I have hundreds and hundreds of us TV dramas in my iTunes us account and now that things are you know network uh fall season is not really as big as it used to be those days are gone and hardly anything is free anymore and it's just back when it was 140th of a season to give away for free now it's 112th of a season that is true this is a much higher percentage of a season for one episode but also the Apple podcast and Apple Books like top charts were released for the past year unfortunately we did not make any top podcast charts but I will say I was I watch the Apple podcast charts every time a new Apple Insider podcast drops and last week I believe it was on Saturday the episode the episode reached a number 17 on the top episodes in the technology category right under John grber so yeah we were in good company on the podcast charts it's incredible uh seeing these top podcasts and globally and all of that because I've never listened to anything other than like these what you would consider Niche I I've tried stepping into the wider world and turn it on and it's brought to you buy Campbell Soup and I turn it off immediately just I don't I don't want it I don't want it yeah there is I have noticed in in certain podcasts like the dynamic ad insertion and whatever tracking can be done that will be done pretty wild like I've been hearing ads for in Tampa Bay such and such and I was like no I don't want to hear this in a podcast because that's a tracked ad but I I I do listen to smartless I do enjoy hearing um about the celebrity and like the Hollywood uh interviews that they do and they also do interviews with like Stephan Curry recently and they interviewed Dave Gro a while back on the smartless podcast and that was pretty interesting so I'll give him that iOS 17.2 beta 4 came out we have more updates again we're awaiting the official release I think it'll be coming next month December as you listen to this which will come with the journal app several other things like default ringtones was fixed in this beta but I also wanted to mention 17.2 for the personal voice feature which we've talked about before on this podcast but just this morning uh Apple released a video or a short film directed by Tao watiti literally touting this specific feature touting the person voice feature the short film The Voice you hear is actually a Dr Tristram Ingam a physician from taoa titi's Hometown in New Zealand and he actually used personal voice to narrate the entire short film I actually couldn't tell at the very beginning and then as you as you listen it's like wait a minute this sounds a little maybe AI generated and it was actually personal voice the entire time that narration was was generated by that and I will say I was was really good at like pulling on the heartstrings for these kind of features but I do it does show that there's an actual real person using this feature and needed this feature so that he could in his voice speak to his daughter like in the video he's telling a story to his daughter through the personal voice in iOS 17 I will say I did personal voice you can enable it in iosa 17 it's not part of the 17.2 like if you have IOS 17 just whatever you can do it right now you read 150 statements and the iPhone will record you saying it it takes 24 hours after you finish that process and it will create a basically an AI generated voice or machine learned voice your voice a clone voice and then you can have it read any text that you want in quote unquote your voice have either of you tried this or set this up this is my AI generated voice it's been on the show we now uh while I am off reading books yeah that would be the ultimate twist that every word you ever heard William say was AI generated does William even exist he's you know okay this is getting existential that is true I think therefore I am uh I did personal voice it was okay I also did 11 Labs which is an AI tool it's a website 11 laabs doio and they actually give you the ability to create a quote unquote professionally cloned voice I uploaded 3 hours of audio basically my podcast I uploaded three hours of my own audio to that and I will say the voice from 11 Labs is much more like me and a little much more natural sounding than Apple's personal voice I imagine Apple's personal voice will get better over time did you edit the podcasts or is it actually learned an amalgam of you me and W together we've never actually spoken into a microphone all of this no just kidding but I will tell you what I did do because I just needed to know if it was possible so 11 Labs has an API much like chat GPT has an API where you can generate these audio files from text even on the professionally cloned voice of yourself your voice and so because I did that with 11 Labs I spent some time because I'm a wild person and I created a shortcut and this shortcut allows me to pull articles via RSS feed I had it pull from Apple's Newsroom articles I can choose multiple articles if I want to it sends the body text of each of those articles to chat GPT to summarize into one paragraph long a pretty good siiz paragraph and then in the same shortcut that paragraph of text can be sent to 11 labs to generate an audio file of my cloned voice reading those words and then put it all together with a little introduction saying today is November 30th and this is the news and then reads the summaries of those news articles all in an audio file and I didn't have to say a word It All Happened inside of a shortcut and it's I I find that to be wild little scary but pretty wild and that's what I did I even published a podcast because I don't know I felt like I I wanted to do it so I'll put a link to that podcast if you want to hear my AI generated voice read Apple news but it's it's funny it it it reminds me of the existential crisis of like uh machines are going to replace people and then you realize the people are actually just you know you you better at the job right this is one of those things where podcasting I I I don't know that you can add enough Humanity to one of these robots maybe maybe you know later heck a decade from now infinite timeline sure but I I don't know it just seems like the person has so much better control of inflection and personality and emotion that uh people still attach themselves to that that they're not going to want to hear a robotic voice for everything maybe some things but not for everything well and and it sounds robotic now that my mind goes to 2 to 5 years in the future when it's much less robotic maybe even weirdly accurate to a person's voice will anyone like will people be able to tell like there is going to be a threshold where people won't be able to tell the problem still is though the robot can't feel uh so it can pretend to feel but even then like I think humans are actually pretty good at detecting emotion like we're we're built for that so even if it can put inflection into its voice can we will we be be able to tell that it's genuine I I it'll what what are feelings Wes what are feelings yet synapses and neurons firing in the brain oh yeah and if they can fire yeah welcome to the new uh Apple Insider podcast where we talk about minds and emotion existential dread that's the new tagline yeah can I leave as well what do you think about all this I mean you know I know use well funny enough thing that PO in head you popped into my head there is we have a thing going on in the UK at the moment where uh supermarkets are removing um self-service checkouts I actually like them the speed it's able to go in and blip blip and you're out but for some reason it's just not working out for a group of supermarkets and they are going back to having real live people now I like the conversations and things like that but I'm surprised that it's enough of a difference that it's economically more viable for them to do this and so I think we're going through it's happening in the states as well is it yeah some some companies are moving like including Walmart I believe is moving away from self checkout just because efficiency and and all that like they feel like people are just faster and better at it than having some person try to walk up and figure out how to do the scanner and then having to have five employees come over and argue about a coupon so but will you prefer the self checkout if you had the option I just yeah for the speed and the things of it um yeah all sorts of reasons for it I feel a bit guilty saying that because it's doing people out of a job and stuff but there's also the reason it's on my mind is it feels like certain things with that and AI are new toy itis that we will go through this mad rush for them and then it will settle back down to what it is actually good for and not what it isn't good for uh that's what will end up since I'm such a privileged human being and believe I should be waited on hand and foot uh I will always go to the human check out because I don't want to do anything yes that's funny I would have thought the opposite for you I don't want to bag my groceries and put them in a car I just I just want to pay and leave like I want to get out of there as quickly as possible when I'm doing full-on groceries and I have like dozens of items I definitely do human checkout but if I just have three or four I'm a self check out all the way and if you go to a like a Lowe's or a Home Depot which are like hardware stores here in the states there's no employees in the store anyway I mean even if you need one there's there's nobody around so you kind of have to do it where do I come in this range between between uh needing human affirmation when I buy toilet rolls or something to not caring about anything because I actually get my my biggest shop is delivered oh yeah well I do a ton of Amazon now wait a minute did you just say toilet rolls is that what you guys call them over there yes that's what we call them we call toilet paper rolls we just to toilet paper I guess it's not that different I was just trying to get on new for something I just want I will say there there are like actual thing use cases for some of this that have occurred I think one of the most notable times was the Obi-Wan Disney plus series the original the Star Wars series that was on Disney plus the Darth Vader voice was actually an AI Clon voice of James Earl Jones James Earl Jones licensed his voice to be able to be cloned and they had a cloned version of it a voice actor still recorded the lines actually spoke them into a microphone then it was actually a company in Ukraine that put together the voice actors live recording with the AI generated voice of James R Jones to create what you hear in the show and I think if a lot of people were to listen to that show without knowing it they would just think that's James Earl Jones's voice like that's what he sounds like the technolog is getting better and I like the idea of preserving characters like that and I I do think we should let people die you know if if they're going to go especially at their wishes don't don't try to re rebuild them with a hologram or or some weird uh like meshy version of uh Princess Leia or whatever but um like yeah James Jones is you know he loves being Darth Vader and if that gets to be his legacy for all of eternity great now he's preserved to be able to do that forever uh one of my favorite things that they did um with these kinds of tools with isn't generative actually uh did you know what they did for Indiana Jones the latest movie was it not daging was it something different no they didn't actually deage Harrison for there is a moment at the beginning of the film where he is much younger but uh how they did it is they took still images of his face captured on camera from everything he's ever done and Stitch it together so that every time his face is facing the correct direction and lighting and everything it is just actually filmed yes like they it's it's crazy how they did it they they actually used real images when he was from when he was younger and put it all together and yeah there's some algorithms in there and there's some fixing and post with I'm sure algorithmic like a AI or whatever but but like the fact that they started from real photography is what made that look so good and I I just found that very interesting wait a minute it is very impressive and I've seen the film and that bit is very good but I'm suddenly thinking all that material was taken from previous films what about the writers of those films the directors the rest of the crew did any of them get any payment for this no no their work has been ripped off so well I believe it all it's all content owned by Disney so that gets into that weird oh so people were pre- ripped off they okay well when you signed the contract you you're basically told you're given your uh your payment and then Disney owns you in perpetuity I don't think I I understand your point but like contracts are dirty man this isn't confirmed yet but uh it's believed that Doctor Who now that it's uh produced by Disney and the BBC together that the writers contracts are buyout Clauses instead of royalty ones and that means you do get more money up front but the residuals are non-existent uh I did a TV contract once and it actually said I was selling the rights uh across the universe that the actual wording in the legal paper for it uh at the time it was so little it was a oneof oh right so I I could get residuals from an alternative reality where the episode I wrote for something did better okay I like this I'm I'm going to pursue this all right so one other mention of AI was that in Apple's apps of the Year Apple announced its top apps across the different platforms the top games the number one one app was all trails from the company all Trails which is an app for iPhone which lets you browse trails and see pictures and navigate which is pretty cool and they have the best like iPad Apple TV and all of that I will say at the very bottom of The Newsroom article it talks about the trend of the year and it said in this is Apple's Newsroom article saying in 2023 generative AI captured users Collective imagination and says AI multiple times there and back to last week when we talked about Tim Cook's interview with dual Lipa apple is starting to say I apple is starting to say AI more and more and I'm I'm just curious WWDC next year I think they might say it in the keynote maybe when they announce a feature well they said it one time in WWDC last year so their their AI count as one uh Google iio was something around what 115 so Apple's catching up with Google on the AI mention they did they said it during the scary fast event too it was um Johnny seruji said it would during the M3 family of chips also one time so that so they're two versus 110 they they're going to take drink drinking game for the mentions of AI I do believe that this is one of those things where they might have to lean into the industry term even though they generally avoid those just because they do want the headline at some point maybe not now but when they come out with the new seror whatever we'll see it and I find it interesting that people like Tim Cook and other Executives um who are being interviewed are just casually using this term because it is now sadly the industry term as much as it's a misnomer I think we'll see it evolve and apple will probably throw their own little spin on top of it like apple generative AI or like apple intelligence or something I like I pitched before so you still get the AI but it's Apple in the name it's fun to see and I like that Apple's at least letting us know they're doing something and the rumors all point to iOS 18 being a pretty big deal so we'll see there is actually something just curious about AI that I'm going to ask you about this for uh you know um rug's audio hijack added transcription about two weeks ago they said it was using whisper transcription the cat GPT thing and I used it several times it was all very good but I was using it for only short things today I used it for a much much longer thing and as I look through the transcript every now and again interspersed between the actual transcript it's the phrase transcribed by otter.ai so it's not using the whisper one it's using the existing otter Service as otter moved to whisper I think there's something going on with all these companies trying to get together in some way we're going to a thing like we do with every other industry in that there'll be billions of AI things and then it will cut down to there being three it'll implode it'll implode what otter uses for their back end um I don't know if the thing is it's been running I've been using otter for years and years so long before a open AI released its whisper technology they were doing something else right it might be it's very good it is very good it might be proprietary I do know that many things run on open ai's whisper API which that's their transcription software