Hello, everyone, and welcome to episode 195 of The IA Cast. We have Michael Babcock. Hello, Michael.

Hello, Michael.

We have Marty SoBo. Hey, Marty. Hey, all. How's it going? Good. And we have Lynn Schneider. Welcome back, Lynn.

Hi. I'm glad to be back. And I have titanium brain today, so I am not responsible for anything I say.

Lynn, you always have something witty and funny to say every time we introduce you, and I love that. So keep it up. It's great. All right, we've already started laughing. This is already going off the rails. Third week in a row. So we just had a very interesting week, and we did an Iacast special. Well, first we did our predictions. We did our special on the Iacast about the event, and now we're going to do our show about what we've experienced and some information we've learned since the event. But before we do, all we when we have Marty and Michael, who are the experts on everything Unmute, let's go ahead and have them talk about everything that they've been working on with Unmute for the past week and other shows that they've been on. So, Marty and Michael, do y'all want to take it away?

Go for it, Michael.

I don't know what we've been working on. Michael, this is all IA cast. You should be able to keep track of all this for us and just spit it all out. On yesterday. We did Friday finds. If you haven't gotten Friday fines and Unmute, you need to search for Friday fines with Lynn in your favorite podcast app, so that way you get subscribed to that on Thursday, we chatted about music and podcast apps on the A Lady app using Alexa. And then we had our regular call on Tuesday, and we posted technically working on Monday, and I don't remember what we posted. Oh, I posted we didn't have our.

Regular call on Tuesday.

Oh, yeah, that's right. See, this is why someone else should do this. And then we also taught you how to do something on the Blind show on Sunday.

Yep.

So on Tuesday, we did not have our live show because it was the Apple keynote event, but on Wednesday, we posted a post show of all of our thoughts. So you can check that out in the Iacast feed if that's something that you're interested in. I would also say check out Friday Finds new website. Lynn, do you want to say what the website is that everyone can find for Friday Finds?

Fridayfinds Show?

There you go. And then Unmute also has Unmute show, so you can check out Everything Unmute there as well.

And I was actually really excited. I was able to edit and produce our reactions, the special on Tuesday all in one day. That's great. So that's what we've been working on this week. It's been a great week. We've had a lot of content come out, and we're still always working to make the network better. And remember, you could also subscribe at the look for iacast Network in your favorite podcaster and get all the podcasts at once.

There's also a great app you can download if you want to get everything on the app. You can download the Iacast App Store or the I Accessibility app in the App Store.

And we actually have some exciting news coming about that pretty soon, so you guys will be the first to know on the podcast when that news happens. So I'm pretty excited about it. So stay tuned. So we've had some interesting the reason why I never like to do specials right after the event. We waited a few hours and we got as much news as we could, but there's always something that people miss or we don't get all the information about during the event or even right after the event. So Apple did leak out a few things after the event. So we want to talk about those today, and then we'll talk about our preorder experiences because, yeah, it needs to be talked about. Did you guys see my mastodon regarding that?

I think I saw something about it. I don't remember exactly what it said, but I don't remember seeing it.

I put a funny little witty thing at the end of the announcement, so I just didn't know if anybody had seen it. So we've learned several things about these new phones and the rumor websites, and they're still calling it this, and it bugs me, but they were calling it a periscoping lens. Now, I've heard periscoping lenses that can move up or different things like that. There are periscope. The reason why a lot of these lenses are called periscoping is the light is let into the phone at one direction, and then it's bent 90 degrees to hit the sensor. That's why it's a periscope. And I did not understand that. Right, but Apple did not do that. They are using a technology called Tetra prism. And what it does, it's rather interesting, the sensor and the lenses are not perpendicular to each other. They're going the same direction, which means you could fit more the way they did it, you could fit more light refraction into the body of the phone without taking up as much space. And so their Tetra prism is similar to periscoping, but it gives a better quality image than periscoping does. So that's pretty neat. But a lot of websites are still calling it a periscoping lens, and that is not the case.

It doesn't surprise me a bit, considering how this state of tech journalism these days, I see so much blatant misinformation coming from supposedly infamous or famous tech sites, and it's like, really? Especially around AI. But we won't get into that because that gets me all emotional and stuff.

But yeah, right.

I feel like in the tech community, they want to get crazy with their titles of things, which end up being very confusing for normal people. You say periscoping lens and people immediately think, oh, it's going to go in and out. Like when you use something periscope, it would be cool if they did something that was a little more geared towards everyone, so everyone understood what it is instead of being kind of misleading with their titles.

Right. Quick baity, sort of. Yeah.

Yeah. And I feel like that's what's nice about Apple, is mean, yes, others may use this Tetra Prism technology, but they go out and say, this is what we're doing. We're not going to conform to the fads of everybody. Yep.

Yes. And Apple is actually sort of trailblazing in a lot of ways, some different things. The Titanium being know, they are sort of trend setting in many ways, which.

I think pretty you know, one thing, if you guys haven't heard it, I don't remember what episode of the no silicast. But Allison explains why the type of Titanium that they used is going to be great for the iPhone. So I'm really excited. I got the blue titanium. I'm really excited about that phone. And these are going to be great phones. We will be doing a very large unboxing of the iPhone on Friday or Saturday, depending on when I get mine.

Really fun.

The next thing we heard is that the iPhones will be or the AirPods. You will not be able to just buy the case for the AirPods. This is for USB.

To me, I think they're not changing anything whatsoever. They're not changing the earbuds, they're not changing anything. The only thing that they're changing is they're going to put a USBC port in the case. And I find it a little bit ridiculous that you can't just buy the case because they're going to make everyone buy new buds when they don't necessarily need to. So I think it's a little excessive if you want to buy in on the being USBC. Right. But I don't know if it's worth it. Just if you have to buy the whole new set of AirPods for the full price, especially when you already own.

Them, that's kind of I don't know.

What are your thoughts?

Yeah. Plus the environmental impact of people having to ditch their whole earbuds and case and everything. Of course you can recycle, but or.

