March 4's Apple Experience, color MacBooks, and iOS 26.4 on the AppleInsider Podcast

Hello, I'm William Gallagher. Welcome to the Apple Insider podcast, which this week is sponsored by Tempo, Nordsteller and Claude by Anthropic. And I'm joined as ever by Wesley Hilliard in a week where we have a lot to look forward to, at least if leaks is to be believed, and where if iOS 26.4, OK, hasn't brought us a new Siri yet. It has brought us a lot. Now, this brings up something else just before we go into the news of the week, as I'm certain you remember. Siri wasn't originally invented by Apple. It was acquired about 11 billion years ago, something like that. And so much of what we think of as Apple or Apple invented was just brought in like this. So your idea this week apple inside plus is going to be all about acquisitions but what are you thinking about that is it important to apple or just more corporate buying trivial stuff i think we'll talk about just what do they buy how much do they buy how much do they spend uh recently they purchased a company that was one of their biggest acquisitions in history and nobody's really like there was a brief discussion i think about it in our space and they moved on because it wasn't this well-known brand. It wasn't Beats by Dre. It was this AI chatting thing. And it just went by the wayside because, I mean, $3 billion in 2014 to buy Beats was a big deal because it was their biggest acquisition and a big chunk of money for the company. And today, that's a drop in the bucket in such a way that's kind of incredible. They have trillions at this point. They can just spend however they feel like so a couple billions not a big deal you know i can't even remember which company they just bought that's how it went by you're absolutely right um i should say apple insider plus it's the ad free and expended version of this podcast if you haven't already you can join us via apple podcast subscriptions or patreon and if you have already signed up well i knew i liked you but now we're shockingly near we're kind of in sight of the end of february already but that does mean we're waiting for march and that does mean we're waiting for the march the fourth if it was event i was going to say but it's not an event whereas it's an experience what is an apple experience that we're getting in march i think everyone got a little over their skis here um they saw the apple logo from a email that was not made public because normally if it's an event it lands in everyone's inbox like it maybe starts as just press uh invites and you'll get like a random person sharing it on social media saying i got the invite that's how it starts and then everyone gets it this is not that you literally got invited one out of 100 people probably press only uh youtubers mostly this was actually we've we've discovered since this went out this is mostly video production people so that i have and now we have an announcement from ios 26.4 about video podcasts uh i don't i don't know people jumped all over this they said oh this is iphone 17e and ipad with uh a18 uh processor and the new macbook and apple car and uh we're going to the moon right so every dream you could ever label this with has been labeled with it's probably a media event explaining what video podcasts are do you know i actually i missed the fact that it was invitation only like that i just didn't really register that's like the apple creator studio uh experience of a few weeks ago and what i thought notable about that is that one person put up the fact they've been invited just one and the entirety of social media at least one that i saw do you see more well that yeah uh well more people that let me say it again these kinds of things have been happening more frequently for whatever reason um apple creator studio was one uh there was this like camping trip that they did with a bunch of people uh with apple watch um i don't know they're having some fun they must have uh they must have got a new pr person somewhere that's you know trying to drum up um people in social media tiktok and youtube video is increasingly becoming more and more important especially since um i guess it's easier to see a person and see that they're real versus see text and wonder if it was written by AI. It's just in this world that we live in, I think, funny enough, audio and video is just becoming so much more important. Considering we just came from decades of television, it's funny that this is where we're landing. And Apple obviously has been targeting those people more and more frequently versus your standard like editorials from big publications. So I think it's going to be really disappointing for all these people who are hyping this thing up. Can I just say at this point, Apple, if you should happen to ever listen, or you've got a great PR service that scans everything. I'm a YouTuber. I use Apple gear. Hello. Also, I'm in the UK. And one of these events is in that. I'm starting to whine. Okay. I just I really fancy what you said there about Apple Watch I like the idea of going hiking with a watch instead of sitting at a desk editing Final Cut Pro all the time yeah yeah I won't say that these don't sound interesting like they it would be kind of fun it would probably be very cheesy and you'd get like a water bottle with an Apple logo on it out of it but um like I'm embarrassed to say I'd be up for that well they have they the guy who I saw on social media get invited to I forget what this was for it might have been Creative Studio but it was one of those Apple things. And he just got invited and he showed himself in the hotel room. And in the hotel, Apple had planted a backpack full of little goodies. And I'm like, yeah, sure. I'll do that. Why not? Like that's, that's, that's cute, but it, it's complicated. So this can be a lot of things. We have so many wishlists. We have, you know, John Gruber literally saying total guesswork. He said it in the post, and then every publication on Earth said, Apple might be doing a five-day reveal cycle that ends with an experience. It was speculation, and he even admitted it was speculation. Let's all relax, okay? Yes, it can also be all of these things. We could get the iPhone 17e. We could get the iPad all announced over press releases in the next couple of weeks. and this little get-together could promote those items while simultaneously promoting other things. It could be for this video podcast thing, which is what I'm leaning towards, or it could be about the upcoming Apple intelligence updates where they finally get people to have a hands-on. This ties to a wider story in our space. Are you aware that these AI companies have been paying youtubers thousands and tens of thousands of dollars to heavily promote ai on their channels can i just say at this point ai companies i'm a youtuber i mean you know actually i did not know that and oh that's disappointing i mean not surprising but disappointing yeah is they're all you know ironically at least yeah these are medium uh so many years ago um i think it was microsoft um i'll edit that out if i'm wrong uh try to promote and maybe a version of internet explorer i i could be way