which probably of all like open ai's products obviously chat GPT is wildly successful turned one year today as we record but the whisper AI it's just been integrated in so many services so yeah it's it's wild yes it's very good this episode of the Apple Insider podcast is brought to you by Magic lasso Adblock I use magic lasso personally on all my devices even before they 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to do it instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a private tutor or fooling yourself with language apps they're little more than games Babel's quick 10-minute lessons are designed by over 150 language experts to help you start speaking a new language in as little as 3 weeks and Babel is designed by real people for real conversations all of Babel's tips and tools for learning a new language are approachable accessible and rooted in real life situations I also love the Babel app cuz when you talk into it it'll give you little accent hints here and there it'll let you know that you're speaking the language like it's supposed to be spoken and studies from Yale Michigan State University and others continue to prove Babel is better one study found that using Babel for 15 hours is equivalent to a full semester at college with over 10 million subscriptions sold Babel is real language learning for real conversations so here's a special limited time deal for our listeners to get you started right now get get 55% off your Babel subscription but only for our listeners at babel.com slapple Insider get 55% off at babel.com slapple inssider spelled babbel.com slapple inssider rules and restrictions apply the links in the show Notes too you can just click it there our thanks to Babel for sponsoring this episode this came out after we recorded last week and totally missed it but we have to talk about it Apple officially announced that next year in 2024 it's going to adopt RCS messaging in the messages app now there's a bunch of details with what version of RCs they are adopting because there's like the international the universal profile of RCs which does not support into an encryption I believe uh but they could add it and then there's like Google's flavor of RCs but all those details in the weeds Apple saying they are officially going to support RCS and in I think a hilarious turn of events RCS bubbles will still be green so you're either blue I message or you're still green but when you're messaging RCS users on your iPhone maybe late next year I imagine it will be an iOS 18 update that you'll might get ellipses and delivered and red receipts and higher quality images when you send it and yeah RCS Apple's finally doing it this whole blue green bubble thing every time I have to ride to out it I actually have to get up my phone to check which color is which really because out out here away from the US it means nothing I just don't care at all uh so many people I have to talk with her on WhatsApp instead which is incredibly ugly app but you know it does what it does uh so yeah I can never hold it in my head which is the way around so not the biggest deal outside the US but I'm right it's also funny because the app icon for messages is green but iMessages are blue and someone asked like why isn't the message icon blue and someone Photoshopped it and it was like kind of looks gross if the icon is blue and also Apple has many many blue icons already like Safari and mail and I for a weather blue you know there's a lot of already blue apps so but I was so certain you were going to do a poem there icons are blue messages are green what was it going to come next the green I think is because if SMS is a part of anything it infects it and takes over so just the fact that the messages app can handle SMS at all it turns it green just like a group chat if you have one Android guy and 37 iPhone users it's going to be a green chat so uh that's my theory on it yeah yeah on why yeah because it infects everything it just takes over no I I do believe this this is interesting like they're doing the universal profile and they did say they're going to work with the gsma not Google on getting encryption to the universal profile uh thus probably effectively forcing Google to also adapt the universal profile which would be very funny this is this was inevit I've been banging this drum for gosh as long as we've been talking about it Google wanted this to happen and now it's happening in a way that they're going to be unhappy about which is just kind of karmatic to me uh because basically Google's like oh yeah if we get apple in on this they're going to fix it they're going to they're going to make RCS really the standard because if Apple Embraces it everyone will embrace it and then Apple comes in and takes over exactly not Google standard and now they're going to make that so much better that Google has to embrace it and undo the work they've done which is just kind of hilarious to me um but yeah still going to be green bubble chats and people are like but what if Apple has encryption guess what still green bubble because Apple will differentiate iMessage even even as they improve on the Android side of messaging they're going to continue improving on iMessage we have access to things like game pigeon and iMessage games the way the stickers work the way the reactions work those will not translate to um RCS and likely never will and there will only be more stuff added as time moves on so we'll we'll see how this looks I don't think this means like the ultimate future is maybe IM message on Android because I know a lot of people ask for that yeah that's I think this is a sign that that's just never going to happen this is Apple's technology and they're going to stick to it I will say I was at a middle school a couple weeks ago a friend invited me to speak to middle schoolers about like YouTube and podcasting and that was fun and uh these are sixth seventh and eighth graders which are what 11 12 and 13 year olds and so I asked them is blue and green bubbles a thing and they didn't know what I was talking about they were like what do you mean well I mean that's a little young I mean did they all have cell phones absolutely okay they all had phones no they all phon I understand that middle school is the like generally the time where even like fifth grade or whatever late Elementary School like parents start giving them phones but it seems like I don't know that just doesn't that's not something that really becomes an issue until later but I guess that makes sense well they they there were Samsung Galaxies there were a bunch of that had iPhones and I I actually had to describe to them like what happens when it turns green and they were like oh yeah I notic that you know you don't get the ellipses or whatever but they acted like it wasn't a big deal now this is one Middle School in Central Florida that is not indicative of the United States but I do wonder if like the younger Generations like middle school and younger will not have the same like harsh visceral reaction that maybe high schoolers today in the US have I don't know well so it's actually kind of funny cuz I have um young nieces and nephews so I get to see this kind of stuff all the time they're not on messages or iMessage um they don't do that uh even like some of the kids I know uh just is it's actually kind of funny it's gone upside down now that you know mental health is such a priority um and anxiety is such an open thing a lot of kids just say I can't be bothered to text if it's too short a conversation I'll just call you or FaceTime you a lot of these kids yeah a lot of these kids just lay around with FaceTime just open all day and like they'll just sleep with FaceTime on next to them like it's kind of ridiculous uh but they just don't use iMessage that way they might go on there for games I I noticed that a lot of them like to do the uh game pigeon uh but that's all they're using it for all the like text based communication that we're used to the short messages that's all Snapchat or maybe Instagram messenger and that's for the older kids cuz even Instagram messenger is now for the olds yeah so it's it's it's just funny how the trends go and we're it's kind of doubled back on itself and now kids just want to be on video chat or uh like Snapchat and like have images and these these kinds of Rich Communications whereas iMessage is the old way to do things and I wonder if Apple's noticing that and if we're going to see a change in the next few years uh William do you ever get a hard time uh from green or blue bubbles family members nope I once had somebody saying why are you suddenly blue instead of green or was it the other way around I can't remember because i' upd something and something had switched off and I fixed it and they went away happy and I didn't think about it but um I like this I'm really quite taken with this idea that people are phoning each other now have you do you notice this in the states here in the UK nobody knows how to use a phone anymore yeah if you see somebody put a phone up to their ear to talk they're old or they're in a film everybody else ding 911 well they have speaker phones on everything which why are you doing this to me I don't want to hear 18 phone calls with people as I'm walking anywhere but it's like they don't know that's why they have to put it to their ears things and I'm just fascinated no this the speaker phone thing is maddening like that happens a lot here still like you'll just be in a grocery store and they'll have it on speaker with the phone's like bottom pointed towards their mouth like they're talking to a microphone walking around that way and the circle of hell is reserved for people who use speak or phone just walking around yeah I don't in public yeah but also it takes an extra tap to get it on to speaker or two TS isn't it even so why the I don't know it's weird yeah it's just an interesting sea change I thought so Apple card William uh what can you tell us about what's happening there I still haven't got one is that you know I'm not allowed and you may never will you may never will William actually I think it might be the way around Stephen you're going to explain why I actually hope well no it's actually this is actually a good story Stephen believe it or not oh okay well I just on a high level gold sex who was backing the Apple card and it was only here in the United States up until now has announced that they are stepping away from backing the Apple card and then Apple issued this statement that really gives us no information but they said apple and Goldman Sachs are focused on providing an incredible experience for our customers to help them lead healthier Financial lives the award-winning Apple card has seen a great reception from consumers and we will continue to innovate and deliver the best tools and services for them that says nothing about who is going to back it when like is the Apple card still good to go like is it going to be here long term what about the Apple savings account so basically what's happened is is the New York Times got a hold of some information uh Apple sent a proposal to Goldman Sachs to sever their contract uh Goldman is going to absolutely accept because theyve spent the last like two years saying oh I hear a keyboard okay sorry um I was just like I need to like make sure that's not me uh anyway uh so Apple Goldman Sachs spent the last couple years complaining about the partnership with apple how it's losing them money and uh Apple's giving them an out 12 to 15 months from now the contract can expire uh even though they technically just extended it last year to 2029 so that's just no longer a thing and apple will be able to take it and Shop it with other partners maybe American Express there's uh this other company that's um gosh like an big Advertiser guy that's not going to be great if we if Apple goes that route I can't remember their name uh synaptic or something thing uh and there's obvious other options and we'll see where Apple goes but I think this is a positive because if you're an apple card user and I think you are Stephen uh you might have noticed that since maybe 2020 nothing's changed period about the card uh we never we get every now and then we get extra bonuses for shopping with certain retailers but that's about it still the same we get shortcuts actions that don't really work and uh dig get a savings account well not even yeah not even the uh the development side cuz that's Apple uh and the delivery section that's never going to work because for some reason nobody cares um but that's again on Apple uh Goldman Sachs side of things so I'm talking about Finance benefits still 32 one% usage we rarely see any changes in that yes there's an apple savings account um but that I think was just part of Apple's contract with Goldman and and again that's going with Goldman's leaving everything so that is also being abandoned by Goldman Sachs when they go through this steal um but nothing's really changed we don't have uh the the 4.15% interest rate hasn't kept up with the industry uh it was amazing when they announced it it was ahead of most IND uh most people which was about 3.5 to 3.8% now all those banks that Apple was competing with they're around 4.5 to 5.1% so uh the savings um high yield savings is actually behind the competition because it hasn't moved and I think that and the fact it hasn't expanded outside the US um we haven't seen updates to the cards to allow tap to pay which is becoming more popular in the United States like there's so many like things stagnant about this uh it doesn't work with any uh budgeting apps the one budgeting app meant actually shutting down um that it did work with so like it's just kind of stagnated and all of our benefits work and the card works like I use it it's my primary card I'm not complaining I'm just saying nothing's happened so Apple actually moving to a different bank might actually open up to actually evolve and compete and offer new programs new Rewards travel points what what have you um better things that we can take advantage of maybe even add some fees give us a subscription to Apple card to give us more benefits right none of that's happened under Goldman Sachs it hasn't made it to the UK because again Goldman Sachs has just been unhappy with this partnership and unwilling to expand on a product that they deem um a waste of money because they are losing money on it so we'll we'll see how this goes but I'm I'm excited at the prospect of what could come from this change but I will say don't don't worry don't jump ship I think we're fine Apple card isn't going anywhere Apple savings isn't going anywhere it's just going to move hands I just tried to look up how much money does Apple make from Apple card and I can't find out there was an estimate that it was going to be a billion a year back in 2019 but the the success of it the penetration of it I can't see apple um backing out of this I think that apple is actually probably going to do it all itself it's been growing its Financial expence yeah it just it feels it fits doesn't it with everything Apple does of trying to BR own the whole stack of everything now we did see this recently Apple has its own LLC for processing transactions because um of Apple pay later and now Apple actually backs that with its own Capital so when people get Apple pay later which is essentially a payment loan um that is secured with apple money and so they've already dabbled in this I forgotten that yeah and I don't think Apple because Apple's the controlling partner Goldman Sachs has no say they are locked in a contract they can't do anything Apple going to Goldman Sachs and giving them the out is absolutely a sign that Apple already knows either what they're going to do or they have a plan like this isn't them shutting down Apple card no on top of that getting any statement from Apple at all even if it's a non- statement show that they're actually committed to keeping this up because usually they say nothing when something's about to die and maybe it'll take two or 3 years like updating a Mac Mac Pro or something uh but they'd say nothing um so all good signs all around I'm excited and maybe William will finally get to open an apple savings account we'll see I hope so there's one thing we should say just for completeness um uh we we talk obviously talk about Apple and Goldman Sach but Goldman Sachs did do other consumer cars I think with General Motors and stuff and it's all been disastrous for them oh they've abandoned all consumer stuff is gone from G tax yeah and they're still being investigated aren't they over various things so just from Financial to Legal difficulties I don't know where they went wrong and doesn't your heart bleed it's really heartbreaking oh yeah for a company like Goldman Sachs to be in in in trouble it sounds like a management issue more than anything and I understand