Keep them as a backup because I mean, they'd still work fine. Probably you just need a lightning cable.

I don't know.

What's your thoughts?

Michael D. So my mean, I don't know that I need another set now. Granted, Mine, I might need to get mine looked at because the transparency is not working anymore on them. So I use mine a lot. I understand why they're not doing another case because it's e waste. Right. But I don't know when they added wireless charging, you could buy one of those and then put your new ones in it or your old ones in it. But I don't know. I would love a USBC AirPods case, but I don't want to spend $250 again.

It'll be interesting to see if two months, three months down the road, because there supposedly isn't any other difference aside from the case. And I don't know that we know that 100% sure, but how many people are going to buy USBC AirPods, keep the AirPods, but turn around and resell the cases themselves on sites like Ebay or Woote or stuff like that. So we'll see if that happens too.

Now what I don't know is I keep hearing conflicting things online. Some people are saying that you will need the new AirPods and the new case for lossless audio, but I don't see why the current ones can't do that. So I'm thinking that they're adding lossless audio to the AirPods.

See, and this is why this is still rumors until things are actually out in the wild. I didn't know that the AirPods were coming with lossless audio. I thought it was just the new USBC EarPods that are coming out that have lossless audio.

That might be.

I think it's just going to be a software update. I don't think it matters whether you have a Lightning case or a USBC case because the buds themselves aren't changing in any physical way.

But you're still going over Bluetooth and that's where I think you're not going to get that lossless audio. I think the lossless audio rumors for the EarPods that are USBC, that might be.

Now do we know if I guess the Lightning EarPods will not be getting it?

That is what I have interpreted from that, yes.

Now that's a reason to buy some USBC ear pods.

Yes, it is.

I might have to get some pulling the Lightning versions and now they're just going to be the USBC version.

I don't think they'll pull them because you still have 13 and 14s in the wild. So you're going to need people to be able to connect to those phones with ear pods. That's the wired headphones that Apple still sells for $20.

And I don't think you can get a regular headphone jack version of those anymore.

Yes, you can. Okay, so that's pretty exciting and I.

Wonder if you'll have a choice.

That'll be cool.

Just plug if they do work on the Mac. They said that they do work on the Mac.

Okay, well then I might have to buy a new phone.

Why is that? Why a new phone?

So one thing that I loved about having the Pixel is when I had the Pixel three XL, specifically my favorite Pixel phone, I'm torn about the newer versions, but the Three XL is my favorite one.

That was a good phone.

It was, it was well built, it was a great phone. That one had a pair of USBC headphones in the box with it. And I remember popping those USBC headphones out of the Pixel and plugging them right into a Mac or plugging them right into another USBC supported device. I'm like, this is magic. This is nice because I never had to take the headphones out of my ear. Yes, they were wired, but they were still awesome and they were comfortable.

You could wear those all day long, right? Yes, the ear pods. I might really have to get some now. That's pretty cool. So is there anything else that I'm missing that we've learned? I feel like there's something.

Well, another thing, as long as we're talking about the USBC port on the high end phones, when you do that really high resolution video recording that only comes on the most expensive version of the phone, I think the large one, you now can record directly to a USBC SSD hard drive. So that way you don't have to try and transfer all that data from your phone's hard drive internally to an external drive or to a cloud. You can just plug in an external USBC SSD hard drive and just set it to record directly to that drive. And once you have all your video all recorded and done, you just pull out that hard drive and plug it into your computer for getting ready to edit and do all that stuff. So I think that's pretty cool to be able to core directly to an external SSD drive right on your phone. That's awesome.

I know. And that's only on the Pros?

Correct. And it's only on the large one because it's the only one that can do that super high end video quality.

So it's only on the Pro Max, then?

Do we know it's only on the Pro Max? I thought it could be on the Pro as well because they both have that faster controller for recording.

Yeah, it might be on both of the Pro versions because the Pro Max.

Does have the Tetra prism and the spatial video recording, but I think both Pros with that higher USBC controller with USB three speeds should be able to support that. Now, what I'm interested in finding out, and I was talking in a room about this the other day and I'm really fascinated, will you be able to plug an iPhone and iPad or iPhone and another iPhone together and see the two in the files app? That would be very intriguing to find out. Yeah, because imagine if you could just connect an iPhone to another iPhone and copy like large files or things like that between them. That would be so cool. That would be epic.

Yeah, it would be really cool.

We'll have to see how that's going to work, because if they're Pros, that would be ten gigabit of copying speed if you had the right cable, right.

From Lightning to USBC or vice versa.

Yes. Well, no, just USBC with the right cable. We also do know that the cable that comes in the box is still a USBC cable, but it's still a very slow 480 megabit cable. So you will have to pay more for the faster ten gigabit cables and they get expensive. So it might be worth looking at Anchor or some others instead of going through Apple for those faster USBC cables if you want them. Correct.

Now, could you buy those? I mean, like, you could purchase them they're separately.

You can buy them Apple's version through Apple. But if you wanted to get like, Anchor, for example, you could just go on Amazon and purchase them from Anchor store on Amazon.

Because I was just wondering, could I charge my new phone with my Mac USB C cable? Certainly, I think I can.

But the cooler thing is that you can use your phone with the USBC cable to charge up your watch or your earbuds, which is pretty cool.

Now, the one thing that is kind of a let down is the fact that the phone does not have quick charge. So it's still limited to 20 watts, I believe, according to what I saw on MKBHD's videos. So Apple has not put in Quick charge in their phones, and I kind of think they did that for a reason, partly to cause I feel like with Quick charge, it really hurts the battery's health quicker. So I'm kind of fine with that personally, but I could be wrong with that. I guess my next question is, did any of you guys get a new phone and when will it be delivered?

Well, I did not order mine yet, but I plan on getting the big boy, the 15 Pro.

Max yes, and I ordered my Pro 15 Pro, and it is supposed to come by September 29, so hopefully I'm crossing my fingers and hoping it gets here earlier.

So your ship time slipped a little bit.

What do you mean?

