Creator Studio bundle, AirTag 2, new Siri features coming soon

Mayo, before we get started, we have one quick reminder for people that the Happy 26 promo code for all the annual plans for Happy Hour Plus, Daily Plus, and 9to5MacPro, the bundle, that expires next Wednesday. so you have just under a week to cash in on that. 26% off those annual plans. Happy 26 is the promo code. Use it at checkout. Or you can just use the links in the show notes and it should automatically route you to the right plan and automatically apply the promo code. And thank you, too, to everybody who has already taken advantage of that. It really means a lot to us. Creator Studio, Apple Creator Studio, officially launched yesterday, January 29th, January 28th, rather. I have been on the test flights for the Creator Studio apps for the past two weeks. The problem is I couldn't tell you much about how to use most of them. I do not use Final Cut Pro at all. I use Logic Pro to edit this podcast, which is like 1% of 1% of the Logic Pro features. That's what I use. It's kind of misusing Logic Pro to edit a podcast. To a degree, yeah. But I did check out the pages, keynote, and number stuff. And my takeaway from that was that the thing where you can create slides based on an outline from a document, those AI features, the content hub, the image generation, all of that stuff is nice to have, but it feels almost like table stakes at this point for any of the document creation apps on the market. You mean the iWork stuff? Yes. Yeah, the iWork AI improvements are kind of like the things you can ask chat gpt to make for you for free exactly yeah it's like make an outline of like take an outline and make a presentation out of it you can basically do that already or get close enough and uh i was watching some um i watched steven robles he did a nice little coverage of it i've tried to answer myself as well but he was like doing the ai tests and it was like in some cases it was faster to ask ChatGPT rather than do it through the iWork app or some visualization it wouldn't create unless you did it explicitly and stuff. So it's nice that there's an integration there, but it doesn't feel like it's like a $12.99 per month value when for better or worse, most of these AI apps at the moment, whether you're talking about Claw or ChatGPT, they all got free tiers or more inexpensive options. it feels kind of weird paying 12.99 if that's what you want i mean the pages app um like the iWork apps have the integrated uh generate image thing which is like a souped up version of image playground that uses the open ai models behind it rather than doing on device which is what image playground uses but like you can literally do the same thing with a free right gpt account and even when you when you do it for the first time it says are you sure you want to do this because we'll have to send your photos to chat gpt you know so like there isn't even like the the oh you're paying for it so it's completely private but it's not it still just goes to the chat gpt service they say it's not used for training but still it's not that far away from just typing in your request into a web browser you know um and the thing that really gets me going about that is why is it you know ensconced inside the iWork suite like why is this like newer version of image playgrounds which is essentially what it is, it just pops up in a central modal. Why is that not just like an upgrade to image playgrounds? Why is it inside an iWork app thing? Even if you're going to charge for it, right? Even if it's like an upgraded option, if you use other more than just Apple productivity apps on your computer, presumably, like if you do want to pay for image generation through the Creator Studio, why can you not just like open up image playgrounds on its own and export the images that way? Why do you have to go into, you know, keynote pages of numbers to make this image thing? like that's where it kind of breaks down for me it's kind of the same with the um the creator hub thing that they've got right which is like stock assets like i get why it's integrated into like pages right because if you're doing document you want to do a poster and you want some clip art that looks nice you can do it but also you might just want to you know share something on facebook and you just want a picture so like why is there not just like a creator hub app which has like stock library or whatever and it's just unlocked by your subscription as well as having the in-app integrations it feels a bit um like around the backhanded you know what i mean just in the way that it's exposed to you um it's very it's very odd or like let's say you're doing a web like i what do i do my um most of my job blogging i don't use an app i use a website right i go to the wordpress cms and i type in there well this the license you get from the creator hub says you're allowed to use the images in any way you want with personal commercial use basically there are a few exceptions like you're not allowed to use it to train ai models and stuff like if you actually read the terms but you're allowed to use it for like commercial things so in theory i could like do a web a blog post for nine to five mac using stock imagery that i get from the creator hub but where do i make my like header images for nine to five mac i use pixel meter but pixel meter doesn't have the creator hub inside it it's very siloed yeah so i've got to like open up pages just to make an image just to get the image that I want to then copy it out and paste it into Pixelmator, I guess, to then make my header, you know, two by one crop image. Like the Create Hub just feels like it could be an app on its own kind of dealio rather than like a feature of the other things. And the thing that really gets on my nerves is that those exclusive features, so the iWork app is like freemium now, right? Because the apps are free, but they've got features inside them that you have to pay extra for. Like the special, you know, generate formula, like the generate the keynote slides from an outline, like the generate image like the creator hub stock assets they all appear in the iWork suite with purple highlights around them it's like in the toolbar like what is a modern mac ui is monochrome icons in toolbars right they don't do they went away from the multi-colored icons fine but now they've got like upsell features how do we draw attention and we've only been big purple highlights and even after you subscribe the highlights stay so like the generate just conveniently the generate image and creator hub links are in there are in the default toolbar set in pages now right on pages 15 or whatever the number is so even after you pay for it like let's say you do want to generate images every single time you make a page document you probably don't need the generate image button like right there front and center you know like it doesn't really feel like the genuine placement for it and especially i don't need it highlighted in a different color to every other control on the toolbar so even after you pay you've then got to go like view, customize, edit toolbar and drag them out again, which seems a bit pernicious. Similarly, the format, you know, like the menu bar with the file edit, format things. One of those menus lists the generate image and the create hub thing. And you can't rearrange the menu bar, right? Like the list of items menu bar is fixed. But guess what they have? They're the only icons in this entire thing. Everything has an icon, but those two are highlighted in purple it's like i know it's just a different color but it's really like especially if you're already paying for it like if you're already on the plan do you really need it to like highlight in purple the entire time no like i feel like it even if you don't pay for it i feel like it shouldn't be highlighting purple forever but even if you do i feel like the highlight should go away what do you think about just i've seen one of the takeaways being that creator studio is a compelling option even if you just include Final Cut, Logic, etc., Motion, Compressor, those apps. Is it as compelling if you rip out Pages, Keynote, and Numbers and just keep those as purely free apps? Because for the longest time, one of the benefits of buying a Mac or buying an iPad or an iPhone is that you would get Pages, Keynote, and Numbers to their full benefit, all of the features for free included with your device. I can feature the hardware, right? Yes, and now that's not the case anymore. Like you said, it's a freemium app, and I think inherently that is a downgrade even though i can see the argument of apple saying okay we're giving you all this content that you can use to do whatever but you have to pay for it and you can't pay for it separately you can only pay for it in the bundle it feels kind of shoehorned into the bundle and then also