off piece tip but there was a thing where they paid people let's say a company in case i'm wrong paid uh people on twitter and things and Facebook bloggers, that's the word I'm looking for, to mention whatever this product was. And the giant majority of people mentioned it in order to get the money, but explicitly said, we have been paid to do this. And then you'd be scrolling through all of these, and some were funny, some were just flat reportage, I suppose. And then you'd get somebody who would tweet an incredibly praising thing. And because you'd seen the thread, you knew this was a lie and that meant this person had been bought and was hiding it and therefore why would you ever pay any attention to them right yeah you get they got they got fifty dollars up front or something but then they immediately lost their whole reputation and i can't remember who they are i never went back to them so if people are accepting money for ai i hope they're accepting a lot of it apparently it's a lot um and again these these are um not people you've heard of like if it was anyone reputable we would have it would have been all over our spaces it's just uh these medium-sized um channels are you know i don't know mommy blogs and stuff are being paid a lot of money to say that their life was changed by some ai tool or whatever it's very very silly but apple you know has some skin in the game i could see them using these experiences as an opportunity to say hey we have this these tools and we'll get to ios 26.4 in a minute and discuss more about what's coming and what was in the beta and what wasn't but just this march 4th thing i really want to emphasize it's probably going to be something silly and everyone's going to be very upset about it um because they've again they've put everything on this they've all the chips are on the table they're betting everything it's going to be the most amazing secret of it's not an event i i would be surprised if we get a video out of it um it's it's a media experience and where most likely what's going to happen is uh these youtubers are going to get to interview uh craig federighi um and ask him about his conditioner use and that's going to be like the whole thing uh while they talk about like how cool the iphone 17e is this year it's just let's take a let's let's pace it out but what do you think about this um macbook that's being rumored that's definitely coming i'm not saying it's not it's just you know i wouldn't peg it on this little march 4th thing this is a macbook that's in different colors that's all i've gathered and uh if i were in the market for macbook i would be very excited about this is there anything more than the colors though uh iphone processor and oh this one sorry the um you know nearly said cheap macbook this is apple what am i talking about they less costly than other things uh macbook um i didn't appreciate that that was back in the air we expecting that soon oh yeah any day uh 649 to 699 price range somewhere in there uh education probably gets closer to the 500 maybe 599 range definitely going to be a huge hit considering the MacBook Air is the most popular product Apple sells other than the iPhone and it's $9.99 so this drop in price it being a 13-ish inch product it's not we're not bringing back the magical 12 inch I wish we were that's a beautiful product and design it would be really cool if it was somewhere in that range maybe smaller than a MacBook Air because, again, that was so cool. I owned one for 15 minutes and sold it because it basically caught on fire every time you tried to go to Safari and ran out of battery life in about eight minutes. But otherwise, it was so adorable. I could just stare at it all day. Well, I typed on one for a minute and a half and thought it was really cute and regretted handing it back to a producer I was working with who, to this day, I think is still using it. So, okay. that processor the it was an m intel m chip but that meant mobile um back in the day and it was bad it was just really bad um otherwise great machine just not this if it had apple silicon oh perfect and that's kind of what we're getting here inexpensive probably i doubt we're going to get back to the old design but it um like we're not going to suddenly go back to it being tapered but i think it'll be slightly different from maybe the macbook air in some ways um maybe a little chunkier in some ways because again it's supposed to be budget they're not gonna make it as sleek but uh the display obviously will still be retina the differentiators will be there uh but the price is the selling point and like you said we are expecting very faint colors on some aluminum here but it will be a premium like unibody design like it's not like they're going to make it out of plastic um and it'll be close to the mac mini in price i have an old uh tapered macbook air and intel one that i keep meaning to sort of repurpose as just a writing machine you know one project one macbook keep it in the corner and do that stuff uh it's a kind of rose gold thing oh no no actually i think that's the official word but really pink is the answer i can't say pink's a color that i would have gone for i'm more kind of blue sort of person but it looks really good and it's very distinctive i like colors yeah yeah it the rumors are getting silly because it's close but uh this is it's definitely a product that is a 2026 product maybe even a spring 2026 product but um more definitively iphone 17e iPad with A18 and Apple Intelligence, iPad Air with M4. Those are absolutely happening. And then we're going to get the M5 Pro, M5 Max, MacBook Pros relatively soon after probably April, May, or just in time for WWDC, that kind of stuff. I was going to ask you about the iPhone 17e, because you just said they're an absolutely definitely happening. And I realize the basis of that? Is there a possibility that actually there won't be an E iPhone this year at all? Unlike the iPhone Fold, there's evidence that the iPhone 17 E exists and is ready to go. Okay. Yeah. See, it's always so funny to me that we're still talking about the iPhone Fold as if it's absolutely coming and we haven't even seen a mold yet. We're at the end of February, right? Like, it feels like it's not happening. I mean, again, I'm happy to be wrong here, but come on, guys. Something would have leaked by now other than Jon Prosser saying that it's going to be a folding iPhone or something. I don't know. Anyway. Anyway, the 17E has been basically every leaker, big and small, supply chain. It's going to have Dynamic Island. They're bringing back MagSafe because that was stupid the first time around. It's going to have the N-series networking chip and another C modem, maybe a C2, maybe a C1, because, again, inexpensive and C1 works fine. um c1x is a possibility but again budget phone so maybe not the x anyway predictable phone except you're certain magsafe is coming and i'm thinking there's got to be some daylight between the 17e and the rest of the 17 range and that's a key difference well it's one of those things like promotion that i think once once you've had it it's a key difference unlike the 16e which I maybe I'm confusing