The New Siri is delayed again‽

Coming up, the new Siri is slipping yet again, but that's a good thing. EdiQ pulls a plug on Apple's AI Doctor. More new AirPods Pro are on the way. The best multi-Mac setups. And we have a really good tip about the messaging app. Welcome to the Cultimac Podcast. I'm your host, Leander Caney. Joining me today, we have Dee Griffin-Jones coming in from Ohio. Hey, Griffin. Good evening. How are you? I'm all right. Thank you. and also lewis hey lewis what's going on hey it's a great day to wrestle with audio settings we've been messing around for for an hour an hour trying to get the technical settings just just to record this this you know today it's been minor correction leander and i have been talking about what we want to do on the show while lewis swears at himself for an hour figuring out his audio settings. Swearing at Craig Federighi. And there's a pretty funny outburst there, a little, you know, bad tempered outburst. Everybody came in for a hazing. You know, I just don't get it, man. I don't understand why every time I turn on my Mac, all these settings change. I can't explain it. It's maddening, isn't it? Absolutely maddening. It is. Well, that's a good segue. perhaps some new computers might help uh it's showtime actually it's 2026 is going to be a really busy year for apple and they've got reportedly 20 more 20 new products in the pipeline coming out this year so we've been here for ages you know new m5 pro and m5 max powered macbook pros which is frankly a tongue twister it's too early in the morning to try to get through uh but anyway now it looks like we actually have a a time when it seems like they're going to arrive you know We've been thinking it was going to be this month, even last month, but no, no. Now the new target date is supposedly March 2. This comes from, you will never guess the source of this story, Mark Gurman from Bloomberg. And let's see. He says that Apple is going to launch these things the very first, as early, I believe, is his quote, as early as the first week of March, as early as March 2. So that's when they come. And he's basing this on insider information, plus the fact that M4 Max and M4 Pro version, MacBook Pro, again, tongue twister, those are in short supply, which of course means new models are incoming. So if you've been waiting to pull the trigger, just wait just a little bit longer. You've got like two and a half weeks probably. And isn't this dependent upon the next macOS update? the new macbook pros meanwhile are tied to the mac os 26.3 cycle that runs through march he says which is which is a weird thing to say because that just came out yesterday so i don't know i i mean kerman's usually right about these things so uh i would set my calendar for march march 2 to start looking for the macbook pro with the high-powered m5 chips i i know i call to Mac. We've been checking the Apple newsroom every morning at 6 a.m. Pacific time looking for any sort of press release, and it's been a whole lot of nothing. Yeah, very, very sad. Now we know when we can actually start madly checking for those. So we've got a few weeks away. So back to your comments about this being a big year. Supposedly, what we're going to see next is the iPhone 17e. That's like the first new product supposedly coming out, you know, popping out of the pipeline. Supposedly that's going to arrive on February 19th. That's a week away. Very exciting. This thing, you know, if you're not familiar with the 16e, this thing, you know, what is it? Is it really a budget phone? I mean, it replaced the SE. I guess it's less expensive, but it's actually kind of cool and different, right? Griffin, you had the 16E for a bit and loved it. All right. And this new one's going to have a faster chip. But here's the thing. It's supposedly going to add MagSafe, which is, you know, that was the big downside with it, right? And it just begs the question, why didn't the 16E have MagSafe? If a year later they can just, you know, add it back in, maybe they thought they could get away with skimping on it. and then enough people, myself included, ragged on them for not having it there. But it was an interesting image. I'd say it was such a backlash. There was so much griping about it, not having it. And it's such a key feature for so many people that they fixed it. And now this makes it actually a really great phone, doesn't it? I mean, it's actually going to be a really, really cool device if it does have all the A19 chip and MagSafe. You loved it, didn't you? The industrial design. It is. it just means that like for now and forever anytime we talk about magsafe we say we can say we have to say oh if you have an iphone 12 or newer except for the iphone 16e your phone supports magsafe in this accessory which is annoying but i guess only really annoying to me but also for iphone 16e owners like it's sad that you know i know a lot of people who have that phone and you know those are the people who just want a cheap phone and want to keep it for as long as it lasts and you know they've got another four or five years where they won't have a phone with magsafe and that's sad because it's an excellent feature yeah supposedly this one's going to be 599 just like the last one so uh i don't know sounds like a good phone and that's supposedly the first new product that's coming get ready one week one week more of waiting although releasing it on a thursday seems kind of odd doesn't it my guess is they'll probably announce it on monday or no not monday because monday is president's day probably announce it on tuesday and then it'll be in stores thursday or friday i just don't remember them putting stuff on store shelves on a thursday but yeah i don't think i've ever they've ever done that have they it's usually friday it is usually friday but i think uh you know he also says could debut on february 19 so it probably just means like someday later in the week that particular week yeah i can't remember the source of that particular rumor you know some of these some of these rumors are a little sketchy. We're going to talk about one later. That's really sketchy. Really, really sketchy. We've also got the M5 MacBook Air and a refresh-based iPad with the 1818 chip and a Mac Studio with more powerful chips coming in the coming months. Mark Ehrman also wrote at that time, after that, Apple seemingly released the first developer beta of iOS 26.4 featuring the new Gemini-powered Siri. Yay, here it comes. I'm so excited for that. Aren't we, Leander? Yeah, you know, the big news here is that it's delayed again. Multiple reports in recent months said that it was going to be coming in. The AI-enabled version of Siri was going to be coming in pretty soon. But according to our good friend Mark, he said that internal test bills of IS26.4 are played with reliability and performance problems, leading Apple to reconsider the timing of its rollout. The iPhone maker is now preparing to push some of the most advanced features to later releases. Internal testing of these are allegedly now being done in iOS 26.5, which is expected around May. And it's a sign, of course, that Apple doesn't expect them to make it into the earlier version. So apparently some AI features might be delayed into iOS 27 planned for this autumn. One of the most likely features, features most likely to slip from iOS 26.4 is enhanced access to personal data, a function that would allow Siri to pull information from messages and emails to complete complex user requests. And Apple is also reportedly struggling with one of the most complex AI-enabled features, App Intense. This would allow a user, for example, to say something like, hey, voice assistant, please send the email I drafted to April and Lily, and it would understand the app context and carry out the action, you know, if it works, of course. So, quote, Apple employees testing 26.5 say early support for these features exists, but they don't function reliably in all cases. So while the first developer beta of iOS 26.4 