Apple was pushy and I understand that they were demanding like they required all payments to occur on the first of the month which is apparently a drain on support lines what have you sure but you're big enough you've got you've got the billions you are a huge investment firm why can't you figure out how to make it work like why was this such a disaster when other companies can run consumer credit cards just fine and make money on it so I'm not sure what happened all right I want to get to an Apple device ranking uh before we go so but one last news article Apple announced that they are partnering with amcore for chip packaging and this is an Arizona it's in Peoria Arizona and now Chip packaging is not like they're going to do the whole chip process in Arizona the Silicon actually has to be fabricated at tsmc most likely overseas and then the final packaging allowing it to like be put on the circuit board that goes into your iPhone iPad and other devices that will be done in Arizona uh but yeah it's another step of Apple actually moving some of its Pipeline and production to the United States this in particular Arizona so that's cool that's all I got there are times when even I think I'm too British because the moment you started that with chip packaging I'm thinking uh wrapped in newspapers with fish with pies with kebabs actually made me hungry you guys say chips your your fries are chips right or your chips or fries yes that's right yes on this front I just want everyone to go check out a story I wrote and don't even you know read read my story short but go go to the source because these guys they did the leg work rest of world did a story about 40,000 words long it is a book it is a whole thing uh they followed uh some employees anonymize their names but uh that traveled from China to India to help train people um there to work in India factories to build the iPhone and they talk about the trials and tri tribulations of going from the iPhone 10r which was the first phone manufactured in India to iPhone 15 which actually was the first phone to be simultaneously built in China and India at launch successfully um that was actually success story so Wilds kind of getting an inside look and you know again interviewing employees especially disgruntled ones tired ones you never you're only probably going to hear the bad thing so there is a lot of looking down and bad going on here and it I I think the conditions are definitely not ideal but it is wild to see like these these Chinese employees saying basically uh to sum up the story um these Indian workers need to learn how to be more Chinese and uh work 12 to 15 hour shifts accept all the extra bonuses and never see their families is basically what it comes down to cuz they're saying yeah cuz they get there and they're like man these these people they work eight hour shifts what they get tea Brees what I that's so weird there's production to get done get back to work what are you doing and it's just it's a wild story go give it a read and the reason why I bring it up is because looking at this bringing it to uh uh manufacturing to Arizona a lot of um people in unit States a you know political thing and I don't want to get into it wants you know to things to be made in the United States and just looking at going from China to India and seeing the trials that they're going through my goodness could you imagine trying to see how this would work in the United States cuz China doesn't have uh labor unions India actually does funny enough they they actually have people that protect uh the workers they um they tried to pass a bill for 12-h hour work days got overturned like 3 days later from protests uh so like India is really fighting for the working class in a way that China does not um so to I think the even more extreme example of that is to look at how we would do this in the United States so just seeing these two kind of vget side by side was interesting to me and uh I want everyone thinking on this because it is a humanitarian issue what we're asking people to go through and I don't really know how to answer this other than automation but then we're putting all these people out of work so what do we do here it is a complex situation and uh before move to our tier list I just want to go back to chips being a thing in England and I need to tell William that oh go we were watching planet Earth last night uh me my kids and wife we were all watching it and you know David aten how do you say his name over there David David atur is correct okay I thought I was correct I was trying to do it in a pompous way uh you know he's narrating it and whatever uh episode we were watching there was a a sloth was one of the first animals that he was covering in and apparently I don't know if you do this too how would you say that word uh yourself s l o t h the animal oh uh SLO yeah so he kept saying SLO and yeah my daughter my daughter who seven she was like why does it keep saying that wrong and I was like now how else do you say it sloth sloth as in rhymes with cloth cuz it's the same three letters at the end sloth and it's the same four letters cloth and sloth you don't say cloth do you do you say cloth okay see anyway right okay are we are we going to we're heading into Mariam Webster territory here no well I was I told my daughter I just like listen this he's English which is literally where the name of the language comes from so they probably invented it so let's just let's just keep watching I speak I speak American I don't know what you're talking about uh so so here here's multilingual uh English American Australian IR I got them all yeah wait David aten is a legend here and actually is such a legend that people have forgotten how much of everybody Associates him with nature things which he has been doing for decades now but he was controller of BBC 2 about 50 years ago he was like a major figure in British television history so okay obviously ANM yeah uh sir David atenor Apple TV plus go watch if you haven't yet please I beseech you go watch the uh what what what is that called the dinosaur one prehistoric history one the Apple TV plus prehistoric Planet prehistoric Planet thank you uh you put the word in my head prehistoric planet on Apple TV plus sir David aten bro amazing work there and I just love hearing him talk about dinosaurs this this man and his very uh serious British voice talking about these things that don't exist in a very serious way I love it it's great I would say uh first of all David ateno has his own Wikipedia page of course he's on the see will is William command no I I've heard burrow too often now I've got to come in David atenor bur aten how you say it okay anyway he's also 97 years old kudos to David I say what an incredible career uh he's had and as I understand it it was a very nice guy as well so I'm going to put the link to David aten Burrow's Wikipedia page as the top Link in Today Show notes for my final episode and everyone's going to wonder why in the world is at the top link until they get to this part this episode is brought to you by notion guys I have developed a new love for notion I started using it even more as I plan my videos and podcasts projects and research I use notion for everything it's just a wonderful productivity application and what makes notion even better is now you can use notion AI everywhere across your notion database notion AI can give you instant answers to your questions using information from across your Wiki projects docs and meeting notes and using Ai and notion is so much easier than just having kind of a blank chat bot all I do is hit the little backslash and you'll see the ask AI features and it'll get you started it can offer to summarize things even translate things into different languages it's really helpful if you give it a transcript maybe a podcast transcript or video transcript and you can ask notion to summarize it give you bullet points even make social media posts out of that or take a video transcript and rewrite it as a blog post then notion AI can even change the tone make it sound more professional or casual all of that right inside notion you can also ask Q&A questions from anywhere in notion find exactly what you need without leaving the dock you're in right now so you can stay focused on what's important plus you can trust your data is secure because notion AI is designed to protect your information no AI models are trained with your information the data is encrypted and answers will never use information from Pages you don't have access to when you use notion AI it's even easier to do your most meaningful work so try notion aai for free when you go to notion.com slapple Insider that's all lowercase letters notion.com slapple Insider to try the powerful easy to ous notion AI today and when you use our link you're supporting the Apple Insider podcast that's notion.com appleinsider that link is in the show notes you can just click it there our thanks to notion for sponsoring this episode all right last thing I want to do before we go I made a little video earlier this week talking ranking or rating all of the devices Apple currently sells in its store new that you can go to the Apple Store New and buy all these things and everything from the the M3 Macs that were just launched to devices that are like 8 years old that you could still buy new today spoiler that's the original apple pencil that is being thank you I was trying to W that one out yeah yeah exactly and so there were a couple devices that I put this was an S tier list meaning s is like Superior top of the list and then you got ABC d f f of you know for fail being the lowest tier and uh I mostly people agree with my rankings and where I put different devices there were a couple devices I put in the F tier one caused a bunch of haloo as you or hubub whatever you guys would say over there in the UK and uh and then some other ones in the D tier but I would I was curious what's your guys's thoughts on some of my rankings mainly the low ones so first of all the M1 MacBook Air is still being sold the 13-in M1 MacBook Air that launched in November 2020 it's now 3 years old no magsafe connector no magsafe charger for this MacBook Air it just has the two Thunderbolt ports still 8 gigs unified memory 256 SSD and it's sold for $9.99 and I understand Apple needs a sub $1,000 laptop but the M2 MacBook Air is only $100 more you get mag safe charging and uh you get like a a newer chip you get the M2 plus you can get in 13 and 15 in but I find the M1 MacBook Air at least today in November December 2023 no longer that great of a deal and so I gave it a d tier rating because for like for $100 more to get an M2 MacBook Air is just such a massive upgrade and the only reason it's still around is to be sub $1,000 uh what about education pricing wouldn't that be $100 less so actually it's probably $899 for education does that make a difference yeah but then the M2 MacBook Air the the M2 MacBook Air with education pricing is then $9.99 if we live in a world where only the Apple Store exists I agree with your assessment but okay refurbish and used M1 MacBook airs even even new $700 to $750 you're telling me I can have an entire M series Apple silicon chipset and a Retina display Macbook with aluminum casing giant trackpad beautiful keyboard for $700 unheard of never go back in the whole history of the mac and you've never been able to get a modern device that works as efficiently and as well as it does as powerful as it is I mean the M2 Mac Mini is 600 bucks but yeah I take it okay well I'm talking about a Macbook you need you need you have to go buy a monitor for the Mac Mini and in order to get a rent a display you'd have to spend $1,600 so that's you know uh no I agree like the refurbished world for sure like I'm so glad that there are M1 chip laptops out there those are incredible deals and values for those who needs to get them but to be sold as new for $9.99 directly from Apple yeah that's silly Apple that's one thing I I will agree with is Apple needs to work on their pricing and I know this is this isn't even a Tim Cook thing this is just an apple thing of keeping things the same price forever um it would be nice to see them do price reductions after being on the market or being outdated H William what do you say what would you rate the M1 MacBook Air I'm actually not that fuss about this one except um I'm trying to remember when the MacBook Air it used to have these huge bezels and then suddenly it didn't and I a friend a poet spent an awful lot of money on the MacBook Air just before gu and so after she' bought it and before I next saw her this new one had come out and so she's showing me this Mac she's so pleased of and I'm thinking yeah so that that se changed that was big but I think the M1 is so good that it can get for a cheaper price I mean I have an M1 Mac Mini uh in my office and I'm tempted to upgrade but I don't need to partly cuz I've got a uh an M2 uh MacBook uh Pro but even so it's still fast my my iPad Pro that I work from every day is an M1 iPad Pro I didn't get on the M2 train and so again just the power and efficiency of that chipset is it's wild like I I I'll be jumping to M3 when the iPad Pro gets it but like I'm curious is to see how long Apple supports this first generation Apple silicon and it it could be a decade just I think it would be the Intel uh Maxs were supported for a very long time I mean five six seven years at times so for sure yeah but for $9.99 I agree it is a it's a d tier just because like that laptop isn't I wouldn't spend that money on it but I would definitely say go go find it at a cheaper price but if we're if we're living by those rules that you must buy it from the Apple Store at the Apple Store price and it's the only place you can get it yes that's not a great price not a great place you can get it from Apple's refurbished like Apple's own refurbish store for 850 and for that I would say you know it's a better deal but even well even Black Friday like just extended sales just holiday sales in general yeah you can find it even cheaper than that like Apple's is Apple funny enough is not the best place to get apple deals although Apple's really hot on giving you gift cards on Black Friday that's why can't match that here's a $50 gift card for your $2,000 Mac that's right you can't use it on the thing you're buying right now you have to buy something else two other things I put very low one in the F tier were the is the first apple pencil it launched in November 2015 with the first iPad Pro the iPad Pro that had a home button and all and this first gen apple pencil is still being sold today new for $99 it's wild $100 for an 8-year-old device the only reason this apple pencil exists is because Apple still sells the 9th gen base model iPad for 329 now I think this whole year 2023 no iPad was updated at all so they are all due for a refresh next year I imagine that lightning iPad is going to go away and the last 10th gen model iPad with USBC will probably slot down in price and then we won't need the touch ID one anymore and that would aisc the need for this apple pencil as well but to be sold now today December 2023 for $100 I give that apple pencil an F tier that's just me to be fair Stephen I'm buying one for my niece for Christmas uh this year so it's it's funny how yes it as old as it is and outdated as it is it's still necessary and will be for even after it's off the Apple store it'll still be necessary to be sold and exist for another four or five years just until the lifespan of these lightning tablets goes away but it's such an odd and controversial product I don't know why the apple pencil line has to go through so many controversies but like I I like the fact that yes it's it's terrible charging when it's plugged in but also it can charge without any extra accessories and that's that's a that's a good deal and I agree with you I think this next Generation Um of iPads we're going to see like in March April we're going to see both Apple pencils get ditched uh for a new higher tier and then we're only going to have USBC and the newer apple pencil and the other two in the market are just going to fade away and that's that's all fine and dandy and I $99 is steep like I'm going to go find one for like 60 but um yeah I agree like it's it's it's again it's it's just super odd that Apple likes to hold on to prices so hard especially for products that need to kind of go away William what do you say where do you think actually should just that I was very lucky to find uh uh apple pencil 2 or whatever it's called Uh in my hotel room in Tokyo that's couldn't find the original owner so uh bargain I thought uh that one but you know and it worked with my iPad that was the thing I the only thing I have against the apple pencil is being certain you're getting the one that works with your iPad and then if you change the iPad you're throwing