Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the IA cast.

That's two this weekend.

All right. With me today, we have our usual group. We have Lynn Snyder.

Hello, everybody.

We have Marty SoBo.

Hey, all.

And we have Angie Fisher.

Hello.

All right, so we just got off of the WWDC roller coaster. Did you guys enjoy the ride?

Yeah.

I'm not even sure we're all the way off of it yet.

We're coming down.

Well, we're off of all the turns. Maybe we're coming back to the station where you get off the ride and you feel dizzy and all those things. But it was a great event. We had five days of sessions. There were labs. There are all kinds of developer things that I did not have enough time to take part in. This time we got new developer betas, and I'm going to sneak one in here on you guys and talk about this because I feel like it's a big deal. You no longer need to pay $99 a year to get the developer betas.

That's really awesome.

That is awesome.

What I would say, Michael, is maybe you can just explain that to maybe people who wouldn't understand that.

So previously you had to have and be enrolled in the Apple Developer Program, paid membership to get betas. Now all you have to be is an enrolled Apple developer, which means you get free access to the documentation, videos, and other things, and you can see the betas on the downloads page. Now, I think that still means you're under an NDA. You are not supposed to show off anything in the betas and do demos, which people do anyway, which I have mixed feelings about. But you no longer need to pay that $99 a year to be able to get these developer betas. At first, I was really kind of miffed about this because it's like, well, what's the difference between the developer and public betas now? And why did Apple see the need to do this? And I thought, you know what? I guess I don't care because Microsoft and Apple I mean, not Apple, Microsoft and Google and others are already doing free betas for insiders. I mean, now Microsoft has their Canary Channel where you install it, and it may not work. You just know those things.

It's like a nightly build type thing, almost.

Yeah.

I would say if you're going to consider doing any of these betas, then hopefully you'll have a second device to put it on and not put it on your main device because there are bugs, there are issues. Sometimes things go crazy.

I was thinking that exactly. That would be my concern. Would it make unstable software available to people who can't handle oh, it does in their software.

I don't want those same people to come back on Apple and be like, well, they work, and right, yeah, that's on you. If you want to play with a new shiny. And also I also want to stress that it's important not only file bugs, guys, report what you find. Don't just install the new stuff and play with it and then bitch because, sorry, things don't work. Yes, because that's every year and it infuriates me.

Things only get fixed if you report the issues that you come across.

You're fine. Kind of a responsibility thing.

Yeah. Basically, consider yourself like you're an experimental subject in some kind of study and you don't know what's going to happen.

And it's very important to understand what you're getting into now. I will say that this year, knock on wood. We are very lucky that beta one is decent. There are problems, but it's decent when you say beta one.

Yeah, beta one is quite good. I haven't had that crashing thing happen with voices. I think I might have had it a couple of times, but not nowhere near like, in 16. So that, to me, is huge. There are issues, but they're negligible compared to that. Right.

There is problems with keyboards and braille right now, but it's not like the phone doesn't work.

You can get around it. I can still use keyboards and I can still use braille.

The only place where you have a full on you're going in and there's no returning is on the watch. I don't think there's any way to go back once you go forward, and.

I'm totally fine with that. We'll get to our thoughts about the betas later. But I just find it very interesting that Apple is allowing us to do this.

It's a very unapplike decision.

Usually they're very secretive about what they allow out when they do these. Might as well be public betas, even though they're developer betas guys.

Yeah, because I know a lot of times on the list, all of a sudden someone would say something and it was like, oh, my gosh. They weren't supposed to say that. I don't know. I guess that's like, I can imagine if you're using a beta, you might do that accidentally. You know what I mean? You might just say something and forget that. Oh, my gosh, I shouldn't have said that.

Well, they've said that you can say things, you just can't show it. Okay, I can't turn on Share screen and start playing around with macOS Sonoma.

On, and yet there are people on.

Mastodon blind people who are putting audio.

Files of the basis that's a good point, too. I never thought of that.

Ridiculous.

That is not what you want to do.

People who do full on videos of the new operating systems, is that allowed.

Or what's the I think certain people on YouTube are given the go ahead because they're YouTube creators, that Apple says, yeah, you can do this.

You need permission first.

But I've noticed, even I, Justine, and others, a lot of the things that they show in their videos are already things that Apple showed during the keynote.

That's the thing. I think you can't go beyond that point.

The thing I find that's interesting is that you have certain YouTubers who are allowed to do certain things, show certain things, I guess, because they get special permission, right. But the betas are out there, like we just talked about, for everyone to be able to get now. So how do they not or anyone else not just do the same thing? Because there's nothing on any of those other videos that says that they're allowed to do it for any particular or any certain reason. So, I mean, I don't see why other people can't get away with it. And if Apple were to go to them and they could say, well, these other ten people did it, and there was no disclaimer saying that I couldn't do it.

There is a disclaimer.

Yeah. I was just going to say.

What.

Is the punishment or for breaking the NDA or whatever it is?

Basically, you could have your Apple ID turned off. Yes.

It's that drastic, and rightfully so.

Then they would need to read what they're downloading and not just hit yes, yes, I agree, I agree, and just go.

When I became an Apple developer, I read through the entire agreement front to back, because I take what Apple says very seriously in those matters. Because when you become a developer, I guess that's kind of the thing, right? I guess this is why I felt miffed, okay. When I became an Apple developer, that was a privilege. You paid for that privilege, but it was a privilege, right? You are paying, and you're allowed to put things in the store, and Apple can at one point say, even though you're paying, we're taking this out of the store. I almost thought of it as kind of when an author writes a novel, they send it off to publishers and they get their acceptance letter, like, yes, we're going to sell your book, right? Or no, you need to go and make these changes. And that's kind of how it feels when you submit an app to the App Store and it goes through the review process and all these things. It's very similar to that. And when I got that first, your app is ready for sale, that was a very special moment for me. Right?

