Mac shortages, iPhone rumors, and Schmigadoon! on the AppleInsider Podcast

Hello. Welcome to the App and the Side of Podcasts. I'm William Gallagher. Our sponsor this week is Nordsteller, but then if you're a subscriber, you won't know anything more about that. And I am joined after my week away by Wes Hilliard, who I understood last week's podcast twice he liked it so much i may be exaggerating there but west all is sorted and fixed and is there any news this week or should i've taken this week off as well well mike did a great job last week it was the weather that was against us we recorded for five whole minutes before he had a power outage but now everything's uh going well here slowly putting this office together i think uh it's coming together i will say william uh you're going to be disappointed to hear that Mike shared in the Apple Insider Plus segment. So we should share here that we are going to video very soon. We don't have an exact date yet, but Mike already blew up the news. So we might as well go ahead and share it. But I haven't combed my hair or anything. Okay, you got to build up to this stuff. I might have to get a suit. Okay, definitely. We're working on it. We're working on our offices. William took time off to literally reconstruct his office from scratch. I believe he started from the foundation and just built around it uh meanwhile i'm trying to figure out ways to get foam pads to stick to walls because mine keep falling off i'll tell you what i'll just say this because this is desperately important apple news my office is in mid disarray because this is the most showbiz thing i've ever done i went to bafta the british institute of film and television arts and had a writer's guild lunch there that was eight hours long isn't that That is how you spend your lunch hours. Yeah, right. You're just looking at me now, aren't you? I can tell. I also take an eight-hour lunch. Yeah. Okay. I didn't see you there. But, right. But, you know, we're generally very productive, aren't we? Really. This week, let's get into the things because one of the things I was very conscious of the fact of when I was away was that a friend has bought, well, has ordered a MacBook Neo. And I wasn't certain that he kind of got in in time before it all, you know, prices increased if they're going to or delays for it. I think he did. I think he did. But he might be in luck only because Apple won't be bringing out any other Macs for what, the rest of the year or something? Is that what it sounded like to you? Until at least the fall. I mean, we have this crazy shortage going on industry-wide. It's memory, chips, semiconductors, everything is just difficult to get a hold of. Everything's more expensive. Apple's pulling Macs from the shelves, basically saying you can't buy this, so you can't even see the option on the website anymore. All because of this AI nonsense that's basically convinced everyone of some sort of fear of missing out on a global scale. Everyone thinks that if they don't invest in AI or have some computing cluster ready to go, that they're going to suddenly cease to exist or not have a job. And none of that's true. But people with money are telling us that and have some people convinced, I guess. Would they lie to us? Come on, they've got money. They're rich. They're obviously nice people. but just like they didn't lie to us about web 3 or nfts or cryptocurrency or i don't know self-driving cars and moon bases and going to mars and i don't know i could keep going william right this is suddenly a depressing turn well well this is a bit depressing as well i understood uh about uh the processes in iran because data centers and ai need loads of both and And yeah, data system. Yeah, I got that. But this week when I was writing a story about BOE, I can never remember what it stands for. It's the Chinese display company. I learned something else that surprised me. The story is that BOE is not going to be producing screens for the iPhone 18 Pro and iPhone 18 Pro Max. And there are all sorts of reasons to do with quality and quantity. But apparently Samsung is getting orders for it and is already getting orders for it because Apple has brought forward this carry-in thing Tim Cook mentioned as well. They've brought forward their inventory ordering in order to get ahead before prices go up. Now, I wasn't expecting display technology prices to go up. Is it affecting everything, or is there some other reason why Apple would bring those in early? I mean, displays are one of the most expensive parts of a device, and given the current trends, there's always a chance it could get more expensive, and it never hurts to have extra inventory on hand. This is just Tim Cook's supply chain engine in full view. We've seen it before. We're seeing it now. He's just getting ahead of what is a crazy time to be in any kind of computer business, and Apple is dead smack in the middle. Right. I suppose Apple has the money to do it. They have infinite money. We just heard from this earnings call last week that they don't they plan on hoarding more money than ever they've even hired a dragon to keep like watch over the treasury i'm starting to think they just have a division that prints money it would save you know cut out so much trouble they're announcing that in september the new apple money machine do you know i might even know oh well what am i talking about i'm in england uh we don't even have apple card yet or puzzles on apple news plus or i think you might stop it William. But you said there about Tim Cook and the display of his logistical prowess, really. He's famous for cutting down on supplies, getting Apple down from months to days of stock inventory. So it must be going against nature to do this for him. But, you know, if you have to, I suppose you adapt for these things. But I'm just I'm curious to see why displays are going coming in early. I'm wondering if everything else is going to come in early. How far can this drought of other components go? And how far can it go before Apple has to start? Well, I was going to say has to rise prices, but can Apple absorb price rises? Well, we've seen them do that before with tariffs. They basically effectively change nothing about their business, absorbed the cost of terrorists to the number of millions, if not billions of dollars. And now they're going to get refunds and reinvest it into the United States. So customers were left totally unaffected that entire time. So great. Price changes in the industry. Apple has a lot of supply chain levers they can pull. If memory goes up for that one component, they can try to get prices lowered on another component to balance it. So there's so many ways Apple tries to maintain specific margins by keeping component costs low that just because memory goes up doesn't mean the iPhone prices go up. Like I'm not expecting a price raise for the iPhone 18 Pro. Well, one reason you might not is that you're in America. A couple of years ago now, Apple made quite a big thing. It was quite unusual in the middle of the iPhone launch to talk about the prices and how they kept the prices the same. And what they didn't say was they kept the prices the same in America and China and raised them everywhere else, such as, for example, don't know why I picked this place, the UK. Yeah, quite a significant chunk. But nothing about alternative supplies reminds me. I was reading this BOE story I mentioned thinking apparently BOE can't make enough screens. They can't make them as well as anybody else. And Apple's previously chucked them out completely for doing sort of unsanctioned design changes for them. I understand the CEO was ordered over to Apple Park to explain and things. Why would you keep working with a company like that? And apparently one of the reasons is they're cheaper. And that doesn't mean Apple will buy them, but it means they can say to Samsung display and LG display that, well, you know, we could go over here. Samsung doesn't want to lose business to BOE. So, yeah, they're basically using them as kind of a betting chip anyway. And BOE doesn't like that, but they have no choice because every