is expected later this month with some incremental improvements, the more transformational capabilities are now apparently in flux. so I mean isn't that isn't that all of the transformational capabilities like App Intense you know that was I went back and looked at that you know that infamous WWDC video from 2024 when they showed what smarter Siri was going to do and you know again it was based on App Intense and personal context and if they're pushing the personal context and App Intense that's the whole package, isn't it, mostly, of the new Smarter Siri? And, I'm sorry, did you say WWDC 24 as in 2024? A year and a half ago? Yeah. That was the infamous one, wasn't it, where they promised all these things. And that was supposed to be coming that year, wasn't it? Yeah. The farther we get away from that, just the funnier that is, that whole segment. Actually, what do you... I was thinking about this the other day. What do you think is more embarrassing? Apple's Apple intelligence presentation at WWDC 2024 or Facebook's big keynote where they were like Mark Zuckerberg, where they said that we're going all in on the metaverse. We're renaming the company Meta because we're going all in on the metaverse and VR and AR. That I think is definitely, definitely far more embarrassing. Far, far more embarrassing. It's a close competition, though. Well, this is, you know, this Apple, this is famously what Microsoft used to do and a lot of other companies as well, you know, Vaporware. And I used to do the roundup at Wired of the Vaporware Awards, which we went back and we looked at all the stuff that had been promised for that year and never materialized. And it was just an embarrassment of riches. It was a cornucopia of stuff. But Apple, you know, rarely made it. I think Jobs was very, very strict about not announcing anything until it was ready. And we'd often pull stuff, wouldn't we, from keynotes at the last minute if something wasn't up to snuff. But saying that, I actually can think of one good example where that was not true, which is the original iPhone. You know, the original iPhone, even though that was one of the rare cases where they actually managed to pull it off. You know, when they showed that thing, apparently the famous keynote where Jobs showed up the first iPhone, a lot of that stuff was smoke and mirrors, and they were faking a lot of these things. And they actually delayed it. It didn't come out until six months later. And then six months interim, they managed to fix all of the problems and delivered on all the stuff that he promised. If you watch the introduction, there's like a few times where he says, oh, and we have a calculator. And he just like opens the calculator app, doesn't tap anything on the screen, and then just immediately exits. He does that for calculator and calendar and a few other apps. That's because none of those apps were functional at all. He opened them and just opened to a static image of what they thought the user interface was going to be and then just left. Oh, they did the same thing with the Apple II when they first showed that off. Look at this great computer. It was like not real. They had to finish it. This was back at the West Coast Computer Fair back in 1970-whatever. Right. They were using like dummied up things. So we've got corrected. Apple actually does have a long history of vaporware. Well, I mean, they fixed it by the time it came out. I mean. At the introduction of FaceTime in iOS 4 and the iPhone 4, Steve Jobs said, just decided to say, and we're going to make this an open standard so anybody can, you know, that was completely made up. And the FaceTime engineers were very perplexed when they heard Steve Jobs say that because it was not an open standard and it couldn't be. Well, everyone's ragging on Apple about this delay. And, you know, the more this week was an exceptional week, wasn't it, in AI doom. I mean, there was a couple of insiders. There was that guy that quit Anthropic to go write poetry. And there was another fellow who, I can't remember which company he quit, but he said that it's going to be, AI is going to be worse than COVID for decimating people's jobs. And it was just all doom and gloom. In fact, I felt very gloomy. It put me in a really depressed mood, to be honest, all this stuff. It was also the rain. Yeah, that didn't help. That didn't help at all. But anyway, I think these delays with Apple, I think the amount of spending, the amount of boosting going on in the AI industry is off the charts. And it's funny. Apple is the one company, I think, that hasn't spent billions of dollars on AI infrastructure. There was a really interesting graph that came out that showed the different CapEx spending and how much Google is spending on data centers and Microsoft and Facebook and all the other Amazon. Billions and billions of dollars. And then right at the very bottom of the chart, there's Apple. They spent literally next to nothing. And people are saying, of course, this is genius, right, because they're getting all the benefits because they're using Google's Gemini without any of the CapEx expenditure. And the things that people are saying about AI and its impact, even if it's negative, I think that's all part of the hype cycle, isn't it? It's trying to convince future investors and their customers that this stuff is so transformative that the expenditure is justified. and Apple doesn't have to do that, which I think, so I think it's interesting that Apple's being cautious and is running to these roadblocks and I think it's telling us that this stuff is dangerous and it should be done cautiously and it should be done properly and for what, you know, like every time I see a delay, I mean, on the one hand, it's disappointing because I want this stuff to, I want to see these features. They do look transformative but on the other hand, I want it to be done right. I don't want to be, you know, like messing with some open claw, crazy, you know, run amok AI assistant that is going to ruin my entire life. If Apple acted like every other company that's participating in this space, they, it doesn't matter if it barely works, they would ship it anyways and just, you know, put a mediocre product that's dangerous out into the world. Certainly everybody else is doing that. And also like app, we should, we should also be clear. Mark Gurman was the only person who said that, you know, Apple internally is targeting 26.4. They didn't announce that. You know, we were just expecting it. This year. It seems like Apple's learned their lesson, like after they embarrassed themselves two years ago, they're not, okay, we're not going to announce it until it's ready. And it's not ready yet. So we have to wait. Yeah, I saw that. That was a good comment. They know that Apple has delayed a feature that it hasn't actually said that was going to ship. Yeah. I found it pretty rich though. Apple employees testing iOS 26.5 say early support for these features exists, but they don't function reliably in all cases, just like Siri right now. Yeah. I mean, maybe they should just revoke the damn thing. The same as the old Siri. Yeah. Oh, God. I don't know, man. This is crazy. I mean, I definitely understand. You don't want Siri to start ordering a bunch of DoorDash food. You know, you go out and there's like 600 pizzas on your doorstep. But, you know, geez, could they just make it just a little better? Just a little. And it sounds like that's what they're going to do is just, like, here's one little feature that we're adding. And then a little later, there'll be another feature. And, you know, whatever. But I mean you know this whole thing was just Apple trying to act like you know like fake it till they make it with AI right And they still trying to make it You know what else is hilarious? For some reason, I was looking at a story on Cult of Mac about the iPhone 4S. And it was talking about how, you know, basically, oh, you know, this thing sucks. And as I read through it, I'm like, well, that's weird. I