this but wasn't the 17 the first series of phones that all had promotion yes it was so the 17e will not have promotion there will be differentiators it's going to have a core taken out of the processor to make sure that it's also differentiated on performance and it's less expensive more yield right when you take a core out like that um it is it's going to have its differentiators right it's going to have the slow usbc port it's going to have the old display um but basically i think we're getting an iphone 14 i want whatever one had the dynamic island first that was basically what we getting here it doesn sound to me like um any of these things are things that the majority of people who don follow this stuff or haven had iPhones or things would even notice This is not for us, not even in the slightest. No, absolutely. It's just, I think there's a risk that if it has all of these things, MagSafe in particular, that this means that one isn't for us, but say the iPhone 17 stops being for us, because the 17e is at least good enough. Apple's okay with that, because the one thing that Apple has always stood by is if anyone's going to cannibalize their sales, it's going to be them. um 17e is a price point above everything else again it sells in places like the united states but it's not for that it's for other markets it can come in way less expensive in india or china or you know other markets outside of the united states it can compete with those much more inexpensive Android phones. And it seems to be a proven formula. We don't have sales numbers and it's not like, you know, there's evidence that there's a million 16 E's out on the market or something, but it looks like a device that fits in the lineup where they want it to. And that's at the bottom. And this is what's getting even weirder. There's now a 16 E that's a year old. It's going to drop in price. It's going to get removed from Apple's website. It's going to be even more affordable to get into Apple's ecosystem on a relatively new chipset, relatively new spec line. That brown market, that gray market that is just outside of Apple's Apple store, right? So the used refurbished market is about to get much more appealing because last year's model, that was, what is the price of these guys? I forget, but like it's going to shave off $200 from that and be that much easier to get. That's the purpose of these devices. That number Apple's been reporting lately uh the install base this is what's right this is the driver behind that like it's mass appeal inexpensive this episode is brought to you by tempo fresh chef crafted dietician approved meals that are delivered right to your door now i mean i'm certainly the same as me i can typically spend an entire week just dashing around job to job project to project it's pretty common really for me to just get to a kitchen after say a 12 hour working day and of course what that means is that I will just open the fridge reach in and pull whatever's there towards me and especially if it's not going to take long in the microwave but Tempo provides meals actual meals you can cook in two minutes they're not snacks they're certainly not takeaways which I'm a bit prone to they are actual proper meals Tempo delivers nutrient-packed meals that are already cooked. So the speed is great. The taste, I keep looking at their pasta bake. It looks so good. 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And thank you to Tempo for supporting the Apple Insider podcast. so how about this if 17 is definitely coming and it will have that impact you said if it does uh there are other things um that are less certain and further away that i think um just based on what we've said before are probably more interesting than to me and in particular 2027 ai smart glasses from apple built around context but not screens that's the line i've heard about it and i don't fully understand what that means so $599 for the iphone 16e so that guy's about to cost like $399 and that's incredible for an iphone uh also this story i'm iffy who who had this because oh bloomberg uh so the um the the thing about these glasses is until this story um we've heard apple will announce them in late 2026 we could see a apple vision pro situation where because apple has nothing else on the market like it they can pre-announce it um we saw this with airpods max we've seen this with home pods very rarely but it happens apple will pre-announce something and then three to six months later release it so september october november they could show this thing off probably the iphone event is where i would do it because that's where all the eyeballs are and it could ship december 20th or january 8th or something like that like some stupid number so i i think that's what we're looking at because i've seen 2026 and i've seen now 2027 but that it's a winter product um these glasses have confused a lot of people and it's me included yeah yeah it's that's a fair place to be because these are kind of a confusing concept because meta has muddied the waters here you have apple vision pro which is a totally immersive vr headset you put it on your face it covers your eyes it obscures your surroundings and then presents the world to you through cameras capturing the world and then overlaying software on them you can call it mixed reality you can call it virtual reality but it is totally immersive. And then the next step down from that, not down, but adjacent to that on a parallel line would be a set of glasses like I'm wearing to correct my vision, but they don't obscure your vision. In fact, they can be used to enhance your vision and they contain displays that can show computer graphical information over the real world, a la Google Glass, or ultimately literally augmented reality glasses that can show and augment your reality by overlaying software that reacts to the real world that is still not met as ray-bans we're not there yet that is a futuristic device that isn't here because basically you would need the computing power and the intelligence and the ability to react to your world that apple vision pro has in a set of glasses that's what we've dubbed apple glass in the past we've written about rumors and patents that's on the roadmap but it's later this is not a product that exists meta showed off something called orion which is trying to emulate this it's still not quite that level but it's the closest we've seen and meta even admitted if orion was shipping today it would cost tens of thousands of dollars, right? It's just not there yet. Then you step down from the, you know, sci-fi levels of future augmented reality to HUD's heads-up display. That's kind of what we're dealing with with Meta Ray-Ban's display. I hate that name, Meta Ray-Ban display, which is a set of sunglasses or transition lenses that have a display built into them. They're a wearable display. They are not augmented reality because this is a fine line, a little hair, a fine hair to cut. I don't know if there's a metaphor there. Anyway, it is a display that can get in front of your eyeballs between you and the real world that shows information. It's static. It can't, it doesn't understand the world