Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the IA cast. All right, I'm Michael, and back with me today, we have Marty.

Hey, all.

We have Taylor Arnt.

Hello, everyone.

And we have Michael Babcock.

Hello.

All right. And we may have people coming and going as time goes on. This is going to be kind of just a general discussion today. We just finished the keynote. Well, we finished it a little few hours ago, but what a ride. What a ride, wouldn't you guys say?

Yes, it was a lot to chew on. I would say by the time we.

Got to the end, for sure.

Lots of stuff going on.

Yes, a lot of things going on. And some of it I was ready for, some of it I wasn't. So we'll hit the points as we go along. So our first main thing that they went right to the Mac, and specifically the 15 inches of the MacBook air goodness. And there are four colors of this.

Thing, which they never exactly said what.

The colors are, but I'm assuming, like.

Silver and space gray, I'm assuming, because those are like the default that they usually do, and they didn't say what the other two colors were.

I'm going to see if I could find it.

That'd be interesting to know.

So we have the 15 inch. Let's see, it looks like we have Midnight, with a very beautiful background. I want to get that background on my computer. We have Starlight with a kind of a goldish kind of background. It's like all these little brick square things, and they're kind of gold. The midnight is a very blue color, which, again, I want that on my 13 inch. We also have space gray, which is like these purple block looking shapes on the background, and the other one is silver with these silver blocks. So we do have four colors in this model.

And do you think they're going to make the 13 inch MacBook air the same colors as the 15 inch? Are they going to introduce color options and be able to have both the 13 and the 15 in color options?

So I think they're going to keep the 13.

Well, it's interesting because they didn't say anything. They announced that there was going to be colors, but they didn't say what colors.

Yeah, well, the 15 inch was the color that I described. The 13 inch is also in four colors, the same four colors.

Good. So they are see, they didn't even talk about that, but at least they're making a match.

I think it may have already been in those four colors, so I just may not have known that. So that's interesting. We have three MacBook air configurations here, guys. We have the M one, the M 213 inch, and the M 215 inch.

That's a lot of MacBook Airs to choose from.

I think the M one is going to be just those two colors. The space gray and the silver. I don't think they're going to have the other colors, as far as I know. And the reason why they kept that one is so they can have a MacBook Air at less than a $1,000 price point.

They have a space gray, a gold, and a silver MacBook Air M One.

Right. I think it's a good idea that they keep the regular M One MacBook Air because of the price point. I mean, it's still a great computer.

Yeah, it is. I just don't like the form factor. I love the cases on the newer machines.

I have to agree with that.

Yeah. I like the new design much better.

And then we got a new Mac studio with the M Two Macs and Ultra chips, and they scale about the same as the previous years. They gave out some specs, and it starts at $2,000. And then we also got the MacBook. I mean, not MacBook, the Mac Pro.

Which was totally unexpected. I didn't think that was going to happen today.

Neither did I.

So, I'm curious, did you guys catch what processors are in that?

Yeah, it was the M two ultra.

So it's just going to run the Ultra?

I think so.

Yeah.

So I had to step away, so I missed part of that explanation. But, I mean, it looks pretty nice. Yeah. M. Two ultra is what it has.

They kind of stuck with the same modular thing as they did originally with the new design, where they were talking about how they want to make sure that the pro level people who need external cards and all that stuff would be able to still do that. And I don't know if you noticed this, but another thing that they did, which I was really surprised about, is you can get it in two configurations. One is the original configuration, how it's always been up until now. But you can also get it in a rack mount configuration for server.

Yeah. Like a tower. Yeah.

It can support up to 192 gigs of Ram eight displays, folks. That's ridiculous monitors.

And the price on that's crazy.

$7,000, basically.

And I wonder, at that $7,000 price point, they didn't say, but could you get either a regular tower or a rack mount? Does it matter which you choose at that point?

I'm not sure. It's just the configuration, really, how it's built.

Yeah.

But it looks like a very nice machine.

Oh, yeah. So fast.

Yeah. So this means, folks, that the intel transition has been completed now no more Intel Macs being sold, I don't think.

Yes, no more. That was the last one. And now that's gone totally 100%. Intel transition to the M processors is complete.

It's done. Max, what are you all excited about? Are there things that you're like? This was cool.

I think it's great that the 15 inch MacBook Air is in play now. There's a lot of people who want to be able to get a screen that's a little bit bigger than a 13 inch without having to buy a 16 inch MacBook Pro. So I am definitely glad they were able to get a bigger display option in the MacBook Air. The studio is pretty awesome. I wouldn't mind having one of those, for sure.

Oh, yeah, those would be nice.

The Mac Pro is an awesome machine, but I don't really need a machine like that. But I can see where people who are doing really high end stuff, where they need that kind of power, and they got to be able to use external cards and things like that, would want that machine. So glad to see that. That's in the wild now.

Yeah, I think the speakers and the display are good. My biggest thing, I love that they have a 15 inch machine. My biggest complaint is I kind of wish it had one more port or something, but I know since it has an M two, they can't do that and maybe a little bit better screen. But we get what we get, right?

Yes.

And I think the purpose was to keep the cost down. That was the biggest point of that machine.

And that's good. They have to kind of figure out what they want to, I guess, go on and skimp out on, because if they want to keep the cost down, they have to try to balance out the needs of multiple users.