mean, I think of people liking that a lot. But the guy that wrote this ends up saying, Siri's in beta, because Siri came out on the 4S. Apple talks about it as in beta, and it's obviously, they just did this to make Wall Street excited about this phone. Wow, that's like a flashback. And even back then, Siri works kind of for some things, but not all things. I mean, the problem is we're all used to expecting more and more and more from these things. And Siri seems to be delivering less and less and less as opposed to even just working as well as it did five years ago or whatever. Yeah, like what happened to all of the Siri integrations with like Wolfram Alpha, you know, where you could say, you know, plot this thing on a graph. and it would actually like show you like mathematical formulas or like the, the, the, the deep knowledge that it had of, you know, every actor's like heights and ages and statistics and things, or like it's deep integration with Wikipedia. Like, did they take those things out? You know, if you, if you look at old, I was looking through my phone of like old screenshots of things I used to ask Siri. Cause I, I actually, uh, jailbroke it, my iPhone four so that I could get Siri early. Um, and it's still technically run. And I was like taking screenshots of all the fun things that I was, you know, having it answer. And, you know, I don't think Siri does those things as reliably anymore. Yeah, it's really nuts. And I mean, it's also hard to tell how our, you know, sort of experience of this stuff has changed, right? I mean, if you think about voice recognition, I mean, 25 years ago, you had to talk one word at a time. and it you know it could be very good if you had a very expensive computer and and very expensive software but one word at a time now every device can hear and understand what you're saying and answer questions and do things and so you get sort of used to things working properly and i mean i see this with my wife all the time she's so used to talking to siri or alexa that she just says you know hey she just kind of like blurts it out she doesn't even like wait for the thing to like realize oh you're talking to me yeah because you're so used to using it and it just so naturally works so many ways but i don't know so it's it'd be interesting to see how somebody from you know 2015 thought series now maybe they go wow this is really way better i think you know that it's true it is isn't it the the uh you know the natural language comprehension and the fact that you can i have music blaring and the speakers at the microphones are so good that it can pick up you know something that you say in another room while it's blasting out music um it's actually pretty remarkable how much like things like natural language um understanding has improved in the last few years it's remarkable yeah it's it's a it's a weird it's a weird ball of conflicting sort of emotions and experiences. You expect everything to work better and better, and then you start pushing it, and then maybe it doesn't work the way you want to. Maybe it's just not up to, like, I mean, they have to hear you address them, supposedly, before they can start thinking about things. Have you tried the new Alexa Plus? Yeah. Yeah, and honestly, I mean, the other day, I came damn close to have a conversation with it. But it was a little bit unnerving. The wife and I and somebody else was here. We were talking, and I asked a question, and then it answered it. But then it said, oh, do you also want to know this? I'm like, well, yeah, sure, why not? And it went on. And then I asked some other question. It was kind of, I mean, that was, I've never had that happen with Siri. Freaky? Yeah, it was kind of weird. It was kind of weird. Talking to a machine like it's a real conscious entity? Freaking people are talking to ChatGPT and asking it for psychological evaluations and mental health tips. And then it asks you if you'd like to buy any products on Amazon or purchase any new skills. Yeah, exactly. Ads and ChatGPT. I haven't seen any of those yet. Yeah, I haven't seen them either. The story I read about it, it seemed like right now they made all these promises that it's going to be pretty well firewalled. but as you can see with what happened with facebook like how long is that going to last until it's like mining every intimate detail that you disclose to it and to sell you stuff i mean it it's for sure it's going to fall i mean that is that is a good point like we're comparing siri against all of these other products that are loss leaders right now chat gpt isn't making money alexa lost billions of dollars to to be as good as it is and they tried you know shoehorning in a bunch of ads and telling it oh you know every time you give an answer you also have to plug something you can use to to send money to amazon but it was still losing money well they kind of blew it didn't they amazon was i think probably the the leader in this space and i i you know i don't think they're the leader anymore for sure i mean they have the same problem of of apple and that they were also you know they were a little after apple but they were still one of the really early systems and so they have they built on a bunch of infrastructure that's still a glorified like text adventure interface where every time you ask it, it's trying to, you know, rigidly like piece apart like the syntax of what you're asking. And, you know, it wasn't like a modern, you know, LLM based thing. That's probably, yeah, two peas in a pod. That's why they're behind. Let's thank our sponsor. And once again, our sponsor is Cult of Bank. Thanks so much, Cult of Bank, sponsoring this week's topic podcast. Deep pockets. Let's keep this one brief. Newsletters. We have this fantastic newsletter, and I say that without any bias or any kind of – it actually is a really, really good newsletter. It's probably the best Apple newsletter out there. I mean, one guy wrote to me. I thanked one of the readers for commenting regularly, and he said, I genuinely look forward to this email every day. I genuinely look forward to it. That was like – that really warmed my heart. It's at newsletters.cultonmack.com, newsletters.cultonmack.com. Please sign up. I'm sure you will love it. It's a bunch of great stuff. Stories, Steve Jobs quotes every day. Polls. People love the polls. We do great polls. Our polls are the best. Newsletters.coltermack.com. Many people say these polls are the best. Let's talk about this. Here's another. The same story, unfortunately. We're going to be sounding a little bit repetitive, but this is unfortunately the same story. Apple's pulled the plug on its ambitious AI health and wellness coach. But, you know, there's some good news. It's parts that are going to be living on. Griffin, why don't you tell us about this one? The AI health coach project, internally codenamed Mulberry and referred to as Health Plus, recently folded. The new plan came after longtime executive Jeff Williams retired at the end of the year with services chief Eddie Q taking over the health organization. the new focus is all about updating the existing health app features so q reportedly said to colleagues apple needs to accelerate its pace and become more competitive in the health space he pointed to newer competitors like aura health and whoop which i've actually heard good things about from uh other people noting that these companies offer more compelling features through their iphone apps um i think whoop actually their their whole stick is that it builds on top of the existing health app data but the only difference is that it actually gives you recommendations and says yeah we processed all of your data but like you know here's something actionable you can do with it you need to the health app will just tell you oh here's your average walking pace but we will say oh you should go for regular walks to you know change change those numbers or be healthier um so anyways apple spent years developing the ai powered service It