greedy to take those apps that have historically been free and making them freemium like you can make the argument that like other default apps are freemium in a sense that you know the music app basically to use it these days you will need to subscribe to apple music or like the tv app i mean technically you can do other stuff in it but it wants you to subscribe to tv the tv service right so it's not like these are the first apple apps to ever go freemium but there's a way to do it more tastefully i think and i just feel like the bar for feet like the stock image library thing is like a cool thing and you can understand why it's not free right because they have to get licenses you know they presumably going to update it over time with more content but just you know maybe don't put it front and center in the menu in the toolbar by default or like yeah don't highlight in purple or what i kind of hoped it would work is it's highlighting purple because it's a new feature and then you like use it once and the highlight goes away right to just to indicate to you where something new but no the highlight's just there permanently but and also if you have like um you know from like the template browser when you make a new document they have like premium templates so now you have to scroll past the premium templates if you don't subscribe right to get to the basic things i think there's better there's more tasteful ways to execute it than how it's quite done in this first release where it feels quite heavy-handed and i was a big proponent of the iWork suite through university i did everything in pages right i used pages for all my essays all my dissertation stuff everything i did in pages and it pages has i think is quite a competitive app it's not feature for feature with microsoft of office right with word but it's pretty close and it came for free and it had great um compatibility across mac ipad iphone and you could like use it on the on you know take notes on your ipad when your lecture come home and finish editing the document on your mac and stuff um all for free and it was so easy to like when you were trying to sell not you know i mean like advertise the mac to other people it's like well look you get pages king numbers built in for free you don't have to worry about a presentation app and it's built by and designed by apple ongoing continuous updates that keep it to date with the system. What a great perk of macOS, right? Now it's like, well, yeah, they are for free and you do get a word editor, but maybe in the future, half the features you have to pay extra for. Like when it's quote unquote, just some templates and the creator hub and an image generator, you can maybe like tick it off, but it's a slippery slope, isn't it? It's like, is every single new feature of the iWork app is going to be a quote unquote, create a studio exclusive. Then it's going to go in a step too far. some of the ai stuff they do in like numbers is like an easy way to make formula right so you can like type in a prompt and it will make the formula for you in i don't think it's too far-fetched to say that that should just be like a feature of numbers and if you didn't have the creative studio services revenue incentive they would have just been like here's the new version numbers and look we've got this great feature where they on device it generates a formula for you like you get what i'm saying right like some of these things don't feel quite at the bar of you should pay 12.99 a month for them. Especially if you're not interested in video editing or photography, like you say, there isn't a way to pay for them individually. There isn't a way to pay them separately. They're all kind of blocked into these one things. And when you do buy it, like I bought the trial through the Pages app. It then shows you this list of like 10 other apps that are in the Creative Studio bundle, Logic, Final Cut, Motion, Compressor, Mainstage. And it's like Pixelmator. And it's like, do you want to install these as well now that you can and like no like i just don't use them enough you know like i use pixel meter pages and that's about it really in my day-to-day job now when i was at university i always use keynote a lot because you do like presentations and group group work right um but i don't edit a lot of video really i use imovie to edit video and i don't do any audio editing so for me let's say i'm coming from the university's perspective i've got my macbook air for uni and I've gone to uni and I'm like, well, now the Word editor that I want to use because it came built in with the system and it's all nice and up to date, I'm not going to pay $12.99. Now, because I was in university, you could have got the education prices which is what, $2.99? So I guess the price is lower, but still it's like, it's not as good of a proposition. I kind of feel like it might have been a smarter choice for them to say, this is the Creative Studio. It doesn't include any of the iWork apps and the iWork apps are like, so it's like a $9.99 a month subscription for the creator apps. The iWork apps remain free and maybe some of the bonuses come with like Apple One or some other subscription. It just kind of feels a bit hackneyed shoving the iWork apps in with Logic and Final Cut as subscriptions. You know what I mean? Yeah, because I don't think we're in the minority where we would or we do use pages, numbers and keynotes for certain things and would maybe consider subscribing to get the AI features and premium features in those apps but we don't use Final Cut and Logic enough to justify the full subscription. It's a shoehorned bundle, I think is the best way to say it. Yeah, and it's also kind of weird how it breaks down. So Pages Keynote numbers are freemium, right? You can get them for free. And then if you get the subscription, you get some extra features. Logic and Final Cut are, they're in the subscription, but alternatively, you can buy them one time as a one-time purchase, right? But it's unclear to me whether the one-time purchase option will continue to get all the same features that subscription does it's impossible to tell for final cut right now it seems to be parity right and they have ai features in final cut like the transcription stuff that does apply to both right so right now you get them all for free or not all for free but like always part of the one-time purchase right you don't have to get the subscription but then you look at pixel mayor pixel mayor is also available as a one-time purchase in the app store still but it is not getting any updates seemingly apple says it will continue to get free updates but as far as i can tell that means like bug fixes because what shipped this week is the creator studio version is the new one with the liquid glass update for the os and it's got like the warp features we spoke about before um but they the the non uh subscription version of pixel meter is unchanged it has the old design not liquid glass it doesn't get the warp feature am i like that's the version i paid for is it just not going to get any more updates at all i that would seem to be what is suggested by the current state of things and i think part of this is is that in order to bring the full pixel meter pro experience to the ipad they re-architected the mac version and made it a universal binary so it's mac and ipad now so the standalone individual purchase of Pixelmator Pro is still the old binary and I think in Apple's eyes they aren't able to justify right now keeping both of those separate architected versions of Pixelmator Pro updated I'm not saying that's the right decision I think it's actually really bad that Apple is selling something for $50 that based on what we know right now is never going to get a proper new feature it's never going to get liquid glass integration which is the system theme right? I think it was you who said this to me. Apple rolled out a major liquid glass redesign to all of its platforms and is now paywalling liquid glass updates to their own apps, which is not good. Yeah, I didn't say that, but I mean that's true. At least that's what they're doing in Pixelmator Pro. It's very odd because like in other years, all of Apple's app would get like a liquid glass update a couple of months after the OS got updated and that would be that, right? It wouldn't be like this completely separate experience. And I could even understand them saying you know because they just acquired pixel meter last year right or the year before time's a weird thing i could understand them incorporating it into a bundle a subscription bundle and say here's the direction of pixel meter pro going forward it's going to be it's going to be part of creative studio it costs you 12.99 a month but if you're going to do that don't get keep the one-time option around if you're not going to update it like if you're going to say you're going to keep