So they're supposed to be like the launch day is the 22nd, so if it's going to be the 29th, then the ship date kind of slipped a little bit.

I did not order which phone did you get?

Lyn the 15 Pro, not the promo. I got black because somebody said black would be the color that I might be able to get without having to wait a long time. So that's the color I got with a black case, I guess. And I'm totally blind, so you could tell me it was some other color and I wouldn't be able to argue with you.

What size did you get?

The smallest memory was it 128? And the reason I did that is because I looked at my current usage, I have a 128 right now and I'm only using half of it. And I don't do video because I can't see. I keep my stuff in Dropbox, I keep it on my cloud. I don't keep a lot of stuff on my phone, so I might be sorry I did that. And I'm very particular about I house clean often on my phone, I get rid of stuff I don't want. I'm really good about that.

I also ordered a new phone and as people are probably not surprised about, I ordered a 512 gig 15 Promax in blue titanium and I'm really excited about this phone. I do feel like it's not going to be as shiny. It might be harder for me to find at times, but the always on display kind of helps with that. So that's awesome. And I'm just excited about this phone. So I guess we all preordered on Friday.

I did not preorder a phone and I was just looking at my storage. You had me wondering, Lynn, and it's interesting how people go big. Like, they go big. I have a 64 gig iPhone. Twelve. And I am only using 48 gigs, and I find that to be really interesting, how much storage I'm not actually using.

But if you only have 64 gigs and you're using 48, then you are starting to get close to your Max.

I am, but the entry level is 128 on any of the newer phones. So when I upgrade, I'm just going to get that 128. But I wanted to check to see what I'm using because I'm like, oh, I thought I had a 128 because I've never had storage issues. But.

To note, to let people know, is the Big Boy the Max. It is $100 more expensive than last year, but not really. The only reason why it's $100 more is because the base model in The Big Boy, the Pro Max, starts at 256 gigs. There is no more 128 option for the Big Boy. That's why it's more expensive. So really it's the same price as last year. It's the same price as the 256 version was, and now the base is 256 only because they don't have the 128 anymore. So, yes, the price did go up for the base, but only because they don't offer the 128 anymore. So it's the same price as the 256 was.

So we're going to take a quick second to deviate off topic here for a minute. And I just want to say, Marty, every time you say the words Big Boy, it makes me think of Big Bang Theory with Sheldon. Before, when they would eat hamburgers, they'd go to a place called the Big Boy.

Big Boy is what it was. Every, every time you talk about the.

Iphone and call it the Big Boy, it always makes me think of Sheldon. So I will always think of that. Now, yeah, I have the 512 gig. If anybody knows me well, they know I have a rule, and that is my phone shouldn't have more memory than my tablet, my tablet shouldn't have more memory than my computer, and I typically live by that. Although my phone and my tablet right now have the same memory. That probably will change when I get my next computer and iPad. I'll probably upgrade them both computer to two terabytes, iPad to 1 TB phone at 512. But that seems to do well for me. Now, what may change my rule is this new Spatial video thing. If I start recording a lot of those and they take up a lot of space, which I'm sure they will, then next year's phone might be a 1 TB phone. For me, it just depends on what they're able to do and how they fit on the phone. Because I have 40 gigs of just photos and videos that I like to keep on my phone. I could keep all of that in icloud, but I just like having offline access to all of my stuff, right?

Yeah. And I know like a lot of sighted folks, like my sister, I have a sister that I'm trying to convince her to bleed off some of her photos onto the cloud or put them somewhere and she just doesn't, she wants them on her.

Like I like them in both places.

Yeah. So, I don't know, she's probably going to end up having to get the bigger phone, the big boy, the higher capacity. Anyway.

Since we're talking about storage, michael, what are your thoughts on the six and twelve terabyte plans that they released for icloud?

I'm glad you brought that up because I'm very curious what people's thoughts are on this. So I believe they're 30 and $60 apiece, like a month for each of those. And I guess my thought is, my opinion is that could be more expensive or it could be cheaper. I mean, it just depends on how you look at it, right? But at the same time, icloud now offers where you could have your own domain on icloud. And so if you had twelve terabytes of icloud space, your own domain and all of that stuff, you could use icloud email and icloud drive and your icloud storage as your business solution. Folks, if you wanted to live completely in the Apple ecosystem, be a YouTube creator and do all those things, you could live completely in the Apple ecosystem with those large plans. And so I'm curious, what are your thoughts on that? Would y'all use Apple as know, you could, um, [email protected] as your icloud address technically, and you could have like six gigs, or technically you could have even more of space because you can buy parts of that individually, like other amounts, or up to twelve terabytes or more, depending on your Apple one and all those other things. So would you guys use this? Would this be something that you're interested in to use for a business, not just for [email protected]? I would not.

I find icloud email to not be reliable enough for me, for my needs. And a lot of times I run into more issues with icloud related email addresses than any other one. And the other thing is we have the icloud one, and I think it's important to be aware of if you have a family, both the six and twelve terabytes are shareable automatically in your family. And that's kind of what brought it up.

Like I checked with my phone, I.

Went to see how much icloud storage we're actually using, and we're only using 200GB of our two terabytes. So to me it makes zero sense to upgrade to those plans. But to you, Michael, it might make more sense because I guarantee those oh, wow, mallory dropped her phone down a whole flight of stairs today while at the Ducks game, and only on the concrete. And the screen protector got cracked.

Thank you, screen protectors.

Anyways, the spatial video, I think, is going to take up a lot more storage than we anticipate. Do we have the specs on that, how much storage it takes? Because I think that's where these larger multiple terabyte plans are going to come into play a lot.

I don't know, but I heard something.

About six gigs per what did they say?

Now?

I forget. Six gigs per minute, maybe, is it?

That wouldn't surprise me because you're recording from two cameras at once. Yeah, that's why they gave you the.

Capability of being able to record directly.

To an external hard drive so you.

Can plug in a two terabyte drive.