originally planned to launch it with iOS 26 last year. The debut was delayed multiple times before the project was ultimately scaled back. Apple designed the service to generate detailed health reports and deliver AI-driven recommendations to help users improve their well-being. And it would have combined new surveys and health assessments with data from Apple Watches and external lab reports. As part of the initiative, Apple built a content studio in Oakland, California, that's meant to produce educational videos explaining medical conditions, training plans, and wellness topics. And apparently that's still being saved. The video content and certain capabilities, such as suggestions based on existing health app data, may still come sometime this year. Another feature in development involves using an iPhone camera to analyze how a person walks. But I guess the AI health coach, the AI doctor, eddie q came in and took one look at that project and said no no you got to get rid of this it's no good so but it's a kind of a weird report because now but they're still going to be rolling out small you know um parts of it like frankenstein's monster you know yeah i guess you know this thing is good that thing is good but you know you get i mean that's a good thing about a leadership change a leadership change always brings in you know a fresh set of eyes that's able to you know look at a project without bias and say no this sucks that's not a good product yeah right someone that worked on it for seven years and and uh you know desperately wants to make it work uh that's a good point thing about whoop i was reading about whoop i haven't actually used one but the the whoop app um i think the big difference is the actionable stuff like i was reading about sleep scores i became obsessed with my sleep score especially because i'm not getting any sleep these days but uh and in fact the sleep score is completely back backwards on the apple watch like when i get terrible sleep it gives me it seems to be when i get bad sleep it i get a high score and when i get when i sleep well i get a relatively low score so i really don't know what's going on here but whoop will give you recommendations for all these kind of different experiments so it'll tell you to i think has this thing called a journal the journaling some kind of journal in whoop that allows you to record things like you know caffeine like a caffeine intake and oh my god if you stop drinking caffeine after like 3 p.m. in the afternoon, it'll tell you what effect that has on your sleep score or blue light late at night or, you know, drinking alcohol. If you don't drink any alcohol, you can record this and it'll actually try to coach you to set up all these different experiments and it coaches you to set up one variable at a time so you can, you know, it becomes clear what the important thing is. And that's supposed to be a really good feature and that's the thing That's definitely missing from Apple's, from the health app, you know. Like, it tells you, it gives you these scores, and then they do have some stuff, don't they? Some explanatory stuff that tell you about, like, hypertension or high blood pressure or whatever. But nothing that really is actionable. And I wonder whether there's a liability issue here. Medical-wise is a very touchy thing. This is one thing that when Graham was talking about this, he was very, very skeptical about this whole AI doctor situation. and all the ways it can go wrong and all the horrible advice it could give you? Well, my brother's a medical editor, and he said that there are laws in the EU that you're not allowed to use AI to produce any kind of stuff that he's doing. He writes in medical journals. He's often taking what doctors write in their reports and then writing it for more of a lay audience or more of a general audience. and he said that there are laws that forbid using any ii in those kind of things because um you know that this medical advice you're not allowed to use a machine to give medical advice it has to come from a doctor or somebody with you know some kind of credentials who's credentialed to give this kind of advice um and i wonder whether that there's an issue that with that with this kind of thing that apple's getting into don't know i mean i think absolutely it's a it's a huge risk. I mean, there was a, in terms of the medical industry, I always think back to the story of like the Therac-25, which was like this advanced like machine that was supposed to like treat cancer patients by like, you know, specifically targeting like, you know, radiation treatment of certain things. And, you know, it was a, it was a computer that was, had a really poorly designed user interface and inundated the doctors and operators who were using it with like errors and screens. And it just trained people to ignore all of them. And it was, it was this major lawsuit because they were using this machine incorrectly and blasting people with like orders of magnitude more radio with more radiation than was like humanly safe and literally killing people and i thought it would just turn you into the incredible hulk you would think but uh unfortunately not i guess i guess that was probably the problem with the machine jeez uh yeah well i mean i i find some of the health apps uh sort of observations to be useful you know i mean they give you like a weekly summary like like for instance your blood sugar has been in this range more percentage this week right all kinds of things that they tell you i although like you're talking about the sleep score thing i i have found oftentimes i get an alert that says, oh, you had a really bad night of sleep because of interruptions. That's why you have a sleep score of 49. That's what it says on my lock screen. I tap on it. It says, you have a sleep score of 93. It's like, how could it not know what the actual sleep score was? How can it be two different things in two different places? That to me is an example of how things can go wrong. And you don't want something giving you bad information for sure about your health. I mean, And that's a one-way ticket to lawsuits and horrible outcomes. Especially at the scale that Apple's doing things. I mean, what is it? The two and a half billion devices in use now? Inactive use? The scale has got to be also making them very, very cautious. And all the different edge cases, maybe these things work well for most people, but it's that 1% of times when it breaks down. and 1% of the user base is still 25 million people yeah right exactly I mean all this stuff is like recommendations right I mean it's never a diagnosis they're very careful with all this stuff the blood pressure stuff it's like oh well it looks like you might have hypertension perhaps you should test it yourself or go see a doctor and I mean I think all that stuff's totally great and still yet to hear anybody say that they've had to actually had one of those alerts. But yeah, we did. One of the readers said that they got one and they got it checked out and they did. Oh, they did have it. Right. OK. So I guess I didn't mean to say I've never heard it once, but I haven't seen like a rash of these things. You know, usually when they introduce some new thing, you know, some fall detection or whatever, like headlines around the world, you know, fall detection saved this old lady who fell in her garage and would have never been found for weeks. All kinds of things like that, where the Apple Watch actually saves people's lives. But I just haven seen a single news report about any of this about the blood specifically about that blood pressure Just wait until next September I bet Apple will have a video on it And it not the kind of thing that I actually did sort of do some research into this I polled a couple of people and I think we got more reports of false alarms where they said they got an alert and it actually turned out not to have hypertension, that their blood pressure was okay. But, you know, it's a sensitive issue, a medical