a one-time option around it should be parity feature wise with the subscription version at least for the stuff that doesn't have a server component right if you want to i understand if you don't want to give the create hub away to a one-time purchase customer that's fine but the liquid glass update of pixelator pro should be available to the one-time purchase people that just feels fair what they could have done is also done a migration where you say you know all those people who have had pixelator pro and paid for it once for 10 years ago because it was a one-time purchase only app well we'll give you five years free of creator studio right and then you have to subscribe and going forward pixelator pro is subscription option would I be a bit uh annoyed about that a little bit I'd be because I'd be uh yes but at least I understand it right that's the new direction for the business what I think is unfair is still offering a one-time purchase version of Pixieman Pro in the app store but it seems to be dead like like why is it still there that's what I don't really understand um so I feel like that's a bad a bad situation they've got themselves into and they should really like clean it up if you're going to go subscription for this stuff go for it right don be confident enough to tell people Like what do they evangelize to third developers They don tell third developers to have two separate versions of their apps in the app store One a subscription version one a one only option They just tell you just go to the subscription and sort out your business model going forward. And most apps have done that, right? So I don't really understand what the hesitation is for their own first-party stuff. I think to zoom out though, I think Creator Studio is a pretty compelling bundle in terms of the pricing to the $13 or $129 per year, or especially the $3 per month or $30 a year for students. If you need all of these apps or most of these apps, then it's a very compelling bundle, like the ability, especially if you're new or just want to try something out, the ability to have access to these apps for just $13, even if it kind of plays into the subscription fatigue problem a little bit my biggest problem with this though and i think we talked about this when creator studio was first announced though it's pixelmator pro on ipad only being available as part of this that is my biggest disappointment but overall i think this is a compelling option so do you think they should have like a a non-1299 subscription to get pixelmator pro or do you think it should be one-time purchase only like what do you want them to be either one i mean before if If you think about the iPad before this, you had Logic. Because equally Final Cut and Logic used to be available for what, $4.99 each? Separately, yeah. On the iPad? Yeah. And now it's $12.99. Taking away those individual options and then launching Pixelmator Pro without an individual option on iPad is just a weird choice. And it goes kind of back to the iWork thing where there should be, if you're going to charge for iWork, there should be an independent version of iWork, not included in Creator Studio. To get Apple's creative apps on iPad, I don't think you should have to pay for the full bundle. especially if you're someone who only does creative work on the iPad. You don't need Motion, Compressor, or Mainstage because those aren't available on the iPad. You just need the three apps that Apple has for iPad. Some sort of either standalone subscription option for those apps or like an iPad-centric Creator Studio bundle would make more sense. So that's some weirdness with the kind of business model offering of it. You also need them to commit, right? if you're going to do a subscription-based platform, you need continuous updates on a decent ongoing basis. We have to wait and see whether they do that or not. One of the things that Stephen Robles showed in his YouTube videos, he does his thumbnails through Pixelmator on the Mac, and now it's on the iPad. It's like, well, you can open the same documents on your iPad. You can open your Mac. He opened one of his thumbnails, and it said, this file is too big. You've got to resize it to open it on the iPad. Why? It was an iPad Pro, right? So it's got the same chip in it as the Mac. would have that could open it perfectly fine but for some reason there's some sort of like software limit on the iPad uh which is silly so that kind of stuff they need to clean up I've seen a lot of comparisons to the Adobe suite where it's like the Apple Creator Studio is only $12.99 and Adobe is like $60 a month it's like yeah but the Adobe apps also have a lot more features to them in a lot of the comparisons right like Illustrator is more fully featured than Pixelmator is um logically like you know the InDesign is more fully featured than Pages is like for like, you are probably, the Adobe apps are more mature. All the company did at Adobe was make these apps, right? For the Apple apps and the creation, a lot of them are like side projects that they've like now grouped together. And maybe on an ongoing basis, they'll commit more to them. But so far that isn't really the case. So the pricing, if you want to use the whole bundle, is not too bad, I think at $12.99. But like you say, a lot of people aren't going to want to use the whole bundle. They only want like one or two. And the same problem with that applies to Adobe too, where if you only want Photoshop or you only want Illustrator, you generally have to pay for a bundle that includes a bunch of crap that you don't want that's more expensive. That is how subscription bundles work nowadays. Yeah. And then I use Pixel My Air all the time, right? Right now, I'm not very incentivized to be subscribed if I wanted to because I don't think the Liquid Glass update of Pixel My Play looks very good. The controls are quite bulbous. The things that used to be like docked little toolbars are now floating pallets and they've got massive blur effects from the liquid glass stuff. And like when you're doing like photo image editing, you kind of want to be more distraction free on the Chrome. And the liquid glass update is kind of in your face. So I'm not a huge fan of how it looks. So even if I'd got the update for free, I don't know if I'd be like effusively recommending it. Also the Pixelmator Pro new version uses that kind of like red tint color thing. That's like the new action color for the app. Again, quite in your face, quite overbearing. i feel like the older design of pixelmator pro was more professional more refined uh so even if i i mean i am right now on the one-time only version of pixelmator i'm i'm not going to renew the studio trial um right now because i don't really see why i would but like i almost feel like it made pixelmator pro slightly worse in this transition as it is right now which is a bit unfortunate um but you know it's only the first version i'll keep iterating on it and then the other criticism i had just testing around the creator hub which is the stock content library thing you try and use that on my mac at least on my member pro it is super laggy right if i paid 12.99 a month to access stock image assets it should be like a premium experience this you open this floating window in pages and you like click on a category and scroll the images and it's like the frame rate just drops to the floor and i just it's not not good enough it's not good enough it was free it's not good enough that that's a feature that's behind a payable um so the quality bar needs to be a bit higher i think um like the concept of apple doing a subscription creative studio thing bundle is fine but you still got to make the good quality products inside of it you know and don't think they're quite there with the first release compounded with the weirdness of well what if only use one of the apps and then it's like well i don't know what you should do because even if the new version of Pixelmator Pro was like fantastic, I don't know if I'd want to pay $12.99 a month for it. Maybe that's me being too stingy, I don't know. But it feels like quite a high price for a single application. So at least as it stands right now, I won't be renewing the Creative Studio bundle. But I'm not like completely offended that it exists, but as always, it comes down to implementation and there's definitely areas for them to work on. You mentioned Apple's commitment to this And you would think that now having a $13 a month subscription, they will be incentivized to roll out new features and roll out updates to support system features. I think one example of this is background tasks on iPad, which came with iPadOS 26. So Apple launched iPadOS 26 in September, right? Final Cut Pro has been available on the iPad as a separate subscription, was available by itself in September. but it did not add background tasks until just now with the