But if I didn't have shared drives from Google, this would be very tempting to mean, and it even still is, right? Because I could have that and share those folders. Okay, now I'm curious because I've never thought about this. Does sharing a folder in icloud Drive take up space on both people's icloud drives like Dropbox?

I do believe it does, yeah.

But see, here's the thing that's sort of frustrating with Dropbox is that if the person you're sharing with doesn't have a premium account, you can't really share with them if the amount is more than the two gigs they give you on the free version. So that's kind of a bummer. They go, oh, you have to upgrade and start paying if you want to share with this person. So I feel that you should be able to share a folder or share whatever with someone so they can download it without having to make them also have to pay for a premium account. I don't think that Apple does that. Now, the thing that is good about the Apple side of things is that if you are like a Mac user and you're in the Apple ecosystem, then you're kind of used to the way it works and you're not going to have any third party issues. It's all going to kind of be built in and work sort of natively when you're using a third party thing. Like, I've heard more in the past couple, few years that people don't really like using the native Dropbox app because it takes up so much resources and it gets so far into the system and all of that, and people hesitate to want to really install the Dropbox app locally on their system. But they do out of necessity because a lot of times people are so invested that they don't really have a whole lot of choice. So you got to kind of make that decision. I guess when you decide which direction you want to know if native is what you want, then Apple is going to be the way to go.

Oh, whoa, no, this is big. It only counts towards the owner's space.

Okay.

So that's good. See, that's something that Dropbox doesn't do.

Yeah. So Dropbox is going to have some real competition.

I mean, well, they always say competition makes know better quality in the long run. Yeah.

For the consumer.

Right, exactly. So if Apple's going to start doing this and people are going to steer away from Dropbox to be able to share larger files with people who don't have to pay for a premium account, dropbox may have to rethink.

Again, that trend setting kind of thing that we talked about, like Apple trend setting sort.

Get, because I think OneDrive even does what Dropbox does. I think everybody that has access to the folder has know have that space available. So to me that's kind of huge, guys.

Yeah, I think that's a big deal. Now the only difference here is that if the file that you're trying to share with someone, they don't have a premium account and they've only got that, I think it's initial five gigs or whatever you get for the free version. If the file that you're sharing with them is going to be larger than that, they're going to have to download it locally to their system.

No, it only counts against the owner's space. Allotment all right.

Wow. That's just amazing.

Yeah, that's what I read online. So that's pretty incredible.

The only thing is that when you've been using Dropbox for years, and especially if you collaborate with people, which is I do, because I'm on a few projects where I collaborate with people and they all have the links and we share and we know how to do things, would that only be for Apple? For people that are Apple customers? How would that work?

You would need an icloud account, but that's all you need is just a free icloud account. That's easy.

You just go to the website, set it up, or you can do it through your system, I believe.

Yeah, but you know how it is when you're trying to get people to change over to something new.

Right.

They're going to definitely be more inclined to do it if they don't have to pay money, though.

Yeah, that's true.

For Dropbox, if you want anything equivalent, it looks like their closest is a 15 terabyte plan, and that is $72. So it's comparable for pricing.

But again, when you share something, you have to both people eat up the space. Yeah. Icloud, I think, is becoming. A pretty good contender in this. And I finally was added to my first shared folder. Now I'm wondering if I add files to a shared I think it still counts against the owner. So if I add files, it counts against the owner's space and not mine. This is something I think we need to play with a little more. And Michael, this might be a good technically working topic.

Might be.

Yeah. So this is pretty why? See, I use icloud as my main email for personal, and I personally haven't had any problems with it. But they do have a very aggressive spam.

Yes, they do.

It's not just icloud, it's anything using the Mail app really will put, at least for me, will put weird stuff in the spam folder. But icloud itself, it's like, that is from my newsletter. Please do not put that in my spam folder. Like, I'm part of a mastodon newsletter and I have to go and take stuff out of my spam folder all the time. It's like I don't want to add all these things to my contacts, people.

Even I noticed that Gmail is getting that way too, where I look at my spam folder and I would tell people that you really should go in there and look from time to time, because like Michael was saying, there are wacky things that get put in there. Like, why in the world does my doctor's appointment reminder for me get put in the spam folder? And so, yeah, you do have to definitely make sure everybody should make sure they're looking at their spam folders every once in a while to make sure there's nothing important in there.

Yes. So I guess we should go ahead and get to the meat of the show and talk about our review. Did we go through everything, guys? Is there any other tidbits that we missed? Because that icloud one was kind of a big one.

I will bring up something really quick that I think is good to be noted. We don't have to spend a lot of time on it, but it's just good to be noted. I was not going to update to the Watch Nine, but there's two features that make me want to upgrade to it, which I feel are pretty major. And the first one is that Siri is going to be local on the device. I think this is a big deal. It's going to make Siri much faster. And if you don't have an Internet connection and you need to be able to use Siri for something, just to have it locally and not have to go and call home and come back just for it to do anything is huge. Also, I really want to be able to utilize Double Tap, and that's also only going to be on the Nine. So those are the two reasons why I would upgrade to the Nine instead of just keeping my Eight. Like, I originally thought I was going to do. So I think I'm going to be going up to the Nine.

So I want to actually clarify that because the feature known as Double Tap is only available on the Nine, however, there is a feature and accessibility. I believe it's under Assistive Touch that does a similar thing, and I'm a little confused on what the difference is between these two different features. Do you know, Michael?

I do not. I've been wondering that myself.

And does it work exactly the same way? Because if it does, well, then, yeah.

It would be worth poking around in the accessibility sending is under Watch to purchase that before you purchase that. But you're right, the Siri locally has me really intrigued. I'm on an Se 2022 right now, and I probably will hold off until next year, says Michael, as he realizes that I'm probably going to put an Ultra Two in my card at at and T, too. I have the intention of holding off till next year, especially if there's some additional things. I think it's the U two chip for Wayfinding and being able to find other people. That's huge. I'm thinking about that in a conference environment. And let's say Marty's like, hey, let's meet up over here. I can share my location with Marty and he'll be able to come find me directly and use a similar experience that someone gets when they're looking for Air tags. And it is my understanding I haven't confirmed this, but it's my understanding and it appears that this feature will also work in the watch. So if you have a cellular based watch, and I say a cellular based watch, because you're going to need some sort of data connection to be able to pull in the data of who you have permission to be able to track, unless you're on WiFi, then it is potential that you may be able to do this from your watch directly. And that has me really intrigued as well.