now and then Apple does actually buy from them, I believe. Weren't they involved in AirPod production or something? Like, they get orders from Apple. Yeah. Well, BOE does something for Apple. I just can't remember what. They did actually get some iPhone 17 screen orders and then even some iPhone 17 Pro orders. The news was no 18 Pro one, so they kind of lost out there. But they're making older screens as well. Excuse me, screens for older devices. The story I have here, I wrote based off of a comment from Tim Cook. No, it's not Tim Cook as Kevin Parekh during the earnings call. He basically said that the next quarter Q3 will be a tough compare because there will be no iPad. and so basically Apple is saying don't expect an iPad for this quarter at the very least they haven't released one yet and even if they released one in say July for some reason it wouldn't affect the quarter at all so they're just saying it's going to be a tough compare so between now and the fall don't expect any new iPads and that means the iPad with A19 and Apple Intelligence the base model so none of that shortages around the world as you said no Mac Mini with M5 no m5 imac no mac studio not nothing there's whatever you were waiting on you're going to be waiting a little bit longer well i'm okay with that because i bought an m5 ipad pro last november so so i'm all right for a while you think this means the m6 gets pushed back well it sounds like everything's going to be pushed back i did read another Yeah. Sorry, yeah? I was going to say, alternatively, could Apple skip the M5 in some of these products and just go straight to M6 because the M6 is ready? Well, the thing I was reading was a claim from the supply chain that all of these shortages will continue, for the Mac at least, until TSMC, the processor manufacturer, can ramp up its production of M6 chips. Now, the M6 is expected in the next MacBook Pro. I don't know what else it's expected in. surely AI companies want the latest and the best processors as well. So I didn't know that that followed necessarily, unless Apple has already ordered and bought a massive supply of M6s, in which case, yeah, they could chuck them everywhere. Good point. It's hard to say. I mean, the supply chain is complex, and Apple has so many hands in so many baskets. There's really not one point we can look at and say, see this as apple's plan we see this all the time with supply chain reports that some person gets a whiff of an order from one company and they're like apple is massively reducing yada yada and it's just not the case they just reduced it from that one supplier this stuff is getting so complicated to watch and then there's tsmc who makes all the chips so i mean i guess less complicated in that respect but these shortages go are going with the trends of AI. And if you're following AI, you might see that the trend is shifting. Well, this week, for some reason this week, anything I've tried with AI has just come back with, I was researching something and you know, you're not going to trust it, but when it comes back with absolutely, totally, obviously wrong answers and you point out to it that they're wrong and it always goes, oh gosh, you're right. What does one of them say to me this week? I read too quickly what what he why do i care how it's all made up it doesn't know what it's saying yeah so it's just trying to make you happy like it like it's it's failing yeah well it's predictive texting its way through apologizing and that's something someone might say to another human being it's like oh sorry i misread that well the ai didn't misread it that's oh yeah no sorry that It reminds me, I don't know if this happens in the States, but here in the UK, sometimes if you're on a support phone call or something, you know it's automated. But they add in the sound of typing noises. The breathing is what gets me. They do automated like sighs and stuff. Oh, God, I've not had that one. That's creepy. It takes some breaths, stuff like that. Right. the um the the shortage it's going to be annoying for a while there's yes especially because the supply chain i don't think people understand it's not an on-off switch it's not suddenly tomorrow everyone stops buying gpus and mac minis and suddenly the next day there's gpus and mac minis on the market the supply chain has to catch up we're probably six months out from any real stability and that's only if people stop buying this stuff tomorrow um but we're also seeing a lot of changes in terms of shifts in investment which i know that's boring but this is how you keep track of like what's actually happening here and man has things started shifting i mean anthropic just bought xai's uh capacity in memphis because of course that was going to go poorly um xai is just bleeding money at this point uh then you have chat gpt giving up on various aspects of its business in order to consolidate and changing the rates on certain models that make them more expensive and get you less tokens because they have no foreseeable runway the investment money starting to dry up because all of the promises they made aren't being returned of course you can turn on any news program and hear uh and like these analysts investors and ceos saying wow it's going so great you know we're railing into the future but if you look at the reports it's so and so partnership is no longer happening so and so product is no longer happening it's more expensive to do with this and that's only going to continue until only the most obsessed are going to stick with the AI stuff. This is the same trajectory we saw with NFTs and crypto. I don't know if you remember, but that stuff just disappeared overnight more or less. It felt like it did anyway. Yes. But you can still go on social media networks like X and see people promoting crypto and NFTs as if it was still a thing. There's always going to be those weirdos. And I believe that's going to be the case in AI where they're going to go out and buy up as much as they can, but they only have so much money. We're no longer talking about corporations, but individuals and all this is going to even out. Like this is what we've been talking about for a long time with this bubble popping, which turned into a bubble deflation. It's deflating more rapidly every day. And I'm hopeful. And maybe this is my hope creeping into my prediction, but I think by the end of the year, I think things will start stabilizing and returning to some form of normalcy. I don't think the media conversation around AI is going to get any better for a while because that's just its own level of lunacy but the actual market shift is going to take place sooner can we just take a moment to feel a little sorry for open ai and xai i'm look i'm saying this with the straightest face i can just take a moment to go if gpt open ai can't find a revenue like a real revenue source that isn't just investment funds they can be out of money by 2028 so we gave up all of our i mean as writers we gave up all of our data for nothing that's what that is the thing is is when people hear me talk about this stuff they they instantly jump to the most extreme and they're like you believe ai is going to disappear i'm not saying that i'm just saying the grift is going to finally disappear and we can all breathe i was so close to crossing um so always be a grift there will always be a grift and there will there will definitely be people pushing that grift but on the massive scale it will be reduced and maybe we can finally get to the point where it's just a tool that's in our toolbox that improves human efficiency right i just saw match group uh tinder say that they're going to lay off a bunch of people and switch to ai for what like what it's you keep seeing these reports but it's in the weirdest way and it and again just signs of this whole thing just kind of collapsing inward on itself just it's a very slow kind of collapse like a like a black hole um we'll see where it's going obviously i can't predict the future but the signs are starting to appear right that cracks in the surface the the general population is tired of ai they're seeing the effects that