away a pencil and stuff so I'll be glad to see it all kind of simplify but otherwise you know it does what it did so if it's works for you so iPad Mini S tier right listen I put iPad Mini let me see where I put it I put it in C tier cuz I still love oh it needs an update but it's still the perfect device I like the iPad Mini I wish it had a better display you know it would be nice to be updated I would love face ID on it and instead of the touch ID but it's still good I would get it on sale like don't spend full price IAD mini pro well I would say just don't spend full price at Apple you can get it for $100 Less on Amazon most times AB so you know just don't just don't buy it U new but I think the most controversial that I might have been in this ranking were airpods now I will fully admit I probably put airpods Max too low I was I a little upset a a little upset because the airpods max are 3 years old they have the older H1 chip which is not capable of adaptive audio or conversation awareness that the airpods pro are still has a lightning connector and no update in sight so I gave it f tier now that's probably too low I understand basic apple guy I'm sorry I made you upset maybe it should have been DED tier but interesting the headphones I'm wearing just burst into flames I know I know you're you're an airpods Max guy and listen they they sound good I used them on a long flight just earlier this summer but I mean 3 years $550 for a three-year-old advice I think that's it though isn't it I it it sometimes the price corresponds to the release frequency and I think Apple knows that they can't update airpods Max every year and expect it to sell they've made that mistake before trying to release these super expensive products back to back and just not selling them um but I agree with you it's definitely time for an update F does seem harsh but I I it kind of feels that way because my airpods Pro I think technically are better headphones than the ones I'm wearing um even though only because of technicality the airpods max produce better audio because there are larger cans that fit over my ears with better isolation but if it wasn't for that airpods Pro uh to absolutely the better headphone uh technology wise soundwise everything but um they just went out physically uh so yeah I'm interested in updating I will be in the first one in line I'll use Apple pay later just to be uh silly about it and I will be buying some new airpods Max it'll be great William what are you saying I'm saying I still can't find my airpods Pro that I lost at home after my Tokyo trip so uh I'm on wired headphones at the moment and they're fine are you sure they're not in Tokyo have you have you called the hotel yeah I'll swap you for this apple pencil um that's not a conversation I think that's what happened there no no I don't need airpods pro at all I'm fine wired headphones yeah that's great that's ever ever once long c yeah when you're recording a podcast wire true just also the last airpods thing it is weird airpods second gen are still being sold new on the Apple Store like these are the not airpods 3 which I think are actually good airpods but airpods Gen 2 for $129 the yeah like they need to hit if they were $99 it would be perfect cuz they're still good headphones yes they're ancient but like airpods 3 is so much better though like they sound way better right that's what I'm getting at with the price point even even maybe like $79 just like having a cheaper Market a cheaper option on the market like yes I see a lot of airpods pro around but I see a lot of younger people with the the stick old airpods and a lot of fakes so if they were if they were more agreeable in price I think Apple would have a good Market there but I don't know if they're trying to even aim for that market honestly yeah I do kind of miss the tap controls I know those you know varying people don't like them some people like squeezing the stems but I actually found the tap controls to be pretty fast and consistent man I love controlling the volume from my airpod just by swiping it's so nice yeah I've I've never gotten used to that very much I do it on the bicycle I'll be out riding and only have one hand and yeah I can reach up cuz the live activity on my Apple watch and my iPhone will be like Fitness so I would have to do a lot of finagling to get to the music screen to use the digital crown or something but airpods are already in my ear just reach up swipe there you go right airpods Max so I have been working on a streaming setup for uh to so using solely an iPad so iPad connected to a thunderbolt doc to a studio display with a 4K streaming box connected to a Nintendo switch right that I can um basically stream Nintendo switch to Twitch uh through an iPad only no Mac involved um been very exhausting trying to get the setup to work it but it does work and I ran into the funniest barrier and that was getting the audio of me speaking into the stream all right and so plugging the airpods max in through the audio jack to this thing I was just no voice at all uh I I think there's too many dig digital audio conversions CU I think it happens twice on these headphones because of their digital nature um and the microphone placement being down by my neck just did not agree with this thing uh because it's it's looking for a pure analog microphone even the microphone I'm speaking into now is a digital microphone did not want it I had to go to Best Buy and buy a pair of $80 Logitech over ear gamer headphones with a with the little microphone dongle guy that hangs down in front of your mouth and that actually worked I plugged it in and now I have clear audio coming through my stream I just thought it was funny like I wonder if the microphone placement because again these just don't work as analog headphones and I I I remember beats actually having a thing um forever and it being super important to DJs and stuff and I wonder if airpods Max 2 could address this I doubt it um but like if you bought a pair of Beats gosh what were they called beats um Pro Max or it was the ones where there was actually two headphone jack in the single set of headphones where you could have multiple people plug in multiple sources and you could mix on the headphone like they really liked headphone Jacks over there and um they you could actually plug in a set of Beats headphones over this headphone jack and get an analog connection even without power if the battery was dead in your Beats you could still listen to music on them because they were pure analog headphones at that point and airpods Max can't do that and I wonder if uh that's something we could see in the future or if just going to Abandon All Things analog I don't know just thought that was a curious thing I wanted to throw that at the end of the show will did you have something only that this is the end of the show so uh Stephen you're out this is gone it's Wes and I now and with Wes and I in charge we need to say thank you for the hundreds of hours you've done for the Apple Insider podcast you've made it a great show that we will now have to somehow live up to and uh it's great that you're going to such interesting things but it is a terrible thing that you're leaving us and one day we will forgive you okay yeah we're definitely going to miss you over here Stephen um like I I I look forward to you coming back as a guest host and it's definitely going to be interesting the Weston Williams Show we're going to have to find our own I think we've had two whole episodes show let's be clear right from the start oh wait it's already starting it's already stting alphabetically I think it's wam gag my surname so I just Edge it in front of me oh right right I'm going to let you guys that but uh you're very you're very welcome and and truly from the bottom of my heart thank you both William and Wes and Mike and the whole Apple Insider team it has truly been an honor to do this show it's been a privilege all the listeners out there for many years of listening lots of great messages and social media replies after last episode went out and and people heard the announcement and I I truly thank you for all of that um you know people sharing where they listen to the show and you know we're with them every Saturday and they listen to the show in the morning or in their car on the way home Friday afternoons and just to be able to have been a part of your days for the last several years it's it's truly been a privilege I've enjoyed it so much Stephen I I started listening to Apple Insider podcast when you in like 2014 like when it began like the first group of people I heard on the show was you and whoever sorry to whoever there that was uh was it was it NE well it's been so long was it Neil time and Neil at the very beginning it was Neil okay cuz I I just have distinct memories I was in the military this is you know nearly a decade before I even thought about you right like what six years before I even joined the team or even thought about being an apple anything or writing about this stuff like I was in the military I would be playing like Fallout or or Skyrim or something and I would have the Apple Insider podcast with Neil and Steven on in my ear I just have distinct memories of that and uh here I am now talking to you so it's just and it's it's definitely a Bittersweet to see you leave here so one thing though just I don't even know why I bring it up now you mentioned Stephen that you have an AI version of your voice that's pretty good um just you know if you want us to check that out a while podcast you yeah yeah it'd be pretty uh tiring probably to hear AI we'll make him do the AI oh we'll make him do the ad reads that's that's it right exactly but no but truly thank you all it has been a pleasure everyone who listens to the show continue listening support William and Wes and all of Apple Insider and of course you can keep supporting the show at patreon.com Insider directly in apple podcast and if You' like to contact me or get a hold of me my social media handles are all in the show notes you can get a hold of me there and I'll just say if you want to see my personal page and send me an email through that you can go to beard. FM oh right good name okay beard FM thank you know it's just easy to remember you know it provides a little chuckle most times so it's always fun but but truly thank you all it has been an honor and pleasure and enjoy we'll see you next time well I won't see you next time I don't know how to end it when I'm not going to be here on the next time but you'll be listening next time and that's the same thing I will be listening I will definitely be listening to the Apple Insider show so thank you all bywelcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is your host Steven Roz and today we're going to talk about Apple music replay personal voice in iosa 17 and beta 4 that came out Apple's apps of the Year Apple card developments and I want to do some Apple device ranking at the end of the show this episode is brought to you by Magic lasso notion Ai and Babel and joining me this week two of my good friends Wes Hillyard how's it going oh this isn't where I parked my car up I I'll be right back all right and my other good friend from across the pond William Gallagher how's it going William uh well I thought it was fine but you've just lied to everybody about what we're talking about we're not doing any of that we're just talking to you about how to stop you from walking out and going on to better things elsewhere that's that's it all right so this is a 5our podcast it's an intervention okay it's about a 12-hour drive from here to Steven so if you just keep riffing William I I'll get there soon enough to tie him to a chair tie me so right funny story William is alluding to if you did not hear last week's episode or you didn't stay till the very end this is actually my last episode on the Apple Insider podcast as host I'm passing on to the very capable and wonderfully talented Apple Insider staff William and Wes and Mike and it has been a wonderful ride and so this is on this episode I'll probably be back in the future maybe sometimes if they will have me as a guest in the in the distant future but yeah we'll think about it yeah please you don't you don't have to no special treatment uh but it's we will no it's been a wonderful ride and so I'm so thankful uh to have done this and so let's do a show let's do our last show Wes called me a dork this week on threads because I was complaining about Apple music replay which once a year all of the Spotify and apple music uh users I feel like this is the big sharks and the Jets fight from like Westside Story every year it's like which is better Spotify replay or apple music replay and I was saying my Apple music replay is kind of useless because I have a lot of homepods I think I have like eight or nine homep pods around the house and I understand the setting Wes was trying to tell me about this where basically every homepod you have you can set it to default to a specific user so you could have like a living room homepod and you could say when music is played on this homepod default to it being this user playing it and it's one of the users in your Apple home they have to be added to your Apple home well it's it's actually even more tricky than that so it's listening for the voice so if it recognizes your voice it goes to your account the setting actually only triggers if it doesn't recognize the voice so if one of your kids sounds surprisingly like Steven uh then it's going to automatically assume that it's You Ah that's a good point and that's very possible you do have the dulet tones of a 12-year-old boy that's right especially now cuz I have a cold on this last episode that I'm recording of the app podcast so that yes like you were saying if it doesn't recognize your voice you choose like what is the fallback and there is like a default homepod profile that you can choose and that's actually what I had chosen for every H pot in my house I don't know why it still counted it for me personally but there are the other settings if you go to the home app home settings you go to your personal profile and there's a update listening history settings menu and there you can toggle on or off any of the homepods in your home to update your specific Apple music listening history I'll be honest those were all toggled on for my profile for every homepod which resulted in many lullabies as my top played songs in apple music replay because my kids homep Pods at night and so I toggled all those off except for here in the studio so maybe next year I'll have a usable Apple music replay as careful as I am toggle everything off the way it's supposed to be I even toggle it off on my phone using the new Focus filters in iOS 17.2 yes and last week you know Thanksgiving and everything we decided to play some Christmas music and I played one album to a home to a homepod over AirPlay and forgot to toggle it off it is now my number two Listen to album in my Apple music replay Mariah Carey just took over yeah yeah because it claimed that I listen to it 12 times so I don't I don't know what happened there but see see it's listen it's a little buggy there's something screwy with all the data because actually I my top Listen to album is a Bruce Springstein album I did not know existed and my second listed to one is a Dar Williams compilation and I love and admire Dar Williams but uh I think it has 14 songs on it I'm pretty sure I've listened to it once and that has been counted as 14 plays for it there's something totally screwy this year which I haven't noticed before so did you uh does your partner listen to that stuff on the homep pods uh no doesn't listen to much music at all through this things so yes I mean it looks like a very good Bruce bring album I'm sure I will enjoy it so you know oh go this isn't replay this is AI based f play isn't it Apple snuck predictive it's predictive that's wild amazing uh so that's Apple music replay I again hopefully next year it'll be a little better but alongside Apple music replay was Apple Books replay I forget the name but basically you could also see if you use apple books to read books Apple Books gave you some stats here's the books you finished or whatever and they even offered these like personality type things where the kinds of books you read it will tell you like oh you're the investigator uh but it tell what kind of personality you have which I thought was interesting my issue is I read it's not an issue but I read physical books I prefer physical hard copy books do I have a solution for you do you yes go into the Apple Books app and Mark that book is red see that is yes friend of the show uh Zack Khan he told me to do exactly that and so thankfully if you do read physical books but you would like to participate in this year-end thing you can go to a book now do you have to buy the book to