That'd be huge.

So to be any random person that can just go in there and say, oh yeah, I'm going to download the betas because I'm a developer and I get it for free, is kind of like where we came from. That's just been minimized, I feel like. But this has happened in multiple ways, right? Because there are those of us that started with Mac, the Mac program.

Oh, yeah. Where we had our that was great.

Our Mac email addresses. I still have mine, so I have mine too.

It's awesome. Every time someone sees [email protected], they're like, Whoa, how did you get that.

And you can still have your Atme.com address if you want to give that out too. And all of those accounts still work, right. And you had to pay 99 a year for that. Right. But now it's just, oh yeah, icloud is free. You get a free icloud. It's like everything we went through as original Mac users, it's just like, oh yeah, that's so yesterday. I feel like those of us that started with Apple a long time ago really have an understanding of where we were compared to where we are and where we're going. Right.

It just felt more substantial. I guess, in a way, people took it more seriously.

At the same time, I understand why they want to do this, because if you have more hands testing the betas and able to submit feedback, then you have less bugs. And that kind of comes down to what we see, especially with accessibility. Because I feel like Apple doesn't do the internal testing for accessibility anymore that they used to. Final Cut and Logic Pro have unlabeled buttons and there's unlabeled buttons in a lot of places. So if they could give these developer betas to people and say, hey, where are we having problems? And we can submit that feedback, then we finally get to have that piece of the pie that Apple has really reserved for their internal staff. And I think that's really where we need to think about this change.

Exactly.

The more people that use the betas and comment on them, the better off the final releases are going to be. Because sometimes when we get a final release, when we get a new version of an iOS and you download it, or Mac OS, whatever, and there are glaring bugs, like, are you serious? Why is it messing up people's WiFi? Why is it that not messing up people's WiFi? But for some reason they can't use their WiFi on their phone or stuff like that. That is so glaring. And it's like, how did they miss that? Or how did they not see some of these really glaring things? I think you're right, Michael, that the more people that have access to that beta and the betas and are willing to do their part and do their job, which is to find and report the bugs, I think you're going to see less bugs.

Follow the guidelines in the feedback app as well. Don't just go off half cocked and have this emotional, it's not working and it sucks kind of response. Don't do that.

Right.

Be professional.

That feedback app is very useful and.

Sometimes make sure you can reproduce it. I know there are bugs that can't be reproduced, but that's important.

I kind of wish that there was a way to add the feedback app for stable versions as well, because I feel like if you are on a stable version and you find a bug, there should be a way to report.

That and they exist on stable versions as well.

That'd be great because a lot of the people who have a lot of issues, even once the GM comes out, and then moving forward, it'd be a great way to report bugs and stuff like that for people, just everyday users, right?

Yeah.

So that one little thing that I thought we'd talk about became a huge thing.

Happens a lot, do you?

It does happen a lot, yeah. So let's talk about another thing that's been really big in the news this week that is not WWDC related. Wow. How is that possible? You would not think, like, how could there be more tech news that happened this week that's not WWDC related? And that's we have an official word on what's going to happen with the app Apollo, which is a reddit app for iOS as of June 30, the creator of Apollo is shutting down the app.

The reason why they're shutting it down is due to the cost of the API. The cost of the API that reddit is charging them to continue using it, which is an extravagant number. I believe it's 20 million. They just can't do that. So they're going to just have to shut it down.

Yes. And it's sad for people that have I mean, he offered a lifetime membership to that one thing that we talked about in our we have a technology discussion room that we use for a few of us, and we talked about this last night, and we said when you have a lifetime purchase for an app or a service you're not talking about your lifetime. You're talking about the lifetime of that product. And that could be two months or 20 years.

You just never know, right? That's the sad part of it. You just never know.

And that's one of the things that you have to really look at. Like, okay, say Ivory had a lifetime subscription of like $200, which that'd be cool, but say they did. Ivory, I think, would be okay because mastodon is not going away. If something happened to mastodon, they would just change something. Right. Just change it to be the next thing. Right. Because activity pub is a protocol that exists among a lot of different application frameworks. Right.

And it's interesting that you bring up Ivory, actually, because the parent company of Ivory actually had a Twitter app that got shut down due to not being able to continue using that app with Twitter, because Twitter shut down the APIs for third party apps.

Right.

The parent company of Ivory was actually one of those. And they pivoted, though, and they were able to create Ivory and get that out. And people are really enjoying that app.

Yeah.

And I think Mona was the same way, right?

Mona.

Mona was spring.

Right.

And one thing about this whole thing is you have to look at the service. Like Twitter, for example, is a centrally owned platform ran by the Twitter company Mastodon is not. So if somebody says, yes, we're going to offer this third party app for Reddit, twitter other first party platforms, and you build a third party app, what is the likelihood of that party shutting it down? You never know, it could happen any day. Right. But Mastodon not so likely because you would have to shut down all of Activity pub to get that to happen. And that's a lot now. So I think when we do these subscriptions, when we do these services, we need to look at what is the potential, what is the trust factor of that service still allowing this third party app in the future, right?

Yes.

Because whatever the platform is, whoever controls the platform controls what can happen with that app.

Yes.

Especially when you have a company that's creating an app for another service not their own.

Right, exactly. And that's the reason why I'm saying that you really have to be careful with that. And I think that we've learned some valuable lessons right. With these things. So I think it's a shame. The other news is that Reddit is going to allow accessibility focused apps to still exist. Now, my question to you out there is, what is an accessibility focused app? Is that a good thing? I think it's not, because it's Reddit's way of saying we don't want to deal with accessibility, so you deal with it and we'll just allow that to be free.