I was definitely surprised that they were able to bring the price point on the 15 inch at 1200. I mean, that's pretty awesome. I thought it was going to be a lot more than that because the 13 was 1200, but they dropped the price of the 13 to make it. So the 15 can be the 1200 price point.

Yeah, well, I thought it was 1299, but it might be 1200.

Yeah, it might be 1299, but they still brought it in at a lesser price point than I thought. And they dropped the 13 down, I think, $100. And then they put the MacBook Air M one version down to 999, I want to say.

Yeah, 999. So it was basically $100 as you went down the line. $100 each off of each of them.

So that's great. You could get in for less than $1,000 if you need to.

Yeah, I think it's very good.

And I think the base specs are the same. They didn't change any of that. It's still either I think it's what, M 2256, eight gigs? Is that the starter?

I believe so. I hadn't looked at the specs, but either way, I think they're great machines. I guess we should go ahead and move on to the operating systems. So they started with iOS, I believe, and we got iOS 17, as we expected. We've already downloaded the betas and we've got some first impressions that are apps seem to work really well. Some system level things do not accessories. So we're going to be watching that very closely. But again, as people always say, if you don't want stuff to not work, don't get the betas.

Exactly.

I do have one pet peeve with the operating systems, so when they come out with something on the phone version, like last year, they came out with the more things you can do on the lock screen. For example, live widgets and all that kind of stuff. They didn't come out with it on the iPad last year, but then now this year they're coming out with it on the iPad. I think that it's a little bit silly that they make such a big deal out of things that they already had on the iPhone last year and now they're just bringing it to the iPad this year. It's not anything new or innovative. They're just now bringing it to the iPad a year later. I think that's kind of silly. I mean, they make it like a much bigger deal than they need to because it's not innovative. They're just bringing what they have from the phone to the iPad, but it's not anything new in my opinion. I think they make a much bigger deal out of that.

Yeah, and they've been doing that for a while. It's kind of a TikTok cycle. It's like they bring things to the iPhone first and then they bring them to the iPad second. And it's neat because they do find innovative ways to make this stuff work on a bigger screen. But I wish they would just get big enough teams to do it all at once if they're going to do that. So that this was the iPad year. And I wish that if we're going to get new iPad features, we don't have to wait two more years to get those same features on the iPad.

Yeah, they need to figure out the resourcing, in my opinion, because it's like it's always just why do we have to alternate?

Well, they also don't need to make such a huge deal out of it. Like it's something innovative and oh my gosh, it's not really. They're just bringing that stuff from the phone up to the iPad and if you take those things away, then what actually new? Because there wasn't that much else besides that. Maybe just a couple of things that they announced on the iPad side that was new. But if you take those things away, then there wasn't much really.

Right. Well, the thing is that certain things are different that work on the iPad. One thing that I like that they brought out this time is the interactable widgets that has me pretty excited and they kind of focused on the iPad where that would be most useful, but that also works on the iPhone as well. So I just don't know. What else do you really do for the iPad, I guess? Well, there's a lot you could do. Yeah, there's a lot that can be done. Like, I don't know, adding multiple user support. We've been asking for that for years.

What about being able to do two tasks at the same time? For example, if you're a podcaster and you need to be able to be on Zoom, but you also want to record locally, when are we going to get that on the iPad?

Right?

Well, like recording locally is something Zoom could put in if they wanted to.

Some people want to be on Zoom but then use like audio hijack or some other audio on the iPad. It could be fair, right? Or whatever the case is, I want.

Them using audio hijacked. iPad.

Well, somebody would have to make that. But that actually is capable is possible because Logic Pro has it where you can record in the background while other apps are open. With screen recording, you could do things like that as well. Technically with screen recording, you could do all of those things. You can just record to the screen and it will get all the audio. It won't get multiple tracks like Zoom built in would. But those things do exist on iPhone and iPad.

Well, I didn't know in the new Logic that you could do that. So that's pretty cool.

I don't know how well it works and what it's capable of, but it does allow you to run in the background and things. So it's pretty cool. So we've had iOS, iPadOS. There's all these neat call features. We've talked about the new accessibility features before. Those are in there. So I want to check out the personal voice feature. That's what I'm really excited about. There is the ability to with FaceTime to leave a message if somebody doesn't answer and things like that. So there's some great features. There's these new contact posters. I'm kind of excited about that. So that'll be that's real interesting.

You could bump somebody else's phone and.

Send your info, name drop as they call it.

I'd be very interested to try that out.

So those are just some of the real basic features that they're coming out with on those sides.

I'm wondering, are you excited about this standby feature?

I actually am, and I'm really excited to see what that's going to be like. And we have a new person joining us. So welcome Lynn Snyder to the podcast. We let her in. Hi, Lynn. Welcome to our discussion in Progress. Welcome. We're just talking about the iOS features, the standby and all those things. So what's your thoughts and takeaways of iOS and what they've come out with today?

Well, I am actually quite excited about lots of things. And I know on the outset it seems like a lot of the things mentioned were not going to be useful to us. But I don't believe that. I think we need more information. I believe that the VR headset, we're going to find out that that thing is going to have benefits for us. It's too expensive.

We'll get to the headset. We're going to get to that last. But we're focusing on kind of going through item by item. But for iOS, like the standby, I'm really excited about that because now I need a stand. Well, actually, I've got a belkin stand that could put my iPhone in that position.