that's having on their environments. Like all these data centers getting built, but no jobs are getting created. Pollution getting added to areas, but no real benefit from it. All of these things, more expensive computers, more expensive smartphones and components and accessories. All of this pressure for what And there almost nothing to show for it except a bunch of nerds on the internet saying they built an app that you know someone with actual skills could have built themselves and i again not to go after the vibe coders i glad that you having fun and you able to build something and maybe even learn from it like our co-worker malcolm owens learning a lot from vibe coding that's great but shortcuts never really get you anything except pain actual experience actual learning is so important and i think we've seen a lot of effects of these reduction in skills because of ai even though it's even though it's only been a few years it's just really impactful really sad already and i think people are tired of it so as society gives up on it at some point the grift has to move on they'll find something else to throw at us of course but you gotta yeah it's gotta slow down i mean look at the macbook neo this thing is selling like hotcakes well this is something i want to ask you about because i think this sounds like good news actually in the midst of all of these shortages macbook neo like you say incredible sales and to the extent that apple is they're making more of them presumably is that what you going to say yeah so they well this is what's actually bad news for apple because it's costing them more money um they have to double the production of a18 pro chips because their bend collection of throwaways have already been exhausted so okay but that's how popular this macbook is it's well way beyond apple's expectations which is great it's doing good for apple but um I wonder what the margins are on this thing. I mean, clearly the technologies they're using are very inexpensive. So I would say it's a really good margin product. So they're not changing the price to do this new chip production run, thankfully. But it is definitely, it caught them by surprise. I just hope that they don't get overconfident and then expect suddenly the MacBook Neo 2 is going to sell as well. Because that's not how demand is going to work here, I don't think. Oh, that's interesting. is way back in the day, the PowerBook day, so long before your time, the PowerBook was doing incredible for Apple, and then suddenly it wasn't. I mean, really suddenly. It was like everybody who was ever going to buy one had bought one, and they were not upgrading it. Apple wasn't helping that by how slowly it was releasing things, but it wasn't getting sufficient Windows users over. So this cash cow was gone suddenly. So, yeah, it kind of happened. This is the problem. This is the iPad problem all over again. apple sold way more ipads than i ever thought it would just because that price point was not a thousand dollars like people thought it came in cheap and people are like wow we can just buy these yes and then everyone bought an ipad and they were good enough that you could just keep using them and so the next ipad comes out and no one buys one and the macbook neo is in a similar situation it's perfect in a lot of ways like it's construction it's performance even it's display yeah there's compromises but for the people buying this product apple if they come out with an a19 version of this or whatever next year the people who already own one are not going to bother upgrading because the people in in this budget category probably aren't buying a laptop more than every five years so i would wonder if this is an annual product i think they'll shift the chipset just because now they'll have a new collection of bend a19s laying around you've got to put them somewhere yes okay that makes the chips yeah the chips will get bumped but this sales drive that we're seeing will ultimately slow because as you said everyone who wants one will have bought one and it's not going to have an upgrade cycle this thing's going to last a while i'm very curious what the first mac os is that dropped support for it oh that's an interesting point. I never thought of that. Just as a side point, because it reminded me of this. So not the next macOS, but the one after it's going to drop certain support things. Last week or so, I keep getting pop-up notifications on my Mac Studio saying, well, this is going to happen and that app's not going to work. Most of the time, it's things like some ancient Kindle reading app I didn't know was still on the Mac. I don't care. But then, as we record this, today it popped up and said, there's a component within the stream deck app that won't work with it now i i think i'm up to date with stream deck stuff i'm life support dependent on my stream deck but am i going to lose a component from it i guess i've got a couple years to find out but why is it why is it worrying me now i think you have six months to find out stream deck will update to um fix whatever ancient component they have in their code or whatever. We'll see. There's going to be some weirdness, like with every Apple transition, the 32-bit transition to 64, Apple Silicon, Rosetta, and everything. Like, Apple tends to do well with these, but it's not always perfect. There's always going to be one weird outlier. I mean, I believe a lot of audio stuff had trouble transitioning during the 64-bit transition. So I don't see it being a big issue. These developers know it's coming. They're just waiting until the last minute. This summer is probably going to be a busy summer for a lot of developers trying to make sure that they don't have any old components, like no Intel. Because that's what's happening is this fall, when macOS whatever comes out, 27, there will be no macOS support for Intel anything. Yeah, no more Rosetta. I honestly didn't care until I got this warning every day for the last six days something like that, I mean a warning of something else for it I just said then about Stream Deck, Elgato makes Stream Deck and the hardware is fantastic but the software can be a bit ropey so hopefully they'll sort that out but how about this other things that are coming out that we know are coming out because they've come out, there's a new Pride collection for Apple Watch and this happens quite a lot but it's a good thing and it's out there and I haven't actually seen it. Have you? Well, I went and bought one. Excellent. Yeah, the moment they announced it and it came the next day, so they clearly had them in stock. Yeah, it's a pride band. They've done the Velcro one again where it's a strap. My wife goes through these things pretty hardcore every year because she wears them constantly because they're vibrant rainbow color. We really liked the, it was like a knitted solo loop or whatever. That one was my favorite, and I wish they would do another. But they've done the Velcro one a couple of times, and we went ahead and got her a new one because they wear out if you wash your hands a lot. She does a lot of cleaning and stuff, so yeah, definitely an instant buy. And happy that Apple continues to do this. I mean, this is one of those indicators of if something was truly happening inside of Apple, like dramatic and hateful and terrible, this would be one of the first things that would go. And it's never, it hasn't gone away yet. And we're getting some wonderful pride wallpapers and a watch face that looks cool with iOS 26.5. So that'll be out in a few days. Oh, I didn't realize about that. Well, there's news of potential watch faces for iOS 27, but then there's so many rumours coming out. Where do you start with the rumours? This episode is brought to you by Nordsteller. Nordsteller is a threat exposure management platform for businesses. 