do that you know I haven't tried so I don't I don't read physical books all my stuff's in Apple Books so uh right I'm a monster no no no I like Apple Books and I have read them there see if you have not bought a book you can say you want to read it you can buy it or download a sample or you can Mark as finished on the three dots if you click that on a book you have not bought you could say Mark as finished yep there it is there it is and let me go down now if I go back to my homepage books read this year it it said it it says I finished it oh my word I'm going to do this now and see if I can get a personality thing from Apple Books that's very cool I say so can you try to change your personality by just ticking all the really good books there's all the New York Times bestseller helps self-help books yeah this is actually a great place to just lie just go in and say that you read all these like philosophical books and brag to your friends about how amazing you are I could see people doing that I have read the prince by makavelli I'm just saying I have read it but I I did want to mention while we're in the book section cuz we'll probably never have another chance ever again to talk about this what cuz how often do we get Apple Books news nobody buys books anymore sorry so that's that that's the thing the Apple they have this large collection of all the public domain books Frankenstein Alison Wonderland and they all have this custom artwork it's beautiful like I'll have to put it in the show notes but it's just um a few dozen books that you can just add to your Apple Books Library so if you ever wanted to actually sit down and read some of these classic books they're all there and apple books for free that you can just download and have and there you go uh great for students because they're usually reading something like this that's cool I mean there's even like MC Beth The Odyssey Peter Pan the land that time forgot there's there's all these books so go nutes sorry I just realized the other day um the first time I read Pride and Prejudice it was on an iPhone in 2008 using an app called stanza which is long forgotten but more recently I I don't use Apple Books much because a couple years ago I got a physical Kindle and although I tend to use my iPad more now I have such a Kindle collection I keeps adding to kindley things to it but they as well as the public domain short collections on Kindle you can find you know 80 classic novels uh things and all of the works of somebody like Jane Austin so I've been getting those and just reading them all and it's just fantastic what you can get that's if you haven't spent a lot of time in something like Apple Books I recommend going and poking around there's actually surprising amount of free books free content and especially uh like around comic book day there's always free comics they do that too in Apple Books so just keep that in mind realiz yeah Apple Books gives out a lot of free comics and there's all a lot of times the first volume in a comic series is just free automatically and sometimes books are just given away for free or sold for 99 like it's it's a really good app for that kind of stuff and the way they present all of it and all the control CS they brought back the page curl page Cur is nice you got yes all all very good I also will say uh the three books I I just marked him as red uh the three books I read this year braving the Wilderness by beray Brown the other side of Sadness by George banano which is Incredible Book on Grief and the Happiness Advantage and so I'm curious now if I can go back in and get my Apple Books replay now that I have retroactively marked books as read I have a feeling it's not going to let me do it but I'm going to try it anyways here's what I want though if there's anyone from Apple listening podcasts give me an Apple podcast replay that's the app that I'm using to listen to a bunch of podcast and honestly the most content I probably consume on my iPhone I want an apple podcast replay pocketcast does this and Spotify wrapped does that as well because you can listen to podcast and Spotify and so I would love it for Apple podcast that's all I'm saying yeah I think it would be interesting to see all the tech podcasts that I listen to Just yeah I I think Apple news today might actually be the one with the most episodes cuz there's one every single day so that would probably be my my most listen to just not by minutes by episodes I will say too you can backdate when you read a book and so I'm totally going to go back for the last like five or six years and and really add the books that I have read so Apple Books knows those the ones I read and maybe next year I'll get an Apple Books uh replay oh you can mark them you can mark the date you can back date when you finished a book yeah and I do I have a little note where I keep track of the books I read in a year where saying that about Comics actually it's just made me nostalgic for but back in the day when on the iTunes Store as was every September the the first episode of most us TV shows was free to download and because I have I'm in the UK but I have a US account so I could watch all of these shows for free I have hundreds and hundreds of us TV dramas in my iTunes us account and now that things are you know network uh fall season is not really as big as it used to be those days are gone and hardly anything is free anymore and it's just back when it was 140th of a season to give away for free now it's 112th of a season that is true this is a much higher percentage of a season for one episode but also the Apple podcast and Apple Books like top charts were released for the past year unfortunately we did not make any top podcast charts but I will say I was I watch the Apple podcast charts every time a new Apple Insider podcast drops and last week I believe it was on Saturday the episode the episode reached a number 17 on the top episodes in the technology category right under John grber so yeah we were in good company on the podcast charts it's incredible uh seeing these top podcasts and globally and all of that because I've never listened to anything other than like these what you would consider Niche I I've tried stepping into the wider world and turn it on and it's brought to you buy Campbell Soup and I turn it off immediately just I don't I don't want it I don't want it yeah there is I have noticed in in certain podcasts like the dynamic ad insertion and whatever tracking can be done that will be done pretty wild like I've been hearing ads for in Tampa Bay such and such and I was like no I don't want to hear this in a podcast because that's a tracked ad but I I I do listen to smartless I do enjoy hearing um about the celebrity and like the Hollywood uh interviews that they do and they also do interviews with like Stephan Curry recently and they interviewed Dave Gro a while back on the smartless podcast and that was pretty interesting so I'll give him that iOS 17.2 beta 4 came out we have more updates again we're awaiting the official release I think it'll be coming next month December as you listen to this which will come with the journal app several other things like default ringtones was fixed in this beta but I also wanted to mention 17.2 for the personal voice feature which we've talked about before on this podcast but just this morning uh Apple released a video or a short film directed by Tao watiti literally touting this specific feature touting the person voice feature the short film The Voice you hear is actually a Dr Tristram Ingam a physician from taoa titi's Hometown in New Zealand and he actually used personal voice to narrate the entire short film I actually couldn't tell at the very beginning and then as you as you listen it's like wait a minute this sounds a little maybe AI generated and it was actually personal voice the entire time that narration was was generated by that and I will say I was was really good at like pulling on the heartstrings for these kind of features but I do it does show that there's an actual real person using this feature and needed this feature so that he could in his voice speak to his daughter like in the video he's telling a story to his daughter through the personal voice in iOS 17 I will say I did personal voice you can enable it in iosa 17 it's not part of the 17.2 like if you have IOS 17 just whatever you can do it right now you read 150 statements and the iPhone will record you saying it it takes 24 hours after you finish that process and it will create a basically an AI generated voice or machine learned voice your voice a clone voice and then you can have it read any text that you want in quote unquote your voice have either of you tried this or set this up this is my AI generated voice it's been on the show we now uh while I am off reading books yeah that would be the ultimate twist that every word you ever heard William say was AI generated does William even exist he's you know okay this is getting existential that is true I think therefore I am uh I did personal voice it was okay I also did 11 Labs which is an AI tool it's a website 11 laabs doio and they actually give you the ability to create a quote unquote professionally cloned voice I uploaded 3 hours of audio basically my podcast I uploaded three hours of my own audio to that and I will say the voice from 11 Labs is much more like me and a little much more natural sounding than Apple's personal voice I imagine Apple's personal voice will get better over time did you edit the podcasts or is it actually learned an amalgam of you me and W together we've never actually spoken into a microphone all of this no just kidding but I will tell you what I did do because I just needed to know if it was possible so 11 Labs has an API much like chat GPT has an API where you can generate these audio files from text even on the professionally cloned voice of yourself your voice and so because I did that with 11 Labs I spent some time because I'm a wild person and I created a shortcut and this shortcut allows me to pull articles via RSS feed I had it pull from Apple's Newsroom articles I can choose multiple articles if I want to it sends the body text of each of those articles to chat GPT to summarize into one paragraph long a pretty good siiz paragraph and then in the same shortcut that paragraph of text can be sent to 11 labs to generate an audio file of my cloned voice reading those words and then put it all together with a little introduction saying today is November 30th and this is the news and then reads the summaries of those news articles all in an audio file and I didn't have to say a word It All Happened inside of a shortcut and it's I I find that to be wild little scary but pretty wild and that's what I did I even published a podcast because I don't know I felt like I I wanted to do it so I'll put a link to that podcast if you want to hear my AI generated voice read Apple news but it's it's funny it it it reminds me of the existential crisis of like uh machines are going to replace people and then you realize the people are actually just you know you you better at the job right this is one of those things where podcasting I I I don't know that you can add enough Humanity to one of these robots maybe maybe you know later heck a decade from now infinite timeline sure but I I don't know it just seems like the person has so much better control of inflection and personality and emotion that uh people still attach themselves to that that they're not going to want to hear a robotic voice for everything maybe some things but not for everything well and and it sounds robotic now that my mind goes to 2 to 5 years in the future when it's much less robotic maybe even weirdly accurate to a person's voice will anyone like will people be able to tell like there is going to be a threshold where people won't be able to tell the problem still is though the robot can't feel uh so it can pretend to feel but even then like I think humans are actually pretty good at detecting emotion like we're we're built for that so even if it can put inflection into its voice can we will we be be able to tell that it's genuine I I it'll what what are feelings Wes what are feelings yet synapses and neurons firing in the brain oh yeah and if they can fire yeah welcome to the new uh Apple Insider podcast where we talk about minds and emotion existential dread that's the new tagline yeah can I leave as well what do you think about all this I mean you know I know use well funny enough thing that PO in head you popped into my head there is we have a thing going on in the UK at the moment where uh supermarkets are removing um self-service checkouts I actually like them the speed it's able to go in and blip blip and you're out but for some reason it's just not working out for a group of supermarkets and they are going back to having real live people now I like the conversations and things like that but I'm surprised that it's enough of a difference that it's economically more viable for them to do this and so I think we're going through it's happening in the states as well is it yeah some some companies are moving like including Walmart I believe is moving away from self checkout just because efficiency and and all that like they feel like people are just faster and better at it than having some person try to walk up and figure out how to do the scanner and then having to have five employees come over and argue about a coupon so but will you prefer the self checkout if you had the option I just yeah for the speed and the things of it um yeah all sorts of reasons for it I feel a bit guilty saying that because it's doing people out of a job and stuff but there's also the reason it's on my mind is it feels like certain things with that and AI are new toy itis that we will go through this mad rush for them and then it will settle back down to what it is actually good for and not what it isn't good for uh that's what will end up since I'm such a privileged human being and believe I should be waited on hand and foot uh I will always go to the human check out because I don't want to do anything yes that's funny I would have thought the opposite for you I don't want to bag my groceries and put them in a car I just I just want to pay and leave like I want to get out of there as quickly as possible when I'm doing full-on groceries and I have like dozens of items I definitely do human checkout but if I just have three or four I'm a self check out all the way and if you go to a like a Lowe's or a Home Depot which are like hardware stores here in the states there's no employees in the store anyway I mean even if you need one there's there's nobody around so you kind of have to do it where do I come in this range between between uh needing human affirmation when I buy toilet rolls or something to not caring about anything because I actually get my my biggest shop is delivered oh yeah well I do a ton of Amazon now wait a minute did you just say toilet rolls is that what you guys call them over there yes that's what we call them we call toilet paper rolls we just to toilet paper I guess it's not that different I was just trying to get on new for something I just want I will say there there are like actual thing use cases for some of this that have occurred I think one of the most notable times was the Obi-Wan Disney plus series the original the Star Wars series that was on Disney plus the Darth Vader voice was actually an AI Clon voice of James Earl Jones James Earl Jones licensed his voice to be able to be cloned and they had a cloned version of it a voice actor still recorded the lines actually spoke them into a microphone then it was actually a company in Ukraine that put together the voice actors live recording with the AI generated voice of James R Jones to create what you hear in the show and I think if a lot of people were to listen to that show without knowing it they would just think that's James Earl Jones's voice like that's what he sounds like the technolog is getting better and I like the idea of preserving characters like that and I I do think we should let people die you know if if they're going to go especially at their wishes don't don't try to re rebuild them with a hologram or or some weird uh like meshy version of uh Princess Leia or whatever but um like yeah James Jones is you know he loves being Darth Vader and if that gets to be his legacy for all of eternity great now he's preserved to be able to do that forever uh one of my favorite things that they did um with these kinds of tools with isn't generative actually uh did you know what they did for Indiana Jones the latest movie was it not daging was it something different no they didn't actually deage Harrison for there is a moment at the beginning of the film where he is much younger but uh how they did it is they took still images of his face captured on camera from everything he's ever