Now, my question about this, and this is just, I guess to clarify for everyone is what would be the difference in that feature and just going into Find My and finding the person in, your know, because you can just locate people already and see where they are and stuff right through the Find My app.

Not like find people, not like Air tags. Marty, do you have Air tags? Yes.

Okay, so have you played with the AirTags and the Find My feature with them yet? How it guides you and tells you a little to the left, go forward, a little to the right, all the.

Way down to inches. I see.

That's how this will be with your friends.

Okay, cool.

Yes.

Good stocking feature.

Yes. So Marty can buy me an Apple Watch Nine for my stocking. I'm over that IRA gift card, sir. Apple Watch.

Now we're moving up to Watch.

It.

We've graduated.

So one of the things I will point out though, and I'm playing devil's advocate and you know me, I don't do this, but next year is the ten year anniversary of the Apple Watch. What kind of neat stuff are we going to get with that compared to this year? I mean, there were some cool features for this year. Also, I heard that the heart sensor on the Apple Watch has been upgraded this year as well. So that is interesting. But what are we going to get on the Series Ten? Yes.

Well, probably we'll start with some kind of an X logo of some sort, something that has to do with Ten.

Or will they skip X from now on because of how unlucky it is for, you know what?

Who knows? We'll just have to see what happens. But I think one of the things is on the let's call it the Ten version, I think there'll be a major redesign is what I think. They'll probably do something different. They haven't really done anything different in terms of the way it looks in terms of the design in quite a while. So I think that when they get to the Ten version, there's going to be some sort of a major design change is what my feeling is, is where it'll start. They have a lot of other things they've been talking about for a long time too. For example, glucose meter and things like that. So we'll have to see how that all goes. Are they going to be able to really do that much major stuff or is it just going to be kind of like a design change?

We'll have to see.

I think it would be great and I think it would benefit so many people if Apple could get that right. But then I can also see that if something goes wrong with that thing, oh my mean the liability, Apple has the money, but if they can get.

It, some of these technologies have a lot of other things behind it. Like for example, if you can actually get glucose monitoring to work and it be actually up to par and certified the way it's supposed to be and all that stuff. That really brings up a lot of things for the people who have to deal with that kind of stuff. One thing is you wouldn't have to prick yourself anymore, which a lot of people can't stand. It's just the part of the nature of having to do that. Secondly, is if it does get to that point, then you're talking about insurances being able to cover that product because it's now used in a medical situation. Just like if you need a glucose monitor now, your insurance usually will cover it within reason.

Oh, that's true. Would the insurance cover an Apple Watch?

I mean, you're talking about heart monitoring, you're talking about glucose monitoring, you're talking about a lot of things where fall.

Prevention isn't there a fall thing where if you fall.

Yeah, absolutely.

And you know, the thing about that is it's actually better than a lot of those other devices that you get. Because here's the thing. The thing about the watch, which makes that a game changer, is that if you have a watch on and you have it set up correctly for the fall feature, if someone that you're keeping an eye on, an elderly person or maybe someone who has a disability or anything like that. If they have a fall or they have some sort of a medical emergency, the thing is going to just do what it needs to do right away. If you don't answer it in a minute, it's just going to start calling emergency services, mapping your location, and contacting the important people that need to know what's going on. These other devices still that you pay for and you have like a thing around your neck or on your wrist or whatever, you actually still have to hit the button. And if something happens to you, if you fall and you get knocked out or you have some sort of a medical emergency, how are you going to hit that button? You're not. So when it comes to that watch, especially when you're talking about medical monitoring and covering, having insurances cover and things like that, that's a game changer. So I think if they get to that point, you will see insurances starting to cover.

Yeah. And I think that being a caregiver for my mom who is elderly, it's really hard to get her in and out of the house. We do it when we have to, but it's really hard because she has really significant mobility difficulties. I'm a big believer in being able as much as possible to have your health care delivered at home, being able to check your vital signs. Like with my mom, we do that because we look for patterns. We look for a blood pressure that goes up or down too much, we look for oxygen that goes down too much or whatever. And to have these things that we just wear on our bodies that can do this kind of monitoring I think is a game changer for a lot of.

Know. There was a podcast that I was listening to. I believe Renee Ritchie and others were talking about this a while. We've, we've always seen science fiction where we talk about cybernetics and cyborgs and robots and stuff like that, where we replace parts of our bodies with cybernetics. Well, our phones and our watches are external cybernetics. They exist on us to improve our lives and that's really what they are. And that concept has always just been interesting to me, that we're living in that time where we don't have internal I mean, we're starting to get internal things that can help our bodies, but we have these external things like our Apple Watches and our iPhones and everything else that augment our reality to make things more improved. So that's why I love all this tech because we're always improving ourselves through the use of our technologies.

Amen. Yes.

We've been too positive. Let's talk about something not so let's get negative.

Let's get.

We we pre ordered our iPhones yesterday, lynn and myself, and it was an. So Lynn, do you want to talk about yours first and I'll explain mine?

Yeah. So I tried to be on time and I actually waited until I did the you could all week. They were letting you fill in your information and then so that all you had to do supposedly would be to hit a few buttons to check out on the day of launch or on the day of preorder. So I had everything done, I thought I did, but when I went to do the actual checkout process things just went wacko. I got to the carriers. Well first of all, for some reason the thing I had saved was like gone. I don't know, that could have been my fault. But when I got to the checkout process everything was going super smoothly until I got to the carrier part. And that is when things just went wonky fast. And I got to a point where I froze up. I mean my phone froze up and I couldn't do anything. It was just sitting there like hanging. And I went back on leader to try to work this stuff out and for some reason I would get to the carrier settings and I just could not get past that. So I finally went to my carrier side and just ordered the phone on my carrier side and it just and it went very well, very smoothly. So it may be operator error but things were just a little bit wacko, I don't know.