Right.

Because if you think about it, Apollo was accessible and that was an accessibility app. I mean, it was a mainstream app, but also people that were blind used it. So what classifies as an accessibility app?

Yeah, it's interesting.

If you took any app and you said, okay, well, let's say Apollo just took their app and said, okay, well, we're going to change it now, it's going to be for the blind, or it's going to be how would that could they circumvent the API?

Unfortunately, no, because they've spoken to Reddit directly and Reddit is saying, you're done, you're done.

Okay, well, it would be interesting to understand where Reddit is coming from with accessibility. Are they trying to only allow apps that are free that solve an accessibility problem, specifically, or are they just being picky and playing fair with some and they're just not being nice to others?

I think both of those are really what's at play here. So I think it's a shame, I really do. We're just going to have to wait and see what happens, right, to know where people come down on this. Because I know a lot of people that are blind are just saying, no more Reddit, I'm done.

And I know people, which is unfortunate, but in the scheme of the Reddit readers, how many people is that really, that they're losing? The blind community goes somewhere else, but how much of that loss is going to really affect Reddit in the retrospect?

Well, we say that the blank is going to affect the blank community, but a lot of big tech people and influencers are leaving Reddit as well.

Yeah, that's what I was just going to say. It seems like the general population of Reddit is pretty ticked off as well. I mean, there was supposed to be a protest. I'm trying to remember what the dates were.

Yeah.

And I don't know how successful that was, but they were going to go dark for a few days to protest. So it's not just blind people. And I think Reddit is a pretty opinionated crowd. You know what I mean? They're not just people that there are people that really have something to say about whatever they're talking about.

Although going dark for a few days. Yeah, I get that and that's good and all, but that doesn't really make it a dent. I mean, if you really want to protest, then you should go dark and not go back to Reddit if that's really what makes the difference because okay, so people don't go to Reddit for a few days and then they go back after a few days. What does that really do?

Right?

It puts a little dent in maybe their advertising revenue.

And it's not the users that went dark, it's the subreddits. Like what they do is they set them as private so the people cannot go in and even write or read them. They're all private subreddits. So that's why they made them private for a few days. So people would say, we are serious, we mean business.

Yeah. And then there's Mastodon and what's the other one? That's blue sky.

Well, Blue Sky is still invite only and you have to be very well known to get an invite still from what I've been able to tell.

So I wonder how their API policy is.

Well, they can't have a policy, right, because Blue Sky is running on the I mean, the main server can, but they're going to decentralize it one day once they are ready. Now I don't understand again why we need Blue Sky's At protocol and we already have activity pub.

Right.

Why do we need both? But it is what it is, right?

Well, the one thing about both, which is kind of cool sometimes, is that it then creates some competition and then the bug fixes and the updates and improvements come because there's competition. If there's no competition, then sometimes it just gets stale and there isn't any urgency.

Well, I understand that, but when you're talking about open protocols like this, you're not talking about competing for money. Right? That's the difference here. I mean, Blue Sky is definitely a for profit business, but their protocol is an open source, from what I understand, an open source protocol. And anybody will be able to create their own instance of the at protocol and basically run their own Blue Sky server. So I don't understand why they can't just make them all activity pub or at and them just talk to each other. Because then we would have that decentralized social network that everybody could use and we wouldn't have Blue, sky or Mastodon or others.

How is their onboarding process for new users?

I would love to know, but I'm on a waitlist.

Okay. Because I think that's where Mastodon has issues, right, is the onboarding can be a little tough to get people to pick an instance and all that. And people say, what the heck? And they just say, I'll forget that.

The reason why Mastodon is difficult is because it requires more work than just saying, here's your username.

Right.

That's what I like about it actually.

It makes you think a little bit.

Yeah.

Discord actually just got rid of the numbers on their usernames. So it's just you can now go claim your Discord user. Like I'm Mike Doey's on Discord Now. I don't have a number on my account, which is great. And Discord is getting more popular and they have voice messages now, so it's pretty neat. So there's so many different platforms now. So it's good stuff. Choice is a great thing.

Yeah, it is competition choice.

Yeah.

So let's start going back into the realm of WWDC and I want to bring up a few articles that were brought to my attention. Actually, no, there's one other thing I want to mention before we get to that, and that is that Logitech has now abandoned the Blue microphone brand and they are moving the Yeti and Snowball microphones under the Logitech branding, which I saw that on Amazon a while back. So this was in the news recently. So I just don't understand what's terribly different.

I really think that even though Logitech purchased Blue a while ago, I think that now they're really going to move everything under the Logitech brand and they're not going to use the Blue brand anymore. I think that they kept the Blue brand around for a while just because, for example, like the Blue Yeti that was such a popular microphone that a lot of people didn't even realize that Blue was purchased by Logitech. They just kind of kept it out there and people just looked for the Blue yeti and they just purchased it. Not really knowing about what parent company owns them at this point.

Right.

But I think now Logitech is going, all right, it's been long enough, we want to start putting everything under the Logitech brand now. So really nothing else is changing except that. I don't even think they've changed the mechanics of the microphones really since the purchase. They may be starting to change them now, moving forward. And maybe the first step in that is letting everyone know and making it like a big deal that, hey, we are now Logitech, which owns these microphones. And maybe once that's out there, maybe they'll start making some updates or some changes to some of the microphones. This is my guess. I'm not saying this is what's happening, but I'm just kind of guessing.

I looked up the yeti about a month or two ago because I'm always curious. I have a yeti microphone that's like an older one and they have new colors and new things like that. So if they had a USBC yeti, I would probably pick another one up because I really do like the stereo mode on the yeti. It sounds really nice.