done and Stitch it together so that every time his face is facing the correct direction and lighting and everything it is just actually filmed yes like they it's it's crazy how they did it they they actually used real images when he was from when he was younger and put it all together and yeah there's some algorithms in there and there's some fixing and post with I'm sure algorithmic like a AI or whatever but but like the fact that they started from real photography is what made that look so good and I I just found that very interesting wait a minute it is very impressive and I've seen the film and that bit is very good but I'm suddenly thinking all that material was taken from previous films what about the writers of those films the directors the rest of the crew did any of them get any payment for this no no their work has been ripped off so well I believe it all it's all content owned by Disney so that gets into that weird oh so people were pre- ripped off they okay well when you signed the contract you you're basically told you're given your uh your payment and then Disney owns you in perpetuity I don't think I I understand your point but like contracts are dirty man this isn't confirmed yet but uh it's believed that Doctor Who now that it's uh produced by Disney and the BBC together that the writers contracts are buyout Clauses instead of royalty ones and that means you do get more money up front but the residuals are non-existent uh I did a TV contract once and it actually said I was selling the rights uh across the universe that the actual wording in the legal paper for it uh at the time it was so little it was a oneof oh right so I I could get residuals from an alternative reality where the episode I wrote for something did better okay I like this I'm I'm going to pursue this all right so one other mention of AI was that in Apple's apps of the Year Apple announced its top apps across the different platforms the top games the number one one app was all trails from the company all Trails which is an app for iPhone which lets you browse trails and see pictures and navigate which is pretty cool and they have the best like iPad Apple TV and all of that I will say at the very bottom of The Newsroom article it talks about the trend of the year and it said in this is Apple's Newsroom article saying in 2023 generative AI captured users Collective imagination and says AI multiple times there and back to last week when we talked about Tim Cook's interview with dual Lipa apple is starting to say I apple is starting to say AI more and more and I'm I'm just curious WWDC next year I think they might say it in the keynote maybe when they announce a feature well they said it one time in WWDC last year so their their AI count as one uh Google iio was something around what 115 so Apple's catching up with Google on the AI mention they did they said it during the scary fast event too it was um Johnny seruji said it would during the M3 family of chips also one time so that so they're two versus 110 they they're going to take drink drinking game for the mentions of AI I do believe that this is one of those things where they might have to lean into the industry term even though they generally avoid those just because they do want the headline at some point maybe not now but when they come out with the new seror whatever we'll see it and I find it interesting that people like Tim Cook and other Executives um who are being interviewed are just casually using this term because it is now sadly the industry term as much as it's a misnomer I think we'll see it evolve and apple will probably throw their own little spin on top of it like apple generative AI or like apple intelligence or something I like I pitched before so you still get the AI but it's Apple in the name it's fun to see and I like that Apple's at least letting us know they're doing something and the rumors all point to iOS 18 being a pretty big deal so we'll see there is actually something just curious about AI that I'm going to ask you about this for uh you know um rug's audio hijack added transcription about two weeks ago they said it was using whisper transcription the cat GPT thing and I used it several times it was all very good but I was using it for only short things today I used it for a much much longer thing and as I look through the transcript every now and again interspersed between the actual transcript it's the phrase transcribed by otter.ai so it's not using the whisper one it's using the existing otter Service as otter moved to whisper I think there's something going on with all these companies trying to get together in some way we're going to a thing like we do with every other industry in that there'll be billions of AI things and then it will cut down to there being three it'll implode it'll implode what otter uses for their back end um I don't know if the thing is it's been running I've been using otter for years and years so long before a open AI released its whisper technology they were doing something else right it might be it's very good it is very good it might be proprietary I do know that many things run on open ai's whisper API which that's their transcription software which probably of all like open ai's products obviously chat GPT is wildly successful turned one year today as we record but the whisper AI it's just been integrated in so many services so yeah it's it's wild yes it's very good this episode of the Apple Insider podcast is brought to you by Magic lasso Adblock I use magic lasso personally on all my devices even before they sponsored the show I pay for it for my iPhone my Mac my iPad and it's the ad blocker I use everywhere if you want to experience twice as fast load times on all your Apple devices magic lasso ad block is the ad blocker designed for you it's super easy to set up it blocks web ads some ads on YouTube and it doubles the speed at which Safari loads plus magic lasso is an efficient high performance and Native ad blocker with over 5,000 fstar reviews it's simply the best Safari ad blocker for your iPhone iPad and 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support of the Apple Insider podcast and our friends at Babel noo than Babel yeah that's right I said there's no better way to learn another language than with Babble we're heading into the holiday season maybe you have some time on your hands and you want to pick something up well spend that time and learn a new language maybe you're traveling to another country or you have relatives that speak another language and you want to be able to have conversations with them Babel is the way to do it instead of paying hundreds of dollars for a private tutor or fooling yourself with language apps they're little more than games Babel's quick 10-minute lessons are designed by over 150 language experts to help you start speaking a new language in as little as 3 weeks and Babel is designed by real people for real conversations all of Babel's tips and tools for learning a new language are approachable accessible and rooted in real life situations I also love the Babel app cuz when you talk into it it'll give you little accent hints here and there it'll let you know that you're speaking the language like it's supposed to be spoken and studies from Yale Michigan State University and others continue to prove Babel is better one study found that using Babel for 15 hours is equivalent to a full semester at college with over 10 million subscriptions sold Babel is real language learning for real conversations so here's a special limited time deal for our listeners to get you started right now get get 55% off your Babel subscription but only for our listeners at babel.com slapple Insider get 55% off at babel.com slapple inssider spelled babbel.com slapple inssider rules and restrictions apply the links in the show Notes too you can just click it there our thanks to Babel for sponsoring this episode this came out after we recorded last week and totally missed it but we have to talk about it Apple officially announced that next year in 2024 it's going to adopt RCS messaging in the messages app now there's a bunch of details with what version of RCs they are adopting because there's like the international the universal profile of RCs which does not support into an encryption I believe uh but they could add it and then there's like Google's flavor of RCs but all those details in the weeds Apple saying they are officially going to support RCS and in I think a hilarious turn of events RCS bubbles will still be green so you're either blue I message or you're still green but when you're messaging RCS users on your iPhone maybe late next year I imagine it will be an iOS 18 update that you'll might get ellipses and delivered and red receipts and higher quality images when you send it and yeah RCS Apple's finally doing it this whole blue green bubble thing every time I have to ride to out it I actually have to get up my phone to check which color is which really because out out here away from the US it means nothing I just don't care at all uh so many people I have to talk with her on WhatsApp instead which is incredibly ugly app but you know it does what it does uh so yeah I can never hold it in my head which is the way around so not the biggest deal outside the US but I'm right it's also funny because the app icon for messages is green but iMessages are blue and someone asked like why isn't the message icon blue and someone Photoshopped it and it was like kind of looks gross if the icon is blue and also Apple has many many blue icons already like Safari and mail and I for a weather blue you know there's a lot of already blue apps so but I was so certain you were going to do a poem there icons are blue messages are green what was it going to come next the green I think is because if SMS is a part of anything it infects it and takes over so just the fact that the messages app can handle SMS at all it turns it green just like a group chat if you have one Android guy and 37 iPhone users it's going to be a green chat so uh that's my theory on it yeah yeah on why yeah because it infects everything it just takes over no I I do believe this this is interesting like they're doing the universal profile and they did say they're going to work with the gsma not Google on getting encryption to the universal profile uh thus probably effectively forcing Google to also adapt the universal profile which would be very funny this is this was inevit I've been banging this drum for gosh as long as we've been talking about it Google wanted this to happen and now it's happening in a way that they're going to be unhappy about which is just kind of karmatic to me uh because basically Google's like oh yeah if we get apple in on this they're going to fix it they're going to they're going to make RCS really the standard because if Apple Embraces it everyone will embrace it and then Apple comes in and takes over exactly not Google standard and now they're going to make that so much better that Google has to embrace it and undo the work they've done which is just kind of hilarious to me um but yeah still going to be green bubble chats and people are like but what if Apple has encryption guess what still green bubble because Apple will differentiate iMessage even even as they improve on the Android side of messaging they're going to continue improving on iMessage we have access to things like game pigeon and iMessage games the way the stickers work the way the reactions work those will not translate to um RCS and likely never will and there will only be more stuff added as time moves on so we'll we'll see how this looks I don't think this means like the ultimate future is maybe IM message on Android because I know a lot of people ask for that yeah that's I think this is a sign that that's just never going to happen this is Apple's technology and they're going to stick to it I will say I was at a middle school a couple weeks ago a friend invited me to speak to middle schoolers about like YouTube and podcasting and that was fun and uh these are sixth seventh and eighth graders which are what 11 12 and 13 year olds and so I asked them is blue and green bubbles a thing and they didn't know what I was talking about they were like what do you mean well I mean that's a little young I mean did they all have cell phones absolutely okay they all had phones no they all phon I understand that middle school is the like generally the time where even like fifth grade or whatever late Elementary School like parents start giving them phones but it seems like I don't know that just doesn't that's not something that really becomes an issue until later but I guess that makes sense well they they there were Samsung Galaxies there were a bunch of that had iPhones and I I actually had to describe to them like what happens when it turns green and they were like oh yeah I notic that you know you don't get the ellipses or whatever but they acted like it wasn't a big deal now this is one Middle School in Central Florida that is not indicative of the United States but I do wonder if like the younger Generations like middle school and younger will not have the same like harsh visceral reaction that maybe high schoolers today in the US have I don't know well so it's actually kind of funny cuz I have um young nieces and nephews so I get to see this kind of stuff all the time they're not on messages or iMessage um they don't do that uh even like some of the kids I know uh just is it's actually kind of funny it's gone upside down now that you know mental health is such a priority um and anxiety is such an open thing a lot of kids just say I can't be bothered to text if it's too short a conversation I'll just call you or FaceTime you a lot of these kids yeah a lot of these kids just lay around with FaceTime just open all day and like they'll just sleep with FaceTime on next to them like it's kind of ridiculous uh but they just don't use iMessage that way they might go on there for games I I noticed that a lot of them like to do the uh game pigeon uh but that's all they're using it for all the like text based communication that we're used to the short messages that's all Snapchat or maybe Instagram messenger and that's for the older kids cuz even Instagram messenger is now for the olds yeah so it's it's it's just funny how the trends go and we're it's kind of doubled back on itself and now kids just want to be on video chat or uh like Snapchat and like have images and these these kinds of Rich Communications whereas iMessage is the old way to do things and I wonder if Apple's noticing that and if we're going to see a change in the next few years uh William do you ever get a hard time uh from green or blue bubbles family members nope I once had somebody saying why are you suddenly blue instead of green or was it the other way around I can't remember because i' upd something and something had switched off and I fixed it and they went away happy and I didn't think about it but um I like this I'm really quite taken with this idea that people are phoning each other now have you do you notice this in the states here in the UK nobody knows how to use a phone anymore yeah if you see somebody put a phone up to their ear to talk they're old or they're in a film everybody else ding 911 well they have speaker phones on everything which why are you doing this to me I don't want to hear 18 phone calls with people as I'm walking anywhere but it's like they don't know that's why they have to put it to their ears things and I'm just fascinated no this the speaker phone thing is maddening like that happens a lot here still like you'll just be in a grocery store and they'll have it on speaker with the phone's like bottom pointed towards their mouth like they're talking to a microphone walking around that way and the circle of hell is reserved for people who use speak or phone just walking around yeah I don't in public yeah but also it takes an extra tap to get it on to speaker or two TS isn't it even so why the I don't know it's weird yeah it's just an interesting sea change I thought so Apple card William uh what can you tell us about what's happening there I still haven't got one is that you know I'm not allowed and you may never will you may never will William actually I think it might be the way around Stephen you're going to explain why I actually hope well no it's actually this is actually a good story Stephen believe it or not oh okay well I just on a high level gold sex who was backing the Apple card and it was only here in the United States up until now has announced that they are stepping away from backing the Apple card and then Apple issued this statement that really gives us no information but they said apple and Goldman Sachs are focused on providing an incredible experience for our customers to help them lead healthier Financial lives the award-winning Apple card has seen a great