So I had a very similar experience on Wednesday or Tuesday whenever it was. I went to the Apple store app and I said, okay, let's get my pre order ready. And I picked my phone, I picked my carrier, picked my trade in, all of that was ready to go. I mean the way they explained it was I could just go in on Friday, press the button and I was done. Okay? So I added it to my calendar, I did all the things, got the push notifications. Friday morning I was all up and eager ready to go do it. And then I get in there and I'm ready, I'm on the Apple Pay screen. I go and I'm like, okay, let me just verify the shipping address because know wise go out of the app, check it, come back and the Apple Pay screen went away. The screen I was on went away. My bag was emptied and said, you have nothing in your bag?

Yes.

That's terrible.

And you always hear like in the first couple of minutes the phones are slipping, like the dates are slipping and I'm like oh my God, I put so much work into this to get this phone and I'm not going to be able to get it for two or three weeks is what was going through my head. So then I went back in and I started adding everything back into the system. New phone? Yes. Got all the specs? Yes. Do you have a trade in? Yes. Got a spinning activity indicator. The process, the trade in service is down, please try again later. So then I said, OK, I'll just skip it and bring a phone in later to trade in, if that's possible. Got to the carrier part and like Lynn, the carrier part was down, had to try again later. Then the app just stopped working and rebooted.

Yeah. I would say there were some issues and I'm sure their servers were being slammed, but they might want to do a debrief and think about this for the next time.

The problem is though, this is not the first year this has happened. I remember having similar problems last year. I went back in and I kept working and I finally got everything in the cart and I'm like, okay, how far has this slipped? And it still showed the day of 22nd.

Wow, that's pretty cool. And I did see an article somewhere where some are shipping right now.

Yes. Mine is already preparing to ship, I believe.

Yeah. I haven't looked at my ship, my tracking thing because I don't want to be super impatient. So I'm like, all right kid, get the titanium thoughts out of your head and do something useful for a while and then look at your ship notifications if you had anything.

So mine is still on preparing to.

Ship, which what does that really mean?

Well, I'll tell you what it means. $1,514 just got yoinked from my bank account. That's what it means?

Yes. Okay, so you paid for yours in full then you didn't finance it or whatever, correct? Yeah, I did the finance part because, well, that's what I always do. And they made me pick another plan and the plan I picked is more expensive than the one I had. They wouldn't let me pick the one I had. It was a plan that they discontinued anyway. Honestly, I have a really hard time understanding these plans because they show in like a table and sometimes I am just thoroughly confused. Like I'm looking at it and thinking, I don't understand this. I was thinking about, well, what I might do is call them and try to talk to a human, right.

With that. Right. So I really feel like these preorder processes we always talk about where I work with way around, first impressions are important, right. When somebody is going to order a new device and they're getting a new thing and they're like, okay, I'm switching from Android to iPhone. Right. And I'm going to preorder this year. This is going to be the year they get all excited, all pumped up. It is not becoming of a company to have these kind of issues. I think it really turns people off of that. Now there's another side to this into saying you don't really see this happen with Google or Samsung or others because they don't have that pre order must have hype that Apple does, but even on its own is a good thing because people just, they get a new phone when they get a new phone. The media having a new iPhone is like, yes, that's the thing to do. But a new Android phone, it's like, well, I upgrade when I upgrade. So I feel like there's a lot of sides to this.

But I do feel like there's one other point here though to be made where if you're getting a new iPhone, you're getting it from pretty much one place for the most part. I mean, you're going to try order it directly. Um, Apple, I guess you could go through your carrier like Linda, a lot of people go through, but still, you know, it's just one company and everyone is going after the one company. When you're talking about Androids, there's so many different Androids out there and they all come out at like different times, right? So if you're a Pixel fan, then that percentage of people, they're going to go for the Pixel, which is not going to be nearly the amount of people that are going for the iPhone. If you get a Samsung, right, then those Samsung fan people are going to go for the Samsung, which is going to be a certain group of people, but not nearly as much as, you know, Android is just a giant pool of a bunch of different companies that all come out at random, different times throughout the year. And it's going to always be less because when the iPhone comes out, it's all iPhone fans, right? When it's Android people, it depends on what phone you have and what manufacturer you have and when it comes out. And there's all these other variables to consider.

Go ahead, Michael. But also one thing to consider with Android, android fans have very different ways of thinking about Android than Apple fans do when they buy an Android phone. Most people know I'm not going to get the latest and greatest on my phone, but my phone will do it'll. Get updates through the apps that increase the phone power so they can go four or five years and be fine with one phone. Whereas on the iPhone it's like we get a lot of cool features that are trying to catch up with Android. But also keep this in mind, iPhone on a global scale is a lot less than Android phones. It's about the equivalent of like Samsung or others on the global scale of things. In the US. It's a little different. There's more iPhone users in the US. Than other places. But each launch of a phone is very almost getting to be equal because when Samsung launches phones samsung's, I would say Samsung and Google are Apple's biggest competitors. There's other Android manufacturers, but they only launch once or twice a year as well. And I think they handle it a little bit better because the expectation of users is not as high to buy that new phone. So their servers and stores do not get basically a denial of service because of all the people flooding it. And that's kind of what's happening with Apple.

I would love to know statistically how many people did pre order. I mean, I think that would be a fascinating thing to know.

Well just look at the quarterly numbers every year that they do through Apple.

And you'll see what it is.

I mean it's ridiculous. They just sell crazy numbers every know.

I've spoken to several Apple employees that work in retail and when we talk about retail stores, it's always Black Friday or Cyber Monday. That's kind of where they make their money. Like their holiday season. It's not holiday season for Apple stores. Holiday season, like the big busy season for Apple this year is September 22. They hire seasonally, not for the holidays but for September because of the iPhone launch. And next Friday is that launch. So that's when they're going to want everybody on deck to be able to work to sell iPhones.