Right.

Oh, we're forgetting something very important.

What's that?

They removed hay. So now you just say the word.

Without hay, and it works better than you'd expect.

You tried the beta?

If you want.

Yeah.

You still can say hey, but you don't have to. And I've tried it on my iPad. I've tried it on my phone. It works really well. I was really worried about how it would work. So, let's see. I've got the beta right here, and we can do this because it's not like we're doing anything different. If I say the word Siri and keep talking, it doesn't do anything. But if I say Siri, what's the weather?

It's currently cloudy and 81 degrees.

Expect thunderstorms starting early evening.

Temperatures are heading down from 81 to 72 degrees tonight.

So I don't know if you could hear that in the background, but my iPad picked it up and it worked exactly how I thought, and that's actually really good.

Yeah, but we have some problem with Lady A, right? Where every time you say her name.

I know, but I just demonstrated that I said its name in a sentence and it didn't pick up.

It didn't pick it up. Okay.

Right.

Really?

Well, yeah. I was actually kind of surprised about that.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, we'll have to keep playing with it, but just that first initial demonstration there was actually pretty good.

The biggest thing this past year with 16 was Siri had a lot of problems. So I really hope that they were able to resolve a lot of the issues that we've been dealing with.

Right. I'm just very pleased with the fact that we've gotten some changes. And another thing that they mentioned, and I don't know how many people out there pick this up, but they mentioned Transformer based AI a lot. Apparently, Dictation is now using Transformer based AI, which is basically whisper guys.

Yeah, that'll be pretty cool. We'll have to see how well it works once it becomes live.

Well, it's in the betas, so if you have the betas, you will have this technology.

Does any developers can use it, too, Michael, to make apps?

You know what? I bet they can. So we're already seeing a lot of new like, they talked about using Transformer technology in Autocorrect as well. So that was pretty exciting. Like, it will be able to even finish sentences as you're typing. So that's going to be interesting and might get me to turn Autocorrect back on on my Macs. Yeah, I turn it off because I don't like it.

I don't like it because it would just do crazy stuff and it would interrupt my when you're using voiceover, it sort of interrupts your thought process as you're trying to so I turned it off.

I could be a paragraph down the road and look back. It's like I never wrote that.

Right, exactly.

That is not the word I intended that to be.

I never take certain cough medicines where I'm thinking, oh, did I write that? Really?

Yeah, it can be pretty wacky.

Go ahead.

I was going to say, I know Jeff mentioned that we didn't get a whole lot of AI talk. We really didn't, which I was slightly surprised about. But then you pointed out that Apple generally is a hardware company. So maybe they are implementing AI, but they don't really like Google. I think they said if you had a dime for every time Google said AI, and they could have had the.

AI drinking game at Google, you could.

Go out and treat everybody to a pizza.

Yes, whatever.

Pizza.

That sounds good. And even now, Google's AI stuff is not that great.

No, it still isn't, unfortunately.

So they brought all this stuff out and it's just not that not as good as GPT. So I would like to see their image creation because Bard apparently can now do image like generation. Okay, but I would like to see that for myself. But Dolly does. Okay, but it does some weirdness, too.

Yeah, I really feel like Google, they try and make every kind of app and then they kill it before it really has an opportunity to really flourish. I mean, I feel like in a lot of the things they do, they don't give it a chance. They don't wait long enough to see if it'll actually gain traction. They put it out there and then they kind of get rid of it. And then they'll put something else out there and then they kind of get rid of it.

It's sort of weird when companies do these presentations, you'll hear a lot of people saying how disappointed they are and how oh, that's just stupid. That's nothing. But you know what, all these companies do that, all of them, all companies, they just sort of throw everything out there in these presentations and it's not that unusual.

Apple has a magic about their presentation. And I was very hyped this time. I was very excited because we also got all those accessibility features we talked about. All those things are great. And then we got to look at the Mac and macOS Sonoma.

I love that name.

I like it, too. It's going to be a neat version of macOS once we finish this podcast. I will be putting it on my MacBook Air. And I wish Samsung phones had a mute switch. I mean, you could hold down the volume buttons and do the same thing, but I still mute switches. But I really think that sonoma is going to be great because you can add widgets to the desktop. I am so excited about this because I can just add my Zoom meetings to my desktop.

Yeah.

Now, just to clarify this just a little bit, they were on the desktop already, but you couldn't move them out of that right side. You can put them anywhere you want on the desktop.

That's not the desktop, though.

That was the Notification Notification Center, which is different than the desktop. So right now they're only available in the Notification Center.

Right.

Got you. All right. But you can now move them out of the Notification Center and put them anywhere you want on your desktop.

Exactly. And that's what I'm very excited about. Yeah, that'll be cool because they were very limited in the Notification Center. Also, now I wonder if this will work on the iPad as well. I'll have to find out. But one of the things that I'm super excited about is that you can add your notification your widgets. See, I can't even get the right word out because I'm so excited.

Oh, my God.

Tapping my keyboard tray, I was that excited. You can take your widgets from your iPhone and put them on your Mac.

That's nice.

That's going to be interesting to see that in progress. I want to see how that works.

Yeah.

Even without the apps installed, and that's what was super cool. You don't have to go install right app. You can just grab that widget from your phone and bring it right over to your computer.

Or it's just there for a short time.