around you. It's just showing you data. Here's a text message. here's a recipe that is a heads-up display or what we are now calling smart glasses but annoyingly these smart glasses are divided into two categories heads-up displays which have a display which is in the name meta ray-ban display below that are the meta ray-bans or ray-ban metas anyway again the naming is stupid, but these are the ones without the display that are just cameras and microphones and speakers. A wearable set of AirPods that happen to have lenses that you wear on your face. Those are smart glasses. They allow you to interact with a smart assistant, but they don't show you any data. If it's going to show you anything, it's going to show up on your phone or maybe a watch or something like that. That's the scale we're dealing with. So to reiterate, smart glasses two categories no display or heads-up display then fully sci-fi augmented reality future glasses that don't exist then fully vr immersive headset apple vision pro that's where we are apple is developing the futuristic ones based on vision os that will be a computing platform like apple vision pro that is not this what apple is expected to announce in 2026 and released by winter is smart glasses without a display. At this moment in Los Angeles, there's a social media health case, really. A woman and a mother was suing YouTube, TikTok, Snap, and Instagram, and some of those are settled. But today, Mark Zuckerberg has been basically defending himself. But what interested me is that apparently a whole team of meta people walked into court wearing these glasses and the judge said to them, do you want to be held in contempt for this? But I was interested too, because she obviously saw what they were. And you and I talked before about how incredibly obvious they are. But Astrid et Raphael, a great French thriller series, one of the characters in an episode I saw recently put on the glasses to take a photograph. And I did not realize they were the meta glasses until we saw the photo. So I think, I mean, if I'm fooled and I'm looking out for it, these things are becoming scarier. Oh, they're hard to detect. um i've i've had people in my life who i'll give them the uh what's the word i'll give them a pass because to them they're outside of this it's a neat gadget they like taking photos with their face okay they're not spying on me so i'm not going to beat them up about it too much i'm not going to be that guy because i know how annoying that guy can be but it is someone in my life who is showing up wearing these glasses and i'm like oh there they are but it took me a while to notice and um and again they're being worn innocently they weren't being worn to harass anyone which is their primary purpose these days apparently um it's inescapable so apple's version of this is going to be really interesting and i think we discussed it last week i don't think we need a controversy corner for this this is very straightforward meta is talking about using the database of the internet and artificial intelligence that it's building to identify every human on earth through your glasses and tell you who you're looking at. Right? That's terrifyingly dystopian and stupid. And I hope it becomes illegal in every country in the world somehow. Mind you, it could be so handy at parties. But okay. So the party thing, this is what I'm going to get at. Alternatively, right? Because technology is not inherently good or evil, right? it's how we use it right you can have nuclear bombs and nuclear power from splitting it well not splitting an atom but using yeah bullets don't kill people yeah uh guns don't kill people bullets do that's the argument yeah but anyway um there's a whole that's a whole different discussion of like who does the killing gravity i don't know so um this is one of those interesting situations where we have such a distinct line between meta and apple and two competitors meta clearly like dystopian terrifying company apple has its problems but at the very least so far has proven to care about privacy and security and their approaches are going to be wholly different meta's doing scary face scanning stuff and outing people in public and being super creepy with complete strangers and the data of your, you posted one photo of your child one time and now Meta can tell a complete stranger your child's name. You know, like terrifyingly weird garbage. Versus you have a private photo collection in your Apple iCloud photo library. And if you are like us nerds, you've probably noticed there's a face naming feature and you've named your faces and organize your loved ones in these cute little albums and you can now name your pets and all of that. Well, that data currently, if you have HomeKit secure video cameras, is being used privately, encrypted. Nobody has it but you. But it's being used to label people's faces in those camera feeds. If you have your mom labeled in your photo library and she rings your doorbell, Siri will announce over your HomePods, your mother is at the door. And it will show on the Apple TVs a preview of the doorbell and say, mom has rung the doorbell, right? So that is all really cool. Apply that to your smart glasses where right now it would be a HUD-less display, but you would still interact with it. You could quickly ask it like looking at a person like, hey, what's their name? Or you could say, when was the last time? Again, the silly commercial that made everyone mad with Bella Ramsey, but do that but with glasses where the glasses have a contextual surrounding. They can see what you're seeing. Maybe you see the person and you duck away and say, hey, I was just looking at this person. Who are they? Right. That contextual awareness. Take it even further. Accessibility. Apple has gotten really good at telling you when there's a door or a window or like imagine someone who has poor or no eyesight. or is hard of hearing, this kind of wearable can really enhance their lives in wild and amazing ways when used appropriately. And I think Apple is going to be going towards these types of angles. There might be cameras you can actually use to take photos, but I have a feeling it's going to flash a giant light, play a siren noise, and send a notification to every phone nearby that a photo was taken. Like Apple's going to do everything in their power to make sure this isn't creepy. And of all the companies that are going to do this, I think Apple can succeed at that. Yeah, okay. I've often thought that you are much more in favor of wearables like this, glasses. I mean, you're an Apple Vision Pro user, and I've tended against it. But I'm finding some of that really appealing. So I'm reminded of Mission Impossible, Rogue Nation, where somebody's iPhone identified an assassin. I mean, on the one hand, there's a small plot point that nobody knows what she looked like. And here was the phone doing it. And also, it was so slow that she killed the guy who owned the phone. So I felt there were some bugs to be worked out. And glasses would have meant he might have had enough time to dodge the bullets. Good point. Okay. Extreme situations might do it for me. Spy gear. Absolutely. This