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NordStella has flexible plans at scale with your business size, but right now you can get an exclusive offer. Unlock your 10% discount on Nordsteller with the coupon code NordAppleInsider-10-Nordsteller. Go to nordsteller.com slash appleinsider. That's nordsteller.com slash appleinsider and use that coupon code. Just mention it to Nordsteller. And thanks to Nordsteller for supporting the Apple Insider podcast. I was just saying rumours. There's so many of them coming up. At this stage, I never know quite whether to believe anything or just cover my ears. It's only going to be, what, a few weeks, really, until we see everything in iOS 27 and macOS, whatever it's called. But I still want to know earlier. And one of the things I saw was that there might be a new version. No, excuse me, not a new version. Doesn't the Apple Watch Ultra have a particularly good modular face? And that might come to the other smaller, cheaper Apple Watches. It'll just be a reduced version with as many widgets as you can fit on the screen, but just on the smaller Apple Watch screens. Because it's a very popular face. It's a good one. One of the ones I enjoy on Apple Watch Ultra. So, yeah, we're just going to get a version of that with the next watchOS version. That's an easy win for everybody, I think. I've realized I tend, I mean, I have my watch face change automatically. So overnight it goes to a dull red big digit so I can see it in the middle of the night. And then in the morning it changes. But I always seem to go for very minimalist things. So, I mean, right now it is just the hands. There's no widgets. There's no extra things on it at all. I enjoy the big numbers where the seconds count up as a line changing the color of the numbers. Oh, I haven't seen that one. Oh, right. There's a lot of really good watch faces. The utilitarian ones with a lot of widgets, I save for, because I use different watch faces for pretty much every focus mode, and I have all of my focus modes, 10 of them. So fitness and work tend to be more utilitarian. But Apple's also changed a lot about how the watch works. You don't need as many widgets because you can scroll up and get hints about actions you want to take. Now, every day, every Friday at like 1 p.m., a cycling workout hint shows up on my Apple Watch, which is consistent with what I usually do on Fridays. So I like that the system is working out for Apple. And I think we're going to see some interesting changes in watchOS 27 because last year was mostly about liquid glass. uh so yeah i think i think a lot of interesting changes because there was so much effort put into that redesign now this is the year where we refine it and those refinements often bring a lot of small changes across the ecosystem but in a large number of small changes and i think that makes for an exciting wwdc right i wonder if i can get a chocolate hint right the publish and said that out loud okay one thing because you mentioned focus modes there and i am now using them more than i ever was before but i am finding although i have some that trigger different watch faces like the overnight stuff and things like that sometimes the watch will change its face seemingly by itself is that just a thing or am i is there am i jekyll and hiding in the middle of the night setting things that i shouldn't be you've probably got something set somewhere um or you've got multiple watch faces assigned to like a single focus somehow like i think because you can do multiple lock screens assigned to a single focus oh yeah you can yes but it it's one of those where you probably accidentally switched because all it takes is a long press and a swipe and you can do that pretty you can do that accidentally for sure well i think i will strip it all back and start again because i'm finding focus modes more useful i'm i was really tempted i was writing um an ios review and i was thinking wouldn't it be nice if i had like some new focus mode stuff lock screens automations and i was like i don't want to do all of this rebuilding right before wwdc i'm gonna be patient and on june 9th i'm going to delete everything on my phone and start over so that'll be right he took me into something then he took me out of it but last week when I was away and shipping furniture and doing all sorts of things like that, I had a focus mode that only let my wife Angela get through to me, and it was blissfully peaceful, and I enjoyed that. But that's the Apple Watch things, and this one rumour I had heard about a new face. There's also rumours about Apple Wallet, and this is also something else I'm finding more and more useful. Particularly when I went off for that eight-hour lunch in London, I walked to the train station and I got near it, and there was Apple Wallet showing me the ticket on demand. as I needed it. I think, well, it's remarkably good, but I understand there's going to be more. And I don't, you can do your own passes is the headline I read, but I haven't read the story. I don't understand what passes I would make. Anything as a barcode, you could turn into a pass. Apps already do this. So this is basically a Sherlock from Apple, but it's an obvious Sherlock. I don't, I understand those app developers might be a little upset, but this is definitely one of those things that should have been a wallet in the first place, those developers created because it's an obvious feature. But now Apple's going to have it and there's no reason to have those third-party apps unless, of course, they do something more, which is likely. There's a lot of these third-party apps. You can get one that has one pass that changes based on where you are or what you're doing or where you can just generate an unlimited number of passes. There's so many things here. But I think Wallet is one of those apps that Apple just puts out features into the world. and expects people to adopt them, and they rarely, if ever, do. For example, there is still an active feature in Wallet that nobody uses that I'm aware of. Walgreens did this for about 10 minutes, and then they stopped, where if you have a rewards card, you could share it to Apple Wallet, and then the NFC reader, when you tap it at Walgreens, would say, hey, I'm Walgreens, and check for a pass while you're transacting, and simultaneously do your debit credit card and the pass all in one transaction without the user having to do anything and it would register your account give you your points give you your discounts it was great and then walgreens ditched it because i don't think anyone realized it was there nobody bothered also at the time walgreens had this really privacy invasive system that in order to get access to that you had to like give them access to your health data and then they would give you coupons if you ate a healthy breakfast i don't know right yeah so that was a whole different issue but yeah wallet is one of those underutilized apps by third parties and i think apple has incorrectly put the onus on these other companies and by creating a past creation system in the wallet i think it will allow users to have more control and more optionality because they'll make the decision to put a wall a item in wallet versus the other okay just curious to know how i'll use that but i'm finding passes a bit dangerous because um what sort of july august last year i went to paris and i bought a um metro pass with 10 tickets and by the end of the trip i still had six left so obviously i had to go back to paris again and i've still got two left so obviously It could work out because I think about everything that was in my wallet when I carried an actual wallet. And it would be business cards, which Apple's going to take care of in iOS 27. You can use visual intelligence to capture a business card and create a contact with it. So there's that. You would also carry coupons, right? that's a function of apple wallet because for example my local grocery store food city has an app that has a wallet uh integration and i can go and clip coupons in the app and then scan the barcode on the wallet uh card and apply all the coupons at checkout right so coupons are kind of already taken care of as long as the third-party app accounts for it and then there's these punch cards now nobody's figured out how to do punch cards because when i buy nine bottles of hot sauce i expect to get the 10th free but how are they going to track that unless i'm