Creator Studio updates this week. I think stuff like that going forward, especially with Creator Studio now being a thing, stuff like that is just unacceptable. If you're going to charge people for these apps every month, you need to support your own system features from day one. The optimistic take is that the reason Final Cut Pro didn't get background tasks in September is because they knew Creator Studio was coming and that going forward, they'll be better about that stuff. But people want new features from an Apple app when Apple updates are released. And that's something that they need to prove that they can do if they want people to stay committed to Creator Studio for $13 a month for the long term. Yeah, and even if you go back to the start of Final Cut Pro and iPad, it came out as a subscription. At the time we said, well, if you're going to make a subscription, you need to deliver regular updates to it. I think if you look at the two years of it being available, they did update it on a continuous basis but it wasn't it wasn't that frequent you know what I mean it wasn't that substantial I feel like they could have done more and they didn't Happy Hour This Week is sponsored by Quince check them out at quince.com slash happy hour all lowercase we're in the cold wintry period right now and if you're looking at upgrading your wardrobe make sure to start with pieces made to truly last season after season Quince brings together premium materials thoughtful design and enduring quality. That's all so you can stay warm, look sharp and feel your best. Choose from their range of Mongolian cashmere sweaters, stylish wool coats, leather and suede outerwear and more. And Quince partners directly with ethical factories and top artisans to cut out all the middlemen, making them able to deliver premium quality up to half the cost of other high-end brands. 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We knew an AirTag 2 was in the works, but we've known an AirTag 2 was in the works for over a year at this point, and then they just randomly released it on a Monday in January. And it's technically, sorry, we should clarify, it's not AirTag 2, AirTag 2nd generation. So that's a mouthful. It's AirTag 2. Yeah. I mean, I don't have a problem with them not, because officially they're not going to bump the number, right? So that's just like what they do with like, you know, Macs and other products, products for a while, where it's not MacBook 17, it's just MacBook, you know, and if you did brackets, it's X generation. I mean, think more recently, they do macbook pro like m4 right to like delineate which is fine but you're not going to do that with the air tag right they're not going to put an air tag bracket whatever chip it runs um but if they did it would be air tag bracket u2 right because it's the second generation u2 chip uh ultrawide band chip which they also have in the um newer generation iphone right so we knew for a while what the air tag 2 would comprise it would be let's give it the newer chip the newer ultra wideband chip which would give it more range and sure enough that's what they delivered because the headline features of air tag 2 are improved range and louder sound because they got a new speaker in it right and the actual physical dimensions of the air tag is the same as the first gen yeah so the three big things are the second generation ultra wideband chip and that specifically focuses on precision finding. So the feature where you're looking at the Find My app on your iPhone or now the Apple Watch, and it shows you your keys are 20 feet to your left and you can turn and follow an arrow on your screen and it gives you some nice haptic feedback and sound as you get closer. And with AirTag 2, Apple says that works one and a half times further away than AirTag 1. Then they say there's an upgraded Bluetooth chip for better range, but they don't give any actual numbers on that. So take their word for it. And then like you said, that the speaker Apple says is 50% louder than the original. One thing we were wondering is whether that speaker is also more tamper proof because one of the problems, as much good as Apple has done in improving the privacy and the security and the anti-stalking stuff around AirTag, they haven't been able to solve just the actual hardware problem, which is you can remove the speaker. And then like the feature that chirps when there's an AirTag near you that might be following you or tracking you. If a bad actor removes that speaker, then that negates that feature. With AirTag 2 teardown that was posted by Joseph Taylor on YouTube, they show that the speaker is redesigned and re-engineered and that the overall structure of the inside of AirTag 2 is re-engineered. And they say the speaker is glued in better than it was in AirTag 1. and it takes more tools and more effort to take it out, but ultimately you can still remove it. So better tamper-proof resistance, but not perfect, which I think in this form factor, that's all you can really ask for. Yeah, I mean, you're not going to be able to stop people from modifying them if they want to use them in more malicious ways. You can do the best you can with the product that you ship and they improved, like compared to the launch of AirTag back in what, 2021, they added a lot more like, for lack of a better word, anti-stalking features, right? And they make it ping more often and it pops up on other people's phones when it's following you. And they added support for Android, right? They did a common standard with Google. So you remember the first answer to the Android issue was you have to download the Apple Tracker Detect app on Android and like open it every now and again and see if there's any AirTags nearby. It didn't even work in the background. Well, you know, in the intervening years, they fixed that up. They have a proper protocol agreement with Google now. It's like an open standard. So, you know, Apple trackers and Google trackers can be detected by each other's brands without having to do anything special so that kind of stuff they've improved um i didn't really expect them to be able to do anything too crazy with the hardware itself like i think some people wanted them to like make a speaker that if it was detached from the rest of the pcb it would like turn the thing off and stuff but the problem with the airtag speaker is because it works by vibration as all speakers do but it like vibrates the outer casing of the airtag if you just put like a sellotape you know enough enough rounds of sellotape you can make the airtag speaker almost silent and there's no way that a thing that small can have like sensors to work out whether it's been tampered with enough it's just insane so they've done the best they can with what they've got um which is fine and you're never going to stop the bad actors from doing the bad things you can just do as much as you can um you can also by the way if you do want to be nefarious the air tag find my protocol has been like open sourced by other people and like crowdsource so you can make like a raspberry pi act as an air tag if you want to you know and have any any software design any physical hardware design you choose including no speaker at all on it so you know there's always ways around if you want to be if you want to be creepy but i think as the the out-of-the-box shipping experience they do a pretty good job um in some ways people complain they do too much of a good job because yeah you know a lot of people see these things and they want to put them on items that are going to get stolen apple will never tell you the air tags designed for theft uses um but people buy them for that and if you buy one and the thief's got on phone after a few hours it'll start beeping at you saying there's an unknown air tag tracking with you so you know the if you're using them for the legitimate purpose they're perfectly good if you try and use them outside of that whether it's from apple's policy or from just the limitations of the device like i see so many people put air tags on their pets oh yeah blake our dog has i'm looking at her right now she has an air tag on right and i'm not saying it's not not going to work but air tags are not designed for things that move right yeah the way that the find my network works is it triangulates based on bluetooth pings of other devices finding your tag and then it can put a spot on but that means if the dog is like running off in a park a it's probably gonna go to a part of the park where there's no apple devices nearby right now if it's a big open field and secondly even if there are devices nearby the the updates of the location are like five minutes behind there's a lag to them because of the way the system works the perfect system for air tags like if you've got a pair of keys you drop them on the floor they stay in the same physical location a few things