is one of those things where it has utility, right? I'm not going to sit here and tell you they're pure evil. Don't buy them. And I, you know, I really don't want to be around metaglasses, but I won't blame the people who are just like, oh, this is neat. I want to get this. Now, the guys who are buying this to go to massage parlors and like black women on the Internet, like that's a whole different story. But again, good and bad uses. I think that Apple clearly is going to follow this path. The first one is going to be basically AirPods. And then the next one might have a heads up display. But people keep saying oh this is a whole different discussion We need a whole podcast for this one of they abandoning Vision Pro Clearly that was the failure The glasses are the way to go Guys these are different products That like saying Apple doesn need Apple Watch anymore because they make the HomePod right It a different product line completely serving different purposes night and day, just not even close, right? You can't say Apple no longer needs X because they made Y and this like sometimes that's okay. You no longer need an iPod because you have the iPhone. That makes sense. The glasses that we are discussing here are not the evolution of Apple Vision Pro. They probably won't even be running anything close to Vision OS. They're probably going to be running this weird little subset of iOS, right? Which is basically what AirPods do. So we'll see how this goes. But I have a feeling this is going to be how you access assistants, not just Siri, but like you can probably access your favorite AI thing, just like you will be able to in carplay apparently um you you'll be able to this is one of those nerd things of life logging i have a feeling these are going to be the life log gadget of it's going to be aware of what you've done and where you've been it's going to automatically log things contextually that maybe you might forget or you can enable this to do this automatically like you look at a plate of food and say log this meal and it just does it for you right apple has been working on that integration in apple health to directly log food without a third-party app sorry food noms um imagine just doing that with a set of glasses uh or you could say again what did i eat earlier it'll it'll it could know that if it has the permission to be capturing bits of your life as you're walking around um but is it continuously recording like where you can recall a full conversation no that would be an incredible privacy violation and you have to start every conversation with another human being of i am currently recording this conversation for quality assurance purposes yes i don't know i find this depressing um new journaling suggestion william You sat at your desk for 12 hours today, but around 4pm, you did make a cup of tea. 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Or how about this? I often design magazines for charities here in the UK. And there was this one where a writer really needed a very particular long table at the end of her article. But all I'd got from her was kind of the lowest resolution screen grab, I think, of what it should be. Yeah, you can make it out, but you couldn't publish it. And also, you know, deadlines are like there was no way to get back to her in time. So I dragged that low-res screenshot into court and asked it to make a HTML table out of the text there. without Claude, I would have been typing in, it would have been something like eight rows and six columns of text and things. It was all precision stuff. I could so easily have made important mistakes. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop it. Good enough, it's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, not for you. So whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at claude.ai slash appleinsider. That's all lowercase, claude.ai slash appleinsider. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned here in today's episode. Claude.ai slash appleinsider. And thank you to Claude Biothropic, both for supporting the Apple Insider podcast and for sorting me out with my research and magazine work. OK, so we have just spoken about possible future items, devices. I do want to talk about today and what's out now. But there is one more thing, which I think actually is kind of the flip side of this that I'm more interested in than you are. the Siri pendant what I'm hearing is that you know Apple's quite keen on it I think that's the extent of the story the pendant is like the Star Trek badge isn't it or is this something else so there's not we know nothing and this is another part of the same Bloomberg story okay Right. Well, it's a whole different discussion. I never know what to believe from this publication anymore. But Apple, there's evidence in patents and other rumors that Apple has been working on everything. They work on everything. They have every kind of foldable, every kind of wearable pendant, every kind of speaker and television. this is a big company with a lot of research centers hundreds of square feet dedicated to just building stuff and seeing if it works they spend ungodly amounts of money i can't say the number right now because i'll say the wrong one but it is some billions of money in r&d they are developing everything right now so it is conceivable that they are developing a pendant and a necklace and a wearable pen and probably a apple pencil you can get therapy from like there's they're doing it all right so this this this rumor i found kind of amusing because it's kind of just a repeat we've we've heard this before the um failed rabbit r1 and the failed humane AI pen are echoes of this. They failed because they tried to replace your smartphone, and that's stupid. People don't want to replace their smartphone. I've said it before. If anyone's going to make something like this, Apple could. But we also already have the Apple Watch. But maybe people don't want to wear an Apple Watch. Maybe they just want to wear a thing on their shirt that says, hey, I'm recording you. Well, one thing. I just want to clarify what this thing actually does instead of just pooping all over it. But the idea would be that instead of a set of glasses, this is kind of doing the always available assistant. But again, I don't really understand its purpose if you have an iPhone and an Apple Watch and potentially glasses. Is it a better microphone? Does it have storage? Is it going to record things? Does it have a camera? Is it capturing images? They're experimenting. And that's what they do. So I honestly wouldn't count on this being a product. Before there's a product, there's experimentation. And in between, there's a beta release, iOS 26.4. Previously on this podcast, I was crushed that it didn't include any new series stuff. And you were saying, yeah, probably wasn't going to. But everything's still on the way. It does appear that actually 26.4 has more in it than I was expecting. and some of course is AI. This is a dense release. Dense as in that's a positive thing not a stupid. Okay just two countries divided by a common language. Confused there. Okay so the headline. It's a thick release