carrying the punch card they need an apple wallet integration somehow maybe i tap every time i visit their kiosk it clips a virtual punch card for me i have a feeling that this is an american thing more than here i mean we do have coupons but to me coupons seem a very american thing i mean in fact i know the first coupon ever was for Coca in the U somewhere Punch cards to me are like from ancient history how you used to program the very first computers Oh, hang on. We have things here when you buy coffee, you've got a stamp and so many coffees. So that's got a punch card in the U.S. A stamp card, punch card, loyalty card. There's names for it. um i would love to see those kinds of because apple has a loyalty card program for apple wallet again i'm not aware of anyone actually using it uh or the businesses that i go to don't use it i'm not sure what the problem is just like with deliveries and wallet apple had to finagle a system together that lets them track your deliveries through email scanning um which is great because again the onus is no longer on fedex for example or uh walmart it's now you get a digital receipt it's going to wallet it's not perfect i wish there was better organization and automation there but it's definitely working and apple still doesn't use it so whatever but wallet needs some love i think it needs a full redesign the skeu morphism is great that should stay for the card stack but we need different sections we need an identification section We need a loyalty section and a credit debit card section, that kind of thing. So because there's also keys in wallet. My home key is there. There's so much. So we'll see what WBC has to offer for the wallet. But at the very least, we'll probably be scanning some barcodes, I guess. So that's where CarKey lives as well, I presume, Dan. From the eight people who have it. Well, this is okay. I feel better about that now. um speaking of different things and peoples and stuff um something else that came up that it was presented as very good news and i can i mean if you like that that seems great but uh apple will allow siri or just apple intelligence to work with more ai agents or services and i'm thinking we've talked about this multiple times um we've talked about this as early as like may 2024 um it was always the assumption that apple would have some sort of ai agent app store where people could select the eight the ai agent they wanted to interact with that didn't launch with apple intelligence because clearly the what apple had ready at the time was what we have now um and this this rebuilding process has taken longer than apple expected and doing the whole Gemini training process. What we should see at WWDC is what was rumored and expected for a while now and rumored multiple times in the last six months. This is not a new rumor of Apple intelligence and Siri, which are the programs that you interact with. That's a top layer program. We'll have, we'll be powered by these, the Apple foundation models, which is the backbone, right that is what is actually driving the software so apple foundation models will be running siri and apple intelligence you'll communicate with them via text or via an app interface or whatever visual intelligence and then their output can be manipulated by other models so basically you can make a request to siri or apple intelligence and have that query processed and passed to an AI model that is installed on your phone via an app. So if you have the chat GPT app or the, uh, Claude app on your phone, you could designate it as a information repository. Say anytime I ask about work related tasks, go take this information to Claude and get it processed. Um, that's more or less what's happening. It'll be an API call most likely to an app. It's not going to be like chat GPT was. If anything, Apple might get rid of that ChatGPT integration and that partnership because they no longer need it. But yes, we've been expecting this for a while. Sage, that last thing, right up to the end there, it sounds like this is the same as the extension we have for ChatGPT. The way in shortcuts you have a used model and can choose ChatGPT instead of Apple Intelligence. But this, you think that will go and we will have these instead? chat gpt is being communicated with through a direct like server connection through a deal apple made with chat gpt uh with the utmost privacy protections in place this new api model not so much um apple will most likely not be able to make a deal with every single possible ai algorithm that you can install on your phone via an app store so you will be using these at your own risk um if you pass a image to chat gpt the app not the apple deal version um it will get that image and store it or train on it or whatever same goes for claude or anthropic or xai or whatever uh apple might be able to promise a layer of privacy or require now this is where it gets tricky because apple does stuff like this it could put in the developer like guidelines a requirement that privacy is you know held up but apple can't guarantee that at this point because it's no it's no longer that kind of deal the deal that was with chat gpt is contractual in a way that like legally binding in a way that a app store guideline is way more loosey-goosey And I say anyone with a lawyer is going to try and get around it. So don't just willy-nilly hand your stuff over to these apps, I would say, especially your Apple Health data and stuff like that. God, no. So this is stuff that's likely to happen or be introduced or start at WWDC 2026. There are a couple of things about iPhones coming up. And I want to ask you particularly about the iPhone 18 Pro, because there was a leak this week saying definitive proof that the Dynamic Island would be smaller. This is confirmation. But the leak was of a CAD design, and the same leaker who said this now confirms everything previously claimed to be showing photographs of finished models for it. That seems to me like going backwards for it, and it makes me doubt the whole thing. for it uh do you genuinely expect a smaller dynamic island this year well yeah we the the components already leaked um processor had it upside down oh it was that one right yes oh okay but the component is leaked the camera gets to go under the display but the face id module does not which is why we still need a software covering for the cutout in the display for the right infrared sensors and stuff for face ID. That's going to happen. This leaker, though, I don't know why we cover them. I don't know why anyone's paying attention to them. They're relatively new. They seem to be sharing things that probably came from other websites. I'm not sure yet. You say in the story, and this is true, I trust you, that this particular CAD model appears to be original, like they didn't get it from some other place. It looks like, yeah. but the the same leaker shared a very dubious photo we discussed it on the show of a flash photo taken of a display so that you could see underneath the display to see the underneath uh camera but the dynamic island was perfectly black because they it looked like they painted it on oh i see yes right i saw that shot yeah yeah and that's stupid um not fooling anybody so I really wish, because rumors is kind of one of my main beats. I keep track of all these rumors and these people and these fake guys pop up a lot and I don't know who this person is. They seem on the younger side, they're in kind of a feud with the fake Majin Buu account which is fake where they're just arguing with each other all the time on X while he's still trying to post these supposed leaks or whatever. you can just get a cad program and make a cad guys i don't know if you know this you can download autocad uh so cads really aren't leaks either and the dubious photo that we got before is the only real other thing they've done so i'm just saying we really probably should collectively choose to ignore them but i know sadly we're not so as since other publications are talking about this random leaker uh we're going to too but we will continue to make sure to say how dubious and weird and definitely probably