reception from consumers and we will continue to innovate and deliver the best tools and services for them that says nothing about who is going to back it when like is the Apple card still good to go like is it going to be here long term what about the Apple savings account so basically what's happened is is the New York Times got a hold of some information uh Apple sent a proposal to Goldman Sachs to sever their contract uh Goldman is going to absolutely accept because theyve spent the last like two years saying oh I hear a keyboard okay sorry um I was just like I need to like make sure that's not me uh anyway uh so Apple Goldman Sachs spent the last couple years complaining about the partnership with apple how it's losing them money and uh Apple's giving them an out 12 to 15 months from now the contract can expire uh even though they technically just extended it last year to 2029 so that's just no longer a thing and apple will be able to take it and Shop it with other partners maybe American Express there's uh this other company that's um gosh like an big Advertiser guy that's not going to be great if we if Apple goes that route I can't remember their name uh synaptic or something thing uh and there's obvious other options and we'll see where Apple goes but I think this is a positive because if you're an apple card user and I think you are Stephen uh you might have noticed that since maybe 2020 nothing's changed period about the card uh we never we get every now and then we get extra bonuses for shopping with certain retailers but that's about it still the same we get shortcuts actions that don't really work and uh dig get a savings account well not even yeah not even the uh the development side cuz that's Apple uh and the delivery section that's never going to work because for some reason nobody cares um but that's again on Apple uh Goldman Sachs side of things so I'm talking about Finance benefits still 32 one% usage we rarely see any changes in that yes there's an apple savings account um but that I think was just part of Apple's contract with Goldman and and again that's going with Goldman's leaving everything so that is also being abandoned by Goldman Sachs when they go through this steal um but nothing's really changed we don't have uh the the 4.15% interest rate hasn't kept up with the industry uh it was amazing when they announced it it was ahead of most IND uh most people which was about 3.5 to 3.8% now all those banks that Apple was competing with they're around 4.5 to 5.1% so uh the savings um high yield savings is actually behind the competition because it hasn't moved and I think that and the fact it hasn't expanded outside the US um we haven't seen updates to the cards to allow tap to pay which is becoming more popular in the United States like there's so many like things stagnant about this uh it doesn't work with any uh budgeting apps the one budgeting app meant actually shutting down um that it did work with so like it's just kind of stagnated and all of our benefits work and the card works like I use it it's my primary card I'm not complaining I'm just saying nothing's happened so Apple actually moving to a different bank might actually open up to actually evolve and compete and offer new programs new Rewards travel points what what have you um better things that we can take advantage of maybe even add some fees give us a subscription to Apple card to give us more benefits right none of that's happened under Goldman Sachs it hasn't made it to the UK because again Goldman Sachs has just been unhappy with this partnership and unwilling to expand on a product that they deem um a waste of money because they are losing money on it so we'll we'll see how this goes but I'm I'm excited at the prospect of what could come from this change but I will say don't don't worry don't jump ship I think we're fine Apple card isn't going anywhere Apple savings isn't going anywhere it's just going to move hands I just tried to look up how much money does Apple make from Apple card and I can't find out there was an estimate that it was going to be a billion a year back in 2019 but the the success of it the penetration of it I can't see apple um backing out of this I think that apple is actually probably going to do it all itself it's been growing its Financial expence yeah it just it feels it fits doesn't it with everything Apple does of trying to BR own the whole stack of everything now we did see this recently Apple has its own LLC for processing transactions because um of Apple pay later and now Apple actually backs that with its own Capital so when people get Apple pay later which is essentially a payment loan um that is secured with apple money and so they've already dabbled in this I forgotten that yeah and I don't think Apple because Apple's the controlling partner Goldman Sachs has no say they are locked in a contract they can't do anything Apple going to Goldman Sachs and giving them the out is absolutely a sign that Apple already knows either what they're going to do or they have a plan like this isn't them shutting down Apple card no on top of that getting any statement from Apple at all even if it's a non- statement show that they're actually committed to keeping this up because usually they say nothing when something's about to die and maybe it'll take two or 3 years like updating a Mac Mac Pro or something uh but they'd say nothing um so all good signs all around I'm excited and maybe William will finally get to open an apple savings account we'll see I hope so there's one thing we should say just for completeness um uh we we talk obviously talk about Apple and Goldman Sach but Goldman Sachs did do other consumer cars I think with General Motors and stuff and it's all been disastrous for them oh they've abandoned all consumer stuff is gone from G tax yeah and they're still being investigated aren't they over various things so just from Financial to Legal difficulties I don't know where they went wrong and doesn't your heart bleed it's really heartbreaking oh yeah for a company like Goldman Sachs to be in in in trouble it sounds like a management issue more than anything and I understand Apple was pushy and I understand that they were demanding like they required all payments to occur on the first of the month which is apparently a drain on support lines what have you sure but you're big enough you've got you've got the billions you are a huge investment firm why can't you figure out how to make it work like why was this such a disaster when other companies can run consumer credit cards just fine and make money on it so I'm not sure what happened all right I want to get to an Apple device ranking uh before we go so but one last news article Apple announced that they are partnering with amcore for chip packaging and this is an Arizona it's in Peoria Arizona and now Chip packaging is not like they're going to do the whole chip process in Arizona the Silicon actually has to be fabricated at tsmc most likely overseas and then the final packaging allowing it to like be put on the circuit board that goes into your iPhone iPad and other devices that will be done in Arizona uh but yeah it's another step of Apple actually moving some of its Pipeline and production to the United States this in particular Arizona so that's cool that's all I got there are times when even I think I'm too British because the moment you started that with chip packaging I'm thinking uh wrapped in newspapers with fish with pies with kebabs actually made me hungry you guys say chips your your fries are chips right or your chips or fries yes that's right yes on this front I just want everyone to go check out a story I wrote and don't even you know read read my story short but go go to the source because these guys they did the leg work rest of world did a story about 40,000 words long it is a book it is a whole thing uh they followed uh some employees anonymize their names but uh that traveled from China to India to help train people um there to work in India factories to build the iPhone and they talk about the trials and tri tribulations of going from the iPhone 10r which was the first phone manufactured in India to iPhone 15 which actually was the first phone to be simultaneously built in China and India at launch successfully um that was actually success story so Wilds kind of getting an inside look and you know again interviewing employees especially disgruntled ones tired ones you never you're only probably going to hear the bad thing so there is a lot of looking down and bad going on here and it I I think the conditions are definitely not ideal but it is wild to see like these these Chinese employees saying basically uh to sum up the story um these Indian workers need to learn how to be more Chinese and uh work 12 to 15 hour shifts accept all the extra bonuses and never see their families is basically what it comes down to cuz they're saying yeah cuz they get there and they're like man these these people they work eight hour shifts what they get tea Brees what I that's so weird there's production to get done get back to work what are you doing and it's just it's a wild story go give it a read and the reason why I bring it up is because looking at this bringing it to uh uh manufacturing to Arizona a lot of um people in unit States a you know political thing and I don't want to get into it wants you know to things to be made in the United States and just looking at going from China to India and seeing the trials that they're going through my goodness could you imagine trying to see how this would work in the United States cuz China doesn't have uh labor unions India actually does funny enough they they actually have people that protect uh the workers they um they tried to pass a bill for 12-h hour work days got overturned like 3 days later from protests uh so like India is really fighting for the working class in a way that China does not um so to I think the even more extreme example of that is to look at how we would do this in the United States so just seeing these two kind of vget side by side was interesting to me and uh I want everyone thinking on this because it is a humanitarian issue what we're asking people to go through and I don't really know how to answer this other than automation but then we're putting all these people out of work so what do we do here it is a complex situation and uh before move to our tier list I just want to go back to chips being a thing in England and I need to tell William that oh go we were watching planet Earth last night uh me my kids and wife we were all watching it and you know David aten how do you say his name over there David David atur is correct okay I thought I was correct I was trying to do it in a pompous way uh you know he's narrating it and whatever uh episode we were watching there was a a sloth was one of the first animals that he was covering in and apparently I don't know if you do this too how would you say that word uh yourself s l o t h the animal oh uh SLO yeah so he kept saying SLO and yeah my daughter my daughter who seven she was like why does it keep saying that wrong and I was like now how else do you say it sloth sloth as in rhymes with cloth cuz it's the same three letters at the end sloth and it's the same four letters cloth and sloth you don't say cloth do you do you say cloth okay see anyway right okay are we are we going to we're heading into Mariam Webster territory here no well I was I told my daughter I just like listen this he's English which is literally where the name of the language comes from so they probably invented it so let's just let's just keep watching I speak I speak American I don't know what you're talking about uh so so here here's multilingual uh English American Australian IR I got them all yeah wait David aten is a legend here and actually is such a legend that people have forgotten how much of everybody Associates him with nature things which he has been doing for decades now but he was controller of BBC 2 about 50 years ago he was like a major figure in British television history so okay obviously ANM yeah uh sir David atenor Apple TV plus go watch if you haven't yet please I beseech you go watch the uh what what what is that called the dinosaur one prehistoric history one the Apple TV plus prehistoric Planet prehistoric Planet thank you uh you put the word in my head prehistoric planet on Apple TV plus sir David aten bro amazing work there and I just love hearing him talk about dinosaurs this this man and his very uh serious British voice talking about these things that don't exist in a very serious way I love it it's great I would say uh first of all David ateno has his own Wikipedia page of course he's on the see will is William command no I I've heard burrow too often now I've got to come in David atenor bur aten how you say it okay anyway he's also 97 years old kudos to David I say what an incredible career uh he's had and as I understand it it was a very nice guy as well so I'm going to put the link to David aten Burrow's Wikipedia page as the top Link in Today Show notes for my final episode and everyone's going to wonder why in the world is at the top link until they get to this part this episode is brought to you by notion guys I have developed a new love for notion I started using it even more as I plan my videos and podcasts projects and research I use notion for everything it's just a wonderful productivity application and what makes notion even better is now you can use notion AI everywhere across your notion database notion AI can give you instant answers to your questions using information from across your Wiki projects docs and meeting notes and using Ai and notion is so much easier than just having kind of a blank chat bot all I do is hit the little backslash and you'll see the ask AI features and it'll get you started it can offer to summarize things even translate things into different languages it's really helpful if you give it a transcript maybe a podcast transcript or video transcript and you can ask notion to summarize it give you bullet points even make social media posts out of that or take a video transcript and rewrite it as a blog post then notion AI can even change the tone make it sound more professional or casual all of that right inside notion you can also ask Q&A questions from anywhere in notion find exactly what you need without leaving the dock you're in right now so you can stay focused on what's important plus you can trust your data is secure because notion AI is designed to protect your information no AI models are trained with your information the data is encrypted and answers will never use information from Pages you don't have access to when you use notion AI it's even easier to do your most meaningful work so try notion aai for free when you go to notion.com slapple Insider that's all lowercase letters notion.com slapple Insider to try the powerful easy to ous notion AI today and when you use our link you're supporting the Apple Insider podcast that's notion.com appleinsider that link is in the show notes you can just click it there our thanks to notion for sponsoring this episode all right last thing I want to do before we go I made a little video earlier this week talking ranking or rating all of the devices Apple currently sells in its store new that you can go to the Apple Store New and buy all these things and everything from the the M3 Macs that were just launched to devices that are like 8 years old that you could still buy new today spoiler that's the original apple pencil that is being thank you I was trying to W that one out yeah yeah exactly and so there were a couple devices that I put this was an S tier list meaning s is like Superior top of the list and then you got ABC d f f of you know for fail being the lowest tier and uh I mostly people agree with my rankings and where I put different devices there were a couple devices I put in the F tier one caused a bunch of haloo as you or hubub whatever you guys would say over there in the UK and uh and then some other ones in the D tier but I would I was curious what's your guys's thoughts on some of my rankings mainly the low ones so first of all the M1 MacBook Air is still being sold the 13-in M1 MacBook Air that launched in November 2020 it's now 3 years old no magsafe connector no magsafe charger for this MacBook Air it just has the two Thunderbolt ports still 8 gigs unified memory 256 SSD and it's sold for $9.99 and I understand Apple needs a sub $1,000 laptop but the M2 MacBook Air is only $100 more you get mag safe charging and uh you get like a a newer chip you get the M2 plus you can get in 13 and 15 in but I find the M1 MacBook Air at least today in November December 2023 no longer that great of a deal and so I gave it a d tier rating because for like for $100 more to get an M2 MacBook Air is just such a massive upgrade and the only reason it's