pass by it pings up it shows on the map you go back and find it they're not really designed for like moving objects like animals um people use them for that fine but it's not really like the perfect design but they're meant for like keys bags suitcases right they're like the best use cases for air tags and the air tag one was great at it air tag two is even better i got mine on tuesday they announced on monday I ordered two and they came on Tuesday at first I was like have they sent me the first gen ones that were still in stock but no they sent me the second generation ones and it says the packaging looks almost the same but it does say AirTag second generation on the back and I can tell you immediately you can tell that the range is better oh yeah especially for precision finding so I did a bit more testing I live in like a you know two story house nothing crazy but my office is at like one end of the room and like the kitchen is like the diagonal end of the floor plan downstairs right so it's like the biggest diagonal distance you can get air tag one from my office the ping will connect but the sound is not really loud enough to be able to hear it from up here you have to like exit the room and go and walk a little bit and then you can hear it the airtag 2 the increased volume you can definitely hear it from up here so the speaker is louder and um i i think it connects slightly easier when you doing the pinging probably because the upgraded bluetooth chip um but the thing where the range really feels the difference is the precision finding with the first gen airtag the precision finding was a bit of a gimmicky thing that you do reuse in practice because the range of the prison finding was so short that at that point you could just like see it you know like you or you just make it it'd be so much quicker just to make it make a noise and then use your echolocation of your ears to go and find the item than look at the screen and do your left right navigation when you get to in about 10 feet of it because when you're further away it would say you know just far or weak signal keep moving around and it was quicker just to make it make a noise anyone who has the first in air tag has had this experience with air tag two i think it's actually um precision finding actually works in the way that you hope it would like you still have to be within a reasonable distance but from upstairs i turn on precision finding it it locks on it finds a signal and it shows me which direction to go with the air tag one it's just like weak signal far away keep moving around so let's say you lost an item in a library, right? Where you don't want to make a lot of noise. I actually think the precision finding would help you locate it in that situation where you probably couldn't get away with the AirTag one. Or if you live at home with a partner or something and you've left something in the bedroom, it's probably a bit more polite if you just did your find my thing with the precision finding rather than make it make a noise and maybe wake them up, right? So I actually think nowadays with the AirTag Gen 2, the precision finding will actually be used and it won't just be like a flashy demo. um i've definitely used it like i've definitely thought i would use this where i didn't really think that with the first gen one um just because the range if the range is bigger it immediately makes it more useful and like you get the little direction thing if you're on the second floor you stand on top of it it'll say the air tag's on a different floor to you so you know it's downstairs right otherwise you'd like follow down walk around it gives you a distance it gives you direction and as you get closer and closer it starts vibrating and it says it's now one feet your way and and there it is so i think the default scenario would still be to make it make a noise because it's just you know humans are really good at hearing where sounds are coming from but there's definitely situations where in the past i can think back and i'm like even if you're at like a busy party sometimes the pinging you can't hear it right because it's just over overshadowed by all the other hubbub of voices in the room with precision finding if you've lost something in the room now you're 100 it's going to tell you which direction to walk in and find it down. So I think it's a big step up and it kind of fulfills the promise of the original with a relatively understated update, right? But when the AirTag itself is quite a simple device. So if you make it have better range and a louder speaker, you're kind of improving the main points of the thing. So I, and it's the same price as the previous one, right? 29 for one or four pack for $99. So I give it two thumbs up. I was waiting this entire year of the rumors of the AirTag 2 to buy some more and I got the opportunity. I bought two more. uh they'll be used on a suitcase and a backpack and i have nothing really to complain about the only thing that's slightly odd is that one of the promised features of this gen is that the ultra wideband precision finding works with the apple watch now where it never used to before um i was a little disappointed when i tried this uh the biggest issue is that you don't actually get to the precision finding experience from through the app on the watch so the watch has a find items app right a dedicated app for the items but it hasn't been updated to show this feature so the only thing you can do from inside the find items app is make it make a noise or show the directions on a map for precision finding you have to make a control center widget oh that's weird like why but no the official instructions on the apple support page are you know go into control center go press edit go press add scroll all the way down find the find air tag option then close your air tag and then save it and when you open it from the control center it brings you to the precision finding experience um if you've got multiple of them it's then also just annoying because you've got to have like six icons in your control center on your watch just for when you want to do a precision finding thing and then you've got to figure out which one's which like overly, why is it not in the app? Befuddles the mind. Like, if you're going to update it to do it, do it in the Find Items app, right? When you do Find My, when you do precision finding on the iPhone, you don't have to go to like the fourth home screen. You just go in the Find My app and you find, you know, you click on the accessory and you click Find Nearby. But for the watch thing, there must have been some weird like technical thing where they just couldn't get it done in time for this release. So the official instructions are you have to make a control center widget. Which is just, I don't think you'd ever think to do that as a normal person unless you look up how to do it in the first place. So that was stupid. And then secondly, even if I did go through the rigmarole of making the control center widget, I think the precision finding range on the watch is not as good as the phone. Even though it's the same chip. Even though same chip, it seemed a bit less accurate. I had to like fiddle about with it more. It said that the tag was 40 feet away on the watch when the phone would say it's 30 feet away and the phone was definitely more accurate. um i don't know the explanation for this i just don't think the um i just don't think the i just have to assume the antenna's not as big on the watch compared to the phone um so would i use precision finding on the air tag too definitely would i use it on the watch uh probably not going to i mean i guess if you don't have your phone to hand it's an option but i think i probably i think that's what i'd turn to first i'd just do it on the phone like even if my phone was across the room it's probably more convenient to go and get the phone to then find the item than it is to like open it up on the watch and like stare at the little screen there um but if you're if you're out and about i guess you haven't taken your phone with you but you've just brought like your car keys and your watch and you're on a run and you drop your keys maybe then it comes in handy um but that was the that was kind of my conclusion on on the air tag too so yeah thumbs up but the precision finding the watch thing is a bit silly in the way it's done unlike you or I guess like you, I was supposed to get my AirTag on Tuesday and it has not shown up yet. Thanks to, I guess, all of the snow that we've gotten here in the most of the United States this week. FedEx is struggling. My AirTag 2 has been sitting in Memphis, Tennessee since Tuesday. Allegedly, it might come today, but I don't know for sure. But I'm taking your word for it that it's a worthwhile update. And I mean, AirTag is such a understated product. I think it does what it does really well. You pointed