issue. It's the kind of thing that I don't think people crow about. It's not something they're very proud of, is it? And like, you know, if they get rescued out in the wilderness because their Apple Watch, you know, helped rescue services locate them, I think that often comes from the rescue services themselves. It's not something that people keep quiet, but, oh, you know, I got my blood pressure through the roof. I don't think it's something that people really want to crow about. Yeah, sure. I guess. I would think that, I don't know, I would expect that you would at least see some stuff on social media of people going, hey, I got this alert, went and got it checked out. you know, thank God it was right and it's really good. Or the alternative, you know, which is actually, sounds like what you have heard of people doing anecdotally. I got this alert, I got it checked out, false alarm. I mean, you would think that people would either be, you know, writing letters of thanks to Tim Cook or blasting Apple for the false alarm. I guess you're not on the hypertension side of TikTok then. I should go to the Reddit, the hypertension subreddit and look around. Yeah, yeah, good going. All right, we'll do that for next week. Let's talk about this AirPods rumor about the next AirPods Pro. This is kind of funny, right, Lewis? Yeah. New rumor says next generation AirPods Pro will come equipped with cameras that can perceive a user's surroundings. Okay. I guess that's fair enough. Here's what the actual, this is based on a single tweet, by the way, this intro. I'm just going to read the entire thing. Next AirPods Pro can see around you at same price avail. This is from a leaker known as Kosutami. Fairly decent record for accuracy, I believe. I'm not so sure that, I mean, it doesn't say that that quote is translated, but it's so cryptic and weird. It makes me wonder what the heck is actually going on. But anyway, this is the first time we've heard about cameras, right? Previously, one of our most revered Apple supply chain analysts, Ming-Chi Kuo, said that the 2026 AirPods Pro would feature at least one infrared camera. And what he described as a more significant hardware upgrade than the one that brought a heart rate monitor to AirPods Pro 3. he previously suggested these cameras could enable hand gesture recognition and deliver an enhanced spatial audio experience when paired with apple's vision pro headset okay uh you know i'm not so sure that the world needs more people waving their hands in front of their ears but uh maybe maybe so um and then there's you know yet another person has weighed in on this chinese leaker known as instant digital suggests a different scenario uh and that was it instead of replacing the airpods pro 3 the 2026 model with infrared cameras would be a pricier high-end variant sold alongside the existing version so i don't know what airpods pro ultra airpods pro max what are they gonna they already have airpods max though yeah airpods well why not just throw more words all the same words in the name of products so it's just what's between pro and ultra or no pro and max we don't know i guess i'll know yeah it could become even more confusing uh it's already confusing that there's two airpods four right there's airpods four and then there's airpods four with active noise cancellation uh and you know anyway the idea was that maybe this would be uh fall somewhere between the airpods pro 3 which 250 and the airpods max which 550 who knows um supposedly they're coming up with an h3 chip that's going to go in airpods pro and uh they're also talking about adding temperature sensors temperature sensors isn't that what an infrared camera is don't you remember uh predator uh i i thought that this meant like body temperature sensors right but that's what that's what you could get with a with an infrared with an infrared camera it would it would it would you know it it detects heat so that's i think that's how they do body temperature detection you think maybe all these people are talking about the same thing but just in different ways and translated poorly and so they're yeah because you know that's what i yeah because the camera thing i'm very skeptical about um i think in terms of like camera lenses something that you could see um you know that maybe you could pull it up on your iphone and it would give you these you'd be like an insect you know something or or a rabbit you'd be able to see in both directions at once i can't imagine this being like a like a full-size like take a picture with a camera that you see it's probably like even the people who are suggesting that it'll be like a full camera i don't think it's something that the user will be see it'll be you know used for some other related ecosystem sort of feature like you know something to do with the vision pro i think that's somewhat likely if they were to have a camera what they would do with it but i i i don't know honestly maybe it would do a thing where uh it's it's it can tell that there's a person around you and it goes into transparency mode or something like that as opposed to only going to transparency mode when you know you or a person talk loud enough to trigger the sensor. Or if it hears your voice, but it doesn't see a person around you. I have this problem all the time where I'm letting my dogs out and I have my AirPods with conversation awareness turned on and then I say, Indy, come here. Indy, come here, Indy. And it takes a few times. And then it pauses the podcast I'm listening to, even though I'm not talking to a person. Right. Yeah, that feature is helpful in some situations and not as reliable as it would be. I mean, I constantly walk around, you know, and like I've mentioned before, you know, both the wife and I work from home. So there's a lot of situations where I'm walking around with AirPods in my ear, or as I've mentioned before, one AirPod, just one. And she'll start, you know, talking all of a sudden, like, you know, I realize completely normal human thing. You walk into a room and say something, but it always takes a second for the AirPod to clip out. and stop yammering. And, you know, I am not like a TV news anchor who can like have something going in their ear and they can also talk at the same time. I don't know how in the world those people, I think those people are freaks. I don't know how in the world they do it. If I got something going in my ear, forget it. I can't listen to anything else. I can't, it has to stop before I can have a conversation with someone. So, you know, I mean, there's probably tons of situations where having this sort of like, you know, LiDAR on your ears at all times could be helpful, right? I mean, Apple might come up with some novel ways to use that sort of data. Yeah, and maybe it's something akin to gestures on your Apple Watch where it detects, you know, you're pinching your fingers or those other movements you can make. I've never actually used those. Have you ever used those, Louis? Oh, you know, a couple of times, but it just always feels so awkward and doesn't seem to really work that well. I don't know. I mean, to be honest, I mean, I don't – there's not all that many times where I need to tap the screen of my Apple Watch to stop something. Maybe I should try it to stop a workout. That might help. But, yeah, I don't know. Like ashing an invisible cigarette, you know, it's kind of a weird gesture. Picking an invisible blueberry, as you described the Vision Pro. Yeah. It's all these weird things. So I don't know what, like if they're talking about gestures for my AirPods, I mean like what I'm going to, you know, wax on to turn the volume up, wax off to turn the volume down. I don't know that I'm going to be doing that. Well, perhaps it would be like a DJ. You could scratch in the air. I will say after I wear the Vision Pro a lot, the one gesture that I really internalized is the whole thing where you can now like look at your hand and then turn it over and see like a little floating clock next to