Yeah, I mean, they were really popular. A lot of people, especially getting into podcasting and stuff like that. For a lot of people, this was their first microphone. Their first decent microphone.

Yeah. Let's clarify decent because I started with the snowball and that was not decent, right?

No.

Somebody at Best Buy said, yeah, you'll do great with this.

Well, Blue did a really good job of marketing because Blue make a sale. The Blue Yeti, even though it wasn't necessarily a great microphone, it was a decent microphone. It sold a lot. I mean, it was just people who were starting, what should I get? Oh, blue yeti.

Everybody had a thing back in the day.

Well, people had the snowball than the yeti. Not as many people had the yeti. More people had the snowball. That was kind of the this is where you start. Like if you went to Best Buy and you ask, what microphone should I start podcasting with? Most of the time they'll tell you the snowball and the yeti was the.

Step up from that entry level mic.

And you could sound good on the yeti, you really can. But it's tricky. It's a good streaming microphone because it can do a lot with your environment. Believe it or not, the microphone that I feel like is closest to the yeti as far as its performance is the Sennheiser profile.

That is much better.

It's actually about the same. If you use a yeti correctly, you can get about the same amount of sound from it. I've had two, never heard of the.

Snowball, but I had heard of the.

Game I think was huge.

It's about the size of a softball and it looked kind of like a softball, too.

It's a ball.

Okay.

Yeah, it was like a softball on a stick.

Yes, basically. So it's very interesting. I would still love to see if they have put USBC in there since I've seen new models arrive.

I would hope so. And I really don't like I'm going to complain about some of the share models that are like 200, $300 and they still come with micro B connections into the mics. Oh my God. No, just no.

Go ahead.

I think if you're making a microphone these days and you're doing something not even a microphone, but just anything, it should be USBC at this point. Totally. There's no reason why it shouldn't be.

No excuses.

Compatibility. It's the easiest to deal with.

Yeah, it's been around for long enough. It's time.

So now let's get on to the WWDC stuff, and here's one thing that I want to talk to you guys about that I found very interesting, and that is Mark Zuckerberg, the CEO of Meta yeah, you know where it's going with this. Said that the Vision Pro is nothing spectacular.

Because he has an inferior product. I'm not being a fan girl when I say that. That's the fact.

The Metaquest is not as powerful. It doesn't have as many things it can do. But he fell into what's being called the Steve Ballmer trap now, and what that means is Steve Balmer, the CEO of Microsoft, said that the iPhone did not pose a significant threat to the status quo.

How's Windows One working out for you now, right?

They both have said that the product of their time did not disrupt the industry. And I think that the Vision Pro will disrupt the industry just because somebody said it wouldn't. And that's what Apple is good at. It's like there are certain things you don't say, right? Nothing can go wrong now. Something's going to go wrong if you're in a scary movie. I'm going to go out and I'll be right back. You don't do that. There's just things you don't say. And you don't say, Apple's product is nothing spectacular. You just don't do that. Because Apple will just come back and say, oh, yeah, we are going to prove you wrong, and they will. Now. Or maybe he did it on purpose to see what kind of competition he can get with Apple. Maybe that was all done on purpose. What are your thoughts on this?

Well, I agree with you on you really shouldn't talk like that about other companies. You would think that there could be a little bit more, I don't know here. Professionalism. How about that? Would that be a good word? Support? Yeah. But at the same time, that's the thing these days. I mean, it's a normal thing for big companies to talk BS to each other or about each other.

It just seems Apple does it, too. Look at how many times they dis other companies, ran keynote.

Exactly. And other companies do it. They all do it. So it's a pretty normal thing these days.

My favorite one was not necessarily at other companies, but at journalists. When Phil said, Apple can't innovate anymore, my something, he said that during a keynote. And I could not believe that. That was just yeah, I was very surprised. And he said some other statements, but that was kind of the headline. That was funny that Meta's creator or CEO is saying that I do think that the Vision Pro is something new, something spectacular. And in a minute, Angie, I want to get your thoughts on that, but I want us to kind of go through and talk about everything we've learned a. Lot since WWDC has been going. And at the beginning we did not know if the Vision Pro headset would be accessible, if it would work with voiceover, if it would work for motor impairments, if it would work for people for people that can't move their eyes or things like that. And we got confirmation that there are twelve different accessibility features on this headset, which is a big deal to me. There's like Voiceover, there's Zoom, there's hand motions, there's Assistive Touch, I believe all the major features that are on iPhone.

And any combination, I think you can mix and match those as well. Yes, voice control.

You have voice control. So you could control the whole headset with your voice.

You can also pair it to things.

Like keyboards and such as well, keyboards and track tabs. Yes. And it will be able to be used as the display for your Mac. So you'll see your display on your Mac turn off and you'll see it on your wall.

My biggest thought about this is that I want to see this thing ate or Cam and other such devices for breakfast. I just do well, I want this to be my visiting classes.

Or Cam only does like a few tasks. This is going to be doing a lot.

Exactly.

Things. Or Cam, for example.

As far as.

Mark Zuckerberg and for the price point, you get a lot more for your dollar.

As far as Mark Zuckerberg, I think he had sort of a negative experience with the whole headset thing. Like the VR headset that they were what do they call that? Metaverse or whatever.

Well, which one? They have like three or four headsets.

Yeah, that didn't work out so well, the metaverse so maybe that's well, it's.

Not that it didn't work out so well. It's just that it doesn't have a big adoption. And that's because the meta devices cause I don't remember the term, but augmented reality illness, I think they call it, or VR illness or something like that, where after you've been wearing a headset for so long, you will feel nauseated. But people that are using this say that, and this is interesting. They said they put it on and they took off the head, the Apple headset, and they said that they couldn't tell the difference. Now that folks, that is huge. And I believe it was John Gruber who said that. And if you know anything about that guy huge critic. Getting him to be satisfied takes a lot.