fake they are until they ultimately give up like most leakers do this is the time of year when you would expect leaks about the iphone in fact we have for many months expect them and got them yeah exactly this year though for the first time ever i heard a leak about last year's iphone the iphone 17 pro and specifically it was that apple is going to continue making them for it, which is being interpreted as a bit of a clue that this thing we expect of the, I need a name for these, the non-pro iPhones will not be launched. Standard, that'll do. Will not be launched in September. They'll possibly be next year and things. Does that fit or is this in some way another sign of chip shortages and problems like that? Well, this is stupid. um they they're just saying things this is the ming chi quo problem where you can't tell if it's a blog uh or an analyst oh yeah um yeah instant digital i believe i i or it's the other digital one there's two digitals now but fixed focus fixed focus yeah what one of these said that um shared this and it's just it's a made-up opinion it's a random thought they've had and for some reason people are covering it uh we covered it correctly though because we labeled it as bs because it's it's stupid uh there the idea that apple was going to split the iphones from spring to the spring and fall instead of having one big release each year has been discussed for at least a year if not more yeah um well before the iphone 17 came along so the success of the 17 benefits apple because they can continue to sell the successful phone for longer but that's not why the 18 is getting released in spring and i also just take issue with anyone calling the 18 a delay because it is not a delay it is an intentional release date that we've known about for a while because of leaks so don't get silly it occurs to me that we went forward to the iphone 18 and we went back to the iphone 17 let's go forward again because there has been more news of the iphone 20 if it's going to be called the iphone 20 could be the iphone xx it seems next year's iphone 2027 yeah sorry my mind's just gone ahead to the 30th anniversary and the iphone xx anyway um yeah the story i heard was that it will have rounded edges and i thought well we've had rounded edges before is there something more to look forward to do you actually think there is any scope for uh as big a redesign for the 20th anniversary as there was for the 10th there's really no reason to pay attention to any of this until um after the iphone 18 comes out so may of next year we can talk about the iphone 20 look this is this is how these rumor cycles go uh there's prototypes there's um validation testing there's a lot of stuff going on again this isn't me saying don't pay attention to rumors i i'm kind of saying that because it is it's meant to be more fun this is not people twisted the rumor cycle into some sort of serious like gamble or something like they're gambling or they have money on the line it's supposed to just be fun um it's supposed to be a way to like see if we can break through apple secret cone of secrecy and and find out something before we're supposed to because it's exciting to do but people have turned it into determining if they're going to buy the next iphone based on a leak from a guy in china like it's that's dumb so first off let's calm down second it's probably going to be some sort of model with a glass and metal and cameras i mean i don't know what these the descriptions of these phones are so like broad it could mean anything right like at least when Prosser was wrong he was wrong in a very specific way like he said that we were in an iPhone anniversary edition with round buttons that looked like an iPhone 4 clearly we didn't but like at least that was a specific way of describing it. A leaker saying it's going to be a curved piece of glass with glass like that doesn't tell us anything there's glass on the iPhone right now like a lot of it's glass actually there's a display there's this whole back section for magsafe that's a cutout from the metal frame i'm not personally buying the idea that the whole phone's going to be glass um i do believe this rumor that apple might invest more in capacitive buttons because i think they've been trying to get here for a while it's going to increase water tightness it's going to mean better we might even finally get a submersible iPhone, maybe. That would be a cool feature for the 20th anniversary. The first iPhone you can dunk underwater for video or something. Right, that'd be really useful. I can see that. Okay. So there's something... Take it with a grain of salt. Right at the start of the show I mentioned, Up Inside the Plus, and how if you subscribe to it, you don't get the ads, and you do get this extended extra thing. I don't want to spend too much time on this next thing, because we are going to examine it in app insider plus but um your idea for app insider plus was to do with apple's legal cases and things and it's topical now because of the back and forth and forth and back with epic games things so stuff happened with that this week um do i care what it is we don't need to get into it um epic just just because i've i've actually been on the phone a lot with apple's legal team this week to make sure i fully comprehend what's happening so i finally can say like i think i i have a grasp of what's going on so long story short apple was sued by epic because epic purposefully violated rules and app and epic wanted to blow a hole in apple's whole ecosystem by taking them to court epic lost on every count it was a terrible move they lost billions of dollars it was a bad idea for epic to do any of this except they won on one count apple had was required by the court so this is the district court that they went to court so when there's so many courts i was so mad about this because it's i can never i used to never keep up with this i finally forced myself to learn this so they went to the district court That is where Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers resides, presides, and ruled that Apple must get rid of anti-steering and allow external links and external payment methods on external purchases. They did not rule anything about a commission. The original ruling had nothing about a commission. So Apple did that. They allowed external linking. They took away some of the cost from 30% or 15%. They went down to 27% and 12% and changed the payment methodology that Apple requires because they still require commission. It was obviously convoluted in a way that made it not worthwhile for developers. Apple could have done better, but I think they were deliberately maybe a little bit not doing as good a job as they could have because they don't want developers doing this. Anyway, malicious compliance. Epic said, no, no, this is bad. took it back to the district court and said hey apple is doing a bad so yvonne goes salas rogers indicts them for violating an injunction and gives them a punitive charge of you must immediately stop uh requiring any action for developers to link externally and you must stop taking all commissions this is the first time a commission is mentioned in any of this so apple is like whoa this is weird uh first off scoping reasons why are you saying all developers this is a lawsuit with epic and second of all um you're saying we violated the um what is the word for it it's left my brain uh word of law versus the spirit we've they said we violated the spirit of the law not the word of the law which is not how district courts are supposed to rule things first off. So we're going to take these two counts to the Supreme Court and have them decide what going on But meanwhile we also going to appeal everything going on here The appeals court the circuit court so so first the district court makes the ruling and the injunction and the and tells apple bad no more payments apple does comply they stop charging and since april of 2025 apple has not taken a dollar from uh external purchases from anyone and epic's loving this finally we get to where we are uh there was some back and forth with the circuit courts and a circuit