out the biggest limitation of the first generation one was the kind of gimmicky precision finding feature. And it sounds like based on what you've said and based on what other people have said, AirTag 2 is a legitimate update in that category. And it's one of the things, it's one of the products where you'll notice the improvements in a time of stress or anxiety when you've lost your keys, when you've lost your backpack. And that's, I think Apple, I think that's a good indication of how understated AirTag is so I'm excited to get mine I'll put probably put one in my backpack one on my suitcase when I travel I have to decide if I'm going to update Blake's AirTag or not I don't know if I can justify that but yeah I don't know if I'd like replace like if I already had AirTags in my backpack and suitcase I don't know if I'd go my way to buy AirTag 2 and like change them out um but I just knew I've been waiting for a year because I knew there were other things I wanted to put an AirTag on and I was like I'm waiting for the second gen when the second gen comes along i'm gonna do it and so i've done it so i'll be in a two new airtag one old airtag lifestyle and but it's not like the airtag 2 is great but it's not so compelling i need to throw away airtag one another airtag 2 to like put on my keys or whatever and you mentioned it but it's the same physical size so all of your if you have extra accessories or you just want to buy something cheap on amazon you can still buy all of the same accessories and use them with air tag too so that's nice but still no built-in like keyhole or anything so you still do need one of those accessories yeah in a perfect world they probably do like a range where you had like the air tag is now where it's as small as possible but it's just a ring and then they'd have a one that's a bit bigger but it's got a hole in it so you don't have to buy like a separate accessories to plonk it on something um which is more like what tile and stuff do right they have like a square one that has like a keyhole attachment already integrated into it um so that's maybe a product direction they can go in but even as just as it is it's good enough the credit card shaped ones are really popular from third party i think nomad just released one and there are others but i know that form factor is super popular yeah i use a switchbot one yes that's me at one time and there's a review up on the site you want to read more but they work well too and they're just long and thin ones that fit better in a wallet rather than like a you know the the air tag isn't big but it still makes a wallet bulge compared to a credit card shape so yeah There's definitely like product direction they could go in if they wanted to, but if this is all they're going to do, I'm still very happy. 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Thanks to Shopify for sponsoring the show. in his power on newsletter over the weekend mark german kind of had a bunch of details about everything that's changed and everything that's ongoing in apple's ai group and how plans have changed since since craig federighi and mike rockwell took over that group and john gianandria has been pushed out and is officially retiring this year i think the headline thing here for us is that Apple, German says, Apple appears to be less than a month away from unveiling the results of its partnership with Gemini. It is currently planning an announcement of the new Siri in the second half of February and it will give a demonstration of the functionality then. So originally we were thinking, what, like March, April time and now it seems to be February. It's, see, I wonder if they'll show it off in beta in February because we're expecting 26.4. So a beta launch in February, public beta released to everybody in late March or early April probably. What I want to know though and what Mark questions is whether this is like a major event like quote unquote quintessential Apple event or just something like briefings with the press. I think people would appreciate some sort of public event because they had a public event where they announced all of the features then failed to ship them. So I think to have another public event to actually show them off and say it's real it's coming you can try it today in beta that would probably go a long way towards helping some of the optics of this and to just show people a live demo that it works and not just privately to the press so then put the burden on the press to show the public that it works yeah but i mean if they're gonna say here's our features and it's in beta today then it doesn't matter so much about the accountability right because you can go and try it the problem with the wwc thing is that they were like this is coming and we'll be able to do this we'll be able to yeah and then it wasn't in the betas or anywhere close to the betas right um with this i feel like they could announce it any which way and as long as it says you know these features are available in beta with 26.4 available tuesday you know just give it a date within the same month people would be happy enough and they can then go and try the features and then find out if they're good or not because we haven't got to that step of the cycle Oh, yeah. We've got to ship the features then we can evaluate if they're actually any good or not. If they want to do an event thing, they definitely could. I mean, supposedly that smart display thing is coming out in the spring as well, right? But maybe it's going to be a thing where they announce 26.4 beta with like press briefing and then they do an event when it actually ships in like later in March maybe and then that's when they announce the hardware alongside it. I could see that. I could see them doing it either way. I don't think the issues of the delayed rollout probably have any impact on their decision making here. It's more a practical thing of, do we want to have a spring event for this stuff or do we just want to do a little video and a press release? They've taken their, I don't know what the expression is, but they've paid for their error, right? They've paid the press. They've apologized for it. You know, the last WWDC, Tim Cook even said, he was like, we're still working on it, right? You know, they've given a public apology for it. And now they can announce the features almost as if all that previous stuff didn't happen right they'll be like and look at what we can do right now in 26.4 and hopefully we can ask about when my grandmother's fly is to land uh because obviously now they've got the gemini model gives a lot more confidence and their ability to ship this but there's still other components in the problem right i mean the semantic index is supposed to like look at your device and collate all the information out of it but are they going to be able to find the right stuff from my email when like mail search is as buggy as it still is you know like i don't know about you but mail app search is not great oh it's terrible awful that's why i use mime stream messages search is a lot better mail search is like yeah you use mail stream i use messages i use apple mail and if if there really is a time when i have to find a really old email and the apple mail thing fails i go to the web mail and i go to like gmail and log in but most time you don't have to bother um but yeah if the semantic index is as good as the Apple Mail app is at searching, then it's not going to be very good. Hopefully, they've had two years to figure that stuff out, right? But I'm excited for these features. I think they're compelling. When they show them the time, they were compelling. It was mostly disappointing when they got delayed because they were the most interesting part of the original Apple Intelligence rollout. And we know they've now got a solid model behind them that can do a lot of this stuff and has the context that it needs. The personal context was the flashiest example, but equally, the on-screen action stuff and in-app awareness, screen awareness and in-app actions, that is pretty useful. Like if that works as advertised, you can be looking at like a note and say, you know, make a reminder for this and it can like pull out the text and change it to the reminders app So if they can pull that off in a good way even if it only for like select apps and not every single app on the system has been updated with the domains and the schema support and everything even if it's just for select apps that's a really nice step forward for the iphone um and it sets them up well for the rest of the year because remember that what's shipping in 26.4 is the older gemini model and then they're going to follow up with 27 where they're doing this more like overarching chatbot experience thing, which is using a model based off of the latest like Gemini 3 model. But for 26.4, it sounds like the objective is ship those things