your hand. I catch myself doing that in person a few times Oh dear If I spend a lot of time in the Vision Pro Well the one thing I love about the new AirPods Is that the touch controls are so reliable That they work every single time You know the volume up and the volume down And you can even do it with gloves I do it with my cycling gloves on And it works And it works the first time you touch it and, you know, like they've perfected that so well. And, you know, you can control, like for music, you can go forward and back, skip to the end of the track, skip to the beginning of the track, volume up, volume down. The one thing I don't, the one thing I wish you could do is scrub through a longer track or scrub to a certain point in a track, which actually I listen to the BBC Sounds out quite a lot, and that has a great control where you can skip forward or back 20 seconds. so if you want to skip through a song you just go click click click click click click and double click you know twice a bunch of times and it'll it'll loop forward and and i was talking to graham about this i said how come the bbc sounds app behaves differently to all these other audio apps and he said well because it's a podcast they it's uh everything put out on bbc sounds whether it's a podcast or not it's categorized as a podcast it's a podcast app and those are the pocket and In Apple's API, the podcast controls allow you to skip ahead or back 10 or 20 seconds, whatever it is. But you can't do that with a music app. So that might be a nice thing. That's about the only thing I could think of, though, with gestures, that sort of fine control. I can't think of any other gestures, at least for listening to music or podcasts. What other controls would you want? I suppose it's possible that you could use a hand signal like this to unlock a door. It wouldn't have to just be audio, right? If these are persistent things, infrared cameras on your body, you could use it for anything. There are times when it's kind of inconvenient, like raising my hand up to click the button on the AirPods. To go back to the same example, when I'm walking my dogs, I might have a flashlight in one hand, the dog leash in the other hand. it might be easier if i could just like do a gesture like with my fingers rather than reaching up and moving things around switching things around in my hands to click the button yeah yeah that's a good point do you remember the m do you remember those air mice mice that you would rings a bell hold up in the air and of course like you know that's because you can use camera control now can't you your airpods to take uh to control the shutter on your iphone camera that's a good point maybe it's you know maybe i'm completely not thinking about the right thing it's it's it's going to be controlled for all sorts of stuff, isn't it? All kinds of apps and all kinds of controls for all sorts of different devices. It's getting a little weird. It's like we're all becoming bionic. Yeah. Let's talk about our setup this week. We have a really good feature on the best multi-Mac setups, which is like workstations that feature two or more Macs. And we're going to talk about this one. This one has one of the most unusual keyboards I've ever seen. But this thing is fun. People are fanatical about this keyboard. Why don't Can you tell us about this? Yeah. I mean, first up, you know, this is a list of top ten, right? And my first question was, like, what in the world? Is this really a top ten? Anyway, because it's kind of a bare-bones setup. But, yes, at the center of this thing, aside from the two Macs, there's a Mac, what is it, a Mac Mini? I can't even tell. M4 Mac Mini and M3 MacBook Air. But the main thing in this is this weird keyboard. and it's called uh it's called a zsa moon lander never heard of never heard of the company never heard of this thing never i mean i've seen keyboards like this before it's split in two parts with a cable running between it uh so you can disconnect the two part in fact that's that's how like it comes with a case so you can put one side in the case one of the other side of the case the cable that connects the two halves of the keyboard is really long which makes me think like how do they expect this to be used like one arm over here one arm way over there like yeah it is it is rather long i mean you know it's an ergonomic keyboard that's that's what the whole deal is right and i can tell you that that is a much better situation having your arms spread far apart rather than kind of jam together definitely a better situation for your your shoulders and everything for using a keyboard all day however this i mean that's like the beginning of the weirdness with this keyboard this keyboard is like the keys are in columns like straight up columns uh and you know not whatever you call the the standard qwerty uh keyboard setup these things are straight we have it's very it it looks just basically like a you know a tic-tac-toe board only with like what six or seven columns square uh or a crossword puzzle something like that um It's got weird sort of like, I guess, thumb rest buttons, you know, like those things are weird. That's supposedly the killer feature of these things is those thumb buttons. Yeah. And it's supposed to, you know, so you can use your thumbs for things like command and option, you know, command paste, command cut, whatever. Yeah. which I think gives a lot of people problems when they're on a regular keyboard, but those, those buttons there make it much easier to, to use your thumbs and the red ones can be programmed. The, the buttons aren't, you know, towards the left corner and right corner of your keyboard. Cause it's not a normal keyboard. They're towards the center where your thumb naturally is. So, you know, I can imagine like if I have to do like, you know, command V, I don't have to stretch my thumb way over here and press my finger over there. like it's right there under your thumb where it naturally rests yeah and this thing has like a you know palm rests on either side so that you know you set your hands on there and then you use the thumb things and i mean honestly if you look at those things it looks like a pair of uh kitchen uh you know mitts right the the things you use to get a something hot out of the oven uh they also this thing also bends like you can kind of tint tint it up and and make it so that the keyboard is bent, or the bottom of it is up. It's a very strange keyboard. And you're talking about that red thing being programmable? You could program all these keys. Yeah. And they're mechanical key switches. You could swap out those things. You can get them with the letters printed on it or not. It's also got RGB backlighting. I mean, this is like the most crazy keyboard. I mean, I'm used to looking at ergonomic keyboards. I've never seen anything like this thing. It's very, very interesting and weird. Didn't you have a split? You used to use a split keyboard like that, didn't you? It was more like it wasn't completely split. It was like split in the center and kind of splayed out, which was more comfortable than using a standard keyboard for sure. But something like this, I mean, I don't know. If you're a touch typist, I don't know how easy it would be to switch to this thing with that strange column layout. But people on the website for this company, of course, you know we're they're not going to take you know use examples of people who hate the thing but you know people are raving about it how great it is how comfortable and and how how much it makes their workflow better so the keyboard steals the show like we're supposed to be talking about how oh he has two macs on his desk but i mean when you look at that keyboard he also has a magic trackpad between the two halves of the keyboard uh so i guess he has you know equal access to the trackpad from either hand maybe he ambidextrous That could be handy I just imagining like maybe he could also have a mouse but you know to the right side of the keyboard You