still around is to be sub $1,000 uh what about education pricing wouldn't that be $100 less so actually it's probably $899 for education does that make a difference yeah but then the M2 MacBook Air the the M2 MacBook Air with education pricing is then $9.99 if we live in a world where only the Apple Store exists I agree with your assessment but okay refurbish and used M1 MacBook airs even even new $700 to $750 you're telling me I can have an entire M series Apple silicon chipset and a Retina display Macbook with aluminum casing giant trackpad beautiful keyboard for $700 unheard of never go back in the whole history of the mac and you've never been able to get a modern device that works as efficiently and as well as it does as powerful as it is I mean the M2 Mac Mini is 600 bucks but yeah I take it okay well I'm talking about a Macbook you need you need you have to go buy a monitor for the Mac Mini and in order to get a rent a display you'd have to spend $1,600 so that's you know uh no I agree like the refurbished world for sure like I'm so glad that there are M1 chip laptops out there those are incredible deals and values for those who needs to get them but to be sold as new for $9.99 directly from Apple yeah that's silly Apple that's one thing I I will agree with is Apple needs to work on their pricing and I know this is this isn't even a Tim Cook thing this is just an apple thing of keeping things the same price forever um it would be nice to see them do price reductions after being on the market or being outdated H William what do you say what would you rate the M1 MacBook Air I'm actually not that fuss about this one except um I'm trying to remember when the MacBook Air it used to have these huge bezels and then suddenly it didn't and I a friend a poet spent an awful lot of money on the MacBook Air just before gu and so after she' bought it and before I next saw her this new one had come out and so she's showing me this Mac she's so pleased of and I'm thinking yeah so that that se changed that was big but I think the M1 is so good that it can get for a cheaper price I mean I have an M1 Mac Mini uh in my office and I'm tempted to upgrade but I don't need to partly cuz I've got a uh an M2 uh MacBook uh Pro but even so it's still fast my my iPad Pro that I work from every day is an M1 iPad Pro I didn't get on the M2 train and so again just the power and efficiency of that chipset is it's wild like I I I'll be jumping to M3 when the iPad Pro gets it but like I'm curious is to see how long Apple supports this first generation Apple silicon and it it could be a decade just I think it would be the Intel uh Maxs were supported for a very long time I mean five six seven years at times so for sure yeah but for $9.99 I agree it is a it's a d tier just because like that laptop isn't I wouldn't spend that money on it but I would definitely say go go find it at a cheaper price but if we're if we're living by those rules that you must buy it from the Apple Store at the Apple Store price and it's the only place you can get it yes that's not a great price not a great place you can get it from Apple's refurbished like Apple's own refurbish store for 850 and for that I would say you know it's a better deal but even well even Black Friday like just extended sales just holiday sales in general yeah you can find it even cheaper than that like Apple's is Apple funny enough is not the best place to get apple deals although Apple's really hot on giving you gift cards on Black Friday that's why can't match that here's a $50 gift card for your $2,000 Mac that's right you can't use it on the thing you're buying right now you have to buy something else two other things I put very low one in the F tier were the is the first apple pencil it launched in November 2015 with the first iPad Pro the iPad Pro that had a home button and all and this first gen apple pencil is still being sold today new for $99 it's wild $100 for an 8-year-old device the only reason this apple pencil exists is because Apple still sells the 9th gen base model iPad for 329 now I think this whole year 2023 no iPad was updated at all so they are all due for a refresh next year I imagine that lightning iPad is going to go away and the last 10th gen model iPad with USBC will probably slot down in price and then we won't need the touch ID one anymore and that would aisc the need for this apple pencil as well but to be sold now today December 2023 for $100 I give that apple pencil an F tier that's just me to be fair Stephen I'm buying one for my niece for Christmas uh this year so it's it's funny how yes it as old as it is and outdated as it is it's still necessary and will be for even after it's off the Apple store it'll still be necessary to be sold and exist for another four or five years just until the lifespan of these lightning tablets goes away but it's such an odd and controversial product I don't know why the apple pencil line has to go through so many controversies but like I I like the fact that yes it's it's terrible charging when it's plugged in but also it can charge without any extra accessories and that's that's a that's a good deal and I agree with you I think this next Generation Um of iPads we're going to see like in March April we're going to see both Apple pencils get ditched uh for a new higher tier and then we're only going to have USBC and the newer apple pencil and the other two in the market are just going to fade away and that's that's all fine and dandy and I $99 is steep like I'm going to go find one for like 60 but um yeah I agree like it's it's it's again it's it's just super odd that Apple likes to hold on to prices so hard especially for products that need to kind of go away William what do you say where do you think actually should just that I was very lucky to find uh uh apple pencil 2 or whatever it's called Uh in my hotel room in Tokyo that's couldn't find the original owner so uh bargain I thought uh that one but you know and it worked with my iPad that was the thing I the only thing I have against the apple pencil is being certain you're getting the one that works with your iPad and then if you change the iPad you're throwing away a pencil and stuff so I'll be glad to see it all kind of simplify but otherwise you know it does what it did so if it's works for you so iPad Mini S tier right listen I put iPad Mini let me see where I put it I put it in C tier cuz I still love oh it needs an update but it's still the perfect device I like the iPad Mini I wish it had a better display you know it would be nice to be updated I would love face ID on it and instead of the touch ID but it's still good I would get it on sale like don't spend full price IAD mini pro well I would say just don't spend full price at Apple you can get it for $100 Less on Amazon most times AB so you know just don't just don't buy it U new but I think the most controversial that I might have been in this ranking were airpods now I will fully admit I probably put airpods Max too low I was I a little upset a a little upset because the airpods max are 3 years old they have the older H1 chip which is not capable of adaptive audio or conversation awareness that the airpods pro are still has a lightning connector and no update in sight so I gave it f tier now that's probably too low I understand basic apple guy I'm sorry I made you upset maybe it should have been DED tier but interesting the headphones I'm wearing just burst into flames I know I know you're you're an airpods Max guy and listen they they sound good I used them on a long flight just earlier this summer but I mean 3 years $550 for a three-year-old advice I think that's it though isn't it I it it sometimes the price corresponds to the release frequency and I think Apple knows that they can't update airpods Max every year and expect it to sell they've made that mistake before trying to release these super expensive products back to back and just not selling them um but I agree with you it's definitely time for an update F does seem harsh but I I it kind of feels that way because my airpods Pro I think technically are better headphones than the ones I'm wearing um even though only because of technicality the airpods max produce better audio because there are larger cans that fit over my ears with better isolation but if it wasn't for that airpods Pro uh to absolutely the better headphone uh technology wise soundwise everything but um they just went out physically uh so yeah I'm interested in updating I will be in the first one in line I'll use Apple pay later just to be uh silly about it and I will be buying some new airpods Max it'll be great William what are you saying I'm saying I still can't find my airpods Pro that I lost at home after my Tokyo trip so uh I'm on wired headphones at the moment and they're fine are you sure they're not in Tokyo have you have you called the hotel yeah I'll swap you for this apple pencil um that's not a conversation I think that's what happened there no no I don't need airpods pro at all I'm fine wired headphones yeah that's great that's ever ever once long c yeah when you're recording a podcast wire true just also the last airpods thing it is weird airpods second gen are still being sold new on the Apple Store like these are the not airpods 3 which I think are actually good airpods but airpods Gen 2 for $129 the yeah like they need to hit if they were $99 it would be perfect cuz they're still good headphones yes they're ancient but like airpods 3 is so much better though like they sound way better right that's what I'm getting at with the price point even even maybe like $79 just like having a cheaper Market a cheaper option on the market like yes I see a lot of airpods pro around but I see a lot of younger people with the the stick old airpods and a lot of fakes so if they were if they were more agreeable in price I think Apple would have a good Market there but I don't know if they're trying to even aim for that market honestly yeah I do kind of miss the tap controls I know those you know varying people don't like them some people like squeezing the stems but I actually found the tap controls to be pretty fast and consistent man I love controlling the volume from my airpod just by swiping it's so nice yeah I've I've never gotten used to that very much I do it on the bicycle I'll be out riding and only have one hand and yeah I can reach up cuz the live activity on my Apple watch and my iPhone will be like Fitness so I would have to do a lot of finagling to get to the music screen to use the digital crown or something but airpods are already in my ear just reach up swipe there you go right airpods Max so I have been working on a streaming setup for uh to so using solely an iPad so iPad connected to a thunderbolt doc to a studio display with a 4K streaming box connected to a Nintendo switch right that I can um basically stream Nintendo switch to Twitch uh through an iPad only no Mac involved um been very exhausting trying to get the setup to work it but it does work and I ran into the funniest barrier and that was getting the audio of me speaking into the stream all right and so plugging the airpods max in through the audio jack to this thing I was just no voice at all uh I I think there's too many dig digital audio conversions CU I think it happens twice on these headphones because of their digital nature um and the microphone placement being down by my neck just did not agree with this thing uh because it's it's looking for a pure analog microphone even the microphone I'm speaking into now is a digital microphone did not want it I had to go to Best Buy and buy a pair of $80 Logitech over ear gamer headphones with a with the little microphone dongle guy that hangs down in front of your mouth and that actually worked I plugged it in and now I have clear audio coming through my stream I just thought it was funny like I wonder if the microphone placement because again these just don't work as analog headphones and I I I remember beats actually having a thing um forever and it being super important to DJs and stuff and I wonder if airpods Max 2 could address this I doubt it um but like if you bought a pair of Beats gosh what were they called beats um Pro Max or it was the ones where there was actually two headphone jack in the single set of headphones where you could have multiple people plug in multiple sources and you could mix on the headphone like they really liked headphone Jacks over there and um they you could actually plug in a set of Beats headphones over this headphone jack and get an analog connection even without power if the battery was dead in your Beats you could still listen to music on them because they were pure analog headphones at that point and airpods Max can't do that and I wonder if uh that's something we could see in the future or if just going to Abandon All Things analog I don't know just thought that was a curious thing I wanted to throw that at the end of the show will did you have something only that this is the end of the show so uh Stephen you're out this is gone it's Wes and I now and with Wes and I in charge we need to say thank you for the hundreds of hours you've done for the Apple Insider podcast you've made it a great show that we will now have to somehow live up to and uh it's great that you're going to such interesting things but it is a terrible thing that you're leaving us and one day we will forgive you okay yeah we're definitely going to miss you over here Stephen um like I I I look forward to you coming back as a guest host and it's definitely going to be interesting the Weston Williams Show we're going to have to find our own I think we've had two whole episodes show let's be clear right from the start oh wait it's already starting it's already stting alphabetically I think it's wam gag my surname so I just Edge it in front of me oh right right I'm going to let you guys that but uh you're very you're very welcome and and truly from the bottom of my heart thank you both William and Wes and Mike and the whole Apple Insider team it has truly been an honor to do this show it's been a privilege all the listeners out there for many years of listening lots of great messages and social media replies after last episode went out and and people heard the announcement and I I truly thank you for all of that um you know people sharing where they listen to the show and you know we're with them every Saturday and they listen to the show in the morning or in their car on the way home Friday afternoons and just to be able to have been a part of your days for the last several years it's it's truly been a privilege I've enjoyed it so much Stephen I I started listening to Apple Insider podcast when you in like 2014 like when it began like the first group of people I heard on the show was you and whoever sorry to whoever there that was uh was it was it NE well it's been so long was it Neil time and Neil at the very beginning it was Neil okay cuz I I just have distinct memories I was in the military this is you know nearly a decade before I even thought about you right like what six years before I even joined the team or even thought about being an apple anything or writing about this stuff like I was in the military I would be playing like Fallout or or Skyrim or something and I would have the Apple Insider podcast with Neil and Steven on in my ear I just have distinct memories of that and uh here I am now talking to you so it's just and it's it's definitely a Bittersweet to see you leave here so one thing though just I don't even know why I bring it up now you mentioned Stephen that you have an AI version of your voice that's pretty good um just you know if you want us to check that out a while podcast you yeah yeah it'd be pretty uh tiring probably to hear AI we'll make him do the AI oh we'll make him do the ad reads that's that's it right exactly but no but truly thank you all it has been a pleasure everyone who listens to the show continue listening support William and Wes and all of Apple Insider and of course you can keep supporting the show at patreon.com Insider directly in apple podcast and if You' like to contact me or get a hold of me my social media handles are all in the show notes you can get a hold of me there and I'll just say if you want to see my personal page and send me an email through that you can go to beard. FM oh right good name okay beard FM thank you know it's just easy to remember you know it provides a little chuckle most times so it's always fun but but truly thank you all it has been an honor and pleasure and enjoy we'll see you next time well I won't see you next time I don't know how to end it when I'm not going to be here on the next time but you'll be listening next time and that's the same thing I will be listening I will definitely be listening to the Apple Insider show so thank you all by\n"

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