court judge said actually you know apple is supposed to get a commission they're they should they're they should get one they're running the store go back to court the district court and figure it out with epic and apple's like yeah but we're in the supreme court right now we don't want to do that can we get a stay they said yes and then epic walks in and says no no no they shouldn't do that so then the circuit court says no you don't get a stay so apple goes the supreme court and asks for a stay and the supreme court said no so that's where we are today is now apple has to go to the district court with epic and argue with uh judge yvonne gonzalez rogers about how much money they're owed while going to supreme court and trying to get the entire thing nullified anyway so it's a lot of legal silliness yeah uh there there's two outcomes here and we can move on if the supreme court sides with apple they can side on with one charge or two so first off apple is trying to use the casa act that was about uh eliminating birthright citizenship and the supreme court said hey uh the smaller courts can't prevent trump from doing these things because it's outside of their scope so now apple is using the casa case against this trial saying hey the case is about epic you can't say all developers that operate in the united states that's too broad you have to limit the scope and the supreme court will either agree or disagree with that if they agree then they still have to go to the district court but they only have to discuss commission charges for epic not the entire developer community if supreme court also agrees that the violation of the injunction was not required because of it only being the spirit of the law not the word of the law epic won't have to go apple won't have to go back to the district court at all because there will be no conversation to be had the punitive charges will most likely be withdrawn and apple will most likely just go back to what they were doing before and charging 27 and 12 percent So Apple is hoping for a lot here. We'll see what happens. Meanwhile, the district court case, it's a race. If somehow the district court is able to get through its proceedings before the Supreme Court, it could issue more changes to Apple's ecosystem and App Store charging, and then the Supreme Court could just overturn that. So that's what Apple is trying to prevent with all these stays. all this back and forth. But now Apple's kind of, I guess, hoping maybe they'll get to go to the Supreme Court and get that done first while the district court, they're waiting in line at the district court. That's mostly what they're hoping for at this point. And another thing, sorry, totally separate thing. There was also the settlement about Siri for it. Now, I don't want to touch on this because it's going to hurt me. All week, I have been reading that Apple has agreed to pay is it 250 million dollars in compensation for not delivering siri as promised i read articles of how to get your money in all this and every one of them ends up you know it's a thousand words that ends with we don't know yet and things at some point some people will am i reasonable in assuming that it's only going to be in the u.s so i'm out of luck that's also true if you um this is a us thing first off uh if you purchased an iphone the um iphone 16 i get we'll see let's go back even further actually so if you bought an iphone 15 pro because that was the first one that supported apple intelligence or any iphone 16 model or anything that supported apple intelligence between that september and 2024 and today you're eligible for this lawsuit and you will get an email where you can apply for your money you're eligible for 25 bucks per person up to 95 depending on devices purchased but yes 25 is most likely but if everyone claims it it's most likely going to be like two dollars so we'll we'll see where that goes you got your money great for a frivolous lawsuit go america I want to move on to something happy because this did delight me Schmigadoon now if you don't happen to have come across it before or you've vaguely heard of it you've probably heard of it as the Apple TV series it's a musical comedy I did not know until I saw that show how much I like musicals because from the very first note and I mean actually the first note of it it's a make you smile comedy about musicals First season, fantastic. Second one, for some reason, it was a lot darker, went into different types of musical. And then they wrote a third season. It's completely written, including original songs. And we will never see it because Apple cancelled it before production. Well, it's very, very unlikely. But the reason you can even give me a maybe is because there's now a stage musical co-produced by Apple, of Schmigadoon. And the first news this week was that it's been nominated for a ludicrous number of Tony Awards. Apple's first ever Tony Award nominations. Yes, and so many that actually they've extended the run by I think four months or something. Schmigadoon's a hit. I want to see it. If you open Apple TV right now, you will see a giant banner for Schmigadoon winning 12 nominations for Tony. Excellent. Apple is really excited about this and I want to point out that like you said it's all written they're more than happy to come back and make another season and there is a non-zero chance that the success and the hype around this could push Apple to make another season there's nothing stopping them and the storyline is wide open I would love to see this return it's such a happy love like just fun show fun musical really good well written music as well um i would love to see this uh i suppose it's only what in new york on broadway or something so um i would love to see this stage play but uh yeah no i would i would i really hope the show gets to get a return in some form but um we'll see i think it's less likely than you do because all of the deals will have to be restarted i mean everybody has this impression because tv companies trying to make it sound like this that everything is season to season but your second seasons because your first one went down so well but normally well i mean maybe not normally but very very often the original order was for two seasons they just didn't announce it so there's a two-season contract there wasn't a third season contract apple didn't renegotiate for it they would have to start again i can see them picking up two more seasons they could do this forever it's just is is it worth it i mean it's got to be such a low production show it looks like a stage on purpose it's it's very cute large cast though production is also expensive oh i'm sure it's not inexpensive i i'm willing to bet it makes its money but that's about it and apple's really not in the business of breaking even but sure moving on yeah there was something actually because just before i went away you touched on this and you've done more of this now um you're writing this apple at home business and you were talking about it sounded to me like you were going to dive into the electrics of your house and rewire them with a soldering iron and a sonic screwdriver or something and i'd like to hear about it before you do it while it's still safe and things am i just exaggerating how much work you're doing here uh really not doing that much um i was trying to figure out how to get power there there's a couple of lights in our house controlled by one light switch and i'd really like it to not be that way which requires finding a junction box which is probably in the roof it's going to be a whole problem but i'm writing a series on apple home i want it to be more frequent than this so maybe future uh editions might come out at least faster than uh every i don't know two to three weeks uh because the first one i wrote was a little bit ago um about moving uh this one is about having a whole home audio system with just home pods no third-party airplay no sonos just home pods and i quite like having just home pods it's makes everything so much simpler i don't have to think about what speakers and what's room i don't have to think about what