know, that's another thing. They talk about using this for gaming. You can use only the left side, disconnect the right side completely so you can put your mouse in a natural place and, you know, more comfortable, whatever, for gaming. Well, the first question I ask myself is, why does he have two Macs? Well, why do they have two Macs? I know. That apparently is one for professional tasks and ones for personal. Yeah, okay. Well, I mean, it's weird that the multi-Mac setup ends up being all about the keyboard, but what are you going to do? I guess what we're saying is Dave needs to write up an article on, you know, top 10 weird keyboard setups. Yeah, absolutely. Well, Dave's a keyboard fanatic. Yeah, he's written plenty about keyboards. You know, that'll probably be his next roundup. We've got a great comment from listener Connor Furlong about last week's discussion. about AI killing jobs. And Conor says, quote, this idea that AI is going to wipe out white-collar jobs is ludicrous. Think it through. Were it to happen, it would decimate the economy and make tens of millions of people unemployed and the loss of high-paying jobs. A country would collapse in that scenario. And so would the companies behind AI. We live in a totally integrated, independent economy. AI replacing white-collar jobs simply won't happen because it would be the business killing the customer which kills the business. I think AI will basically continue to be what it is now, a tool people use to help them do whatever it is they already do. It won't replace what people do in any meaningful way. That's optimistic. It's very optimistic. You know, I hope, obviously I hope, and here's a good point, like if it does decimate the economy, if it puts people out of work, where are these companies' customers going to come from if everyone's begging out on the street. No one's going to be able to afford to pay the AI companies that have put them out of the work. But in the AI race, what we're seeing is a race right now with, I think, a lot of reckless companies that are spending enormous sums of money trying to find a return. And companies aren't... I don't know if they behave rationally. I don't think, like, you know, when someone... When a corporation does things like laying people off, it's not thinking about the broader economic picture. it's thinking about it in its own narrow selfish terms what's best for that in the next quarter profits and that's yeah to please wall street yeah obviously i would like to agree with connor furlong and and this is an optimistic scenario that i that i could get behind yeah it would be great i mean the the thing that i actually replied to him on youtube um i i don't think it'll wipe out all white collar jobs because really arguments to that effect even though they're kind of like you know doomer scenarios there are kind of ai optimism ai isn't good enough to wipe out ai every white collar job it's only you know barely good enough right now to have a massive change to the software development industry even considering how much tokens are being sold at a loss right now but they're saying that the software industry is the canary in the coal mine you know like uh dario what's his face that the uh the ceo of um uh claude of anthropic said that his engineers are no longer writing any code at all. It's all being handled by AI. And this is, of course, people are... It's decimating... I don't know if it's decimating software jobs within Anthropic because those engineers still to make those macro decisions about what is it we're building, what are the features we need, and they need someone, and they become more like a conductor. But he thinks it's killing entry-level jobs. Entry-level jobs in programming are going to go away. A lot of the ways that we've been seeing it talked about amongst Apple software developer circles is independent developers like Steve Stratton-Smith, who used him as an example in last week's article, saying, oh yeah, I was able to use Codex to make three apps from scratch. And then also in the last week, he went on a tear saying that he had Codex look at his code base and then convert it into an Android code base, something that he could straight up put on the Google Play Store. But again, those are really small projects. And another thing specific to Steve's use case is that all of his apps are meticulously coded by hand using uh you know ui kit which is apple's very you know more old-fashioned dusty but reliable user interface framework uh codex is much worse at writing swift ui not only because there's much less code to train on but also because swift ui itself keeps changing and it's you know a much twitchier user interface framework like the big problem this is an older problem which is why i I'm not sure it's going to completely eliminate white-collar programming jobs because there's already a bunch of massive code bases out there that are too big and complex for a human to handle or understand. Like Salesforce or Facebook, millions upon millions of lines of code run these things. And yeah, you can have an AI thing spit out a new framework. But what a lot of other software developers are saying who've used these tools is that you ask an AI system to add this new feature and it reinvents everything from scratch. It doesn't use the existing frameworks that it could use to make things simpler. So you're just like multiplying and multiplying and multiplying the overall amount of code to degrees that nobody understands, nobody can read or maintain. And so there's still going to be a need for high-value people at the top wrangling these things, reining things in, saying, no, you can't just do pull request after pull request of features that we already have re-implementing. Well, true enough, but people, I think, are worried that you have a highly capable system. And yes, you're going to need a human in charge of it, but you're not going to need 100 humans. Currently, a company employs 100 people all up and down from beginners to experts. And they could reduce their headcount to just a few experts who are using AI to do all these tasks that previously were done by dozens of other people. and I think that Dari Almodi was predicting or someone else was predicting like within 18 months it's going to sweep through accounting, lawyering, you know, all these different white collar professions where there's a lot of sort of data. Look, a lot of lawyers have used AI to generate, you know, court motions and pleas and things like that. It has not gone well for those lawyers. I'll say that. There's a lot of stories of, you know, judges reviewing these documents sort of sent to them and they basically respond with, yeah, half of these cases are made up. It's hallucinating everything. The two sort of big picture problems that I'm seeing right now are, one, how are people going to learn anything? The stories of high school students and college students who don't take the time to read or learn the classes that they're doing, like how are the next generation of senior software developers going to learn anything if they're using chat gbt to do all of their homework and projects for them they don't read any coursework they don't read any essays in their english classes they don't do their history homework their math homework they're just they don't do any of their programming homework especially now that these tools exist nobody's going to learn swift anymore what and another problem is you know yes it works now but a big part of the reason why it works now is there is a massive amount of training data of bespoke human crafted code that it can train on the more these things are out in the world the next generation of coding agents, how are they going to get better if they're training on mediocre code that they've already generated two years ago? These are also big problems. So you still need an economy of humans writing good, handcrafted, high-quality code to be training data. Well, I hope so. I hope so. I had a bad week. I was very, very