of two C's. There you go. Is that better for you? That is better. Yes I like that. Thank you. What are the highlights then for you? Actually do you have 26.4 installed the beta and have you been using any of this stuff? there's stuff i want to use it's not enough to make me install a beta um i i'm iffy uh lately on betas not because i've had any problems it's just i don't want to run them for no reason like um the one that jumps out to me the most is playlist playground i want to go in and play with that in apple music but it's not such a need that i'm going to go install a beta before we get into what's in this release i want to talk about what's not in this release just briefly okay siri yeah we talked about this last week oh sorry that was a stupid thing to say when you knew your phone okay but you were saying yeah it's it's one of those things where we talked about it last week we've been talking about it for weeks the rumor originating from our favorite people at Bloomberg was that last year when it was delayed, the delay to the personalized and AppIntent systemed new LLM-backed Assistant and Apple Intelligence would be launching around iOS 26.4. Notice I said around, but as we got closer, it became iOS 26.4. and then and then a week ago the same publication who has been the one publication saying 26.4 this whole time said actually it's being delayed and everyone treated that as apple's failure how do we know that they didn't just get it wrong well how would they get it wrong and maybe it's actually been 26.5 this whole time that's one theory i have i'm you know but there's another one it's beta one and apple hasn't announced anything yet they could announce all of this stuff at any time they could announce this in beta three and then beta four have it we don't know uh so in either in either case i'm not concerned The actual rumor, if you go back to the beginning of this, was spring 2026. We are currently in the dead of winter. It's not spring. It's beta 1. This 26.4 is set to release somewhere in mid to late March. Spring is the end of March, I'm aware. But when Apple says spring, they tend to mean April, May. okay so just bear with me here and i'm not trying to defend anyone or take up for apple or say there's no delay we'll see we'll judge it when it gets here or if it doesn't get here we can all scream and yell but currently there is no evidence that there's any real delay here let's see where it goes you actually reminded me last week uh that when the first batch i suppose of apple intelligence came out it wasn't present in the betas that it was uh ultimately released in because it was all back-end stuff and it was switched on i don't know if they waited until only the public resource a little bit before but initially there was nothing and it was very late beta highly possible for this as well yeah this this is not a simple like they need to do like a server test so this is going to be enabled during the beta cycle but this is not a beta one thing especially when it hasn't been announced yet. Like Apple is not a company that releases things in a beta and then announces them. So, but they also have a ton of stuff in this release that developers need to target and prepare for. So they needed to get the beta out, let them start preparing for that. And then once they do the big Apple intelligence release, whether it's 26.4, 26.5, there's some space some room to breathe for some of these apis some of these systems um should say you you're obviously right about not installing computers it is always and inevitably a bad idea just from the potential risk unless you are a developer unless it's a spare device all that stuff um i just checked an ipd have accidentally uh upgraded to 26.4 so now the urgent question is what's apple music playlist playground because it sounds like you can ask apple music to play things you like but you can already do that. So I wrote a story on this because I found this interesting. This is our second, well, third playground technically because we also have Xcode playground. Right. Swift Playgrounds. Sorry. So Apple seems to be using Playgrounds as a test bed. Swift Playgrounds is where you learn how to code and then you can technically publish a whole app from there but realistically you would go then graduate to xcode and then export to a full app and do all of that right image playground is where you get to play with apple's apple intelligent models and a way to generate images that are virtually useless in every respect but theoretically you would then graduate to higher end models like and then apple added chat gpt to the image playground model, thus kind of confirming, oh, this is just kind of showing off this capability and this implementation. And then we get Playlist Playground, which what it does is similar to Image Playground, you can give it a set of inputs and qualifiers, whether that's text as an input, you can have a song or an album or another playlist as an input, and then get an output of a generated list based on what you've put in. So you can say, a lot of us nerds who remember Beats Music's The Sentence have compared it to that, where in Beats Music, you could select a few modifiers and it would generate a playlist. Like, I'm at a barbecue and everyone wants to go crazy. And then it would make a playlist for that, right? Apparently it works on some of those. The steamier ones, not so much because there are adult content filters, but you can generate pretty much whatever you want using this as a starting point. You can then go edit those playlists. You can use Playlist Programms to edit the playlists it generates. It's just a fun little tool inside of Apple Music. It doesn't replace the human-created content. It doesn't let you make music from scratch. What do you think of this feature? Is it something you're going to try? well I will very often just ask Apple Music to, I nearly said the triggering word there, I would ask just play something I like and it does Thank you very much that all right I don really know that I going to put any more effort into it more effort into radio station if you do that yeah and you know it almost in very occasionally i feel like it gets into a certain mood it's like right well we're going to do sad songs today and then if i ask it the same thing again it'll be a bit more peppy songs and things that's about the amount of fiddling i do or i'm really that interested in doing although i'm listening to a lot more music these days than I have and I love that maybe this is a way to find more new music so um I'll give it a go definitely I wrote a story about this um not specifically this feature but the idea in general Apple's playgrounds and Apple intelligence are a sign of its larger AI strategy and I say this because and there's some discussion to be had here there's some give and take and you can define it different ways so I'm sure semantically it's not totally correct but from my position Apple's approach to Apple intelligence and AI artificial intelligence since its release has been and executives has said this was their plan and i think they're showing they're executing this plan of these are tools that are meant