It's there for period.

You can pin it to your computer. So it's always there as long as your phone is on the same WiFi network or near your computer.

Oh, yeah. That's pretty cool.

The nerd part of me was just, oh, my God. I know.

You being so excited. I love to see people get excited about stuff.

I don't want to go both ways. Could you go from the max to the phone?

No, I don't think so. And the logic is you have more apps available on your phone that have widgets than that you do on the Mac. Right?

Right.

So if you have more apps that are available on the phone that have widgets, and you can just grab those and put them on your Mac yeah. You get all the power of your phone on the Mac.

Cool.

That is nice, because I really like my Bing widget. Yeah. Yesterday I put a widget on my phone for the very first time ever. I mean, it was the Bing widget because I use Bing all the time now. I guess that's a good example of how you never think that you're going to I mean, if somebody told me I was going to be using Bing as my main search engine, like, even three months ago, I would have thought they were smoking something. And so I guess the take home lesson there is there are all these new things, and I think that one of those new things, or at least one of them, will change the way that we work with our computers.

One thing we missed, and I want to go back to, because it's going to be on iPad, I think, and the Mac or it might just be on the iPhone. I hope not. But the journal app, I'm also very excited about that because I think it would be fun to create a journal. Me personally, I think it's going to be on iPad. Michael yeah. And I think it reminding you to add to your journal daily will really get me at least interested in writing a journal.

And they're putting it in the health category, but I think you can use it for anything you want. You can, I think when you open it up, there's templates to choose what kind of journal you want to start with.

Yeah, that's the one thing I have not done on my phone yet. There's so many great things that I'm just really excited about with this update.

Yeah, it's pretty cool.

And it'll be interesting to try some of these things. I think that's part of it, too, trying them. And it's entirely possible that at first some of them won't be accessible. I hope they are, but hopefully in later iterations of the operating system, they will address any accessibility concerns that happen with these new things. I'm just hoping they fix a braille bug in iOS. We need to get that braille bug fixed.

You know what? I'm not seeing it.

Really?

What, journal? Yeah, I'm not seeing it either.

Wow. So it may not be available in day one.

Imagine that Apple announced something that's not available on day one. No, never.

You get the pun, right?

Yes.

Yeah. The app is what you're referring to.

Yes, I get it.

I'm not worried about day one. I don't think they're going to be Sherlock because they have a lot more innovation than what Apple has right now, especially with third party integrations. And you can text in your journal entries or use it from Android as well.

See, I've never tried day one. I mean, maybe I should try them and compare them.

Well, day one will give you a lot of similar features. You can go in and get information about where you've been and make journal entries. It can capture your pictures, it can notify you at a certain time. So there's a lot of similar features there.

Wow.

And it was actually purchased a couple of years ago. Now I want to say by WordPress automatic. So that's the same company, right? Automatic is the umbrella company for WordPress, yes.

Interesting. One thing that we didn't cover, which I thought was interesting, is the whole mental health additions, the mood tracker, I guess. Didn't they talk about they talked about something with mental health where I'm wondering if it's going to be like some kind of AI type.

I think they were talking about new features they were adding to the health app, I believe.

Right. And somehow it's supposed to help you decide whether you need to get outside help. So I don't know how that's going to work. It's going to be interesting, but mental health is definitely something that we have to address.

They also said that the health app was going to be on the iPad as a native app as well.

Yes, indeed. I don't quite understand all of the mental health stuff that was announced personally.

Right. I wonder if that would be powered by some sort of AI, because believe.

It or not, Apple has been using AI a lot on our devices for a long time. They just don't really talk about it. Yeah, I mean, Apple was the first one. The neural engine course is just for AI use. Apple goes through all of our photos on device and looks at the people in them. When our phones are plugged in, it looks at all the people, places and all those things and makes a nerve.

And my watch decided to and it's also looking at cats and dogs now.

Did you guys catch that?

Cats and dogs, which is the important people or animals in your life, can be recognized.

Very true.

Which is very cool. Very cool.

That could also be a really good.

Accessibility feature because then you could go in label like Angie has a guy dog, Larry, that she talks about and sometimes talks to on the podcast. And she could label him in all of her pictures now, which is really cool.

Maybe they can make a sticker out of it.

Actually. I bet you can. They talked a lot about stickers and that kind of thing this time, which I kind of glazed over, just being honest. But it's pretty cool stuff either way. So let's talk about Apple Watch.

Yeah, they're talking about adding a lot more interactive widgets into the interface, which is going to be something I'm excited about, to be able to interact with the data much easier.

Basically when you're on your home screen, your watch face, you just turn your crown and all your widgets that you add show up.

Yeah, that's pretty cool.

So I mean, like developers, we could create a server uptime widget that will tell us just by looking at our watch, hey, your server has been down.

They also added stackable widgets.

I can have a here's the stats of your Mastodon server or your Mastodon account. There's so many different things that can be done with these widgets. And I'm glad that Apple is embracing these again. They had them in the Apple Watch originally and then they took them out. So I'm very happy they're back there's. New watch faces. I can't even remember the name of it now, but one of. The watch faces that is Snoopy, and I don't remember the other character, Woodstock. Yeah. And so they're doing little things, and while you're being active and things like that, then there's another gradient watch face that just looks amazing. And I cannot wait to put that on my watch because it will look really cool.