Yeah, and the whole idea of preorder, this is the first year that I've preordered and honestly I don't know why I did it. I guess because I was due for an upgrade and I just figure I would try it and see what happens. But it is sort of, some people would say like it's so consumeristic, I don't know if that's a word, but sort of like this idea that I want my iPhone before other people. That's not the way I see it. I mean, I'm willing to wait. I guess it was just the excitement. It was just the fun of seeing if I could do it. Also like I said, I was due for an upgrade on my phone anyway through my carrier. I have trouble getting to these stores. I can get there, but I need a lot more time with salespeople and stuff like that. So I like to do it online if I can. Because that way I can take my time and get what I want and look at everything and stuff like that. So I don't know, maybe it is a little bit selfish or consumeristic, but.

It'S just fun, right?

Why not get excited over something? People get excited over sports, they get excited over the new movie that comes out. I get excited over new phones.

Yeah, there's nothing wrong with that. People love tech. Like what it can do, things like that. So there's nothing wrong with that in my view. All right, do you guys have any final thoughts. Michael, we haven't heard from you too much. What is your opinion over all of this stuff that you've heard about and what do you think Apple could do differently or things like that?

I'm not going to do anything differently because I'm just going to wait a couple of weeks, order the phone from my carrier and it'll be smooth process so I don't have to worry about the preorder things. Because to me that makes a lot more sense for my needs. I will be upgrading my twelve to a 15. Probably a 15 pro. Thinking about a 15 pro max, but probably 15 pro.

I just think that a lot of people order from the carrier just for that reason, because it is a little smoother and if you have a problem, you could just call your carrier. Now, one thing that did happen to me was my shipping address was messed up when I finally got my order in and I used the Apple support through imessage and they fixed it over imessage and that was fantastic.

Wow.

Yeah, that is nice. I've used Apple support through imessage a couple of times and it's awesome. The big reason that I think for me ordering through my carrier is better is because I don't got $1,200 just sitting around that I can just drop on a device. And I don't know if you guys talked about this, because I'm multitasking now, but I think it is very stupid. You cannot finance an iPhone with an Apple card. That makes zero sense to me and I don't understand why they did that. Well, you could finance, let me preface that, you cannot finance an unlocked iPhone.

With an Apple card.

Okay, I was going to say I.

Think it's unlocked, but you have to get it through the big three.

Interesting. That's good to know. Because was the thing that I'm a.

Little bit confused about though, is there's two things that are going on here.

Thing.

Number one is if you go and you sign up for a phone through the Apple store, put it on a payment plan, sign up for your carrier, which does have to be the big three. Then you get your payments collected from a company called Citizens One. Once the initial process is over through the initial purchase through Apple. But there's a second thing where you have the Apple card, the Apple credit card. You can buy anything with the Apple credit card. So if you have the total amount of credit available on your card, couldn't you just say, hey, I want to buy the iPhone 15 pro max outright, here's my card, and just pay for the whole thing off and then pay whatever payments on your credit card. Why couldn't you do that? I don't understand what the rules why that's different or why you can't do that.

The difference is you're charged interest because it's a credit card unless you paid off in full, whereas if you go through a carrier, you get 0% interest over 24 months.

Right, but they're making it sound like you cannot use your Apple card to just purchase a phone outright. That's what I'm trying to clarify.

Well, you could just buy it on your Apple card. But like Michael said, you have to be able to finance it on your card. You'd have to be able to add that completely on your card. But also, I do not believe that if you add it on your card if you add it on your card, you do have to have the amount on there. But if you use the Apple financing through Apple card, you have to pick one of the big three and then you are not charged interest if you finance it through your Apple card. But wouldn't that be with the Apple.

Program through Citizens One?

No, they're different programs. They're different programs. Because the Apple upgrade program does not use the Apple card. It looks at your credit through you have to get a different line of credit from the Apple card. So they are different situations. Okay, well, just do your homework and.

Make sure you get and do whatever the best thing for you individually would think.

Also, I don't know how it works, and I guess there is a simple answer to this. But if you finance through your Apple card, then your carrier payments, what would they come out of? My mine always came out of my bank account directly.

If you finance your Apple card, your phone financing would go through your Apple card, but your plan would go through whatever payment method you have set up.

With your yeah, yeah, I was thinking about that and you know, I'm not sure I dig that set up. I'd rather have just it coming out of one place. But I guess in my case, it really was a lot easier to go with the carrier side. I just understood what I knew what I was doing and it made sense to me. And maybe I'm just used to doing it that way. And I guess now what we have to think about as well is iOS 17 there was what do you call it, accessibility report card that came out from Apple. This and some of the stuff on there made me really nervous.

Why I don't read them.

The people are saying that don't worry so much about it, that not everybody has these issues. But I don't want anything to trash my.

I've seen I've seen several reports from Appleviz say bugs, talk about different bugs each year and it's been hit and miss if those are actually real bugs. Because one of the things that happens and I'm very skeptical every time I read those articles is what has that phone done in the beta process when they're reporting those bugs? What have they done with that phone? Have they set it up as a new phone? Have. They completely set it up as new? Are they still using the phone from beta one like I have been? What are the criteria that are being used to create those reports that they're putting on the website? So I'm very skeptical because I've read through those things. Some of them I have not seen even happen. I just think that when you read through those things, you need to say, okay, that might be what one person or two people saw. But will I see that right?

Yeah. And that is one of the reasons why it's probably better not to do early or preordering, or if you can be patient and just hang in there and wait for 17.1 or 17.2 or whatever, then Apple may be able to work out some of these issues. Whereas if you install it right after the beta release, the first release for everybody, where there are going to be problems and eventually those problems do get worked out. So that's one of the disadvantages of being one of the first people to get something right, because you have the problems and the other people wait. Typically, that was my philosophy. I would always wait a little bit before upgrading because my phone now is absolutely essential to the projects that I do, so I can't have my phone dysfunctional.