He's a carmachian. He kind of is, in a good way, of course.

Yeah.

I want to come back around to what Angie was saying, just for a quick SEC. Angie was talking about the OrCam, which is a small little camera device that you could use it in your hand, but also goes on the side of glasses and you put something out in front of you and it can read it to you. So for example, it can read to you some basic text. It can tell you what like a money paper bill is. So if you had like a $10 bill, you could hold it up and it will tell you, hey, that's a $10 bill or a $5 bill. Now, the OrCam I believe, if I remember correctly, I think it's like $2,000 somewhere in that range.

Isn'T it?

$4,500. Okay.

So we're talking about a small little camera device that does a few basic tasks. It's $4,500. And then we're talking about the new Goggles that Apple is coming out with at $3,500. Yes, that's a lot of money, but it does far more than this little.

In the grand scheme of things, you're getting a lot more. Yeah.

If you think about too, the Esight is $6,000.

That's right.

Even the patriot viewpoint, which helps me see, is over $3,000.

The envision glasses are three, aren't they?

As well, $3,600 for the new.

Yeah, they're the same price. Yeah.

The thing to think about here is they're coming in the first generation at $3,500. So what that means is over time it's going to come down in price and they're starting at 3500. So we'll see what happens over the next couple of few years.

Here's the problem, okay. Here's the really big problem. I think for me, Angie and Taylor, they're going to cost a lot more than $3,500. Why do you all think that is?

Well, because you're going to upgrade every year.

No, not even that.

No, I think it has to do with the prescription lenses.

No, we don't have prescription lenses. You can change the batteries, so you can just get like five or six battery packs.

Batteries.

Now, I did hear something really interesting about the battery pack. So yes, the battery pack at full charge gives you about 2 hours. Now what you can do though, is that you can plug the battery pack into any USBC wall charger and then you don't need to worry about it running out of battery. It'll go for as long as it's plugged in for. So there is a little bit of a bonus there.

I think you could just plug it right into a wall charger. Not correct you even need the battery, right.

So as long as you're going to be moving around, you might need a long USBC cable. But other than that, you can keep it going without the battery and just have it plugged right in.

But I'll tell you what, you get like four or five of those battery packs and you're good for the day, right.

Something for your backpack.

Yeah, a charger you can recharge money.

Yeah.

Now, it would be cool if you could just plug a cable into any battery pack, right? Like get that big anchor power bank, 2600, 800. I bet that thing would keep it going for a good while.

Get a power bank to charge your.

Batteries or not even that just use.

A power bank to charge the work for the glasses. I was thinking about that, too. I wonder what the connector is. Yeah. Why couldn't you just use a power bank?

I think it's USBC on one side and it looks like almost like a watch charger. That fits better on the glasses itself.

Nice. So it's all magnetic on the side of the glasses.

Cool. I don't know if it's magnetic or it snaps or if it's like stronger magnets because the watch magnets okay, but MagSafe. Yeah, maybe MagSafe because they need something that's going to stay on and not because that comes off your glasses. Go, they just turn right off.

Now, you know what, wouldn't it?

That would be especially if you're like, say you're walking down the middle of a street, right? That would be bad.

That would be bad.

I know. Could you imagine you're walking down the street and just instantly you're just like, yeah.

IRA capability with this thing. I mean, there's just so much that this could potentially do and be for people.

So Angie wasn't on our wrap up show, so I kind of want to get Angie's perspective on everything that you've heard. What do you think about the 15 inch MacBook Air? Is it something you're interested in or is it like, that's cool?

It's cool. I've always been a Pro person, so it isn't my thing, but I think there's obviously a space for it. It fits that niche of person who doesn't want to go for the 16 inch Pro, I suppose. And the Air is plenty enough computer for most people. I like the pros.

I'll be editing this podcast on my 13 inch Air, and I think that will be a good way to determine if you could do podcast editing and things like that on a MacBook Air.

People do it. I know a few of them who do very successfully. It's not like it struggles with it. Video rendering might be a different story, but yeah, podcasting, audio and stuff is fine.

I'm torn a little bit because I have a 16 inch MacBook Pro and it's an amazing laptop, probably the best laptop I ever owned. It's just so powerful and you can pretty much do anything with it. It's kind of like a portable desktop, but it is a little bit bigger and heavier to carry around. The 15 inch Air is kind of the perfect middle man. It's not quite the MacBook Pro 16, but it's definitely larger and gives you a little bit more room than a 13 inch MacBook Air. So it's a good portable machine if you can get away with the work you need to do on an Air. I think it has a lot of good use cases for that. Definitely. I think for what I do portability wise, I think I can definitely get away with a 15 inch MacBook Air. But since I already have the 16, I think I'm going to stay with the 16 inch MacBook Pro?

Yeah, I think if you don't have one, that the Air would be good. I mean, they're thin. Yeah. I have an air because I want something. Like if I don't want to just bring up my Pro, I can have a small computer. That's why I have one. And I feel like it would be thin as a 15 inch and it would be interesting to have for some development. I would worry about breaking it almost because with the iPhone, one of the iPhones, I think it was like the six or six plus or one of those we had Bend Gate. Do you all remember that?

Yes, it was a six no, the six plus. Yeah, that's what it was.

I kind of worry about that on this machine. But if you put it in a bag wrong and you get a bent MacBook air because that surface area is so long and thin.

You lean against your bag the wrong way. Yeah, I would worry about that, too.

Yeah.

Be a little concerning.

Yeah, that would be my only concern with that machine. But I think it's a great computer. I think that people will benefit from it. Choice again is a good thing.

Definitely.