I just wanted to clarify that. Are we going to have more presentations throughout the week?

Yes, but they're going to be all developer like, source code related, for the most part.

Okay, because I was just wondering if throughout the week, we might for example, I would love to see there be an accessibility.

There should be one about that. I'm not sure if it's going to cover all of the things that we think they're going to cover, like the consumer level things, but probably how to make your apps more accessible. They may cover accessibility in the headset we're going to cover in just a few minutes. But yeah, it's a great conference. I would love to go to this in person.

Yeah, that would be awesome. You have to be right.

Sometimes they do open it up for tickets, and I think there's a lottery.

I did look at the schedule, Michael, and it looks like there are sessions. There's a lot of accessibility sessions, but some of them are, like a lot of them are like how to make your app accessible in Swift UI, or how to include different kinds of users. I don't know if there's one of things that we're looking for, but yeah, not exactly sure. But Michael, we're not getting new watches this year, are we? Or we already get those.

No, those will come in September.

Okay, good to know.

You think they're going to announce new watches this year?

Oh, yeah, they do every year. Very exciting stuff. And we're on watchOS Ten now, coming up, and that's ten years of Apple Watch. What I'm really hoping, and I want to find out is if we finally get more sounds and if we get the ability to, I don't know, play music without having to have earphones hooked up, that will make me happy. Yeah, that'd be cool because other watches can do it just fine. There's no reason the Apple Watch can't. So the Apple Watch update is downloading on my watch now, so we will find out. So any other thoughts on the Apple Watch before we move on? Did I miss anything?

Not that I can think of. I mean, I'm sure that there's stuff.

So I think with that, there's only one more thing. Yeah, who remembers what that's from?

That would have been I don't remember what the one more thing was when they did it originally.

It's a signature Steve Jobs thing when he wants to announce a new product.

But wait, there's more.

No, it was always Steve would go through all the events or all the topics at a presentation, and then he'd get the crowd completely quiet and you'd think that the present. Like he'd sum up everything that was there that they covered, and then he'd say, but we have one more thing, and the people go crazy. And you could just feel that when Tim did it today, he doesn't do it often, and it's not something that they should do often. It's left for big announcements and they did it with the Apple Watch and they did it with this. Interestingly. I think it was Jeff that said during the event, apple stock went up 46% when this thing was announced, which is incredible.

And it's not even going to be for sale probably until the first of.

The year, is what they said. Yes. I'm kind of wondering if they're going to do a January event like they did this year.

I doubt it, because they've already done that. They're not going to have another event.

Well, if they want to get it out at the beginning of the year, then they may do it at the beginning, like in January. So we will see.

I guess we can save our pennies.

So what are we talking about? Michael and I have some comments about the pricing, so we'll get there. Controversial comments about the pricing.

So we are talking about the Apple Vision pro. It is their new headset. That is for virtual reality and augmented reality. It runs Vision OS, I believe is what they called it. And I'm personally blown away. I've used go ahead.

I was just going to say it's got an M Two processor in it.

Yes.

Got an R One processor, which you might be like, what the heck is that? That's what I'm thinking.

Except for the battery pack. You've got to put it in your pocket.

Yes. And if I need to buy three of those things, I will I will too get 6 hours of use out of oh, yes. And I will charge my four to.

Get a whole workday out.

And I will charge all of them every night. I will have a VR headset stand. Because here's the thing. This headset covers your entire face. It's basically goggles, but they make it where you can see your eyes using screens. And that's part of the setup process. Now, what's incredible about this is setting up the device makes a model of your face and they use that in FaceTime calls. And it really I couldn't I mean, some people may tell the difference. I could not tell the difference between the person's face on the FaceTime call and their real face. But your face is covered. There's no way for it to see you. It's using AI avatars and putting you in the room so it looks like you're not wearing the headset at all.

Wow, that is neat.

Yes, it's amazing. But what's really incredible is if this thing can let you zoom in your environment, this will be the first headset that's thinner than the Quest, the Oculus Rift, any of these other headsets. It's thin, guys. It's very thin. And it may be the first headset that allows me to not wear a bulky headset that's heavy and actually be able to see. Now, for me personally and for other of us that have optin art ficoplasia or things like that, that's kind of huge, that's kind of a big deal. And even with that, I think they're going to find a way to make this thing fully accessible with Voiceover. Whether it be you flick between different items or maybe you turn your head and things turn into focus and speak for you, all of those things are possible. But another thing that I just thought of earlier, I have a severe nystagnus with my vision. My eyes are constantly moving. So the eye tracking part would not work for me. But what if they have a way around that with the hand gestures and speech, right?

Because I was concerned they talk about the iris reading thing and I have fake eyes.

Yes, I'm wondering about that as well.

I know that I do have an iris, but I guess they painted it in there.

Whatever.

I don't know, but I'm not sure how.

But also think about this though, Lynn. What if in like a version two, I doubt that the version one can do this, but what if version two can correct your eyes? Not so you could see, but so that when people are looking at you through this headset, you're looking at them, right? So you're showing that you're paying attention, like you're making eye contact. Even if you through that headset are not fully making eye contact.

Right. That is one of the problems with blind people have, especially those of us who have never had sight. We don't always make the best eye contact and it's not our fault, it's just because we can't.