One thing to keep in mind is there's a complete balancing act that happens, because if you also have automatic updates turned on for your apps, they're going to update to support iOS 17 and may not work the best on 16 anymore. Or I was working with an app yesterday that is crashing in 17. So it just kind of depends on what is working, what is not. This is always kind of that limbo period between releases. And I will say this, I'm running the release candidate of macOS, and it's sharp. I mean, even the rogue Amoeba apps, audio hijack and loopback have been updated with initial support. So, I mean, this year has been a pretty stable year compared to some others. I will say that.

And then I guess you have to know yourself. If you're somebody that absolutely cannot tolerate dysfunctionality, then you might want to just wait until things get more stable. I think you just have to know your tolerance level for problems. I think if you're a new user, I always say it's probably better to wait until things get stable so that you're not having problems and thinking it's your fault when it's really not.

But I want to dangle that carrot out there and tell people that we did find something that is worth upgrading for, in my opinion. Ringtones all new. Ringtones all new alert tones. The TRITone for the system alert sound has been replaced. It's happened.

Is there a classic folder you can go into to get the old sounds back like it used to be? You'd be able to go into the classic folder and get the old sounds if you really wanted them.

Yes. And my favorite ringtone so far is called Departure. I really like that one. They've even updated the Reflections ringtone to be new and different. So check that out. But departure is really neat. Breaking is kind Of Neat is another one, and I think one's called Unfolding. That's pretty cool. So there's so many cool new ringtones, and I love most of them. So check those out. That's a reason to upgrade right there. And upgrades will happen on Monday the 18th. Yes, that's coming out Monday.

I always hold my breath and hit the next button.

Don't forget to back up all your stuff and make sure you have everything secure before you just do enough. Not that it's going to be bad or go south, but just in case, make sure you're always prepared for something to go bad and have all your stuff backed up.

You know, the funny thing is, I never do that.

Of course you don't.

Well, here's the thing, and I think we should probably have a whole episode on this, is Backup Processes. I have everything in icloud. Everything that's on my iPhone is in icloud.

Oh, yeah, right.

So when I get a new phone, I don't even restore from a backup, I just set up as new pick all the settings I want, redownload all the apps I want, because I may say, Well, I had that last time, but I don't really use it. Let's not download it again.

Yeah. The disadvantage of just copying everything over is that you might get that what do they call it? Bit rot. Where you had problems from the last new term? No, if you Google it, it's called bit rot.

And it's a term for everything these.

Days, where you put stuff on a new system from an old system, and a lot of times you can carry over problems.

Yes, that's always been a thing, but I've never heard it referred to as that. So that's interesting. Yeah, those are some things to consider. So I'll be excited to hear from folks about your new phones and how you like them, [email protected]. And I think we need to go ahead and wrap this thing up for today. But as we always do, lyn, do you have a pick this week, and where can people find you online?

Well, my pick is going to be my podcast. There you go. That's probably against the rules, but, yeah, you can visit my website at Fridayfinds show and you'll see a few episodes on there. And if you would like to get in touch with me, you can do so at Feedback at Friday Finds show.

Fantastic. Marty, what about you? What's your pick and where can people find you?

So, my pick is going to be the Apple keynote. And I say this because if you've never seen an Apple keynote, go watch the cinematography and all of what they put into the actual video production and all that. I think it's pretty cool. I think it's probably one of the only companies out there that's doing it the way they do it, so it's pretty cool. If you haven't seen it, check it out. Or if you've never seen an Apple keynote, go check it out. It's pretty cool. If you want to reach out to me, I'm on Macedon. Marty at Unmute Community.

Michael, what about you? What's your pick and where can people find you?

My pick is a flashback to earlier in this episode. And I don't use the native Dropbox app. I absolutely hate that app. But I do use an app called Mistral. M-A-E-S-T-R-A-L app. And this allows you to use Dropbox and store your Dropbox, most importantly on an external drive. Without any hackery. You just choose the external drive, and that makes it super nice. You can also control your Dropbox account through the command line. And one of the cool things about it is, if you don't have a paid Dropbox account, mistro uses the API, so it doesn't count as a device on your three limit for the free app. So again mistro Mastral and you can follow me on mastodon pay on payown at Unmute community.

Fantastic. And let's see. I've been really racking my brain for a pick for this week.

Let me make your pick for you. How about that? Okay, your pick is going to be all the new sounds that are coming in the new operating system.

Thank you. I went on about that on text message and a lot of places all week. So, yeah, we'll go with that.

That's kind of my there is actually a video there's a video out there on YouTube that demonstrates all of the new sounds.

I wish I had the really? Okay, see, I've talked about this before. Sometimes changing little things about your device can make an old device feel new again. And that even goes down to wallpapers to sound effects to all those things. And it's just when you change how your devices work, like even the default system notification sound, it's like a fresh coat of paint. Exactly.

Kind of like cleaning your screen. It feels all smooth and clean.

It's like you just bought a new device again. So I really love the new iOS, and there's new OS sounds, too, so people can go check those. Uh, thank you, Marty, for my pick. That was awesome.

Yeah, no problem.

You could find me online. I'll definitely have a good pick next week. And if people can't guess what it is, then you haven't listened to the whole show. You can find me online on mastodon as Mike Doeies. That's Mikedoise at Techopolis social. You can email me at [email protected] and you can find me all over the web. Mike Doey's on X, Michael Doey's on Facebook. You could find me pretty much anywhere. So just look me up, you could find the [email protected], you can email us at [email protected] and we're always on the radio at slash listen so hope you enjoy it and we will be back soon for more episodes. This has been a great one. Thank you Lynn, Marty and Michael for being here. This has been great and we will see you all next time.

Thank you for tuning in to the IA cast. We hope you enjoyed the show and found the conversation to be insightful and informative. If you have any feedback or comments, we'd love to hear from you. Please send us an email at [email protected]. You can also follow us on Twitter at iacastnetwork to stay informed about new episodes and other updates. Don't forget to check out more great podcasts on the Iacast Network iacast Net. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.