in 2024 that we didn't get to ship that time. The Gurman Report also has details on what he describes as projects from the Gianandria era that have now been scaled back since Rockwell and Federici took over. There was a fully revamped Safari browser built for the AI era that was designed to counter things from perplexity and open AI. There were planned features including assessing the trustworthiness of documents and data and cross-referencing information across multiple sources. That has reportedly been shelved. Apple had also envisioned a standalone chatbot-style experience for apps like Safari TV, Health, Music, and Podcasts. But now much of that is also in flux, and Apple has returned to the drawing board for the health-related AI features that we've talked about a whole bunch. The focus now is on, like you said, Mayo, taking that upgraded iOS 27 experience and bringing that to core apps and integrating it rather than what Mark describes as a patchwork of separate chatbots. Which is sensible, right? Because you want an integrated experience across the phone rather than, well, here's a chatbot for fitness and here's a thing where you can talk to health. And if you're going to do a system-wide chatbot, which obviously John, Gene, Andrea and Co as opposed to before, then it makes more sense to do it this way than to do like app-specific experiences. You still need app integrations, right? Which is kind of how Siri works today, right? Like it has integrations, all the apps and inside some apps, it does some suggestion stuff, but you still can talk to it overarching. It doesn't matter what app you're talking about. It can carry on. And it's a good example probably of the benefit of putting Federighi, giving Federighi oversight of a lot of this as Apple's head of software engineering, as the guy who's in charge of each of the annual iOS updates. Like putting him and Rockwell in charge gives them a more direct control over actual features that ship rather than having Gene Andrea off by himself. Coming up with things, then saying let's do X, Y, and Z and Federighi's team being responsible for integrating what JG's team had come up with. Everything's more... Well, you can see like the health team was thinking, you know, we need some more AI summaries of this data to compete better with Aura and Eko. And so they're working on that stuff. because there's no like overarching leader on like what we're going to do and direction. And the Siri team were kind of like trading war. The best thing about the failure of 2024 Apple intelligence release was that they actually got their teeth kicked in. And now they have like two people in charge, Rockwell and Federighi, who are very motivated to do this properly and not to have another embarrassment. And they're empowered by the resources to make this happen. And Mayo, you have in our note here that one thing you want Apple to focus on that I think hasn't been reported yet is how the chatbot experience, like the new Siri conversational chatbot experience should be synced across devices. Yes, yes. So we were talking about this a bit last week, how you can make your claims that there are better ways to express AI features than a text field, i.e. a chatbot. But what does the market have? It has a lot of textbooks and people like them. And one of the big reasons why ChatGPT is so popular, in my opinion, is that it has this continuity in that you can have a conversation on your phone, right, and it gets you some clever answers. But then a day later, you can log in on Chattapiti on your laptop and carry on. And it has the full conversation history synced across devices like a proper experience as a continuous assistant. One of the most frustrating things about Siri at the moment, even if you accept its limitations and what it can do, is that it's so siloed and like every device is separate. and so if you ask your you know something to your phone in the morning when you see your laptop laptop siri has no awareness of what you spoke to your phone about at all zero um and you can't pick up what you left off you can't come back another day sometimes with um chat gbt stuff i have like you know you have like a chat history if there's something you're talking about a week ago you can just scroll back a week click on it refresh your memory about what you looked up before and then ask follow-up questions and carry on like you left off there is nothing like that um with siri right And I really hope the new 27 Siri can deliver that. If they can do a chatbot thing, you really want the same chatbot conversations to be on your phone, on your Mac, on your iPad. So it doesn't matter which one you're asking, it can have like feature parity and pick up where you left off and come back to it later. And even, you know, now I'm really dreaming, but it'd be great if you could like carry on the conversation on the HomePods in your house or from your Apple Watch or the Apple TV. Like there's no reason why Siri should be like a separate thing, a separate instance and all these devices should be like one continuous flowing thing um but mark didn't really mention that in his report last week right uh but it doesn't mean it's not happening but i kind of hope that it is it sounds like in a lot of ways what you're asking for is maybe something i've mentioned that i think apple should do before which is a standalone chatbot app that would just record all of this in a single spot on your iphone your ipad your mac etc the home pod and the apple tv thing is another that's a whole other thing and i don't I think that's about as low down on Apple's priority list as you can get. Exactly. I do not expect that to happen, at least not this year, right? Clearly, they've been working really hard to sort this ship out, and the priority is the iPhone, right? So anything but the iPhone would be a bonus in my book. I don't even know if it will even ship on the Mac this year. Who knows? Because even the personal context questions you ask from 26.4 should ideally also work on the Mac and elsewhere. but yeah i'm not really counting on that happening um ship what they their first priority is ship what they promised to ship now they can actually do it because they've got a good enough model second priority is bring iphone ai up to scratch with or to par with the marketplace which means it's embarrassing that the system voice assistant is less capable than the system you can download from the app store for free so we're going to bring that up to par and give it some nice apple integration with the first party apps and the apps on your phone and give you access to some of the personal data that's the third-party apps have to go through hoops to access and make that easy accessible by the side button everything else every other platform much lower priority hopefully they'll get to it but i wouldn't like bet on it for the first version i think that if they can ship a good enough chatbot experience this year that's way better than maybe what we thought they'd be had to do a year ago you know i'm skeptical of what ios 27.0 will include though it's they're really pushing up between the the amount of time difference between 26.4 and 27 that's that's tight for them to just be finalizing 26.4 obviously yeah you have to assume there's teams working on both things but i'm thinking this chatbot integrated across the whole operating system experience that germans reported on is probably hopefully it's not 27.4 but probably 0.1 or 0.2 or maybe 0.3 yeah i mean german does counter by saying there isn't much else in 27 so maybe the engineering resources are like concentrated on this one project so it can still come out at the launch but i would not be surprised if it's like maybe i don't think they want to repeat the thing they did in 24 where they announce it and then nothing's there so maybe it'd be like in the betas of 27 over the summer but it's not like it's not shipping until 27.2 or something right so they can like dog food it a bit over the summer and then come out with it ideally before the end of 2026 i do think there is an urgency because the ai industry is not slowing down and so this is your year you know this is your year 18 month period to catch up you really need to catch up right you don't want to drag on and on and on because you at some point want to be leading the market again or at least trying to lead the market not just being in catch-up mode and so the gemini deal helps them accelerate the catch-up but you don't want to be always a year behind and laggy behind the other thing because that's a bad place to be so this is the year to catch up and impress and then next year maybe they can do some more like unique things because even the personal context thing right in 2024 that was pretty unique and it was a pretty cool proposition no one else had really promised they were going to do that you know google at the time