But for me, with mind the stagnant, if my eye contact is looking over somebody's right shoulder or something or left shoulder, so what if that can actually make that proper contact for them and make those social connections, those nonverbal connections that we have difficulties in making that alone, I think, makes that headset a little bit more worth having.

I didn't think about that.

Not to mention the Binaural audio pods that are on the sides to give you full spatial audio to where they say it sounds like you're in the room with whatever movie you're watching or the ability to record in spatial audio. So not just stereo, but basically you have the ambio headsets on this device. If they have accessibility in this thing, this thing will be a powerhouse as far as what it can do for blind users.

If it's running Voiceover though, and someone isn't able to really see, what would kind of be the point of the device because the device is based all around your environment visually. So if you can't utilize that, then what would be the point, really?

Well, the point would be if you're using this device, right, you could swipe from like, put your finger in the air, and the camera would track your swiping, right. Say you've dragged two apps onto the canvas, right? Then you could look to your left voiceover and say, now looking at app A, you move your head to the right. Now looking at app B, and then you would just take your finger in the air and just swipe left and right and double tap in the air on those apps.

Well, it would be even cooler if they could make the device read to you or tell you what's going on in the environment ahead of you, in front of you. If you have the goggles on and you were somewhere where you were not familiar, like an office building or in a mall, or if you're outside walking around, it can breed to you what's around you and all of that stuff. Now, that would be good.

All of those things are possible with this.

Well, if they do it, that'd be cool. If they did it.

Well, even if they don't, other apps can, right?

And because pictures can be associated with names of people, and all of this data is stored on device, I'm curious, is that going to make it more, you know, so and so is coming towards you because Apple recognizes that person's name. I don't know how that would work.

That's possible. Now, what I didn't hear talked about was, how does this thing connect to the Internet? Does it use your phone? Does it do those kind of things? And one thing that was interesting and this is really exciting for low vision and possibly for all users, if you have this thing plugged into a Mac, you can take the image or the Mac screen and move it into your virtual reality.

Really? Wow. That's kind of crazy.

And that's the nice thing about it, is there's so many different things you can do with this device. And we just got a very small glimpse at what it can do. And Marty, you made a statement that I think is going to become truth. They had Disney there, and you said, wouldn't it be neat if you could do Disney World or Disneyland, virtually? And then they even talked about it and showed it.

Yeah, because could you imagine if you could walk around the property to all the different areas that they have? If you could actually go on a ride and experience the ride, virtually. There's so many cool use cases for that.

Another thing that they demoed was and I feel like, guys, we're nearing holodeck levels of technology with this. They showed off the ability to walk around in environments and make environments bigger than your room space.

Yeah, that would be crazy. I don't even know how you would.

Yeah, that sounds like a mobility nightmare, right? I don't know. I mean, it might be fun. Yeah.

This headset just has potential to be amazing. And I know a lot of folks are worried about the accessibility of this. And I don't believe Apple talked about accessibility with the Apple Watch.

They did not.

Yeah, so I was like, well, I don't know that they're going to have voiceover on this thing. I don't know how they could and they did. Go ahead.

Accessibility is the least of my concerns. I was asked on another podcast that I was on earlier today, michael, are you going to get one of these? And I said, yes, I can tell you right now, I'm going to get one of these. Probably not the first one. I'm probably going to let people like Michael D go pick up the first one to try it out and let me know his thoughts. And honestly, I'm looking for something from Apple that's more of a glasses form factor. And now that they have this, I know that they can form something of that. But yes, I'm going to buy it. No, I'm not concerned about the accessibility. And honestly, I'm really not concerned about the price either. A lot of people are like, oh, $3,000. $3,500. That's outrageous. It is. But look at your orcams. Look at your Esights or your Envision glasses. It's really about the same price. But you're going to get so much out of it.

You are very right.

How much is an OrCam now?

It's like 4500.

Is it really 4700?

I think, yeah, 45.

East side is like 85.

Wow.

35 is nothing when you look at it that way.

Right. Or cam isn't going to be able to do nearly what the glasses are going to be able to do.

I mean, think about this, guys. You could run the envision app on this thing.

Or things like be My Eyes.

Right.

Or IRA or Apple's doing its own visual interpretation of images. Because Apple can already identify images.

Yeah, because like I said, using trying to do any kind of image capture, any kind of like even with IRA using just a phone camera, there are limitations. And I think having this more 3D representation will be better when somebody's trying to help you just hold the thing up in front of your fate or hold it in front of you.

Imagine be my eyes with goggles.

Yeah, that's what I mean. So that you're not just because with the phone camera, it's sometimes really like they're always saying, move up, move right, move left. And maybe with this type of camera system, it will be easier to capture what you're trying to capture.

I'm going to be very vocal about this. I'm going to be on YouTube, I'm going to be on Facebook. I'm going to be on any place where people can listen. And I'm going to shout to the heavens for Apple to listen. And I'm going to say, that this device can change the lives of so many people if it has the features that it needs to have. And I really recommend that we all be very vocal and reach out as a community and say, Apple, we want this, we really want this. And there's so much we can make our lives better with this.

Well, right out of the gate they implemented or they said that they implemented APIs so that third party developers can make their app work on it or build apps to work on it.

Because really, I think developers are going to be a huge part of this as well. That it's going to be to the imagination of the developers in terms of what actually gets done for us.