to be in the background they are meant to augment human input not replace it so they want it to be implemented in a way that you don't even know you're using apple intelligence except you know they did add some rainbow stuff in some places i think that's to let you know that the output is generative like that's why that's there it's more of a uh it's more caution tape than advertisement um of like this might produce an unknown output somehow and that it's funny that they use that for siri as well because it's true it's an unknown output when you invoke it um but that's kind of the what they've been doing you as a user will not see ai until you find a place that has it. It's not all-encompassing. It's not taking over your device. It's not everywhere. There's not a little paperclip asking you if you need help every time you click on something. Which, if you use Android or Windows, has been the case increasingly since artificial intelligence has become the keyword. Right? So image playground generates relatively useless stuff. You provide the inputs, whether it's emoji, or your own photo and it outputs something from it but you're not really like apple trains that tool on images that they purchased or licensed and like available open source images and that and that's a probably why it's such a weak program but um it's the closest thing to ethical image generation we've seen so far um but that doesn't generate a piece of art you can claim that you you're an artist it generates a garbage little birthday card you can give your mom i guess if you hate her so okay but so she comes up to your door apple tv says uh you forgot to buy her card you generate one on the spot and kick her out again yeah well what a family life this is so so then you have the playlist thing it's not generating music it's making a playlist or helping you get started on a playlist. You have writing tools, which you can force into making text from nothing, but that's not its purpose. You can ask it to view your text, change its tone, but you're generally speaking, the point of writing tools is you already have text and you're asking it to do something with that text, summarizing it. Yeah. The thing with writing tools is that you have to actually ask it to do things or press buttons and yes i'm a writer i'm never gonna do that yes but again it's still out of the way uh even the personalized siri and the um app intent systems they're going to be very widely used throughout the system but you they won't be used unless you invoke them and i think so i think Apple's approach to this AI boom to the grifter's despair is it's a background tool. It's an accessory. It's an add-on. It's useful when you use it correctly. And when users ask to use it, they get it. Otherwise, you won't even know it exists. And I think that's the right answer. and i think that's why so many of these again grifters are so upset with apple these pundits are going on television saying how bad they are ai and how behind they are and how wrong they are because they're proving the point that this stuff doesn't need to be the end-all be-all it's not taking over the world and the proof is in the pudding they just had their most profitable quarter they're one fourth of the smart devices on the planet are iphones right like this is this narrative around ai and apple's execution are telling two different stories and i'm going to believe one of them well i was going to ask you more about ios 26.4 but now i've got it i'll just play with it and when i've broken my phone i'll come whimpering back to you um that's something that is in progress we know it's happening it's in the beaters it's certain to come out publicly i imagine there has also been an announcement this week from apple about video podcasts um and okay um does this mean i've got to comb my hair or something or what's big about this um so video podcasts have been increasingly there's some issue people take with the what's a podcast what isn't like netflix what it's calling a podcast they are television shows um there is no question in my mind that that pete davidson thing they made is a television show it is not a podcast but that isn't to say podcasts can't have video financial audit which is a podcast but they record video is still a podcast and it's hosted on youtube so i think you know the lines are getting blurred there a little bit is it an rss feed available to the public that's usually what defines a podcast right but anyway i think it's interesting i apple podcasts have always had the ability to play video apple puts their like keynotes in there um there's been yeah there's been random video podcasts pop up there i think it's too hard to do currently so people normally just give up on that and just go to youtube but apple is making it much easier and giving you the ability to stream using the HLS format directly to Apple Podcasts. So all very interesting stuff. I'm going to be checking this out. I'm actually talking to my wife about this because she likes listening to YouTube versions of podcasts. And I was like, oh, I wonder if something like Financial Audit would adopt this, if you would prefer using the podcast app. Because her thing is is she'll listen to it in her pocket right using the background background audio that you have to pay for on youtube premium but when she wants to see something happening she'll pull out her phone and look at it i would say oh that's so interesting i wouldn't have thought of that yeah because it's it's still an audio format but sometimes you might want to see a reaction or they might hold up something on camera and try to describe it but instead you could just look at it well if that's happening in apple podcasts then great i i understand that use case i think and a lot of the shows that I've listened to have started pivoting to video as well. And I think if they could adapt this format, especially since they're, you know, Apple nerdy tech shows, like I listened to, they're probably going to do this. I feel like it'll be interesting. It'll be something, um, I'm not against it. As long as it's an additive experience, as long as I have a choice in the matter. And as long as it doesn't like fill up my phone with videos or something, taking up all my storage, like as long as it works and works well, I'm here for it. Um, actually, let me combine two things here, because you're talking about things you can watch. And we just talked about iOS 26.4. And there is an overlap here because I thought we'd heard about this a long time ago. But there's apparently a code snippet in 26.4. Oh, excuse me. Sorry. There's a code snippet in 26.4, apparently showing that Apple TV is coming to CarPlay. I can see immediately obvious problems with that. uh you have to be why would anybody want it yeah you can't be moving the question is how do you know you're moving um sometimes the infotainment system gets that information from the vehicle basically if the car is in park it can tell the infotainment system it's in park especially if it's a if it has a built-in display capable of showing video modern vehicles build this in automatically. You should have, you might see this before. I've even cars