So, Angie, what do you think of the and we learned more about the Mac Pro. I think the Mac studio was interesting, but the Mac Pro was also a new thing. So what were your thoughts on that?

I'm glad they finally switched it from intel. So the entire Mac line is silicon now, so that's a good thing. I want to see it. I want to play with it.

Now, don't I know.

It's modular, obviously, like the Pros tend to be, and that's a good thing. I like the fact that you have two options for its casing. Yeah, it's a good thing if that's something that you need that people use.

Yeah, I thought it was really cool that they actually gave you the option to a rack mount case for server. Yeah. I mean, even if it's not for server and you put it in there and then you can load up your other rack mounted devices, if that's something you have, then you kind of haul around that case. It's not going to fit altogether.

You're not going to haul that around.

It's huge.

Yeah. If it's rack mounted, it's meant to be on a rack with five other machines of the same type. That's the whole point of that.

It's a beast.

The one disadvantage of this model, or two disadvantages, is no wheels. I don't know, but it does not have like on the intel one, you could get up to 1.5 terabytes of Ram. On this one, you can only get 192.

And I think on the regular case, I don't think they changed the dimensions of it at all, did they?

They did not.

So that means if they had wheels before then whatever wheels that they still currently sell would work.

$1,000 wheels or however much they $500 wheels.

Yeah, exactly. So that's why I was wondering if they didn't change the diameters of the case at all, the regular one, not the rack mounted one, then if they sold wheels before, then you could still get the same wheels, and you could put it on wheels and move it around.

And the other disadvantage is, this machine does not support graphics cards. So what if you wanted to put an Nvidia graphics card?

You better build it.

It won't work at all.

It will take PCI cards, but not.

Graphics, though it does support PCI cards. And the example given that you could use there's a 32 terabyte PCIe card that you can get to expand the storage. And anybody want to take a guess about how much that costs?

$2,000?

Higher.

Four grand?

Lower.

Three grand?

35.

35.

Ding ding ding ding. And Angie gets the prize.

Yes. So it's around $3,500. Angie is closest to the price, but it's actually not because 32 terabytes, that's a lot of space.

That's huge.

If you put six of those in.

There.

Now, you could still put, I think, up to five drives in the machine still without having to do any extra expanding or anything.

And you can add cards that add graphics. CUDA cores, like from Nvidia, they just won't be able to be used as your graphics, but they could be used, like if you're using transcription with Whisper or other machine learning tasks, those CUDA cores could really come in handy, and you could use them for machine learning and things like that. You just cannot use GPUs.

It's expensive. But there's people out there who still would spend the money on that kind of a machine, and that would get.

A lot of $7,000. Maximum is $12,000. So it comes in cheaper than the intel.

It does by quite a bit.

And is that with or without wheels?

Don't know. I didn't customize it. I heard it on a podcast.

Have any of you actually seen those wheels?

No.

In person or at all?

In person.

I should go to the Apple Store and be like, hey, I want to.

See I want to see the wheels. Show me the wheels.

Yeah, show me your wheels.

Really? Cool.

I want to feel the wheels.

You know how people have fancy cars and they put fancy wheels on the car? You should be able to design the colors and make the wheels, like, however you want and make them look really cool.

LEDs on the MacBook Mac Pro wheels.

And then, like, make them glow in the dark.

LEDs. You have all that?

RGB totally.

And then I guess go ahead.

The keynote was all about stickers and balloons, too. That was the thing.

I've played with posters this week and contact stuff that's very interesting. I don't exactly understand how they work. Just because the UI is a little wonky in beta One, but it's pretty interesting. I took Taylor's picture and put her on a different background, and that was interesting.

Now, I heard that you can only have one card that you can bump to someone else. You can't have multiple. Now, I know some people have personal information, business information. You might have a few different cards, but you only can bump one. I don't know if that's going to change.

You're talking about name drop, and I haven't tried that. So I'm not sure how all of that works.

I don't have anyone here to try it with us. I don't have any other beta testers.

I'm kind of available. I'm really excited about the continuous AirDrop, though. So if you go out of rain, that is really cool.

That's freaking neat. Finally.

Yes.

Because how many times have you done that? You're transferring something and then you forget and leave the house.

You're like, oh, crap, it turned off.

Sending it from my phone to my Mac doesn't have to be sending it to someone else.

But yeah, one thing we have to move on through these things, but one thing that I do want to report on is people have done some awesome stuff. So, on macOS Sonoma, there is a game porting tool that we've heard about, right?

Yes.

But there is a caveat.

No.

What's the caveat?

People have already hacked the crap out of it because it's open source. It's open source. And so what people have already done is they have installed Steam using the game porting tool, the Windows version of Steam, and they have downloaded all of the DirectX Twelve games that never could have been supported before, like Hogwarts Legacy and others. And they're just playing them on their max now with this game porting tool. And I'm super excited. I want to do this. I want to set this up totally. Because if you could do that, what other Windows applications can you run? From what I understand, it's using basically wine, like the Windows emulation layer to run these things. But apple. I've heard it. That's what it's using. It's something similar, but Apple built their own, and it works with DirectX Twelve. And it's there so that developers can try their games to see how well they'll work and what they need to optimize and whatnot. But.

What are the specs you need to run?

What do you mean?

Minimum specs to be able to utilize that tool?

Any M chip? Any apple? Silicon chip?

So you can even do a base model like M One eight gigs. You're good?

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah.

Nice.

That's good.

Okay. I will say that games do not run the best on, like, the M One Air. I played minecraft with the graphics set to the maximum, and the macOS would just say, no, too much resources, you're gone. But the M two air works just fine. So the M One Pro and M one max work fine with it, but the M two Air will do just fine with heavier duty games. That's pretty exciting. The fact that Apple built that was like, really?