pessimistic about the whole thing. Like, oh, God, it's doom. SkyNet is imminent. And we're all, you know, we're going to become just flesh batteries inside some giant vat to feed the machine. I actually think I was being too optimistic last week. Like, you know, nobody was saying this like at me specifically, but, you know, sentimental Mastodon was like, oh, all of these people who are against AI-generated text and AI images are suddenly okay with AI-generated programming. And I was like, I didn't quite say that myself, but that is something, you know, an opinion that I need to examine as I, this is such a big, complex topic that is going to have massive ramifications. Like, you know, I hope we can be forgiven for not having solid opinions at this point. right yeah yeah one of the maybe this is one of the things you read this week lander but i i read a thing talking about how the study of of ai use in in companies uh how it basically like people were able to use it to do more things but instead of that meaning like oh they have more free time it meant no now you've you're dealing with you know seven projects at once because the AI is helping you do it. And now you're even more scattered and you send a prompt after work hours and you do all these. It was basically saying, yes, it helps people get more stuff done, but that's not necessarily a good thing and it doesn't necessarily deliver better results. It doesn't mean you'll have less work or less working hours. It means you'll just be expected to do five times more than you've done before. I mean, it's like, go back to watch the Jetsons cartoons from the 50s and 60s. It's like their dream of a utopia is, you know, somebody who only works like two hours a day, four days a week. But no, we have all the, you know, magical automation that people in the 50s couldn't even dream of. And instead, we're working just the same number of hours, if not even more. Yeah. And this was basically saying, like, because people are able to do more, now they're going to screw up more because they can't pay as much attention to any given thing. That was one of the doom reports. If you've ever been caught in the bureaucracy of an online system that you need to be able to do to access your medical records or your taxes or something before, it's only going to get worse. Because now humans probably won't even be looking at that code. There you go, Leander. Right back to the doom and gloom. Precisely. Yeah, I was going to chip in some more stuff, but let's move on. We've got a new way for you guys to send us questions. And this is using iMessage. So please message us at cultamacpodcast at iCloud.com. Cultamacpodcast at iCloud.com. And we'll put this in the show notes, of course, so you can see it. So you can send us a text or send us an audio recording or even a video, which would be great. Like if we get a video of someone making a comment or asking a question or whatever you like, you know, send us a short clip. And if it's good, we might be able to put it on the show. And more importantly, compared to our old system, we can actually text back now. Okay. People didn't understand that before. People had sent us direct questions like, oh, I'm sorry. This isn't something I can really ask on the show, and so I guess you'll just never know the answer. But now I can text back. It goes to a spare iPhone I have set up. Leander and Lewis, if they have spare iPhones, they could sign into it as well. But I'll be looking at those. I'll do the same. I'll do the same. And as you're talking about Messages, we have a really great tip. Griffin wrote a really good post this week about six great features in iOS 26 in messages. There's six notable new features. But we were just going to talk about one particular one that Lewis made use of. And I thought, like, how did I never know this? It makes it much clearer who you're texting and which groups or which person if you fiddle this one setting. Yeah, so now you can set a background in a chat. if you're on iOS 26 you just tap the person's name at the top or the name of the group this applies to group chats as well and sort of like how you can rename a group chat and set the picture for it it changes it for everybody you go to the backgrounds tab and Apple has a number of built-in animated ones like sky water aurora aurora borealis and you know you can pick through a few different color options for each of those they're they're they're nice and pretty you can also choose your picture it has uh suggestions where it sort of like how it recommends uh lock screen pictures for you to use it'll it'll recommend pictures that it thinks would make good backgrounds or you can you know tap photo and choose from any arbitrary one in your photo library for some reason you can also generate one with image playground i don't know why you would do that but the option is available um so you know it's really easy to do you know you just again tap on the conversation name at the top, tap the backgrounds tab, and then you can choose a background. And the main benefit is that you set a specific one for your partner and then you won't accidentally text the wrong person messages that you intend for them because you'll be able to easily identify which conversation is which. It's great for group messages. That's the worst scenario. You're on a group text message thing and somebody says something and then you mean to reply to somebody else about it you know like hey can you believe they want to do this and no you see you put it in the main room right and it's like oh god so this is awesome i i honestly like i had never heard of this feature i was thrilled to read it and learn about it and i instantly uh set up set it up with uh you know for for my wife and i uh and and she goes how did you make the the text message blue or not not blue bubble, but like has a blue background, right? I said, yeah, it's just right there. It's like so simple. And I had no idea it existed either. And it's, it's pretty great. So now like I know when I'm sending a text message to my wife, it's going to my wife, not my band or my group of three people who are planning a trip for the weekend, you know? So it's, it could keep you out of hot water. I think it's a great tip. Yeah. Yeah. It's a classic email CC, everyone, CC all, isn't it? Another one, I guess I'll just shout out another one. Cause this is what I'm looking forward to using. you know, as soon as all my friends are on iOS 26, is you can do a poll in a chat as well. So you can tap polls and you can add, I think, up to 12 options. You can vote for multiple things. So, you know, if you can't figure out where to eat or what to do for a weekend, just send a quick poll and then people can vote and you can quickly figure out, you know, most people are okay with this thing. We know we'll go fencing, you know. Fencing. I sure means fencing stolen goods, right? not getting stabby excellent good tip there good tip yeah that's there are so many features out there now i mean there's so much stuff that's hidden it's great to get these things to you know to know about these little things that make you make your life easier so if you'd like to see the six others you can read the article in the show notes that's right or watch the video you made a short video about it right only like two minutes long pretty quick all right i think that's a wrap thanks very much for everybody for listening please leave us a 5 star rating on Apple or review on Apple Podcasts or share it with someone who you'd think would like to listen to us text us or send us a video question on iMessage and again it's cultofmacpodcast at iCloud.com cultofmacpodcast at iCloud.com to ask your questions for the show you can find Lewis on Twitter at Lewis Wallace Griffin's on Macedon at D Griffin Jones and I write the Cult of Mac newsletter every day which is at newsletters.cultofmac.com so thanks a lot thanks everybody for listening for watching and we'll see you next time have a great weekend everybody goodbye see ya