airplay protocol i'm using it just works and in apple fashion it really does and one of my favorite parts of this is the home theater setup so i dive into that a little bit And I've already had a few people comment, well, you know, there's always going to be opinions. I personally think HomePod sound great. Even the HomePod minis, they sound great. Now, can you spend more money and get better sounding speakers? For sure. But how much more money do you have to spend? A HomePod is $300. How much money do I have to spend to get a better sounding speaker? I'm willing to bet closer to $600 or $700. And it's a single driver forward-facing speaker, whereas HomePods are algorithmically oriented multi-channel on their own and then can be put in a stereo pair for $600. HomePod mini, same deal. They sound really good for a $100 speaker, and then you can pair two of them together and they sound great. How much money do I have to spend to overcome that? Plus, I'm getting all the features with the smart home stuff and assistant stuff. but i just find it to them to be very useful uh in our household and wanted to dive into our use cases and using them as tv speakers because i feel like people don't really understand how possible that is i can play my playstation 5 and have audio come through my plate my home pods we actually have a weird thing that um not every show on apple tv but many of them and actually even on Netflix, whatever goes through the Apple TV box, sometimes on our TV set, the volume is just insufficient. It's not too low. It's just, you know, you'll whack the TV up to 100, whatever its maximum is, and you can barely hear silo, for example, but then you come out of it and everything else is deafening. And we now route the audio through a HomePod mini in the living room, just the one, and it is great. The thing is, everything you've just said, I would have said is a description of me and how I like HomePods. And I had the impression you were much more of an audiophile than I was, because you have AirPods Max and things, don't you? Yeah, well, I enjoy good audio, just like anyone. I previously, so this is 2022, I believe. It's in the story, so you can go read it. But I used to have a whole home Sonos system, including a 5.1 channel Sonos home theater system. It was state-of-the-art for the time. they had just come out with the Dolby Atmos soundbar and the ability to do Dolby Atmos. If you bought all new speakers, I was, so I was on this teetering edge of where do I want my future to be? And Apple had just released in that January, a new second generation giant home pod. So I said, you know what? I'm going this direction. This is before the Sonos kerfuffle of everything breaking in the app being bad. And I got out at a perfect time, honestly, because I was able to sell my system at a good price. But before I did, I did a lot of comparisons because I really wanted to understand what am I doing here? Am I going to enjoy this? Am I going to hate this? The 5.1 system, I had a Sonos Play Bar and two Play 1s, or as, no, Play 3s. I need to go change the story. I had two Play 3s as my rear speakers and a sub. The audio from that system was fine. It was great, right? They're good speakers. but honestly, other than the subwoofer, I couldn't really notice that much of a difference in what the home pods were producing. They were virtualizing surround sound, but it sounded good. The audio that was supposed to come from my right was coming from my right. And the audio that was supposed to be in front of me was in front of me and loud and crisp and clear and vocals were awesome from two speakers sitting a few feet apart a few feet in front of me instead of all these speakers surrounding my room that need power need pairing sonos kept having these issues where i had to basically reset the entire ecosystem because they were giving up and it was just so complicated and frustrating and annoying and airplay would just sometimes give up it was bad and here is this at the time 700 now 600 speaker system fully competing with my, at the time, $2,500 Sonos speaker system. The only thing it couldn't compete on was bass because, again, you cannot compete with a dedicated subwoofer, and I really wish Apple would make one or something. I want them to make a soundbar subwoofer combo. That would be great, but another time. It was doing great. I even just did the test of unplugging the sub, and here's the thing about unplugging that sub. Suddenly, and that's removing $600 from the system, so it's now a $1,900 Sonos surround system. They sounded worse than the HomePods at that point because the HomePods were able to produce downforce bass at a really good quality. Oh, I see. Whereas the Sonos speakers do not have that ability. Maybe more modern ones do. The Dolby Atmos system with Sonos is great. But again, I had the choice between two HomePods I already have or $3,000 worth of Sonos speakers to get the newer, better quality system. And I chose HomePods, and I have not looked back. And it's been great. I can honestly say you don't need all that stuff. And I had someone in the comments saying, well, if I get a receiver with AirPlay and six Denon speakers, it'll sound better than your HomePod. I'm like, yeah, but how much does that cost? That receiver alone is the price of a HomePod. So anyway, and you can get a $2,000 receiver. And for some reason that somehow makes it better. I don't know. But HomePod, Apple, make more of them, make them better. I'm happy. If someone should want to explain the error of your ways, for example, how would they reach you about this or any other topic? Feel free to reach me on BlueSkyHillyTech, Hilly.tech, actually. Mastodon is HillyTech. you can email me, Wes at AppleInsider.com, or you can reach out to both of us and hear yourself on the show through Apple Podcasts. We have a review this week because they were not happy with Mike. We always get at least one when Mike comes on. One star from Nick No Names. Actually, this might be the same person who reviewed Mike last time, so maybe they just don't like Mike. Free William Gallagher. Don't, yeah, they say Mike was, behaving like a two-year-old, yada yada. Mike's Mike. I respect Mike and I like that he is very blunt. People do not like his bluntness. Clearly this person does not. He's going to be on the show sometimes. I appreciate your feedback, but we're not going to get rid of Mike. He will return, but William is here as you can see. Thanks, William, for being here for us. being the light of joy at apple insider um and also interrupting showbiz lunches to be here that i was trying to put a slur in my voice there which since i don't drink wasn't terribly effective but okay as ever i'm here to ask you things i want to know about so thank you for it um and well and i'm going to say one last thing um thank you lewis for your emails as well uh if you send me an email i tend to try to respond i don't always get to like with lewis's i didn't get a chance to respond So I'm saying hi here. Thank you. I did read them. I do read your emails. I don't always get a chance to reply back, but that is a good way to get a hold of me. Well, speaking of emails, the best way to reach me is always william at appinsider.com. But look, since it's just us here, I'll tell you this. I'm also on YouTube. It's 58 keys. And for the last few weeks, I've been getting two and three and four and 500 new subscribers every week. this week this week I'm on minus one subscribers for the week and I don't know what I did okay but I still put out the videos for it no I like your version better yeah I was away people could somehow tell yeah okay so if you ever fancied subscribing to 58Ks you know you'd make my week if you do it but seriously everything else william at appleinsider.com and of course listening to the podcast because the podcast will be back next week And in fact, the podcast will continue in moments if you're a subscriber with Apple Insider Plus. But just before that, I'd like to say thank you again to our sponsor, Nordsteller. Thank you to Wes too for filling me in on everything I've missed. And let's talk again next week. Talk soon.