as old as like 2014, 2015, where you can like go in and play with a phone book. If you're moving or rolling or not in park, it will tell you on the display, park somewhere safe and you can interact with this display. So that's a technology that's been implemented forever. So your car will have to be in park. If you have an aftermarket system, they've, you know, people know this. I'm not, you know this isn't a surprise you can buy a third-party unit that lets you watch you two while you're driving and that's dangerous and stupid wow but um so i'm not we're not talking about that we're talking about legal car play where it's working the way it should while you're driving it will not show a video but when you get somewhere like an electric vehicle and you need to park for half an hour and plug into a charger you can you know eat your meal well with your big 15 inch touchscreen display in the center of your console and watch apple tv plus actually i had a problem with a key fob in a car last year the year before stuck in a car park and i in the end i watched uh one youtube guy who was an expert on it he spent about 12 minutes explaining the problem i already knew i had and then his solution failed if i had another guy who did it in 10 minutes but still failed and there's a woman who did a 30 second short solved my problem straight away so okay in that case i would have watched it on the car screen instead of my phone we can see i could see google uh this is also because it's car play um apple's very sensitive to this stuff you can't just have any app um you have to get an entitlement i could see google actually bothering to get this entitlement on the car uh to let you watch youtube uh from apple carplay um podcasts getting video that's another one i could see that working in carplay this is a third-party entitlement people have shown how this is going to work um using developer tools but it's not active as far as i'm aware uh yet like people aren't actively doing this but it is at the very least apple is dogfooding this and they will be um embracing this as soon as 26.4 so how about the story then i'm not sure if this is code references or not but that ai agents are also coming to carplay um i am struggling to see why i need ai to change radio stations i will say that there's a lot of carplay displays that i would probably never want to watch anything on except for like oh yeah like cartoon they're not very good displays um if you're in a more premium electric vehicle you might have like a full-on 4k theater with dolby atmos but like some of those you know 2016 2017 era car play displays might be really rough for video but um ai agents this is purely conversational um tools so while and i'm sure this is regulatory as well but um basically you'll have the option of opening a app and tapping a button to speak to this assistant and say, maybe ask it a question or ask it to do something for you, but there won't be like a full interface. This is purely conversational. I don't understand what I, I mean, I vocationally asked, uh, I was going to say the magic with Iris, it's called her Iris. I've asked Iris questions and got an answer back. Can't think of the examples except they were usually wrong so this would be um what's the name of the school i just drove past if i'm i have to get school visits and things have i just driven past the one i'm supposed to go uh what what's that tune i can't get out of my head this is the kind of nice to have trivial stuff or is there something more obviously intelligent that i can not see yet People who love this stuff love this stuff probably a little too much and never want to stop interacting with these things. There's surely some use case, just the same use case you might have for adding something to your grocery list while you're driving, which you can do. Okay. Or like adding a calendar event. But what if you're using Claude to manage your calendar or something? Sure. But also, in a much more negative and sad way, a lot of people treat these things as their friends or their partners or their therapists. And if you're going to be in the car stuck in traffic for an hour, maybe you want the ability to talk to your AI therapist, I guess. Sure. Go nuts. But it'll be there. This is the technology people want. There's probably use cases that make sense. There are use cases that don't make sense, but the one thing I will point out is they are not taking control of your car. They're not going to do things for you in the vehicle, like turn on your windshield wipers. That's not what they're there for. It's purely conversational talking to the same tool you might talk to the same way on your phone. It's just you're interacting with it through CarPlay. Okay. Not sure I think about that now. but i will spend some time thinking about it and playing with 26.4 on what we've definitely already got so far um i should say actually at this point uh we don't have any reviews this week but if people wish to uh provide reviews good or bad how do they best do it so obviously you can always leave a review in apple podcasts if you do uh we will read it here it doesn't matter if it's one stars five stars we're happy to discuss your critique or your uh compliments here on the show no one did this past week so nothing to share um obviously you can reach out to us directly and ask about the show i've had a few people ask questions about our conversation around apple's assistant and its ai strategy and that's that's been interesting um so you can always do that through email west appleinsider.com or you can reach me on bluesky hilly.tech oh actually that reminds me you forgot last week you forgot to tell me something and right after we uh finished recording i found out you were a guest on last week's ipad pros talking expressly about pixel meter pro and it was a really interesting piece so ipad pros where's hilliard last week's episode don't miss it okay yeah i talked with tim chat and that was a good conversation yeah it was good and i thought i knew pixel meter pro but uh all the way through you were thinking well actually does this work i thought oh i haven't even tried that and there you were doing all these things i'm not using it on the ipad as much as i expected but you know because i've had final cut pro problems so i've tended to have to be on the mac for that so i've tended to use pixel meter prayer there extensively but i love it on the ipad and you're very persuasive about all the extras i hadn't got to so excellent um for my part i'm i suppose mostly on youtube at the moment with my 58 key series but also william at appleinsider.com that's usually the best way to reach me or you could just listen to next week's episode couldn't you uh you'll never guess when it's out in a week's time yeah um in the meantime thank you very much for listening to this one thank you to our sponsors tempo nord stellar and claude by anthropic and wes good talking to you again speak to you next week oh unless sorry i'm forgetting something big there apple cider plus just seconds way if you're a subscriber hold on we'll be right back um and if you're not yeah forget i said that goodbye yep we'll talk soon