Here's the thing. Developers have already been building for this platform for three or four years. Apple has had these tools that are being used to build this thing for years. And now it's time for what's been built to be put into place. The reason why the iPad Pro got LiDAR was not necessarily for us. It was for virtual reality and augmented reality, partly.

I'm just see what people are going to build and see how this can better people's lives. So I'm excited.

Yeah, there's so many things and I might even do a podcast once I get one of these like podcasting from because think about video recording using oh my goodness gracious.

I thought about that too and I got super excited about it.

Like just doing YouTube content from this headset, you're going to get good quality camera footage. You're going to get good quality audio. Say somebody's doing not a live presentation, but a presentation and you want it on YouTube. Will the Apple glasses be what you use to easily film that right now?

How about would it have stereo capability sound wise?

Oh, yes.

Recording.

It will have spatial oh, that's right.

They're basically air pods, but like kind of a pumped up version of them, I guess.

Well, they're called audio pods and it's basically like it measures and they had a term I haven't heard before. I've heard it in video, but audio ray tracing to figure out your environment. That was a very interesting concept to make sounds that come out of the speaker sound like they are in your environment.

Yeah, because like, for example, I like ASMR I don't know if people know what that is, but for example, I love the sound of keyboards clicking. Keyboards. I know that's odd, but what I would like to be able to do is to have that keyboard sound like it's right in my room and like somebody is actually typing on it from my room right next to me.

If it's recorded with this, it will sound like that. They have binaural microphones on this device. And again, it comes back to, yes, it's a $3,000 microphone, but it's so much more than that. I've already heard people say this is the new iPhone. Do you guys agree with that? Do you guys think that one day this will be our iPhones?

Yes.

I don't think this will be our iPhones. One day. I think a head worn form factor will become the iPhone. I'd like to see it slim down. Personally. I don't want it to cover my entire face.

It would be cool if it was just like a regular pair of sunglasses.

Kind of a thing right now. See, I'm fine with it covering my because it only covers around your eyes. It still has room for your forehead and below your nose.

Okay.

Yeah, but it looks like you're wearing like ski or snowboard goggles.

But it's better than wearing this periscoping face thing that comes out from your face, like on the Quest Two or the Oculus wrist or the LG Vive or any of those. They're huge. They go out a long way. This does not this maybe goes an inch or two out from your eyes and that's it.

Yeah. Currently it's probably the best design for the options that are out there now, but they could make it much smaller, I think.

Well, like I've said before, the tech isn't there. And the way they've made it so small is the battery is not included in this thing. So that's how they're making it small as well.

Yeah.

Well, I can't wait until somebody gets it and can demonstrate it. I mean, I'm just excited. I'll be excited to hear that and experience it.

Now what will be interesting is if we can make 3D content using this thing, that will be revolutionary. If you could easily do that instead of having to have all this other camera gear now, that would be cool. So this one more thing is a pretty revolutionary new thing, in my opinion.

Absolutely.

And we're just going to hear more and more about it and it's just like, wow, this is kind of the next evolution of VR. I was really thinking that I was going to hate this thing and I don't know, maybe it's the magic that Apple does at their events that just get me pumped up. That might be what it is, but there hasn't been a new Apple product I haven't liked. Right. It kind of reminds me of the AirPods Max a little bit. And they did show people using it with AirPods. I think one of the questions that was asked, if it has audio speakers, why would you need AirPods? And the reason is that it does have speakers, but it does play that audio into your environment. So what you would want to do is wear your own AirPods with it so that audio is quiet if you're on a plane or you're somewhere where you don't want that audio to bleed in to other people's environment.

Yes. I know that Facebook sort of dipped its toes into the whole VR thing with was it the Metaverse or whatever.

They're the biggest makers of VR headsets right now.

But it sort of didn't work out, so I wonder what the difference is.

It's working out, but it's not working out, if you know what I mean. There's no other competition until now.

And.

There was no accessibility either.

Right. Well, it will be interesting to watch. We live in interesting times tech wise, that's for sure.

Well, and that's what I've been saying, too, is we have so many there's so many new tech things coming out this year that this is the year I have not been as excited about technology as I have this year.

Yeah, it just seems like everything just came out of nowhere. I mean, at first all you heard about was everybody was cutting back staff and layoffs and whatnot, and then all of a sudden a flood of new things comes out and it's like, where did that come from?

Well, I don't know that Apple did as many cutbacks as well.

They didn't know because they didn't overhire.

And I know that they did move a lot of teams around instead of hiring new people. Okay, so do you guys have any I'm curious what overall I want to go around. And Marty, what was your overall? Was this a good event for you, or was it okay, or what's your thoughts?

I thought it was a good event. I thought that there were some surprises. I think that no one was really expecting the Mac Pro. I know there was talk about it, but ultimately the majority kind of thought maybe it wasn't coming at WWDC and would it even come by the end of the year. So for that to happen today was surprising. And even with a new chip, so things that are unexpected and good, that's always a plus. I thought that the operating systems across the board, they have some new features and some stability fixes, so that's pretty cool. Obviously, the Goggles are revolutionary and they're going to be moving forward with seeing what developers can do with APIs and things like that, to bring their own apps and create new apps for it. I thought it was good across the board. We also got a new Mac studio, which is pretty awesome, and we also got a 15 inch MacBook Air. So we got a little bit of everything. I thought. I thought it was a good event, in my opinion.