hadn't promised to do that and then open ai didn't have any hardware but you know you fast forward to the end of 2026 google's shipping a similar personal context thing with gemini already in some capacity and more coming all the time. And by the end of this year, OpenAI might be making hardware. Do you know what I mean? So like, you don't have that much, you've got some leeway. And I've advocated for this since 2024. It was not essential that those things shipped in 2024 for the iPhone. And iPhone 7 has done great. So clearly it wasn't. But you don't have, you can't just sit on your laurels. And clearly that's not what's happening. So I think that's why you see this accelerated timeline is they're trying to get up to speed with everybody else as soon as they can, which is why they're pushing to get it out before the end of the year so that the year's coming they can focus on more ambitious things. Alongside the new AirTag this week, Apple announced its Black Unity Apple Watch Band, which it does every year. This year, it's a braided solo loop. Apple calls it the Apple Watch Unity Connection braided solo loop, and it honors Black History Month. And Apple says, celebrating the power of connection. It showcases colors of the Pan-African flag, and it's created by weaving recycled polyester yarn filaments around ultra-thin silicone threads with what Apple says is advanced precision braiding machinery. And Apple also reiterates that it's proud to support organizations that inspire connection and promote creativity. But what's interesting about this year's Black Unity Apple Watch Band announcement is that at least based on what we see right here in this press release, there's no new watch face and there's no new wallpaper for the iPhone, both of which have happened for the past few years alongside the watch band. yeah the band looks nice but it's kind of weird they haven't done a wallpaper thing or a watch face maybe they're still coming later but maybe they just decided we've done enough of them I guess how many different versions of a watch face on the same theme can you do like I guess you can't expect them to do one until the end of time so at some point you have to stop so maybe there'll be another one I never really used the Unity faces permanently but I did like some of them And the number one thing with watch faces is there just needs to be more in general, right? So if the Unity event thing was no excuse for them to make another one, I always welcome it with open arms. But in general, there should just be more watch faces in total. So it's kind of disappointing if now they're stopping doing the Unity ones. But yeah, the band itself looks great. I love the braided solo loop style in general and the way that the Pan-African flag colors here. It's always cool seeing how Apple weaves them together. and they had you know was it last year where they said like depending on the angle at which you looked at the band the colors would be different this year they say on closer look the band reveals multiple shades of red green and black for depth and vibrancy they always do really nice subtle touches with these bands and this one i think is is really cool and it's 99 and it's available to order today from apple's website and it's a braided solo loop so it's compatible with the series four or later the SE than all of the Apple Watch Ultras. Finally this week, in a support document, Apple announced a new feature that's coming to, or that's available in iOS 26.3, and it's called Limit Precise Location. And I think there are a few things that are worth calling out here. The feature itself, what Apple says is it's allowed, it allows you to limit some information that cellular networks, so your carrier, can use to determine your location. So for example, cellular networks might only be able to determine a less precise location like the neighborhood where your device is located, rather than the actual address of where your device is locating. It doesn't impact things like signal quality or user experience or Find My or any of that. It's just the location data shared with your carrier. It also doesn't affect location data shared with emergency responders if you call 911. But where it gets interesting is what Apple says you need to use this feature. And they say it's compatible with the iPhone Air, the iPhone 16e, or the M5 iPad Pro. When I first read this support document, I was like, hmm, that's a really weird collection of devices. And then it hit me. All of those three devices are powered by Apple's own modem, not a modem from Qualcomm. The iPhone 16e is the C1, and then the iPhone Air and the iPad Pro are the C1X. so this is clearly some sort of feature that was only made possible by apple having complete control over the modem which i think is a good sign of things to come like it's another example of them controlling the hardware and the software and being able to do things that they wouldn't otherwise be able to do when limited by using third-party partners yeah and it basically brings the cellular carrier sharing location to parity with the location permissions you can choose for third-party apps, right? Because if you go into specific location settings, you can turn on or off precise location for a given app, and it would do the same thing, whereas if you turn it off, it will give you a vague neighborhood, whereas if it's on, they can get within five meters your current address. And obviously, for the third-party apps, apple controls location services on the phone through access to the gps and the wi-fi triangulation so they can manage that but i guess the mobile cellular protocol is embezzled somewhere in the modem right so you need a apple hardware modem to be offered that same feature to carrier exposure and this is clearly what they've done here because like you say the iphone air 16e and the ip pro they're all the C1 or C1X modem phones, the Apple modems. So this is probably something they've really wanted to do for years or something. And maybe they even begged Qualcomm to support it in the modem and they just refused. And now they actually control it so they can offer some unique functionality. The other weird thing is that it's pretty limited in terms of carrier support. So there's Telecom in Germany, EE and BT in the United Kingdom. Thailand is AIS in True and then the United States is only Boost Mobile. I don't understand those limitations or what's stopping Apple from doing this on every carrier, but hopefully it's something that expands, especially the bigger guys in the United States. There's probably something where precise location helps the carriers route which mass you're talking to or doing prediction analytics on which mass are going to be available and stuff. There probably is reasons for it, and by default it's easy for the car say no we're just not going to participate um because i presume if they if like apple did this unilaterally without their involvement it might be like oh your actual experience connecting to account to connecting to mobile data is worse because like the network doesn't know how to handle it properly that's my assumption on why it's not just like applied across the board and it requires some sort of at least them to like say hey carrier can you can you be okay if this phone doesn't tell you what street you're on but only roughly like a postcode um so they probably have to get like sign off or something um because as much as apple loves control the phone still has to comply with the protocols right to talk to the self to the carriers to the gps network not gps you know i mean the gm g what am i trying to say gmc or what gmt not gmt you know what i mean but yeah the gm what is it now it's gonna The standard, the mobile data standard thing, whatever it's called. Yeah. Whatever that is, I'm trying to remember. GSM, I think is GSM. GSMA? GSMA? GSMA sounds about right, yeah. They have to comply to those rules to get licensed and to be able to work. So I can understand why it's not available worldwide immediately, but hopefully, yeah, they can increase the carrier support over time. Yeah, I think it's just a good sign of things to come. Anytime Apple can control the whole experience, they do cool things, and now that they have the C1, and then the N1 for the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and Thread and that stuff, I think going forward, hopefully we'll see them take advantage of what that enables from a software perspective. All right, I think that does it for this week. You can find us on Apple Podcasts where you can leave a rating and a review. You can find an ad-free version of the show at 9to5mac.com slash join. And remember, this is your last chance to save 26% on the annual plans. Send us feedback. happyhour at 9to5mac.com. I am on threads and elsewhere at Chance H. Miller. And Mayo, what about you? At BZMA. All right. Thanks, Mayo. Bye-bye.