They're surprising us this year. Quite a lot different. Apple ask decisions.

There are so many little things that are just like, wow, Apple did. But again, when Apple does it, they do it well.

Yeah.

So the OS are neat. We talked about those. And Angie, since you weren't here, vision Pro buying one.

I want to I want to I want to go play with one first, and I'm probably going to walk out of the store with one if I can. I always I always say I'm gonna, you know, no, I'm not going to buy anything. I'm going to just go play with it. I want to go look.

Well.

Typically, you can't go to Apple and just look.

Yeah. I was doing my game Stream, and.

Taylor was saying, I don't have any impulse control when it comes to Apple or tech generally.

Taylor was going to go to the Apple Store today, but she couldn't get something scheduled. So I said, I want to go to the Apple Store, but I'll probably buy something. And I said, when I go in the Apple Store, I want to buy the whole store.

It's like Disney for tech people.

Yes. The Microsoft store was like that, too.

It was. We went there.

Yeah, we did. It was fun.

It was.

And they had a magic about their stores, too.

They did.

They just didn't have a lot of people to go in, and that's why they closed them. But they had so many different choices. Not just one brand, but they had so many different brands. You could just HP, Dell, Asus, you could just look at them all, and people knew about these things, so I kind of missed that.

And they enjoyed their products. They enjoyed what was there, which really good, and they knew their stuff. How many times have you gone into an Apple Store and people just don't have a clue as to what the hell their stuff is? That's unfortunate. Even some of the some of the.

Genius people I remember one time recently, my family was visiting, and we went to the Apple Store, and I bought a Home Pod. And my mother is not tech centric. She doesn't know how much this stuff cost. So she sees $300, and she just like, eyes bug out. And she's like.

That'S cheaper. An Apple product. Considering that's probably one of the cheapest Apple products you can get.

One of the definite low end.

And the Apple employee looked at me and said, I don't let my mother see my Apple purchase.

That's right.

It was just so hilarious. Wow. So Apple stuff is expensive, but you know you're getting a good thing. And there are so many more things that we can't really go through with WWDC, because a lot of it is well, for one thing, very technical. There's too many things to unpack for it. So I'm sure we'll be talking about a lot of this stuff as time goes on.

And.

Another Apple thing that is very interesting, and I want to point out who's watching Silo?

I am.

Marty and Lynn. Have you all heard of it?

I've heard of it, but no, I'm not watching it. But I know that I think it was mentioned on the last someone's pick, wasn't it? Okay, yeah.

Well, I have heard of it, but I'm not watching it right now.

It's a very good show. It is now the top show on all streaming services at the moment.

Nice.

With good reason, because how many shows are on multiple streaming services at the same time?

Right. So that's very interesting. It's a good show. I like the books better, but it is good.

I do, too, but that's because I'm a reader. But the show is super good.

There's been one. What was it that I liked better as a show than books? It was fairly oh, His Dark Materials was a very good adaptation of the books. I haven't finished the third season, but I really like the show.

Cool.

Because instead of using an older current day, it was written in, like, there's helicopters in our world and things like that. Instead of being older, 18 hundreds, I believe. I think that's the time of day. That the time zone they use for current world in His Dark Materials. I love those books. And then there's a lot of questions, like how will all apps work on the Vision Pro? Will they not? So I think they are. I think all apps will be able to be downloaded. So we're going to have to see Microsoft Office we know works on there, I'm sure. Pages, numbers and keynote. Oh, before we wrap up, I want to share an Apple Watch tip. And this kind of goes to the whole something I found in the betas because everybody's talking about these things. One of the things that's coming that I want to talk about is really cool. I hate the grid view of apps on the Apple Watch list.

Yeah. List is the way to go.

Yes, that is the way to go. But a new feature, little bitty thing that's coming is there's a new button at the bottom of the list and the bottom of the grid to switch between the two. It's wonderful.

Between the two in the sense of whether you want to see a list or grid view. It'll let you just switch right on the fly there.

Yes.

Nice.

That's cool.

Super excited about that.

It's a little thing, but it's so helpful. That is super cool.

And then does anyone want the grid view? I mean, everyone switches to lists and go, not everyone didn't know about this.

Not everyone. There's a lot of people that use the grid view. It's more of a visual thing, but I prefer a list.

Me, too.

It's cleaner. I just like it better.

And I love the widgets. Like being able to just okay.

How do you get to the Widgets?

Just turn your digital crown. That's all.

People who for the people and you.

Do the same flick up or flick down. If you're using Voiceover, all you have.

To do is turn the digital crown. Even with Voiceover, they come up.

Oh, cool.

You can do a two finger flick up to do that. And the side button now does your control center. So I like it better. You could do like a double tap of the crown to bring up recent apps. The same as the dog. Yeah.

Change the way the control center looks, or is it the same?

Same thing. We got rumors that the control center on the iPhone would be updated, but it never was.

It's the same.

Well, we'll see what happens by the time GM comes out. I don't think it'll change at all. No, that was a big rumor going around. People thought they really were going to change it.

Just to show you.

I don't count on rumors. I really don't.

No. Especially where Apple is concerned. Just don't.

And we don't have the Journal app yet. I want to play with that.

I want that, too.

I'm sure we'll get it soon enough.

Day one, we didn't get it day one. Hey, that's why they didn't give it to us in the first beta, because.

It'S not really day one.

They didn't want to give it to us day one.

Day one.

I'm tweeting that now.

Waiting with bated breath.

I'm tweeting that joke now. That is hilarious. That's great.

All the day one puns.

Tech humor is great. Tech humor is great.

Day one, puns and the people who get them.

Yeah.

Wow.