Yeah. And Michael, what are your thoughts about the event?

So I'm going to try to do this without the dog freaking out. If he does, then I will go again. But my biggest thing is I'm excited. I want to see where this is going. Like every year, we see a lot of things in the keynote and then we learn more. Like, for example, we've learned since the keynote that now Air tags can be shared between individuals to track them. Finally. I'm super excited about that. Or Jonathan Mosam posted on his Living Blindfoly account that Apple Music now supports Crossfade in iOS 17. On the music, yes. And it's those little things that make a huge difference, and they're not brought up in the keynote, but they get us excited. So let's see where this week goes.

And the Crossfade thing was really interesting because it's been on Android for a while now, so now they're just now bringing it to the iPhone.

Oh, I'm so excited. Okay, I'm good.

You must not have seen that yet.

No.

Apple is apparently going to be allowing developers to purchase developer kits for this VR headset thing, too. There's info on nine to five Mac, just so you know.

Wait, really? Seriously?

Yeah.

I don't know when they're available, but it was okay.

I better just renew my Apple developer account right now.

I wonder what the fee for that is going to be.

Probably the full.

I think when they did the last time they did something like that was when they came out with M One. They had the Mac minis that the developers could buy $100. And then when they wanted them back, they gave you a credit towards anything $500 you want to get from Apple, that kind of thing. That'd be really cool.

Yes, I had one of those. It was great. And it ran really well with the A Twelve.

Yeah.

Okay, so, Lynn, what was your thoughts?

I think there are a lot of new things. We have not yet had the opportunity to use a VR headset, so I think we're just sort of imagining what it would be like and kind of wondering if it's going to be accessible. But these things can change your whole world if they work for us. And I think that there's a lot of potential for this. We might not see the fruits of it for a while, but just a lot of possibility, a lot of new things. And we have to just keep an open mind and be ready to embrace new things.

Yes.

Taylor, what about you? What are your thoughts?

All right, well, I'm glad you caught me, Michael, because I was about ready to go to Developer Apple.com and renew my developer account. So basically this event has been awesome. I've been looking forward to it for a while now. And my favorite part was the goggles. Oh, my gosh, I'm so excited now that I found out I can go do developer kit.

Oh, my gosh.

So I'm super excited. I'm loving everything that comes out, and it's just been a great event. Everything has been top notch. Audio description. Even was good. So, yeah, it's definitely a great event, and I cannot wait to learn more.

Well, I think you all know how excited I am about all this. I've been going on about it the entire time. So we're not going to do picks. Okay. Actually, we're going to do picks today, and we're going to do a special edition pick section today. So, Michael, what is your pick of your favorite thing from the event and where can people find you online?

My pick for my favorite thing from the event would be right now I'm going to say the live voicemail transcribability. So you can see people's voicemails as they leave. Them them. And the reason I like that is because, well, if you're going into a meeting and someone's leaving you a voicemail, it's a loved one. You can say they just need me to pick milk up on the way home, or oh, no, there's an emergency I need to deal with. And you don't have to wait to hear that voicemail. That'll be super cool. You can find me on your favorite mastodon client. Simply search for payone at Unmute Community.

Okay, Marty, what was your favorite thing from the event and where can people find you online?

Let's see. My favorite thing from the event, I would say, is the 15 inch MacBook Air. I think that's going to be really popular. I love seeing a MacBook Air with a little bit of a bigger screen, so I think that's going to be super cool. And you could find me in your favorite mastodon app. And I am Marty at Unmute Community.

All right, and Lynn, what was your favorite part today, and where can people find you online?

I liked the journal part and the mental health part. I liked that as well. I think everybody should journal. It's very good for your health, your mental health, and it's good for your creative process as well. And you can find me. My email is [email protected].

All right, Taylor, what was your favorite part today and where can people find you online?

All right, so it's pretty obvious, right? I like the VR and AR glasses. Like the goggles. It's obvious. Yes. Everything else is great, but I have just really been looking forward to these goggles, and I really want to buy them. So where can people find me? Well, pretty much if you just search my name on Google, taylor Art. T-A-Y-L-O-R-A-R-N-D-T. I'll pretty much come up no matter what. So you can find me on mastodon at Tayart. Tayarndt at tacopoulos. T-E-C-H-O-P-O-L-I-S social. And I'm also on YouTube and a whole bunch of other places.

All right, see, this is a hard choice. My pick has to be again, there's so many things. Like, I'm kind of teetering between the glasses and Sonoma. I'm kind of going to go with I think Sonoma, because I just think that that's a neat operating system. I'm really happy about it. I think it's kind of more of a tie, but I want to see the glasses a little more. So we're going to go with macOS Sonoma. I'm really excited about it. All the Widget stuff is really. Cool. So can't wait to see that. And as for where you could find me online, I'm Mike DOE's on most places. Mastodon. Mike Doey's at Techopolis social. You can email me at Mike Doey's at icloud.com. I'm Mike DOE's on Twitter and other places so you can find me there. I want to thank everybody for being here, everybody for helping us during the Iacast Plus keynote feed. We'll be doing another episode, following up with everything on Saturday, so we're putting up these roundtables like crazy discussing everything in tech. So we'll do another one of these this Saturday and it'll be out that weekend as well. So I want to thank you all for being here. This has been another great episode and we will see you next time.

Take care guys.

Bye everyone.

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.