I think that's going to we've gone over we're going to have to change up our we have our jeez, that's stuff I got to talk about again, we have so many things that are happening this week.

So many things.

Iacast has had some several changes. If you go and subscribe to Iacast podcast on YouTube, you will now get all of these live streams, and you will get our finished podcasts on our YouTube channel. And speaking of channels, we now have an Apple podcast channel, so you can go and look at your channels and see the IA cast and the nine shows that are connected to it. I did not realize we had that many, but we do, so check that out. And there's all new branding and all new things with that. And we're also looking at changing the Iacast network radio station to be called Iacast Radio. So be expecting that. But what I was going with this is we're going to have to change the scheduling because we only allow for an hour for the IA cast. And well, four weeks in a row.

Going over that it's my fault since I joined.

No, I'm the same way. I'm a blue aviator myself.

No, we just have a lot of great content. The tech news is just huge right now.

That's the thing. Everything's happening at once. I think that's part of it.

And you know what?

It all kind of culminates in WWDC.

We didn't even talk about chat GPT for iPad and Shortcuts.

Next time.

Yeah, we'll talk about that more next time.

Shortcuts has gotten some interesting stuff lately.

And a rewrite in 17. All the things that you could look forward to next time on next week on the IA Cast. But as we always do, Marty, what's your pick for this time, and where can people find you online?

My pick for this time is called ACB Link. And yes, the app has been around for a while, but there's a brand new version that was just released in the past few days, and it works great with Voiceover. It gives you all kinds of information about ACB Link I mean, ACB Community and affiliates and the streaming. It's a really good app. It works on Mac with Voiceover as well as iPhone and iPad. So definitely go check that out. And I will also say it was designed by our own Michael Doy. So do you want to chime in anything there, Michael?

I was about to say, I think I know the guy who made that.

You did a really great job with it. It's awesome. So check that out. You want to say anything along with what I said?

Yeah, it's just a cool app. You can check out the podcast for ACB, hear all the streams. Very easy interface. It's been streamlined a lot. There'll even be more push notifications in the app, so be on the lookout for those. If you want to get information as soon as it's available about the American Council of the Blind, you could get it in that app, and it is fantastic.

Yes, you did a great job with it, so congratulations.

Thank you.

And you can find me on Macedon Marty at Unmute Community.

All right, and Lynn, what is your pick, and where can people find you online?

Yeah, my pick today is something that you guys might have heard of. It's been around for a while. It's called Nebula, and I use it on my phone. It's sort of a YouTube type platform, but it allows more of the proceeds to go to the creators. So there are a lot of different podcasts if you don't have enough to listen to right now, but there are some really interesting things on there. And basically, the idea behind the app is to incentivize and reward the creator. So more of the money that the app generates goes to the creator.

Isn't it more of an education app?

It is, but I listen to a few that talk about news that talk. About news events, world events going on. And I really enjoy the content on there. And it is a subscription, but you can pick a plan. I think it's like $2 a month or two.

Yeah, it's very cheap.

It's not expensive.

Yeah.

And if you don't like it, you can always stop it. But it just has a lot of interesting content on there. And again, it's more focused on the creators, the content creators being subsidized better.

Renee Ritchie used to publicize about it all the time.

Yeah. So it's just another thing to take up your time just in case you don't have enough to listen to. But I know that Nebula is available on the iPhone. I'm not sure if it's available in any other it is. I imagine it is. And you can find me my name is well, you can. King Prince [email protected].

Okay. And Angie. What about you?

I don't have a pick yet, but you can find me online. I'm working on one, that's the thing. So maybe next week I'll have one or I will have come to terms with yeah. Anyway, you can find me online at tech enthusiast at Dragonscave space.

Excellent.

What's that?

Yay.

So, my pick for this week, let's see, I've been trying to think of one and I thought I had one and I lost it.

I had the same thing.

I think I'm going to go with Minecraft 1.20. It came out this week.

Nice.

I played it most of today 5 hours. Did not find it was on YouTube. So you could look at my channel, Michael Doey's, and see the stream. There was two streams, one with Ecamm that did not work and the second I used Zoom and that worked great, which I need to really think about now because if I'm streaming, then some of our other rooms won't work. So I need to figure out a solution there. Anyway. So I have not gotten into any of the 1.20 content yet, so that's kind of a bummer. But I started a new world and it was really fun. So minecraft 1.20 Trails and Tails update and there are mods to make it more accessible. I don't believe there's a way to make it fully compliant for folks with no vision, unfortunately, yet. But I think people may come up with a way to do it eventually, if not the company. So hopefully that happens. If you want to get a hold of me, I'm Mike Doey's on most platforms. That's Mike Doey's on Twitter. That's Mike Doeye's at Icloud.com, mike Doey's at Techopolis Social. And I'm on Facebook as Michael Doey's. Discord now as Mike Doey's. So it's now all uniform, so you can add me on any of those platforms. And I have my personal YouTube channel at Mike Doey's. We have this channel for Iacast. At iacast podcast. We're putting a lot of great content. We may even start doing some short tips on the channel. So be looking out for that 1 minute long accessibility and mainstream tips, so that will be fun. I started doing programming shorts on my personal channel, so those are starting up and so we'll be doing other content and so we're rolling out all kinds of things now. So keep on the lookout on Iacast and we will be back next week with a new episode. I want to thank everybody for being here on YouTube, everybody for listening to the podcast and all of our great panelists here to talk about all this good news. And I have a feeling I could be wrong, but I have a feeling we're going to have another topic next week that is not WWDC related, I.

Imagine, so you never know.

Something inevitably will happen in tech that will demand our interest. So we'll see you all next week and thanks again for listening.

Take care, guys.

Bye bye.

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 IACAs Net. Thanks for listening and we'll see you again soon.